Notes: Generally known as surveillance, it involves the use of technology to monitor the action and behavior of others.
Human trafficking, drug smuggling, and terrorism are all examples of transnational crime, a crime that crosses interstate or international borders. While all of these crime categories are serious, they are outside the realm of experience for many of us. To understand how transnational crime most often affects ordinary people in the U.S., consider counterfeiting, the manufacturing and selling of illegally copied products (HP). According to most estimates, $509 billion in profits are made from the transnational crime of counterfeiting (C-19) annually, with some putting the number as high as $1.7 trillion (OECD and the EU Intellectual Property Office 2021; Petroff 2016; Williams 2013).
Individuals in American society who engage in the most extreme forms of deviant behavior are sentenced to capital punishment, a penalty for criminal behavior that results in the perpetrator’s death (C-19). In contemporary American society, capital punishment is most often applied to cases involving index crimes, the eight forms of criminal behavior to create the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR). Index crimes include willful homicide, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, and arson.
Both of these explanations may have something to do with our collective conscience, a set of shared attitudes, beliefs, and ideas about how things should be in society. It appears that, as a society, our attitudes and beliefs make it difficult for us, and members of the criminal justice system, to reconcile women’s roles as caregivers with their participation in deviance and crime.
This differential justice, differences in how groups are treated in the criminal justice system, can be examined by comparing the stop, arrest, and incarceration of Black and Hispanic males to their White counterparts.
When a person or group engages in deviant behavior that violates significant social norms, they may find themselves immersed in the criminal justice system, formal institutions designed to enforce, arbitrate, and carry out the laws of society. The criminal justice system in the United States is made up of three parts:
- police and law enforcement
- courts
- the penal system
By comparison, the incarceration rate, the number of people in state and federal prisons, is 433,000 in India, 546,000 in Russia, and 715,000 in Brazil (World Prison Brief 2019).
Critics of Merton’s structural strain theory indicate that the theory does not explain some types of white-collar crime, nonviolent and financially motivated crime (HP), such as bank and insurance fraud, money laundering, and Ponzi schemes.
structural strain theory, the theory that social structures can promote crime and deviance among individuals within a society (HP)
The labeling theory ignores individual acts of deviance and the process that leads to deviant acts.
containment theory, the idea that individuals have various social controls (containments) that provide a protective barrier to help them to resist engaging in deviant and criminal behavior, states that individuals have internal and external control mechanisms that serve to control one’s behaviors (Reckless 1970; Reckless and Dinitz 1972).
- Attachment: The family is the attachment source, as parents provide support and teach children socially acceptable behavior.
- Belief: The level of acceptance of the social values of society.
- Commitment: An individual’s focus on achieving socially accepted goals such as a high school or college degree and a high-status job.
- Involvement: Participation in conventional activities that lead to socially accepted goals
Travis Hirschi developed the social control theory, which states that individuals who do not have enough strong social bonds are more likely to feel disconnected from society and engage in deviance and crime (HP), to explain how individuals become delinquent (Hirschi 1969).
Differential association theory, a process by which individuals learn deviant and criminal behavior from associating with deviants and criminals (HP), is the second micro-level theory.
Lemert points out that everyone engages in primary deviance, violations of norms that do not result in being labeled as deviant (Lemert 1967). You may have received a traffic violation or overslept for a class and missed an exam, but neither resulted in being labeled a deviant. Secondary deviance, norm violations that result in being publicly labeled as a deviant and outsider, is the second stage in the identity formation of deviance.
The labeling theory, the idea that individuals labeled as deviant are more likely to act on the label (HP), is grounded in the works of Edwin Lemert and Howard Becker, which focused on deviance, social control, and sociopathic behavior in the 1950s and 1960s (Lemert 1967; Becker 1964; Becker 1963; Lemert 1951).
Do you know individuals and groups who engage in deviance, violation of social norms, and don’t “fit the mold”? What behaviors are they engaging in, and why does society consider those variations violations? What keeps you from engaging in the same behaviors?
most cases, you consider the agents of social control, informal and formal groups that control the behavior of members of society, such as what your family members, friends, acquaintances, and general members of society deem acceptable. Your friends serve as a mechanism for informal social control, individuals and groups that unofficially reinforce social norms, as they remind you when your behavior goes against the norm. Otherwise, there would be more guys with mullets and soul patches wearing parachute pants! There are also mechanisms for formal social control, groups and organizations whose specific function is to control the behavior of members of societies and reinforce social norms (C-19). Examples of these formal controls are high school administrators and law enforcement agencies. Even with informal and form social control mechanisms, why do individuals still choose deviant behavior?