Crime and Deviance

• Socially defined

  Many sociologists argue that while crime involves legally defined behavior, deviance is socially defined.Whether an act is considered deviant or not depends on how people view and label the act.
• Socially defined

  Historical evidence suggests that what is considered as deviant can change over time. E.g. attitudes to smoking and to homosexuality have changed in Britain post World War II.
• Socially defined

  Cross-cultural evidence suggests that what is seen as deviant can vary across cultures. E.g. differing attitudes as to what is acceptable for women to wear and what is seen as appropriate within their group or society.
• Socially defined

  Both historical and cross-cultural evidence also suggest that what is classed as criminal behaviour can change over time and vary between cultures.
• Socially defined

  Both historical and cross-cultural evidence also suggest that what is classed as criminal behavior can change over time and vary between cultures.
• Formal Social Control

  Formal social control is based on written rules that are set out in laws or in codes of conduct. It is the control of people's behavior that is based on written laws and rules. It is usually associated with the ways in which the state regulates and controls people's behavior through, for example, the police force, the courts and prisons.
• Social Control

  Agencies of social control are the various groups (such as peer groups) and organizations (such as the police force) in society that control or constrain people's behavior and actions. Agencies of formal social control are bodies that make the formal written rules, enforce them or punish people who break them.
• Informal Social Control

  Informal social control is based on unwritten or 'taken-for-granted' rules and is enforced through social pressure from groups such as families, friends or beers. It is the control of people's behavior that is based on social processes such as the approval or disapproval of others.
• Informal Social Control

  One way which individuals are encouraged to conform to informal social rules is through peer pressure when a group exerts social pressure on its members to conform the group's norms. Another way is through the rewards and punishments that some parents use to encourage their children to behave appropriately.
• Crime is a label that is attached to certain forms of behaviour which are prohibited by the state and have some legal penalty against them. While crime therefore seems to be easy to define, as the law states what a criminal act is, there is no act that is in itself criminal.
• An act only becomes a crime when a particular label of 'crime' has been applied to it, and even very similar acts can be treated very differently depending on the interpretations of the law enforcement agencies, and the context in which the act takes place in.
• Changing social attitudes can also mean acts once seen as criminal are no longer regarded as such, and laws are consequently changed over time. The most recent example of this is the altered and more flexible legal position on the level of 'reasonable force' people can use to defend themselves when faced with an intruder in their homes.
•  As Newburn points out, even if crime is defined as whatever the criminal law says it is, the fact that the criminal law varies from country to country, and changes over time, reinforces the idea that there is nothing that is in itself criminal.
• Even with an act that appears to be against the law, the police and other criminal justice agencies have to interpret - or make a judgement - about whether it was prohibited. If the police do decide to define the act as a criminal one, that does not necessarily mean they will do anything about it, in terms of recording the offence or prosecuting the offender.
• Crime is therefore socially constructed because there is not act that is, in itself, criminal or deviant - it largely depends on how other members of society see and define it. Crime also covers a very wide range of behaviour, from relatively trivial acts like pilfering from work to very serious acts like murder.