Study Guide Chapter 6-11

Biological Theories

Try to find links between incarcerated criminals an genetic deficiencies.  Cesare Lombroso believed women for evolutionarily inferior to men. Lombroso's approach viewed criminals as born and not made Brain studies suggested that some people might stop being deviant if their brains were surgically altered Biological theories tend to be limited and they offer less convincing explanations.

Psychological Theories

Sigmund Feud believed that people with too little ability to resist their impulses had Oedipus/Electra complexes, death wishes, inferiority complexes, frustration-aggression, castration fears, or penis envy, lead them to commit hostile acts Psychologist has linked personality traits to crime and deviance, especially defiance, hostility, ambivalence towards authority, and emotional psychopathologies. Some psychologist have looked at operant conditioning, which is examining the way behavior modification or human conditioning can lead individuals to commit crime. It is also suggested that people whose mental age lagged behind their chronological age might be predisposed toward criminality.

The Structural Perspective

The structural functionalism was the dominant theory for the first half of the twentieth century and had the greatest amount of sway in explaining deviant behavior.Durkheim went further with this theory, saying that morals (norms, values, and laws) that individuals are taught constrain their behavior.These morals determine how people behave, what they want, and who they are. Durkheim was also concerned about anomie, which is people partially losing their sense of belonging to their communities and the norms and expectations of their groups were becoming less clearly defined. The structural perspective locates the root cause of crime and deviance outside of individuals in the invisible social structures that make up any society. Groups with access to greater power, political, and economic opportunity may define their acts as legitimate and the acts of others as deviant, at the same time as they corruptly use their power to their own advantage. Robert Merton claimed that contradictions are implicit in which the culture dictates success goals for all citizens, while the institutional access is limited to just the middle and upper strata. Merton says the anomie results from the lack of access to culturally prescribed goals and the lack of availability of legitimate means for attaining those goals.

The Structural Perspective cont.

Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin believed that Merton was right that members of disadvantaged socioeconomic groups have less opportunity for achieving in a legitimate manner but also wrong in assuming they would turn to deviance and crime. They suggested that all disadvantaged people have some lack of opportunity, but they do not have the same opportunity for participating in illegitimate practices. There are several factors as to why people may have greater or lesser opportunity to climb the illicit opportunity ladder: some neighborhoods are rife with more criminal opportunities, networks, and enterprises that others, and people reared in these grow up amidst these better opportunities some forms of illicit enterprise are dominated by people of particular racial or ethnic groups, so that members of thses groups have an easier time rising to the top of these businesses or organizations the upper echelons of crime display a distinct glass ceiling for women, with men dominating the positions of decision-making, earning, and power

The Cultural Perspective

Theorist believe that deviance was a collective act, driven and carried out by groups of people. It builds on conflict theory's view that multiple groups with different interests exist in society, the subculture theorists examine the implications of membership in these groups.The disparities and different cultural codes between subcultural groups may become apparent in three situations When people from one culture "migrate" or cross over into the territory of another culture Cultural conflict may occur during a "take over" situation, when the laws of one cultural group are extended to apply to another Cultural codes may clash on ther "border" of contigious cultural areas, such as when people from different cultural groups find themselves in contact Lower-class culture theory suggests that when these individuals follow the norms of their subculture, they become deviant according to the predominantly middle-class societal norms and values. Subculture theories has been to suggest that conflicting values may exist in society. When one part of society can impose its definitions on other parts, the dominant group has the ability to label the minority group's norms and values, and the behavior that results from these, as deviant.

The Interactionist Perspective

There are interactional forces that inevitably intervene between the larger causes these sociologist propose and the way deviant behavior takes shape. Many people are exposed to the same structural conditions and the same cultural conflicts and pressures that have been theorized as accounting for deviance. Deviant behavior is socially learned from people's most intimate friends and family members. The more friends hold deviant attitudes and engage in deviant behavior, the more likely they are to follow suit. The Labeling theory is under the interactionist perspective. It suggests that many people dabble to greater or lesser degrees in various forms of deviance.

Functionalism: The Normal and the Pathological

Crime is present not only in the majority of societies of one particular species but in all societies of all types. Crime will always exist Deviance is critical to society

Social Structure and Anomie

Social structures exert a definite pressure upon certain persons in the society to engage in nonconforming rather than conforming.There are several elements of social and cultural structures but two are most important: The first consists of culturally defined goals, purposes, and interests held out as legitimate objectives for all or for diversely located members of the society. The goals are integrated and ordered in some hierarchy of value. These are worth striving for. The second element of the cultural structure defines, regulates, and controls the acceptable modes of reaching out for these goals. No society lacks norms governing conduct but societies do differ to which the folkways, mores, and institutional controls are effectively intergrated with the goals which stand high in the hierarchy of cultural value.

Types of Individual Adaptation

Conformity- to both cultural goals and institutionalized means, is the most common and widely diffused. Innovation- great cultural emphasis upon the success- goal invites this mode of adaptation through the use of institutionally proscribed but often effective means of attaining at least the simulacrum of success- wealth and power. The greatest pressures toward deviation are exerted upon the lower strata. Ritualism- involves the abandoning or scaling down of the lofty cultural goals of great pecuniary success and rapid social mobility to the point where one's aspirations can be satisfied. Retreatism- the rejection of cultural goals and institutional means is the least common. People who adapt in this fashion are in the society but not of it. Rebellion- leads men outside the environing social structure to envisage and seek to bring into being a new, greatly modified social structure. Organized movements for rebellion aim to introduce a social structure in which the cultural standards of success would be sharply modified.

Differential Association

Criminal behavior is learned. It is not inherited. Criminal behavior is learned in the interaction with other persons in a process of communication. The principal part of the learning of criminal behavior occurs within intimate personal groups. When criminal behavior is learned, the learned includes techniques of committing the crime, which are sometimes very complicated, some times simple and the specific direction of motive, drives, rationalizations, and attitudes. The specific direction of motives and drives is learned from definitions of the legal codes as favorable and unfavorable. A person becomes delinquent because of an excess of definitions favorable to violation of law over definitions unfavorable to violation of law. Differential associations may vary in frequency, duration, priority, and intensity. The process of learning criminal behavior by association with criminal and anti-criminal patterns involves all of the mechanisms that are involved in any other learning. While criminal is an expression of general needs and values, it is not explains by those general needs and values, since noncriminal behavior is an expression of the same needs and values.

Control Theory

Control theories assume that delinquent acts result when an individual's bond to society is weak or broken.Elements of the bond between each person and society Attachment- sociologist emphasize sensitivity to the opinion of others Commitment- when committed to an idea or a goal, being deviant doesn't seem worth it. Fear causes people not to break laws. Involvement- in conventional activities is often part of a control theory. The assumptions is that a person may be simply too busy doing conventional things to find time to engage in deviant behavior. The person involved is tied to appointments, deadlines, working hours, plans and the opportunity to commit deviant acts rarely arises. Belief- the control theory assumes the existence of a common value system within the society or group who norms are being violated. Beliefs are treated as mere words that mean little or nothing if the other forms of control are missing.

Feminist Theory

Chesney-Lind points out that girls and women hold a very different structural position in society, and the experience they are likely to encounter along with the opportunities they face are often markedly at odds with those of boys and men. Girls are more vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse in the home than boys. Feminist analysis of delinquency would also examine ways in which agencies of social control- the police, the courts and the persons- act in ways to reinforce woman's place in male society.

Reality is socially constructed. It calls attention to the processes by which people would make sense of the world; we create- or construct- meaning. Social construction has become an influential stance for thinking about deviance, particularly for understanding how concerns about particular forms of deviance emerge and evolve, and for studying how social control agents construct particular acts as deviance and individuals as deviance.

The Constructionist Stance