Deviant
behavior can be said as an action or behavior that violates social norms,
including a formally enacted rule (e.g., crime), as well as informal violations
of social norms (e.g., rejecting folkways and mores). It is the purview of
criminologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and sociologists to study how
these norms are created, how they change over time, and how they are enforced.
Norms are rules and expectations by which members of society are conventionally guided. Deviance is an absence of conformity to these norms. Social norms differ from culture to culture. For example, a deviant act can be committed in one society that breaks a social norm there, but may be normal for another society. Deviant behavior can be formal or informal, and voluntary or involuntary. An involuntary violation of an informal norm is far less offensive than a voluntary violation of a formal norm. Reactions to transgressions against formal norms and values are external to individuals in the form of punitive action, such as fines or imprisonment. Reactions to informal deviance are typically internal to the individual.
Norms are rules and expectations by which members of society are conventionally guided. Deviance is an absence of conformity to these norms. Social norms differ from culture to culture. For example, a deviant act can be committed in one society that breaks a social norm there, but may be normal for another society. Deviant behavior can be formal or informal, and voluntary or involuntary. An involuntary violation of an informal norm is far less offensive than a voluntary violation of a formal norm. Reactions to transgressions against formal norms and values are external to individuals in the form of punitive action, such as fines or imprisonment. Reactions to informal deviance are typically internal to the individual.
Merton described 5
types of deviance in terms of the acceptance or rejection of social goals and
the institutionalized means of achieving them:
1. Innovation is a response due to the strain generated by our culture's
emphasis on wealth and the lack of opportunities to get rich, which causes
people to be "innovators" by engaging in stealing and selling drugs.
Innovators accept society's goals, but reject socially acceptable means of achieving
them. (e.g.: monetary success is gained through crime). Merton claims that
innovators are mostly those who have been socialised with similar world views
to conformists, but who have been denied the opportunities they need to be able
to legitimately achieve society's goals.
2. Conformists accept society's goals and the socially acceptable means of
achieving them (e.g.: monetary success is gained through hard work). Merton
claims that conformists are mostly middle-class people in middle class jobs who
have been able to access the opportunities in society such as a better
education to achieve monetary success through hard work.[1]
3. Ritualism refers to the inability to reach a cultural goal thus
embracing the rules to the point where the people in question lose sight of
their larger goals in order to feel respectable. Ritualists reject society's
goals, but accept society's institutionalised means. Ritualists are most
commonly found in dead-end, repetitive jobs, where they are unable to achieve
society's goals but still adhere to society's means of achievement and social
norms.
4. Retreatism is the rejection of both cultural goals and means, letting
the person in question "drop out". Retreatists reject the society's
goals and the legitimate means to achieve them. Merton sees them as true
deviants, as they commit acts of deviance to achieve things that do not always
go along with society's values.
5. Rebellion is somewhat similar to retreatism, because the people in
question also reject both the cultural goals and means, but they go one step
further to a "counterculture" that supports other social orders that
already exist (rule breaking). Rebels reject society's goals and legitimate
means to achieve them, and instead creates new goals and means to replace those
of society, creating not only new goals to achieve but also new ways to achieve
these goals that other rebels will find acceptable.
STRATEGIES
THAT WILL BE USED TO CURB SUCH BEHAVIOR
There
are different strategies to that will be used to curb deviance behavior, and to
discuss how each strategy represents how society views deviance.
The four basic different ways that a society can react are: deterrence, retribution, incapacitation, and rehabilitation.
The four basic different ways that a society can react are: deterrence, retribution, incapacitation, and rehabilitation.
- Deterrence or more commonly known as punishment is providing a negative consequence to a particular deviant action to discourage people from doing the deviant action. Members of society who support deterrence believe that people will not commit a crime if the punishment is too great. As long as the benefit of committing the crime is less than the harm done by suffering the punishment, people will opt to take the better route (which is to not commit the crime). This method of dealing with criminal behavior assumes that there is an easy and concrete way to measure the costs and benefits of crimes and punishments, when in fact it is actually quite abstract and difficult to do. On top of that, not all people might make these rational comparisons as expected by the society; people who are not emotionally sensitive to these punishments might not abide by the system as society plans.
- Retribution, better known classically as the “eye for an eye” concept, is the idea that when someone hurts someone else in some way, the victim has the right to hurt the attacker in return via the same method. Expanding off the classical term, if a man were to stab another man in eye and turn him blind, the blind man would then have the right to stab the original stabber in his eye: thus turning him blind as well. This encourages people to only do actions that they would be comfortable having others to do them as well. Societies that support retribution believe that all people are equal, and when one person commits a crime. The society should be able to get even with the criminal. Unfortunately, this method of crime control only encourages further violence or crime, and doe not take into consideration the fact that the particular action itself is still a crime, regardless of if it is being done as an assault or as revenge. This form of punishment is also very inflexible, as punishment is defined distinctly by one action. It leaves out the important aspect of motivation behind one as actions; someone who commits a crime intentionally receives the same punishment as one who commits the same crime accidentally, oras a side effect of good intentions.
- incapacitate is best known in modem society as placing people in jail or prison. The idea behind this method of reacting to crime is to protect the rest of society by preventing the criminal from committing more crimes. Societies that believe in incapacitation believe that criminals are outhers in their community and as a result. it should be designated in a physical manner by separating their existence from the rest of the people. A clear problem of incapacitation, as seen by research and statistics, is that those who are incapacitated once are usually incapacitated again in the future as a result of committing more crimes. Thus, while they are incapacitated, many people do not change their way of life; once they are reintroduced into the society, they return to their old ways, and for many criminals, society as method of crime control ends up not accomplishing anything.
- Rehabilitation has been increasingly supported recently and can be taken down as a moral and ethical school for criminals. When individuals commit crimes, they enter a program where their goal is to understand why their behavior is deviant. Societies that support rehabilitation view criminals as human beings who are still worthy of living with everyone else in a society, but need to be temporarily separated while they learn what is acceptable and what is not. The main goal of rehabilitation is to change criminals such that when they reenter the community from which they came, they live a life that follows all the society norms and laws, and no longer engage in deviant behavior. Although, by definition, this is the most humane method of crime control, it still has its problems â individuals who are persistent in remaining criminals will not benefit from this program, as an internal motivation and desire to change oneself is very important during rehabilitation.
- In summary, as society evolves, the methods of dealing with criminal behavior evolve with it. A variety of different methods has been developed and is being used, but there is no single strategy that is better than the others. Rather, instances of crime should be analyzed on a case-by-case basis, and proper reactionary measures should be taken in a specialized manner, rather than applying a generalized society view or theme on all crimes and possibly not providing some criminals the consequences or treatment that would work best for them.
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