>>In the previous units we've been talking about culture and the rules that exist in
a society, how we learn about those rules, and then how we interact with each other as
individuals or as groups. And the idea here is that people who live in a society expect
people to act certain ways, and that's what defines what a culture is. And that's what
defines what a society is, people acting in ways that are expected. But many times people
don't follow the rules. People act deviantly. They violate the norms that are expected of
them. In this unit we're going to be looking at why people violate these norms, and we're
going to look at the consequences for people who violate these norms. We're looking at
something called deviance and crime, understanding the distinction between the two, and then
we're going to look at the criminal justice system, which is the formal way of sanctioning
people who commit crimes.
Deviance describes behavior by people who are violating the norms of their culture,
people who are acting against those rules. Because deviance is socially defined and culture
changes over time, as we learned in earlier units, deviance changes over time, or what
is defined as deviant behavior changes over time. Think about the act of getting a tattoo.
In some cultures getting a tattoo is expected. In fact, not having a tattoo would be seen
as deviant in those cultures. In other cultures getting a tattoo is defined as a deviant behavior,
and people who have a tattoo are seen as deviants. They're violating the social norms of that
culture. Think about the American view of tattooing and how that has changed over time.
In the 1950s and 60s people who had tattoos in America were seen as deviant. Just having
a tattoo defined you as deviant. Nowadays people have a totally different view of tattoos,
and it is becoming much more commonplace. The tattoo example is an excellent way of
also looking at the distinction between formal deviance and informal deviance. Informal deviance
are violations of cultural norms that are sanctioned or controlled by society but not
by the government. So someone does something like get a tattoo, their mother may say, "I
can't believe you got a tattoo." That's an informal sanction. It's not a crime to get
a tattoo, but it's a deviant behavior, and we sanction that informally. But in some states
it actually was a crime to get a tattoo. In fact, in Oklahoma, before 2006 you couldn't
legally get a tattoo in the state. You had to go to Texas, or to Kansas, or to Missouri
to get a tattoo because it was against the law. There was a statute that forbade it.
That's a formal act of deviance, it has been formally defined by the government as an illegal
act. The distinction between deviance on the one hand and crime on the other hand is that
crime is a formally defined act that has a written down statute and has a punishment
that's associated with it. Thou shalt not do this. If you do, you will get punished
this way. This distinction between formal deviance and informal deviance leads us to
a discussion of formal social control and informal social control. Informal social control
is the way we control people's behavior around us ourselves. If someone acts a way that we
don't approve of, we sanction them informally. We may tell them, "You shouldn't do that."
We may look at them in a funny way. And the idea here is we let them know that they are
acting in a way that we believe is deviant. Formal social control represents the actions
of the government. A government agency, a police agency, whose job it is to find people
who are committing crime, to arrest them, and then take them into the criminal justice
system, to isolate them from the rest of society, and then punish them or rehabilitate them.
The formal social control mechanism that we typically study is called the criminal justice
system. The criminal justice system is composed of the police, the court system, and the correctional
system. The purpose of this system is to enforce the criminal code, the formal rules that the
culture has created, to make sure that people follow the rules. All right, we've been talking
about people who are violating norms. We've been talking about why people violate these
norms, and there's whole sets of theories about why people commit crime or behave deviantly.
And we talked about the informal and social control mechanisms that try to coerce people
to behave the way culture says people should behave. All right, go ahead and read all of
the material that's provided in this unit, make use of those resources I provided for
you, and good luck.