Deviance, Law, and Crime

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1. How is the symbolic interactionist perspective related to the theory of social construction?

Answer: Both perspectives emphasize construction through human interaction. Symbolic interactionists theorize how we derive meaning and come to understand society and our own roles within it through our interactions with other human beings. Social constructionists argue that we enter these interactions with an internally predefined social world, and it is this social world that becomes evident in our interactions with other human beings. Each perspective relies on the process of interaction with other human beings to explain the process of meaning making.

2. How does deviance vary?

Answer: Deviance varies by in the severity of people’s response to an act, in the perceived harmfulness of the act to the public’s safety, and the degree of public agreement over whether the act is, in fact, deviant. Minor acts of deviance aren’t criminal and don’t warrant much attention when it comes to harming society. Lesser crimes are criminal acts but ones in which their perceived harmfulness is not usually seen as a serious violation of social norms. Consensus and white-collar crimes are the final and most serious act of deviance categorized by sociologists. These deviant acts are criminal and the public widely agrees they cause serious harm to society. Deviance varies, then, by people’s response to the act in terms of whether it is seen as deviant and the degree to which it is seen as deviant by the public.    

3. How does deviance encourage social change?

Answer: Durkheim believed deviance encouraged social change if today’s deviant is seen in the future as a beacon of morality. Some individuals are initially considered deviant because they broke a social norm, and some social norms deserve to be broken, despite dissenting public opinion at the time. Racism leading to exclusion has been the social norm for human societies in North America at various points in their past and some might say present. Behaving in defiance of such racist norms may at one time have been considered deviant but in the future the public may agree that they were necessary acts of social justice to change the racist values and norms that existed.

4. What is the difference between individual-level theories explaining deviance and crime and social explanations of crime and deviance?

Answer: The primary difference between the two types of theoretical explanations for crime and deviant behaviour is the scale of explanation. For individual-level theories, crime and deviant behaviour is explained as a problem with the individual, usually a problem that has a biological basis as in the individual is born with faulty genes. At this level of explanation, criminals are nothing more than bad people whose deviancy comes from within. With social explanation of crimes, however, the focus is on understanding how the criminal or deviant act is a product of their environment. A criminal’s or a deviant’s environment shapes their actions, hence downplaying the individual and their biology in the explanation of their actions.

5. What are the various functions of punishment in human societies?

Answer: Punishment in human societies is generally seen as the penalty inflicted on someone for committing a transgression. It serves several main functions in human societies. The first function is retribution, or the idea that the punishment should compare to the victim’s suffering. The second function is deterrence, either punishing someone as a specific deterrence so they refrain from committing the crime again in the future and to send the message as a general deterrence to others who may think about committing the crime in the future. Another major function of punishment is rehabilitation, whereby prisoners are reformed or healed so that they will not reoffend in the future and may integrate back into human societies. Punishment of criminals is also intended to protect society from further harm and for boundary-setting because it illustrates what the public is or is not allowed to do. Finally, punishment functions at times to bring about restoration, or restoring order by compensating or fixing the injustice the crime created. 

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