How is crime defined sociologically

In fact, most American cities at the end of the twentieth century were characterized by high levels of racial residential segregation Massey and Denton Failure to integrate these migrants, coupled with other forces of social disorganization such as crowding, poverty, and illness, caused crime rates to climb in the cities, particularly in the segregated wards and neighborhoods where the migrants were forced to live.

Foreign immigrants during this period did not look as dramatically different from the rest of the population as blacks did, but the migrants from eastern and southern Europe who came to American cities did not speak English, and were frequently Catholic, while the native born were mostly Protestant. The combination of rapid population growth with the diversity of those moving into the cities created what the Chicago School sociologists called social disorganization. More specifically, the disorganized areas and neighborhoods where the unintegrated migrants lived were unable to exercise the social control that characterized organized, integrated communities.

Here crime could flourish. Crime was not a consequence of who happened to live in a particular neighborhood, but rather of the character of the social ecology in which they lived. That is, the crime rate was a function of the area itself and not of the people who lived there.

But, the old neighborhood, with its cheaper housing and disorganized conditions, would attract another, more recent group migrating to the city. Those groups settled there because that is where they could afford to live.

When they became more integrated in American urban life, like those who came before them, they would move to better neighborhoods and as a result have lower crime rates. For African Americans, residential segregation and racial discrimination prohibited the move to better, more organized neighborhoods. Contemporary social disorganization theorists Sampson and Groves are less concerned with the effects of ethnic migration.

The disorganizing effects of urban poverty Sampson and Wilson , racial residential segregation Massey and Denton , and the social isolation of the urban poor Wilson , and the consequent effect on crime is the focus of current research.

This line of research has developed intriguing answers to the question of why some racial or ethnic groups have higher crime rates. Both the anomie and differential association traditions grew out of critiques of the Chicago School version of social disorganization theory.

The latter was developed by Sutherland , himself a member of the University of Chicago faculty. Sutherland believed that a theory of crime should explain not only how bad behavior is produced in bad living conditions, but also how bad behavior arises from good living circumstances. This theory should also explain why most residents of disorganized neighborhoods do not become criminals or delinquents. Sutherland explained this by arguing that crime is more likely to occur when a person has a greater number of deviant associations, relative to non-deviant associations.

Differential association occurs when a person has internalized an excess of definitions favorable to violations of the law. It is not a simple count of favorable and unfavorable definitions. Differential association theory is not a theory that focuses on who a person associates with. Indeed Sutherland argued that it is possible to receive definitions favorable to violation from the law-abiding.

Of course those spending time with delinquent peers will be exposed to more criminal definitions, but the theory should not be reduced to simply a peer group theory of crime and delinquency Sutherland and Cressey As Cressey has pointed out, if crime were simply a consequence of prolonged proximity with criminals, then prison guards would be the most criminal group in the population.

Differential association theory continues to be of influence in contemporary sociology, but it does not occupy as central a role as it did in the s and s. Strain theories, including anomie theory, focus on social structural strains, inequalities, and dislocations, which cause crime and delinquency. Durkheim stressed that societal norms that restrained the aspirations of individuals were important for preventing deviance.

However, unrealistically high aspirations would be frustrated by a harsh social reality, leading to adaptations such as suicide, crime, and addiction. In other words, society helps determine the goals that we internalize by defining which of them are legitimate but it also defines the legitimate means of achieving these goals. American society, for example, defines material comfort as legitimate goals, and taking a well-paid job as a legitimate means of achieving them. Yet legitimate means such as these and economic success are not universally available.

When a society is characterized by a disjunction between its legitimate goals and the legitimate means available to achieve them, crime is more likely. Contemporary strain theorists have moved in two directions. What ties these contemporary versions of anomie theory to the earlier tradition is the notion that there are individual adaptations to social strain, or structurally based unequal opportunity, and that some of these adaptations can result in crime.

Subcultural explanations of crime are similar to both differential association and anomie theories. Like differential association, subculture theories have an important learning component.

Both types of theories emphasize that crime, the behavior, accompanying attitudes, justifications, etc. And, as anomie and other versions of strain theory emphasize, subcultural explanations of crime tend to focus on lower-class life as a generating milieu in which procriminal norms and values thrive.

Miller argued that a prodelinquency value system springs from situations where young boys grow up in poor, female-headed households. This idea enjoys recurring popularity in explanations of behavior in poor, and especially urban, minority neighborhoods Banfield ; Murray even though it is notoriously difficult to test empirically. A different version of subculture theory has been championed by Wolfgang Wolfgang and Ferracuti Wolfgang and his colleagues argued that people in some segments of communities internalized, carried, and intergenerationally transferred values that were proviolence.

Accordingly, members of this subculture of violence would more frequently resort to violence in circumstances where others probably would not. Along with most other institutions and traditions, mainstream criminology was challenged in the s. Critics raised questions about the theories, data, methods, and even the definitions of crime used in criminology. The early challenges came from labeling theorists.

This group used a variant of symbolic interaction to argue that law-violating behavior was widespread in the general population, and the official labeling of a selected subset of violators was more a consequence of who the person was than of what the person had done Becker Consequently, crime should not be defined as behavior that violates the law, because many people violate the law and are never arrested, prosecuted, or convicted.

Rather, crime is a behavior that is selectively sanctioned, depending on who is engaging in it. It follows then that when criminologists use data produced by the criminal justice system, we are not studying crime but the criminal justice system itself.

These data only tell us about the people selected for sanctioning, not about all of those who break the law. And, labeling theorists argued, most of our theories have been trying to explain why lower-class people engage disproportionately in crime, but since they do not—they are simply disproportionately sanctioned—the theories are pointless.

What should be explained, labeling theorists argued, is why some people are more likely to be labeled and sanctioned as criminals than are others who engage in the same or similar behavior. The answer they offered was that those with sufficient resources—enough money, the right racial or gender status, etc. A further contribution by labeling theorists is the idea that the labeling process actually creates deviance. In other words, the act of sanctioning causes more of the behavior the criminal justice system wishes to extinguish.

The Marxist critique of mainstream criminology can be summarized by focusing on the argument that it tends to ask three types of questions: Who commits crimes? How much crime is there? Why do people break the law? The Marxist perspective argues that these may be important questions, but more important are those that do not reify the law itself.

Marxists argue that in addition to the above questions, criminologists should ask: Where does the law come from? Whose interest does the law serve? Why are the laws structured and enforced in particular ways? Their answers to these questions are based on a class-conflict analysis. Power in social systems is allocated according to social class, and the powerful use the law to protect their interests and the status quo that perpetuates their superordinate status.

Law is structured to protect the current status arrangements. Both the labeling and Marxist perspectives experienced broad popularity among students of criminology. Many scholars responded to their critiques not by joining them, but by taking some lessons from the debate and moving forward to develop theories consistent with traditional directions and research methods that were not as dependent on data generated by the criminal justice system.

Victimization surveys and self-report studies of crime have become more widely used, in part as a consequence of these critiques. All of the theories mentioned so far have had significant empirical challenges.

Most of the initial statements have been falsified or their proponents have had to revise the perspective in the face of evidence that did not support it. Several of these explanations of crime, or how societies control their members, are used today in a modified form, while others have evolved into contemporary theories that are being tested by researchers.

No doubt when someone writes about criminology in the future, some or all of the more recent theories will have joined those that have been falsified or modified as a result of empirical analyses. Contemporary criminological theories tend to be in the control theory, rational choice, or conflict traditions. However, these are not mutually exclusive e. Control theorists begin by saying that we ask the wrong question when we seek to understand why some people commit crimes.

We should instead seek to explain why most people do not violate the rules. Control theorists reason that we do not need to explain why someone who is hungry or has less will steal from those who have what they want or need.

We do not need to explain why the frustrated and angry among us will express their feelings violently. Control theory has evolved in a number of directions. Gottfredson and Hirschi have argued that crime and deviance are a consequence of the failure of some to develop adequate self-control.

Self-control is developed, if at all, early in life—by the age of eight or ten. Those who do not develop self-control will, they argue, exhibit various forms depending on their age of deviance throughout their lives. These people will commit crimes disproportionately during the crime-prone ages, between adolescence and the late twenties. In trial it came out that the eldest of the skinheads had recently been released from the military because of his racist beliefs. Another had a large Nazi flag pinned to the wall of his apartment.

Miloszewski The category of hate crimes grew out of the provisions in the Criminal Code that prohibit hate propaganda sections and including advocating genocide, public incitement of hatred, or the willful promotion of hatred against an identifiable group.

In , section However, police reported hate crimes totalled only 1, incidents in About one-third of the General Social Survey respondents said they reported the hate-motivated incidents to the police. In police-reported hate crimes had dropped to 1, incidents. The majority of these were racially or ethnically motivated, but many were based on religious especially anti-Semitic prejudice or sexual orientation. A significant portion of the hate-motivated crimes 50 percent involved mischief vandalism, graffiti, and other destruction of property.

This figure increased to 75 percent for religious-motivated hate crimes. Violent hate crimes constituted 39 percent of all hate crimes 22 percent accounted for by violent assault specifically.

Sexual-orientation-motivated hate crimes were the most likely to be violent 65 percent Allen and Boyce What crimes are people in Canada most likely to commit, and who is most likely to commit them? To understand criminal statistics, you must first understand how these statistics are collected.

These annual publications contain data from all the police agencies in Canada. The accuracy of the data collected by the UCR also varies greatly. Because police and other authorities decide which criminal acts they are going to focus on, the data reflects the priorities of the police rather than actual levels of crime per se. For example, if police decide to focus on gun-related crimes chances are that more gun-related crimes will be discovered and counted. Similarly, changes in legislation that introduce new crimes or change the categories under which crimes are recorded will also alter the statistics.

The GSS is a self-report study. A self-report study is a collection of data acquired using voluntary response methods, based on telephone interviews. In , for example, survey data were gathered from 79, households across Canada on the frequency and type of crime they experience in their daily lives.

The surveys are thorough, providing a wider scope of information than was previously available. This allows researchers to examine crime from more detailed perspectives and to analyze the data based on factors such as the relationship between victims and offenders, the consequences of the crimes, and substance abuse involved in the crimes.

Demographics are also analyzed, such as age, ethnicity, gender, location, and income level. In the GSS on Victimization , only 31 percent of criminal incidents experienced by respondents were reported to police Perreault and Brennan Though the GSS is a critical source of statistical information, disadvantages exist.

Inability to contact important demographics, such as those who do not have access to phones or who frequently relocate, also skews the data. For those who participate, memory issues can be problematic for the data sets. While neither of these publications can take into account all of the crimes committed in the country, some general trends may be noted. Crime rates were on the rise after , but following an all-time high in the s and s, rates of violent and nonviolent crimes started to decline.

In they reached their lowest level since Perreault In , approximately 2 million crimes occurred in Canada. Of those, , were classified as violent crimes, the majority being assault and robbery. The rate of violent crime reached its lowest level since , led by decreases in sexual assault, common assault, and robbery. The homicide rate fell to its lowest level since An estimated 1. The major contribution to the declining crime rate has been decreases in nonviolent crime, especially decreases in mischief, break-ins, disturbing the peace, theft of a motor vehicle, and possession of stolen property.

As noted above however, only 31 percent of violent and nonviolent crimes were reported to the police. What accounts for the decreases in the crime rate? Opinion polls continue to show that a majority of Canadians believe that crime rates, especially violent crime rates, are rising Edmiston , even though the statistics show a steady decline since Where is the disconnect? There are three primary reasons for the decline in the crime rate.

Firstly, it reflects the demographic changes to the Canadian population. Most crime is committed by people aged 15 to This age cohort has declined in size since Secondly, male unemployment is highly correlated with the crime rate. Following the recession of —, better economic conditions improved male unemployment. Thirdly, police methods have arguably improved since , including having a more targeted approach to particular sites and types of crime.

Whereas reporting on spectacular crime has not diminished, the underlying social and policing conditions have.

It is very difficult to get a feel for statistical realities when you are sitting in front of a TV screen that shows a daily litany of violent and frightening crime.

The corrections system , more commonly known as the prison system, is tasked with supervising individuals who have been arrested, convicted, and sentenced for a criminal offence. At the end of , approximately 38, adults were in prison in Canada, while another , were under community supervision or probation Dauvergne By way of contrast, seven million Americans were behind bars in Bureau of Justice Statistics In the United States in , the incarceration rate was approximately 1, per , population.

More than 1 in U. As we noted in Chapter 1, from to , aboriginal Canadians were 10 times more likely to be incarcerated than the non-aboriginal population. While aboriginal people accounted for about 4 percent of the Canadian population, in , they made up Aboriginal women made up This problem of overrepresentation of aboriginal people in the corrections system continues to grow appreciably despite a Supreme Court ruling in that the social history of aboriginal offenders should be considered in sentencing.

Prison is supposed to be used only as a last resort. Between and , the aboriginal population in prison grew by 44 percent Correctional Investigator Canada Although black Canadians are a smaller minority of the Canadian population than aboriginal people, they experience a similar problem of overrepresentation in the prison system.

Blacks represent approximately 2. A survey revealed that blacks in Toronto are subject to racial profiling by the police, which might partially explain their higher incarceration rate Wortley Racial profiling occurs when police single out a particular racial group for extra policing, including a disproportionate use of stop-and-search practices, undercover sting operations, police patrols in racial minority neighbourhoods, and extra attention at border crossings and airports.

Survey respondents revealed that blacks in Toronto were much more likely to be stopped and searched by police than were whites and Asians. Moreover, in a reverse of the situation for whites, older and more affluent black males were more likely to be stopped and searched than younger, lower-income blacks. There are a number of alternatives to prison sentences used as criminal sanctions in Canada including fines, electronic monitoring, probation, and community service.

These alternatives divert offenders from forms of penal social control, largely on the basis of principles drawn from labelling theory. They emphasize to varying degrees compensatory social control, which obliges an offender to pay a victim to compensate for a harm committed; therapeutic social control, which involves the use of therapy to return individuals to a normal state; and conciliatory social control, which reconciles the parties of a dispute to mutually restore harmony to a social relationship that has been damaged.

Many non-custodial sentences involve community-based sentencing , in which offenders serve a conditional sentence in the community, usually by performing some sort of community service. The argument for these types of programs is that rehabilitation is more effective if the offender is in the community rather than prison. A version of community-based sentencing is restorative justice conferencing , which focuses on establishing a direct, face-to-face connection between the offender and the victim.

Part of the process of restorative justice is to bring the offender to a position in which he or she can fully acknowledge responsibility for the offence, express remorse, and make a meaningful apology to the victim Department of Justice In special cases where the parties agree, aboriginal sentencing circles involve victims, the aboriginal community, and aboriginal elders in a process of deliberation with aboriginal offenders to determine the best way to find healing for the harm done to victims and communities.

The emphasis is on forms of traditional aboriginal justice , which centre on healing and building community rather than retribution. It is difficult to find data in Canada on the effectiveness of these types of programs. However, a large meta-analysis study that examined ten studies from Europe, North America, and Australia was able to determine that restorative justice conferencing was effective in reducing rates of recidivism —the likelihood for people to be arrested again after an initial arrest—and in reducing costs to the criminal justice system Strang et al.

The authors suggest that recidivism was reduced between 7 and 45 percent from traditional penal sentences by using restorative justice conferencing. Rehabilitation and recidivism are of course not the only goals of the corrections systems.

Many people are skeptical about the capacity of offenders to be rehabilitated and see criminal sanctions more importantly as a means of deterrence to prevent crimes, retribution or revenge to address harms to victims and communities, or incapacitation to remove dangerous individuals from society.

Deviance and Control Deviance is a violation of norms. Society seeks to limit deviance through the use of sanctions that help maintain a system of social control. In modern normalizing societies, disciplinary social control is a primary governmental strategy of social control. Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance The three major sociological paradigms offer different explanations for the motivation behind deviance and crime. Functionalists point out that deviance is a social necessity since it reinforces norms by reminding people of the consequences of violating them.

Critical sociologists argue that crime stems from a system of inequality that keeps those with power at the top and those without power at the bottom. Feminist sociologists emphasize that gender inequalities play an important role in determining what types of acts are actually regarded as criminal.

Symbolic interactionists focus attention on the socially constructed nature of the labels related to deviance. Crime and deviance are learned from the environment and enforced or discouraged by those around us. Crime and the Law Crime is established by legal codes and upheld by the criminal justice system. The corrections system is the dominant system of criminal punishment but a number of community-based sentencing models offer alternatives that promise more effective outcomes in terms of recidivism.

Although crime rates increased throughout most of the 20th century, they have been dropping since their peak in Deviance and Control 1. Which of the following best describes how deviance is defined?

In , Viola Desmond was arrested for refusing to sit in the blacks-only section of the cinema in Nova Scotia. A student has a habit of texting during class.

One day, the professor stops his lecture and asks her to respect the other students in the class by turning off her phone. School discipline obliges students to sit in rows and listen to lessons quietly in order for them to learn.

Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance 6. A student wakes up late and realizes her sociology exam starts in five minutes. She jumps into her car and speeds down the road, where she is pulled over by a police officer.

The student explains that she is running late, and the officer lets her off with a warning. According to critical sociology, which of the following people is most likely to commit a crime of accommodation? According to the concept of the power elite, why would a celebrity such as Charlie Sheen commit a crime? A convicted sexual offender is released on parole and arrested two weeks later for repeated sexual crimes.

How would labelling theory explain this? Crime and the Law Which of the following is an example of corporate crime? Deviance and Control Although we rarely think of it in this way, deviance can have a positive effect on society. Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance The Vancouver safe injection site is a controversial strategy to address the public health concerns associated with intravenous drug use.

Read about the perspectives that promote and critique the safe injection site model at the following websites. Can you determine how the positions expressed by the different sides of the issue fit within the different sociological perspectives on deviance?

What is the best way to deal with the problems of addiction? Crime and the Law How is crime data collected in Canada? Read about the victimization survey used by Statistics Canada and take the survey yourself. NY: Current. Hare, Robert D. New York: Guilford Press. Rimke, Heidi. Criminology: Critical Canadian Perspectives. Toronto: Pearson. Deviance and Control Becker, Howard. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance.

New York: Free Press. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. NY: Vintage Books. The Politics of Truth. Innes, Martin. Schoepflin, Todd. Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance Becker, Howard. Becker, Howard. Boyce, Jillian. Durkheim, Emile. The Division of Labor in Society. Hirschi, Travis. Causes of Delinquency. Howlett, Dennis. Johnson, Holly. Dangerous Domains: Violence against Women in Canada. Toronto: Nelson.

Kong, R. Johnson, S. Beattie, and A. Statistics Canada Catalogue no. Laub, John H. McFarland, Janet and Richard Blackwell.

Toronto: Oxford. McKenna, Barrie. Pyke, Alan. Quinney, Richard. New York: Longman. Rusnell, Charles. June Samuelson, Leslie. Singh Bolaria ed. Social Issues and Contradictions in Canadian Society. Sharpe, Andrew and Jill Hardt.

Centre for the Study of Living Standards. Sinha, Maire ed. Snider, Laureen. Hinch Scarborough, On: Prentice Hall. Tencer, Daniel. Wheeler, Stanton. Zhang, Ting. Crime and the Law Aboriginal Justice Directorate. Department of Justice. Allen, Mary and Jillian Boyce. Boyd, Susan and Connie Carter. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Correctional Investigator Canada.

Annual Report of the Office of the Correctional Investigator: The Correctional Investigator Canada. Dauvergne, Mia. Statistics Canada Juristat: Catalogue No. October Department of Justice Canada. April Edmiston, Jake. National Post. August 4. Galloway, Gloria. Liptak, Adam. Perreault, Samuel. July Perreault, Samuel and Shannon Brennan. Criminal victimization in Canada, Statistics Canada Juristat : Catalogue No.

Silver, Warren et al. Hate Crime in Canada. Juristat Canadian Centre for Justice Studies. Statistics Canada — Catalogue no. Stockwell, Tim et al. Strang, Heather et al. Campbell Systematic Reviews. November Wortley, Scot. Figure 7. Skip to content Main Body. Learning Objectives 7.

As such, they play an essential role in the way we interpret facts. Several competing theories attempting to explain the same evidence can arrive at separate conclusions. In other words, differing assumptions about human nature and its relation to social order. A legal definition of crime can be simple: crime is a violation of the law. There are many different ways to define crime, many different theories about the origins of criminal activity, and just as many sociological theories of crime.

While there is no simple definition within the field of sociology, broadly speaking, you could say that crime is the study of social deviance and violations of established norms. But why do those norms exist? Some sociologists ask us to reflect on the creation of individual laws: Whose interests are served by the law in question?

Who benefits, and who pays the costs of various behaviors that are classified as illegal? Sociological theories of crime need to explain a diverse range of social phenomena. Definitions of crime have implications for the kind of questions you ask, the kinds of data you use to study criminal behavior, and the kinds of theories applied. Some of the most commonly defined types of crime in sociology include:.

Outside of these five types of crime in sociology, you can find a wealth of different ideas. Committing a crime violates social laws, while deviant behavior violates social norms and rules.

However, deviant behavior can also tiptoe over the line of criminal behavior. While there are many different sociological theories about crime, there are four primary perspectives about deviance: Structural Functionalism, Social Strain Typology, Conflict Theory, and Labeling Theory. Starting with these theories can provide the context and perspective necessary to better appreciate other sociological theories of crime.

Structural Functionalism argues deviant behavior plays a constructive part in society as it brings together different parts of the population within a society. While deviant behavior can throw off social balance, society may adjust social norms in the process of restoring that balance.

In other words, deviant behavior can then contribute to social stability in the long term because it challenges norms while promoting social cohesion. For example, some people turn to crime for the culturally accepted value of seeking to lead a wealthy life.

Deviance can mean breaking one norm to place another before it, which is a fundamental insight of social strain typology. Conflict Theory views deviant behavior as a consequence of material inequality between various socio-political groups. Those groups might be drawn along the lines of gender, religion, race, class, and so on.

Each sociopolitical group has a tendency to perceive its own interests in completion with others.