Crime and Social Deviance

Across groups within one society. What is expected in a village is not what is expected in a city, and a norm binding in one community is unknown in another. India, being plural in the sense of [The Pluralistic Nature of Indian Society], contains many normative orders at once, which is why so much deviance here is deviance from one group's norms and conformity to another's.

By who does it. The same act is judged differently by the actor's status, and this connects to [Status and Role]: conduct excused in a person of standing is condemned in one without it.

Types of deviance

Formal and informal. Formal deviance breaks a codified rule, that is, crime. Informal deviance breaks an uncodified norm.

Positive and negative deviance. Negative deviance falls below the expected standard; positive deviance exceeds it, and is still deviance because it departs from the norm. The reformer, the whistleblower and the saint are positive deviants, and every one of them attracts hostility, which is the proof that the group is reacting to departure rather than to harm.

Primary and secondary deviance. Lemert's distinction, essential and taken up fully in the next chapter: primary deviance is the initial act, often casual and not affecting the person's self-conception; secondary deviance is the behaviour that follows from being labelled and treated as a deviant, and it is the point at which deviance becomes a career.

Individual and group deviance. Alone, or as part of a subculture with its own norms.

The functions of deviance

Durkheim's argument is the most counter-intuitive material in this module and is frequently examined, so it must be given fully and correctly.

Crime is normal. Durkheim's claim is not that crime is desirable but that it is normal, in the technical sense of being found in every society at every stage. A social fact universally present is not a pathology, and a society entirely without crime is impossible, because as serious offences disappear the threshold of condemnation falls and lesser acts become the offences.

Crime is functional, in four ways.

1. It affirms the collective conscience. Punishment assembles the community in a shared reaction and renews the sentiments the offence outraged. On this account punishment's chief function is not deterrence or reform but the reaffirmation of shared values, and it is aimed at the onlookers rather than the offender.
2. It clarifies the boundary. A society learns exactly where its limits are only when someone crosses them and is dealt with.
3. It permits change. Every reform begins as deviance. Norms that no society ever departed from could never be revised, so today's crime may be tomorrow's right. Indian social reform supplies example after example.
4. It provides a safety valve and, in Merton's addition, signals that something in the structure is not working, so a rise in a particular offence is information about the society rather than only about the offenders.

Durkheim's own limit. He held that crime is functional only within limits: too little indicates a society so rigid that it cannot change, and too much indicates anomie, the deregulation in which norms have lost their hold.

The criticism. The functionalist account says nothing about the victim; it does not explain why particular individuals offend; and treating crime as functional risks sounding like approval, which is not what is meant and should be said expressly.

Crime as a sociological object

What sociology asks that law does not. Law asks whether this person committed this offence. Sociology asks why the rate of a given offence is what it is, why it varies between groups, places and periods, who is defined as criminal and by whom, and what the machinery of enforcement actually does.

White-collar crime. Edwin Sutherland's concept, and the single most important corrective in this field: crime committed by persons of respectability and high social status in the course of their occupation. Its significance is theoretical, not merely descriptive. Every explanation of crime built on poverty, broken families and slums is refuted by offenders who have none of those characteristics, so any theory of crime must account for the boardroom as well as the street. It is also less reported, less investigated, less prosecuted and less punished, which distorts every official statistic.

Crime statistics must be read with care, and this is worth its own paragraph because it is where students write things they cannot support. India's National Crime Records Bureau publishes annual figures for offences reported. Reported is not committed. The gap between them, the dark figure of crime, varies enormously by offence: it is small for homicide, which is hard to conceal, and very large for offences within the household or the workplace. It follows that a rise in recorded figures may mean rising incidence, rising reporting, a change in recording practice, or a change in the law's definition, and that four explanations must be excluded before the first is asserted.

A worked example

A man of twenty takes a bicycle that is not his and rides it away.

In a village where everyone knows him and the owner, the response may be a word to his father, restitution and no more. The act is deviant; no formal process is engaged; and nothing enters a statistic.

In a city, reported to the police, the same act is an offence, and a process begins that will attach a record to him.

If he is prosperous and the bicycle is taken as a prank, the act may be defined as a misunderstanding, and the redefinition is done by people with the standing to make it stick.

If he is a migrant labourer with no local connection, the definition of theft is more likely to be applied and to remain applied.

The act is identical in all four, and this is exactly the sociological point. What differs is the reaction, and it is the reaction that decides whether there is deviance, whether there is crime, whether there is a record, and whether there is a criminal. That proposition is the whole foundation of labelling theory in the next chapter, and it is why the question "why do people commit crime" is only half of this module. The other half is "why is this conduct, done by this person, treated as crime".

What this does NOT mean

Relativity does not mean nothing is really wrong. To say that deviance is defined by social reaction is a description of how the category works, not a claim that all conduct is equally acceptable. Prohibitions on killing and on serious harm are found in every known society.

Deviance is not the same as crime, as the four categories above show.

Deviance is not always harmful, and positive deviance is the demonstration.

A high recorded crime rate does not simply mean a lawless society, for the recording reasons above; it may mean a society where people believe reporting is worthwhile.

Quick revision

1. Deviance is behaviour departing from a group's norms and provoking a negative reaction; crime is what the state has forbidden and made punishable. All crime is deviance; not all deviance is crime.
2. Four categories: deviant and criminal; deviant not criminal; criminal not deviant; neither. The sociology lives in the middle two.
3. Deviance is relative (society, time, group, status), defined by the audience, universal, situational, a matter of degree, and not always negative.
4. Types: formal and informal; positive and negative; primary and secondary (Lemert); individual and group.
5. Durkheim: crime is normal, found in every society; a society without crime is impossible because the threshold would simply fall. It is functional: it affirms the collective conscience, clarifies boundaries, permits change, and signals structural strain. Too much is anomie.
6. Sutherland's white-collar crime refutes every explanation built on poverty alone, and is under-reported, under-prosecuted and under-punished.
7. Reported is not committed: the dark figure. A rise in recorded crime may be incidence, reporting, recording practice or a change in the law's definition.

Test yourself

1. Distinguish crime from deviance and give an example of each combination. Deviance is behaviour that violates a group's norms and attracts a negative reaction; crime is conduct forbidden by law and punishable by the state. Deviant and criminal: theft. Deviant but not criminal: abandoning one's religion, or refusing a family obligation. Criminal but not widely regarded as deviant: minor traffic offences. Neither: ordinary conforming conduct. All crime is deviance, but the reverse does not hold.

2. Why is deviance said to be relative? Give Indian examples. Because no act is deviant in itself; it becomes deviant through the reaction of a group, and reactions differ by society, period, group and the actor's status. Within India the same acts have changed category within living memory: untouchability was practised and is now an offence; sati and child marriage were customary and are prohibited; conduct between consenting adults that was criminal has ceased to be so; and the treatment of attempted suicide changed with the Mental Healthcare Act 2017. In each case the act was unchanged and the response changed.

3. State Durkheim's view that crime is normal and functional. Normal in the technical sense that it is found in every society at every period, so it cannot be a pathology; and a society without crime is impossible, because if serious offences vanished the threshold of condemnation would fall and lesser acts would become the offences. Functional because punishment assembles the community and reaffirms the sentiments the offence outraged, because it shows the society precisely where its boundaries lie, and because every reform begins as a departure from an existing norm. Beyond a limit it indicates anomie.

4. What is white-collar crime and why does it matter theoretically? Sutherland's term for crime committed by persons of respectability and high social status in the course of their occupation. It matters because it refutes every explanation of crime built on poverty, deprivation, poor housing or family breakdown: offenders with none of those characteristics commit serious offences. Any adequate theory must therefore account for the boardroom as well as the street, and because such crime is less reported and less prosecuted, it distorts official statistics systematically.

5. Why must crime statistics be read carefully? Because published figures record offences reported and recorded, not offences committed, and the difference, the dark figure, varies by offence: small for homicide, very large for offences within the household or the workplace. A rise in recorded crime may therefore reflect rising incidence, rising willingness to report, a change in recording practice, or a change in the legal definition of the offence, and the first cannot be asserted until the other three are excluded.