Skip to content Functionalist believe that crime is actually beneficial for society — for example it can improve social integration and social regulation. Durkheim: Three Key Ideas About Crime A limited amount of crime is inevitable and even necessary Crime has positive functions -A certain amount of crime contributes to the well-being of a society.
On the other hand, too much crime is bad for society and can help bring about its collapse, hence institutions of social control are necessary to keep the amount of crime in check. Crime is Inevitable Durkheim argued that crime is an inevitable and normal aspect of social life. Crime Performs Positive Functions Durkhiem went a step further and argued that a certain amount of crime was functional for society.
In contemporary society newspapers also help to perform the publicity function, with their often-lurid accounts of criminal acts. For example, when particularly horrific crimes have been committed the whole community joins together in outrage and the sense of belonging to a community is therefore strengthened Social Change — A further action performed by the criminals is to provide a constant test of the boundaries of permitted action.
When the law is clearly out of step with the feelings and values of the majority, legal reform is necessary. Criminals therefore, perform a crucial service in helping the law to reflect the wishes of the population and legitimising social change. The suffragettes: anticipating the morality of the future? Leave a Reply Cancel reply. This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.
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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. Deviance and Control Define deviance and categorize different types of deviant behaviour Determine why certain behaviours are defined as deviant while others are not Differentiate between methods of social control Describe the characteristics of disciplinary social control and their relationship to normalizing societies 7. Crime and the Law Identify and differentiate between different types of crimes Evaluate Canadian crime statistics Understand the nature of the corrections system in Canada.
In Canada, there were 1, reported victims of hate crimes in The General Social Survey suggests that only one-third of hate motivated incidences are reported to police. Section Quiz 7. Deviance is defined by federal, provincial, and local laws. Deviance occurs whenever someone else is harmed by an action.
Deviance is socially defined. We typically decline to violate informal norms, if we even think of violating them in the first place, because we fear risking the negative reactions of other people. These reactions, and thus examples of informal social control, include, but are not limited to, anger, disappointment, ostracism, and ridicule. Formal social control in the United States typically involves the legal system police, judges and prosecutors, corrections officials and also, for businesses, the many local, state, and federal regulatory agencies that constitute the regulatory system.
Social control is never perfect, and so many norms and people exist that there are always some people who violate some norms. The rules of sociological method Ed. Original work published a founder of sociology discussed in Chapter 1, stressed that a society without deviance is impossible for at least two reasons. First, the collective conscience see Chapter 1 is never strong enough to prevent all rule breaking.
Because Durkheim thought deviance was inevitable for these reasons, he considered it a normal part of every healthy society. Although deviance is normal in this regard, it remains true that some people are more likely than others to commit it. It is also true that some locations within a given society have higher rates of deviance than other locations; for example, U. Although talking might be considered deviant in a monastery, it would certainly be considered very normal elsewhere.
If an assailant, say a young male, murders someone, he faces arrest, prosecution, and, in many states, possible execution. Yet if a soldier kills someone in wartime, he may be considered a hero. Killing occurs in either situation, but the context and reasons for the killing determine whether the killer is punished or given a medal. Deviance is also relative in two other ways. First, it is relative in space : a given behavior may be considered deviant in one society but acceptable in another society.
There we contrasted a small island off the coast of Ireland, where sex and nudity are considered disgusting, with another island in the South Pacific, where sexual activity is very common.
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