6 Deviance and Crime

What Is Deviance?

Who Defines Deviance?What Is Social Control?

Functionalist Perspectives on Deviance

What Causes Deviance, and Why Is ItFunctional for Society?Strain Theory:Goals and Means to Achieve ThemOpportunity Theory:Access toIllegiti mate Opportu nities

Conflict Perspectives on Deviance

Deviance and Power RelationsDeviance and CapitalismFeminist ApproachesApproaches Focusing on Race,Class, andGender

Symbolic InteractionistPerspectives on Deviance

Differential Association Theory andDifferential Reinforcement Theory Control Theory: Social BondingLabeling Theory

Postmodernist Perspectiveson DevianceCrime Classifications and Statistics

How the Law ClassifiesCrimeOther Crime CategoriesCrime StatisticsTerrorism and CrimeStreet Crimesand CriminalsCrime Victims

The Criminal Justice System

The PoliceThe CourtsPunishment and Corrections

Deviance and Crime inthe UnitedStates in the FutureThe Global Criminal Economy

ThomsonOW

This iconsignals whenThomsonNOW has importantresources available foryou to useinconjunctionwith the text.See the foldoutat the f ront of thistext f or infor- mation on howto accessThomsonNOW.

F

ELIX(a sociologist): When did you join theDiamonds?FLACO(a gang member): Four and half years ago.I was a freshman in high school.FELIX:And what were the reasons for joining?FLAco:Well, let me see. More or less the reasonwas because I was already hanging with themsince I was small, so I was in the neighborhood.And I had a couple of real good buddies. And I hadprotection by them.FELIX:What exactly did your friends say to you?FLACO:Not much. It wasn't like they were forcingme. They just told me to turn. It was no big deal.FELIX:And what did you do after this? FLAco:I turned. I believed them ....FELIX:You mentioned earlier that your friendsgave you protection. What's protection?FLAco:Protection? I had backup. You have tohave Folks on your side, 'cause, if you're not in onegang, you're not in another gang, and they alwaysbe asking if you got a sign, and if you're on thisside, and you get rolled on anyway. And you havenobody on your side, so you're still gonna pick afavorite of your Folks or People. I don't know, kidscould stay neutron, but it's very hard,and it's veryrarely you see kids that are neutrons.And the ones

The Kendall Companion Website

http://thomsonedu.com/sociology/kendall

Supplement your review of this chapterby going to the companionwebsite to take one of thetutorial quizzes, use theflash cards tomaster keyterms, and check out themany other study aids you'llfind there.You'llalso find special f eatures suchas GSS Data andCensus 2000 inf ormation that will put data and resources at your f ingertips to help you with thatspecial projector helpyoudo some research on your own.

that are neutrons-they still got afavorite; theylike Folks better, orPeople. And the Folks or the Peoplecan't let you see them too much on theother side. Like, if you're a neutron,and you're inf avor of Folks, if theFolks see you in People'sneighborhoods, they're gonna think something about it. And then that'swhen you got problems.FELIX:So one of the reasons why you joined was for protection, for backup?FLAco:Yeah.

I

liked chilling out withthem, too.FELIX:What did you like abouthanging out with them?FLAco:Everything's fun. Sometimeswe would ditch school or take a dayoff .We just go, we get a couple of cases of beer, we drink those, andthen we'll go up to the top of the roofsand look over. Police come, and theychase us down. We just had a lot of fun, do a lot of kinds of things.

-Sociologist FelixM. Padilla

(1993:80-81)

interviewing a gang member as part of Padilla's ethnographic research on why people join gangs

S

ocioLogists and criminoLogists typicaLLy de-fine a

gang

as a group of peopLe, usuaLLyyoung, who band together for purposes gen-eraLLy considered to be deviant or criminaL by theLarger society. Throughout the past century, gangbehavior has been of speciaL interest to socioLogists(see Puffer, 1912), who generaLLy agree that youthgangs can be found in many settings and amongaLLraciaL and ethnic categories. The Office of Juve-niLe Justice and DeLinquency Prevention (2002)estimates that there are more than 24,500 gangswith about 772,500 members in the United States.

For more than a century, sociologistis have studied the behaviorof gangs (such as the Death Squad gang, shown here) becauseit provides important insights on what is considered to beconformity or deviance in particular society.

As unusuaL as it initiaLLy may sound, some im-portant simiLarities exist between youth gangsand peer cliques, which are typicaLLy viewed asconforming to most sociaL norms. At the most ba-sic LeveL,

cliques

are friendship circles, whosemembers identify one another as mutuaLLy con-nected (AdLer and AdLer, 1998). However, cliquesare much more compLex than this definition sug-gests. According to the socioLogists Patricia A.AdLer and Peter AdLer (1998: 56), cliques "have ahierarchicaL structure, being dominated by Lead-ers, and are exclusivein nature, so that not aLLin-dividuaLs who desire membership are accepted."