Crime And Deviance Analysis

Crime and deviance are always been a matter of fact, the ‘collateral effect’ of living among other people. Norms and rules are set in each society, from rural ones to the largest urban environments, but this cannot prevent the attitudes by some individuals, that in the most of case gang up, to not follow these norms. They are the deviant ones and they are condemned to be considered not normal, sometimes just without choosing that. Paradoxically, most of actions and situations that are considered as normal, under a more peculiar analysis may be not so ‘normal’. For example, the norms that consider smoking as a ‘crime’ are the ones that ban this action in public places, since smoking is injurious both to yours and to the others’ health but, in
our society, it is considered as a normal action and on the TV or on the radio nobody tells that, in a thirty seconds spot. So, what does ‘normal’ actually mean? Can be crime and deviance considered ‘normal’? Why? The aim of this essay is to try to answer these questions all related with the crime and deviance issue, one of the most discussed in the sociological study.

First, it is important to illustrate the distinction between 'deviance' and 'crime'. Substantially, the former is considered as the breaking of informal norms sanctioned with stigmatisation and labelling; the latter one on the other hand is the breaking of formal norms sanctioned by bureaucracies. According to Macionis and Plummer, another key difference between the two is that being deviant most of the time is not a choice and that people became outsiders just in line with what society decide to consider deviant (2012:582). Since the idea of 'normality' lies with the conforming of norms and expectations of a particular social context (Macionis and Plummer, 2012:153), then crime and deviance actually can be considered normal because a society decide so. An interesting theory that tries to solve this question is the functionalist one. The idea is that crime and deviance are normal since both them are a sort of physiological necessity of societies, in order to create an equilibrium and to actually make people aware of what is good and what is bad because crime cannot disappear but, due to historical instances, it mutates its form. Then, crime becomes ordinary (Durkheim, 1964:67-69).The assumption here is that deviance is a consequence of the making-of a society, but it is not necessarily like that. Deviance can be understood as the source of collective morality, since people are used to share some values siding against the so-called 'deviant' who start not being considered normal. That is the invention of the outsider, the same culture that invented the normal behaviour (Clinard, 1974:30-31). Crime and deviance are understood as usual and expected because they are not more abnormal than 'normality'.

This affirmation may sound tricky and insidious and the topic itself is so.
However, as Downes and Rock point out, 'ambiguity' is clearly the whole issue in the analysis of crime and deviance: the authors state that it is socially recognised the difficulty of identifying situations or people as deviant and it all starts conforming to the group reaction (2004:5). That is not only about the criminal subject: assumed that sociological behaviour is performance, most of people tend to behave conforming to the situation and, then, to that series of attitudes that are considered moral. So is deviance just a conforming to the wrong side? Most of criminals and deviants are, indeed, influenced by peers despite mass media depict criminals as solitary weirdos (Krohm, 2009:401-402). Erickson, cited in Gibbs (1966:11) formulate an interesting (and prettily sociological) consideration stating that the study of crime and deviance becomes critical focusing on 'the social audience' that refers some individuals as being deviant in order to gain control since it is necessary to react against these people. That is the basis of the criminal law but, since some behaviours do not conform with civil norms, what about informal norms? Stipulating these rules and then conforming to them is the making-of the social culture, which according to Downes and Rock substantially consists in 'traditional ways of solving problems' (2003:145-146) and these problems refer to all those issues and situations that are not considered ordinary, usual and normal. Subsequently, the people who consider that side as the 'outside' are the same that behave affected by moral panic, nowadays generally spread by the mass media; meanwhile, in the Middle Age deviants for example were the left-hand writer or the witches and, in the last century, they were the homosexuals or the mods and the rockers. What makes the former ones ‘more normal’ than the latter
ones?