CRIMINAL DEVIANT BEHAVIOR

Criminal Deviant behavior

Criminal Deviant behavior

Introduction

Deviant behavior is the idea of deviation implies particular values and norms against which behavior is defined as pathological. Deviant behaviors are labeled by a society's norms. As just as these norms are broad-ranging, constructed, and ever-shifting, so too are the behaviors we consider deviant (i.e. what's eccentric, immoral, and illegal). This paper discusses Criminal Deviant behavior.

Discussion

The world would be a better place if we could stop deviant behavior. Well, maybe not. Many social theorists believe that deviance is functional for a society. When we see others as weird, eccentric or immoral, it allows us to see ourselves as mainstream, normal, and perhaps even righteous. Deviance also bonds societies together. We tend to strengthen our bonds when we percieve a common threat. Finally, deviant behaviors can open a path for societal evolution. In the USA 50 years ago, sitting at the front of a bus or trying to get served at a lunch counter were considered deviant if you were black. But the persistence of, and frustration over, these forms of deviance were a catalyst for much needed social change. (Suzanne, 2011)

Deviant behavior is against-the-norms behavior that is dependent on social control, this behavior can also be illegal and criminal. Classified along these dimensions, many - but not all - theories of deviance have been categorized by James Orcutt as “macro-normative,” “micro-normative,” “macro-reactionist,” and “micro-reactionist”. In recent decades, however, sociologists have integrated theories of deviance so that elements of these four types of theories can be found in a single theory organized around a central causal mechanism. (Doug, 2004)

The macro-normative approach to the study of deviance examines how societies and communities are organized, to determine why varying rates of Criminal Deviant behavior appear across subgroups in the population, locations in a community or society, and at different points in history. For example, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, perhaps the most frequently cited classical theorist of deviance, studied how social structure facilitates or impedes the production of deviance, by emphasizing that structural strain produces what he called “pathology” in the population. Based on empirical data on suicide rates across Europe in the 19th century, Durkheim argued in Suicide (1964) that changes in the rate of suicide are not adequately explained by individualistic approaches to deviance. Rather, fluctuations in the rates of suicide within and between societies were best explained by the way societies were structured, especially in light of three types of social conditions that produce strain:

Anomie, a societal condition characterized by a state of normlessness in which individuals become disassociated from a collective moral authority;

Egoism, a societal condition in which the normative order is too weak and individuals are not sufficiently integrated into society, and so they are not bound by the norms of the society; and

Altruism, a societal condition in which the normative order is too strong and individuals are overly integrated into society in ways that compel them to willfully take their own ...