Chapter Seven: Deviance

Deviance is recognized as the violation of cultural norms. Norms help guide us thought life activity. Crime is an act of violation of society formally enacted criminal law. Criminal deviance is divided into a wide range of offenses, from minor traffic violation to sexual assault to murder. In general that we would normally view nonconformity as breaking the rules, or regulation, like driving while under the influence of alcohol, stealing which is viewed as someone is negative or an bad person. On the other side we view someone that is good as a nerd that doesn’t do anything but think about computer software and programs, and someone that does a lot of volunteer work. Deviance doesn’t have to involve our actions or even choose. Some deviances action can be detached on how we all think about others and if we don’t like a certain people because of the person’s disability race, and other difference. This means that racial hate groups are performing a deviance act against other unlike racial groups. Social control is subjected to everyone in a society. Social control is an attempt to control people’s thoughts and behavior to standards of the society. Unfortunately social control has been able to control all of those murders and other people that constantly break the rules and regulation. In cases of serious deviance, however may bring action by the criminal justice system, which is a formal response by police, courts, and prison official to alleged violation of the law. Now lets take a look at structural-functional approach, it is based on the key insight that deviance is a necessary element of social organization. That is were I will be talking about Emile Durkheim, he is the person that preformed a detailed analysis of deviance. He believes that deviance is nothing abnormal, because deviance establishes cultural values and norms.