SOCIAL CONTROL

• What is Social Control?

In sociological dictionaries, “social control” is defined to include all social processes, institutions and methods that produce (or attempt to produce) conformity or regulate the individual and collective conduct of its members.

Social control refers generally to societal and political mechanisms or processes that regulate individual and group behavior, leading to conformity and compliance to the rules of a given society, state, or social group. Many mechanisms of social control are cross-cultural, if only in the control mechanisms used to prevent the establishment of chaos or anomie. Some theorists, such as Émile Durkheim, refer to this form of control as regulation. Sociologists identify two basic forms of social controls:
1. Internal Control- Internalisation of norms and values by a process known as socialization. Socialization is defined as "“the process by which an individual, born with behavioral potentialities of enormously wide range, is led to develop actual behavior which is confined to the narrower range of what is acceptable for him by the group standards.”
2. External Control- External sanctions, which can be either positive (rewards) or negative (punishment). These sanctions come from either formal or informal control.
While the concept of social control has been around since the formation of organized sociology, the meaning has been altered over time. Originally the concept simply referred to society’s ability to regulate itself. However, in the 1930’s, the term took on its more modern meaning of the individual’s conversion to conformity. Social control theory began to be studied as a separate field in the early 20th century. The means to enforce social control can be either formal or informal.[5] Sociologist Edward A. Ross argued that belief systems exert a greater control on human behavior than laws imposed by government, no matter what form the beliefs take.

Informal social control
The social values that are present in individuals are products of informal social control. It is exercised by a society without explicitly stating these rules and is expressed through customs, norms, and mores. Individuals are socialized whether consciously or subconsciously. During informal sanctions, ridicule or ostracism can cause a straying towards norms. The person internalizes these mores and norms. Traditional society uses mostly informal social control embedded in its customary culture relying on the socialization of its members
Informal sanctions may include shame, ridicule, sarcasm, criticism and disapproval. In extreme cases sanctions may include social discrimination and exclusion. This implied social control usually has more effect on individuals because they become internalized and thus an aspect of personality. Informal sanctions check 'deviant' behavior. An example of a negative sanction comes from a scene in the Pink Floyd film 'The Wall,' whereby the young protagonist is ridiculed and verbally abused by a high school teacher for writing poetry in a mathematics class. (Another example: About a boy, who hesitates to jump from a high springboard, is possible to say, that he is effeminate. By the fact, that he eventually jumps, he escapes from this denotation. His behavior is conditionally controlled by a shame, which is unpleasant.)

As with formal controls, informal controls reward or punish acceptable or unacceptable behaviour (i.e., deviance). Informal controls are varied and differ from individual to individual, group to group and society to society. For example, at a women's institute meeting, a disapproving look might convey the message that it is inappropriate to flirt with the minister. In a criminal gang, on the other hand, a stronger sanction applies in the case of someone threatening to inform to the police.

Formal social control
Informal social control is often not sufficient in a large society in which an individual can choose to ignore the sanctions of an individual group. Thus, there is a need for formal control to supplement informal control. This form of control usually takes the form of government action. Government and organizations uselaw enforcement mechanisms and other formal sanctions such as fines and imprisonment. In democratic societies the goals and mechanisms of formal social control are determined through legislation by elected representatives and thus enjoy a measure of support from the population and voluntary compliance. Douglas D. Heckathorn notes that the effectiveness of any type of formal control is determined by the relative strength of the sanction in terms of extent of punishment, monitoring ability, and degree of group or informal control on the individual

• SOCIAL CONTROL AIMS FOR CONFUMITY

• REGULATES HUMAN BEHAVIOR

This report considers social control in terms of its role in securing conformity with established norms by preventing, adjudicating, remedying and sanctioning non-compliance. It focuses on intentional, planned and programmed responses by state authorities and corporations to activities, behaviours or status that are perceived to be criminal, problematic, undesirable, dangerous or troublesome. The anchors of this form of social control are institutions that deal with crime, dangerousness, delinquency and other social problems, including the criminal justice system, the health system, immigration and border control, the welfare system and urban planning authorities.
For purposes of human rights policy, this enquiry is concerned with:
• Forms of social control that are state-centred: criminal justice (criminal law, policing, courts, prisons) and other systems of legal and administrative regulation (e.g., immigration controls, welfare, urban planning);
• Privatised systems of formal social control and security, such as private prisons or policing; National, regional and global regimes of control and regulation (e.g., IHR, the IOM, Europol);
• Less explicit but significant social control dimensions of other state or non-state institutions, such as the media or institutions engaged in education, planning, and health and welfare.
The report gives little attention to forms of informal social control that are “outside” the State’s purview (such as socialisation, shame, gossip, public ritual, peer pressure). The importance of such measures and of related non-state actors is undeniable, but it was beyond the scope of this research to look at them in any detail.The report and the research on which it relies draw on an approach to social control that can be traced back to “critical” or “radical” sociology at the end of the 1960s.It will be referred to as “social control theory” or as the “social control perspective”. The approach adopts a social constructionist analysis of social problems. It assumes that social problems consist of an “objective” condition (e.g., the existence of homeless people, undocumented migrants, sexual offenders) and also a “subjective” condition (i.e., the perception that certain behaviors’ are undesirable or threaten dominant values or interests). A social problem goes through stages of “claims-making” which run from the initial creation of a problem to its categorisation (e.g., as a crime, an illness, a human rights violation) to a method of intervention (punishment, treatment, or political action).
For example, consider the category of “anti-social behaviour” in the United Kingdom (UK). The Crime and Disorder Act (1998) declares that behaviour causing (or likely to cause) “...harassment, alarm or distress to one or more persons…” can be characterised legally as anti-social. The anti-social character of an act does not lie in the act itself but in the reaction of others to it. Parmet signals how important it is to understand the social construction of risk, and address it in policy, arguing that “public health theory and international law overlook the role that social factors play in determining the nature and extent of health risks, as well as how risks are perceived and what interventions are chosen”.
A social control perspective questions how a behaviour or activity comes to be constructed as a social problem or crime and seeks to throw light on the forces that shape attitudes and policy formation, shifts in those forces, and their relationship with larger socio-political processes and institutions.“Naming” a category can be controversial. This is clear from discussions of prostitution, where the descriptors “women in sex work”, “women in the sex trade”, “sex workers”, or “commercial sex workers” each imply different, often nuanced understandings that reflect distinct worldviews and political or moral positions. Use of the term “irregular migrant” rather than “illegal migrant”, or “person who uses drugs” versus “drug abuser” can be significant in exactly the same way.
Once categories have been created, people and behaviours must then be attributed to them. An important aspect of subjective attribution is that at different times and in different places the same behaviour may be perceived and responded to in quite different ways. A psychologist working with sex offenders in the US, commenting on changes of attitude (that now a 17-year-old teenager who has sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend or a drunk who exposes himself in public may be categorised as “sexual predators”, whereas a man exposing himself on a popular TV show was once considered funny) wonders how we come to “fear and hate what we once found pathetic or even humorous”.
Categorisation determines who is labelled as criminal or dangerous, and this judgment is then liable to be articulated in criminal law and governance practices. A vast apparatus of procedures, personnel, expertise and organisations is now devoted to the selection and application of judicial and non-judicial controls to identify people and behaviours that fit categories (“rule enforcement”). Some agencies that do this work have long been the focus of human rights attention, including the police, immigration and border control authorities, and parts of the criminal justice system. Others (e.g., welfare agencies, the health service, urban planners) have been scrutinised far less. These institutions increasingly employprivate agencies to whom States have devolved the delivery of certain services.
Individuals or groups may be regulated by or subject to social controls because their existence is perceived to be threatening or to lie outside the dominant norms of society: they are considered deviant or dangerous, not necessarily for what they have done, but because of who they are or the traits they possess. Non-compliant behaviour or status, or its consequences, may be considered criminal, deviant, or asocial problem, or even a human rights violation and may be subject to measures of social control as a result.
In Visions of Social Control (1985), Stanley Cohen traces four key changes in modes of social control that occurred in the course of the nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries:
• The locus of social control moved from informal social institutions to the State;
• Deviants were classified and differentiated in various categories, each meriting scientific examination and expertise;
• Different types of custodial institutions emerged;
• Policy focused on changing the hearts and minds of offenders rather than on infliction of physical suffering.
In the 1960s, a counter-discourse emerged, which, according to Cohen, called for decentralisation, deprofessionalisation, decarceration and decriminalisation. Such “destructuring” movements downplayed due process in favour of non-intervention, inclusionary controls and pursuit of alternative correctional justice mechanisms. Cohen and other scholars have documented that this movement had the unintended consequence of excluding targeted groups because the alternative measures of control they espoused did not replace but only complemented the criminal justice system. As a result, the range of controls to which people could be subject broadened. An upsurge of interest in the rights of people who became enmeshed in the criminal justice system (particularly in the penal context), apparent in the second half of the 20th century, was overtaken during the 1990s and early 21st century by a preoccupation with risk. Concern about the risks that crime poses to potential victims caused a significant shift in social control practices. Governments focused increasingly on finding effective forms of control and crime prevention and paid less attention to the causes of crime and deviance. Social control today is characterised by the following features:
a) Continued expansion of exclusionary practices, especially detention (often referred to as “hard” measures), including imprisonment in a criminal context but also civil commitment for mental illness or drug dependence, detention for irregular migration, etc.;
b) Continued expansion of inclusionary practices (“soft” measures), such as CSMs, electronic tagging, home confinement, etc.;
c) Emergence of pre-emptive inclusionary controls, notably the use of surveillance;
d) Justification of the above policies in terms of protecting the public from crime, immigration and insecurity more generally (especially after the terrorist attacks in the US in September 2001).
Groups may be subject to social controls because they are perceived as a threat or abnormal, considered deviant or dangerous, not necessarily for what they have done, but because of who they are or the traits they possess.