Thinking About Deviance: A Realistic Perspective

HIGGINS AND MACKINEM

CRIMINOLOGY • SOCIOLOGY

author of more than a dozen books about deviance, disability, and sociology.

Mitch Mackinem is assistant professor of sociology at Claflin University and author of Drug Court: Constructing the Moral Identity of Drug Offenders with Paul Higgins.

Thinking about Deviance

Paul Higgins is professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina and

Second Edition

This second edition of Thinking about Deviance explores how people participate in and produce the phenomenon of deviance. Through nineteen brief and provocative chapters, the book examines how everyone is involved in the many facets of deviance. While a small portion of deviance may seem to be exotic, done by people on the fringe of society, deviance is an integral part of society and of conventional people’s lives. By using everyday instances of deviance familiar to college students (such as shoplifting, academic cheating, and underage drinking) and examples from the media, the book engages readers and enables them to develop more general thinking about deviance. Through an interactive style in which the readers are asked questions and presented with hypothetical and actual situations, the book creates a “conversation” with the readers. It encourages readers to think about and question deviance, including their participation in and their assumptions about it, in ways they are unlikely to have done before.

Thinking about Deviance Second Edition

A Realistic Perspective

Paul Higgins and Mitch Mackinem

ThinkingDevianceDSRPBK.indd 1

ISBN-13: 978-0-7425-6199-1 ISBN-10: 0-7425-6199-2

Rowman & Littlefield

For orders and information please contact the publisher Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 1-800-462-6420 www.rowmanlittlefield.com

5/15/08 10:35:50 AM

Thinking about Deviance

Thinking about Deviance A Realistic Perspective Second Edition PAU L H I G G I N S A N D M I T C H M A C K I N E M

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowmanlittlefield.com Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2008 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Higgins, Paul C. Thinking about deviance : a realistic perspective / Paul Higgins and Mitch Mackinem. — 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-0-7425-6198-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7425-6198-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-7425-6199-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7425-6199-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) eISBN-13: 978-0-7425-6574-6 eISBN-10: 0-7425-6574-2 1. Deviant behavior. I. Mackinem, Mitchell B. II. Title. HM811.H54 2008 302.5'42—dc22 2008001133 Printed in the United States of America

⬁ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Introduction

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1

What Is Deviance?

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Who Is Deviant?

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What Do We Need to Know to Understand Deviance?

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Is Deviance a Threat to, or Part of, the Foundation of Social Life?

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It’s Disgusting, Isn’t It?

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Is Deviance Harmful or Helpful?

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Can Deviance Be Intended to Promote Morality, Not Violate It?

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Once Deviant, Always Deviant?

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How Much Deviance Is There?

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What Causes People to Commit Deviance?

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How Does Meaning Matter in Committing Deviance?

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What Happened?

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What Kind of Person Is the Offender?

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Images of Harm or Harmful Images?

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Who Could Cause Such Harm?

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CONTENTS

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Do You Get the Time Because You Did the Crime?

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Can We Deal with Deviance without Discriminating?

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Each Case of Deviance Is Different, Isn’t It?

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How Can We Get People to Do What We Want Them to Do?

209

Conclusion

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References

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Index

247

About the Authors

251

Introduction

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A national emergency relief organization is fined $4.2 million by the Food and Drug Administration for violating blood-safety laws, including not rejecting donors who had traveled to malarial areas and distributing blood and related products without proper testing. The agency says that it will not use donated funds to pay the fines (The State 2006a, A4). A survey of a military college shows that almost 20 percent of the women attending the college reported being sexually assaulted since enrolling in the military college. Most of the assaults happened on campus and were committed by other students. Only about one-third of the assaults were reported to authorities. Nearly one-half of the women who did not report their assault said they did not do so because they were concerned about harassment, ostracism, or ridicule (Marrow 2006). The Board of Health of New York City approves an amendment to the city’s health code that phases out artificial trans fat in all restaurants and food service establishments in two stages. Packaged foods served in the manufacturer’s original packaging are exempt from the regulation (New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene 2006). Allegations are made that football players and other students at a major southern university received passing grades in independent study courses

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for which they completed little or no work. Some of the football players used the courses to maintain their eligibility, according to the allegations. The head football coach says that he is glad that the university is looking into this matter (Babb 2006). A capital city in a southern state makes it illegal “for any person to recline upon (or occupy for a period of more than one hour) any bench, table or other furniture located upon public property.” An official of an organization that manages the downtown business district notes that some people were spending all day on benches, so they were not available for visitors or people taking a break. While it appears that the rule, which was already enforced in city parks, is aimed toward homeless people, the mayor says that it will be applied to everyone (Smith 2006). A paralyzed Italian author who had his desire to end his life carried out by a doctor who disconnected his respirator is denied a religious funeral. The author’s church opposes euthanasia. The widow says that the family will hold a lay funeral if the church denies him rites (The State 2006d). A sixty-one-year-old grandmother in a southwestern state is convicted of drug running after state troopers found 214 pounds of marijuana hidden in her car trunk. The jury rejected the grandmother’s argument that she had been tricked into carrying the drugs. The prosecutor believes that the defendant was trying to feed her bingo habit, which would explain why a “nice person” might be “sucked into” this criminal activity. She is sentenced to three years in prison and fined $150,000 (The State 2006h; The State 2007d). A federal courthouse is evacuated when authorities investigate a suspicious envelope. The envelope did not contain anything dangerous. Officials refuse to say what was in the envelope and to whom it was addressed (The State 2006e). A police officer is transferred from his duties as a school resource officer when school officials allege that he was viewing inappropriate materials on a school computer. The officer has not been suspended as the internal investigation proceeds (The State 2006k). Food inspectors in New York City are cracking down on illegal meats. “At one time or another, we’ve probably seen about everything,” says the director of the state’s Division of Food Safety and Inspection. Anything killed in the wild is typically illegal. Eating gorilla and chimpanzee and other endangered or threatened species is also illegal. However, if turtles, frogs, iguana, and armadillos come from a licensed and inspected facility, they can be sold,

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though rarely do such places exist. More than 1.5 million pounds of food were confiscated in New York in a recent year (Goldman 2006). An analysis of a national survey estimates that more than seven million Americans have misused stimulant drugs meant to treat attentiondeficit/hyperactivity disorder. Some people use these drugs to boost academic and professional performance. While these medications may enable users to study better in the middle of the night, a certain percentage of them will become addicted to the drugs, some of which have toxic effects. The researchers who published the study conclude that about 1.6 million teenagers and young adults misused these stimulants within a twelve-month period and that 75,000 showed signs of addiction (Vedantam 2006). The federal government distributes government-produced antidrug videos on an Internet service that allows users to share and view videos. The service already shows videos of instructions for growing marijuana plants and “wacky” drug-induced behavior. A top drug-policy adviser says that the federal government is using new technologies to reach its audience. A spokesman notes that if one teen decides not to use drugs from viewing the government’s videos, it will be a success. Internet experts wonder whether this government attempt to reach teens will succeed or backfire with parodies being edited from the government’s videos (The State 2006n). The American Library Association reports the lowest number of threats to remove books from library shelves, 405, since it helped found Banned Books Week twenty-five years ago as a celebration of free expression. The ALA defines challenges as “formal, written complaints filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.” The number of specific works threatened with removal has also decreased from more than 200 twenty-five years ago to 44 in the past year. An official with the ALA suggests that the decline in challenges may be due in part to adults focusing more on online content (The State 2006b). Give the items that follow some thought.

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A star rookie running back for a professional football team is fined by the professional football league for wearing football cleats other than the two

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brands that a marketing partnership stipulates players are allowed to wear during games. The running back says that the fine, thought to be $10,000, was taken care of by the manufacturer of the brand that the player wore (The State 2006c). A small-town teenager in Kansas who claimed that he was harassed with homophobic slurs from seventh grade until he quit school in eleventh grade is awarded nearly one-half million dollars in his suit against his local school district. The teenager testified that he is not gay (The State 2005a). New York City authorities investigate the possibility that bodies of hundreds of deceased people, including that of a famed British broadcaster, were secretly “carved up” in several funeral parlors throughout the city to remove bone, skin, and other tissue without the required permission from their families. The body parts were sold for a profit, allege the authorities. A patient who had implanted during back surgery a bone that had been illegally harvested and sold plans to sue because she claims that she contracted syphilis from the bone (The State 2005b; Hays 2006). An American sprint star receives from the U.S. Anti-doping Agency (USADA) a maximum eight-year ban from competition for a positive drug test. The sprinter’s coach initially alleges that a massage therapist set up the sprinter by rubbing testosterone cream on the sprinter without the athlete’s knowledge. The sprinter’s attorney says she did not condone the coach’s allegations. The coach is a key figure in a federal investigation of steroid use by athletes and has coached several athletes who have tested positive for steroids. The sprinter accepted the positive test without admitting that he intentionally used performance-enhancing drugs. By helping the USADA in its drug investigations, the sprinter may receive a reduced sentence (Patrick 2006; Pells 2006). Kentucky authorities crack down on a crime that they believe is widespread in Appalachia: elderly people are selling their painkillers and other medications to addicts. A Kentucky county jailer remarks that “when a person is on Social Security, drawing $500 a month, and they can sell their pain pills for $10 apiece, they’ll take half of them for themselves and sell the other half to pay their electric bills or buy groceries.” The jails are bearing the higher costs of caring for these elderly inmates (Alford 2005). The founder of a national pizza chain, who is establishing a new town in Florida through providing most of the initial $400 million cost, says that, in

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his town, pornographic magazines, condoms, and birth control pills will not be sold, and cable television will have no X-rated channels. The millionaire businessman wants the community to embody his conservative, religious values. Civil liberties groups are concerned that the plan is unconstitutional and are threatening to sue (The State 2006i; Meadows 2006). Medical ethicists say that a study in which trauma patients are given an experimental blood substitute without their consent, even after they have arrived at the hospital where blood is available, should be stopped, even though the federal government has approved the study. Concern over the study, which began a couple of years ago, reemerged after a newspaper story suggested that the company developing the blood substitute tried to hide important details about another blood substitute study several years ago in which ten heart surgery patients who were given the blood substitute had heart attacks. The chairman of the company says that no secrecy was attempted in the earlier study. An effective blood substitute could potentially save millions of lives (The State 2006g). Opponents to a gay rights law in England that bans businesses from discriminating against gay people in providing goods and services submit a petition to Queen Elizabeth II objecting to the law, which they claim will require them to promote and condone gay sex. Saying that this law violates biblical teaching, they hold a candlelight vigil outside Parliament as the House of Lords debates the proposed law and votes against a motion to scrap the regulations (The State 2007a). A recent study reports that violence on television has increased in the past several years. Further, the discussion of violent crimes has become more explicit, the violence has become more graphic, and the violence has become more an integral part of the programs rather than incidental. Research links youth’s viewing television violence with aggressive behavior (Smith 2007). The music industry is targeting students at colleges for “illegally sharing large music collections over campus computer networks.” The music industry has sent the most complaints to twenty-five universities, involving some 15,000 students. More complaints are being sent now than in the past. Colleges may punish students who are caught by disconnecting them from the school’s computer network, suspending them, or in other ways (Bridis 2007, A4; Ryan 2007).

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Five employees of a religious reform school are cleared of child abuse charges almost five years after they “forced misbehaving students to stand in a manure pit and shovel cow waste.” The school says that the chores were intended to help troubled youth realize what kind of jobs may be available if they did not get a good education. The school’s methods have cost the school almost $5 million to defend (The State 2006j). The Turner Broadcasting Systems and an advertising agency agree to pay $2 million in compensation for placing blinking electronic devices around the Boston area as a publicity gimmick, which resulted in a terrorism scare. Bridges and highways were shut down and bomb squads were called in. Traffic was blocked for hours. The same devices planted in other cities did not result in such havoc (The State 2007f). A man who was fired by IBM for visiting an adult chat room while working sues his former employer for $5 million. He claims that he deserves treatment and understanding for his Internet addiction, not dismissal. The man claims that seeing his best friend killed during patrol in Vietnam almost forty years ago led to traumatic stress, which led to his becoming a sex addict. With the development of the Internet, he has become an Internet addict, visiting adult chat rooms to relieve his stress (The State 2007c). NASCAR suspends four crew chiefs/team directors and penalizes their drivers and teams for rules violations during qualifying for the biggest race of the season, the Daytona 500. The chairman of NASCAR says that his organization will no longer tolerate race teams that try to go beyond the rules to get more horsepower and speed. One racing team president expresses surprise at the present penalties, given the lesser penalties imposed in the recent past for more serious rules violations (Minter 2007). A new type of DNA evidence shows that a man who spent ten years in prison after being convicted of raping a twelve-year-old boy did not commit the crime. A judge exonerates him and the Dallas district attorney’s office apologizes. This is the twelfth person in Dallas County to be cleared by DNA evidence. The county has more of these cases than all but three states, which one Texas lawmaker calls an “international embarrassment” (The State 2007b).

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What do the above events have in common? They all concern deviance. Deviance fascinates many of us. We are intrigued by what seems to be the un-

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usual, strange, even bizarre behavior of others. Some of us are “deviance junkies.” We must have our “fix” of deviance—through the talk shows where people “tell all” or through the tabloid papers and websites that “reveal all.” Others of us merely “consume” deviance through the news, television programs, and the movies. Our fascination with deviance may enliven our spare time. But does that fascination enlighten us much? Thinking about Deviance challenges you to wonder about deviance in ways that you likely have not considered before. It questions common sense about deviance. It may puzzle you. It may even trouble you. It may do so because to question what one assumes to be obviously so may be discomforting. Some of the ideas we explore continue to discomfort us. As you read and think about what follows, we hope that you will come to see the fundamental theme in this book: People, all of us, create deviance. We create all that it is. This is an awesome responsibility, which we cannot escape, even if we try to do so. We believe that we often do try to do so through much of our common sense about deviance. To state that we create deviance may not seem particularly profound or interesting. We hope that in the chapters to follow the statement’s complexity and depth will be evident and that our exploring it with you will intrigue you. We return to this theme in the conclusion. We urge you to try to take the thinking explored here as seriously as possible. While you may ultimately disagree with portions of what you read, try to see the line of reasoning that is presented. Come to learn what you think about deviance and why and how you do so. Careful reading, thoughtful consideration, then reasoned judgment, even if it ends in disagreement, will serve you best. Thinking about Deviance also urges you to take your fascination with “their” deviance “over there,” with the deviance of people and places seemingly far removed from you, and bring it closer to home, to your life and concerns. Most deviance does not make the news as did the events depicted in the items above. However, your participation in the dramas of deviance is significant to you, perhaps profoundly so. Thinking about Deviance encourages you to think in nonobvious ways about your personal dramas of deviance. By doing so, you may develop new, more satisfying ways for participating in those dramas. Thinking about Deviance does not try to provide all that one may wish to know about deviance. Instead, it raises questions and offers ways of making

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INTRODUCTION

sense of those questions that you may not have thought about before. You decide whether turning what we often take for granted into serious, even disturbing issues to explore helps you to think about deviance. PROJECTS

1. We began the introduction with summaries of many different instances of deviance in our local newspaper and other media. In this project, you can explore the media—newspapers, magazines, television, movies, music, perhaps the Internet, and so on. We have not yet defined deviance. However, you can use your present thoughts about deviance to help identify stories, incidents, lyrics, and other items the media present that concern deviance. You might now do a little of this exploration. After reading chapter 1, you could redo your work using your new understanding of deviance. You could even make your exploration of deviance in the media more extensive. You might consider these projects after reading several of the early chapters. They are designed to provide you with a broader, less commonsensical view of deviance. For example, examine a copy of your local newspaper and circle every item that you believe concerns deviance. Read the items that you have circled. Do not skip any section of the newspaper. You might do this for several days. What thoughts and/or questions come to mind after doing this project? How could you explore the questions that come to mind? 2. You could do similar projects for other media. While watching various television programs, you can note incidents that involve deviance. Watch television news, record (with a brief phrase) all stories presented, and identify which stories concern deviance. Listen to various kinds of popular music and note which songs concern deviance. Perhaps several class members could listen to the most popular songs for different kinds of music and compare deviance presented in these different genres. What insights and/or questions do you develop from this exploration? How could you pursue your insights further? These projects could be made more complex if you wish. For example, you could introduce the element of time into the projects. You could compare newspapers of today and of the past concerning the presentation of deviance. You could record how many items of deviance are presented, where in the newspaper they are presented, the amount of space given to the items, and other characteristics of the presentations. Comparisons across time could also be made for songs. What ideas do you generate from these comparisons?

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3. To explore how people commonly think about deviance, you could ask several people to look at the same newspaper and identify items they felt concerned deviance. Ask them to do so separately. You might also ask them to explain why they included the items they did and not other items. By comparing what different people identified as deviance items, what conclusions do you draw about people’s commonsensical views of deviance? 4. You could obtain some sense of how widespread deviance is on the Internet by doing searches using terms that you believe are connected to deviance, such as robbery, gay marriages, alcoholism, fraud, and so forth. See how many “hits” you get for each search.

1

What Is Deviance?

When you think about the phenomenon of deviance, what specific behaviors or conditions come to mind? Maybe you can list ten or even more items within two minutes. Please make your list before you continue reading. Perhaps you thought of murder, child abuse, drug use, mental health difficulties, prostitution, pornography, and robbery. Maybe family violence, embezzlement, sexual fetishes, shoplifting, and corporate fraud came to mind. Did eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa, suicide, developmental disabilities, burglary, homosexuality, and mugging occur to you? Did income tax cheating and academic cheating come to mind? Did misogynistic lyrics of popular songs ring in your ears? Did you list still other items? Would you agree to include the items we presented? Yes? Maybe not? More than 250 different instances came to mind when 180 people were surveyed several decades ago (Simmons 1965). We imagine that an equally diverse list would come to mind from a survey done today, though it may differ from the earlier list. How are the items you listed deviant? How do you define deviance so that the items you listed fit the definition? Before continuing, please think about how you might define deviance. Those who are interested in a subject define it. Deviance is no exception. We believe that the most useful approach for thinking about deviance is this: Deviance is behavior, thoughts, or attributes to which some people react negatively or

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CHAPTER 1

would react negatively if they knew about it (Goode 1994, chap. 2; 2005, chap 1). We think this flexible definition enables us to include what we conventionally think of as deviant. It also points to other activities and conditions that we might overlook but that may be usefully understood within the concept of deviance. Let’s examine this approach. Compare your statement and reasoning with the statement and reasoning we and others use. A caution: In defining deviance as we and others do and in presenting behaviors and characteristics above that fit the definition we use, we are not saying that we personally react negatively to the behaviors and characteristics we mention. To some of them we do react negatively. To others we may not. Those behaviors and characteristics to which we do not react negatively are not deviant to us, though they certainly may be deviant to others. According to the approach we and others use, deviance can be what people do, what they think, or even their characteristics. If a teacher reprimands students for getting out of their seats, then the students have committed deviance. If a member of a club is shunned by other members after expressing particular opinions, then that member’s thoughts are deviant. If acquaintances make fun of a person who is overweight, then that person and the person’s weight are deviant. When behavior, thoughts, or attributes are reacted to negatively, they are deviant. The negative reactions may vary greatly. Execution, incarceration, banishment, and torture are harsh reactions. Less severe reactions might include expulsion, probation, fines, and demerits. Still less severe, though perhaps quite consequential, may be reprimands, ostracism, and belittling. Even urging or requiring individuals to seek treatment for their “problems” implies dissatisfaction with their problems. Whenever people react disapprovingly toward something, that something is deviant. Behaviors, thoughts, or attributes can be deviant even when no negative reaction has occurred. There may have been no negative reaction because those who would have reacted negatively to the behaviors, thoughts, or attributes did not know of them. Much deviance is hidden. People sensibly hide what they know others will disapprove of. Their efforts to hide their actions, thoughts, or characteristics testify to the deviance of what they have hidden. If we know that people previously reacted negatively on similar occasions and would likely have done so if they had known about the behaviors, thoughts, or attributes on this occasion, then we can be reasonably confident that the behaviors, thoughts, or attributes are deviant.

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Nevertheless, if people have followed the customs of their social group without realizing that their behavior is offensive to those from a different group and no one who may have been offended from the second group knows of the behavior, then that particular behavior at that time is not deviant within the people’s group. No negative reaction occurred, and no negative reaction was anticipated! If later, perhaps much later, individuals from the second group learn of the behavior and react negatively to it, then it has become deviant to those who reacted negatively. If people who acted according to their customs learn that the second group takes offense at their customary practices, are their actions deviant? If that happens and people from the first group anticipate negative reactions that could matter to their lives, then when they engage in their customary practices, they are engaging in deviance. Negative reactions, actual or anticipated, have come into play! That is the key. Behaviors, thoughts, or attributes are deviant when some people react negatively toward the behaviors, thoughts, or attributes or when others who have engaged in the behavior, expressed the thoughts, or possess the attributes anticipate negative reactions. Many people may react negatively. Maybe just one person does. Many people, perhaps almost all, condemn strongly the “cold-blooded” killing of a person during a robbery, burglary, or sexual assault. The killer may be executed. Fewer people react so negatively to the abortion of a fetus, though certainly a significant number of people are deeply offended by abortion. Those who abort fetuses are not executed, at least not in the United States. Still fewer react harshly to those who illegally share music over the Internet. Those who act or think in ways or have characteristics to which others react negatively may or may not react negatively to themselves. They may feel ashamed. If they do, then their behavior, thoughts, or characteristics are deviant to them, too. Through their negative reactions, people make behaviors, thoughts, and attributes deviant. How strongly people react negatively, how widespread their reactions are, and the power of those who react negatively are all important. If few people with little influence react mildly negatively, then their reactions may be insignificant. Those to whom their reactions are directed may not even be aware of the negative reactions. However, if a government has passed laws banning certain behaviors, empowered officials to enforce those laws, and instituted harsh penalties for the violation of those laws, and if the citizens support those laws and their enforcement, then these reactions are much more consequential. Deviance varies as negative reactions vary.

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Deviance speaks to that of which people disapprove. It is a flexible concept. It enables us to explore a wide variety of behaviors and conditions from the most widely condemned to the mildly rebuked. Not all instances of deviance are equally significant, but all have in common the negative reactions of people. Certainly, social scientists who explore deviance and officials who address deviance do not give equal attention to all that fits the definition of deviance offered here. What is your evaluation of the definition offered here? How does it compare to yours? Does it make sense to you? Does it seem to be useful? Is it compatible with the ordinary use of the term? A standard dictionary states that deviance is that which significantly departs from what is considered acceptable or normal (Gove and Merriam-Webster Inc. 1986, 618). Defining our interest is a start, not the end. Before we can explore issues about deviance that concern us, how can we decide what fits our definition? How can we decide what is deviant? HOW CAN WE DECIDE WHAT IS DEVIANT?

How would you decide if some behavior, thought, or attribute is deviant? Remember that you are working with the definition offered here. After you have thought about this issue, then continue. We think the surest way is to observe how people react to one another. If some people react negatively, then the focus of their reaction is deviant. If people hide something because they believe that others will react negatively to it, then what they have hidden is likely to be deviant. Observing people’s reactions is the surest way to decide what is deviant, but it may be difficult to do so. You cannot observe people all the time and wherever they are. People may temper or obscure their reactions if you are observing them. Other difficulties can also occur. What else could you do to decide what is deviant? You could ask people what is unacceptable to them. You could ask them to tell you what is wrong, bad, or offensive to them. Or you could ask them to tell you to what they react negatively. What do they punish? You could ask them to tell you what should be punished, even if they have not encountered that behavior, thought, or attribute. Perhaps to elicit their thoughts you could give them lists of behaviors, thoughts, and attributes to evaluate as acceptable or not, deserving of some kind of negative reaction or not. All these and similar ways seek to document what people react to and evaluate negatively.

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All these and similar ways also have shortcomings. We mention a few. Some people may not respond candidly. Some people may not be fully aware of what they take offense at. Listing items of which people disapprove overlooks the complexity of social situations in which people do or do not respond negatively. People do not react to an action separate from the context in which it occurs. You might think about what some other limitations could be. You could examine the standards people have established for themselves— their norms. For example, you could obtain their published, formally established, or public rules and regulations that govern how people conduct themselves. What people publicly prohibit presumably is deviant. As we discuss shortly, however, looking to laws or rules may be misleading, too. Can you think of other ways to decide what is deviant? However you decide what is deviant, your focus should be on the negative reactions of people if you use the definition offered earlier. WHAT DEVIANCE IS NOT

Deviance is that to which people react negatively. Nevertheless, many of us may have thought about deviance in other ways that we believe may be useful. These other approaches may be less useful than we think. These other ways of thinking about and defining deviance may unnecessarily narrow our view or mislead us. (See Goode 1994, chap. 2 and 2005, chap. 1 as bases for the following discussion.) Some of us may think that certain behaviors in their very essence are unnatural, wrong, deviant. We may believe that killing, coercive sexual activity, beating children, homosexuality, and other acts or conditions are obviously and naturally wrong. We may believe that it does not matter whether or not people react negatively to these things; they are deviant. These acts and other conditions are deviant because they violate the natural order of how life is supposed to be or they violate a divine decree, what a divine spirit has commanded life to be. Some acts will be deviant everywhere, anytime. This view, which many of us hold in varying ways, is absolutist. An absolutist view is a powerful approach for making some behaviors deviant. When people use an absolutist view, then deviance is a profound transgression against nature or the divine. It is not simply something toward which some people, even the great majority of people, in a society express disapproval. An absolutist view can give strength to disapproving people’s condemnation. It can also give horror to others’ violations. Who would want to “burn

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in hell” or in other ways be forever banished from the divine for such absolute transgressions? Nevertheless, an absolutist view overlooks the fundamental importance of people in deciding what is deviant. An absolutist view asserts that people are irrelevant to what is or is not deviant. According to an absolutist view, some behaviors are inherently wrong. Those who use an absolutist view, however, cannot exclude people from defining deviance. After all, the absolutist view exists only through its establishment and use by people. People create their understandings of the divine or of nature. People decide which behaviors violate their understandings of the divine or of nature. People have done this at times very differently. In the name of their divinity, people have taken human life and have protested its taking. As much as people might wish for the certainty that comes with an absolutist view, the certainty that some awesomely powerful, transcendent force has determined what should and should not be done, people must grapple with the issue of what to accept and what to condemn. They do grapple with that issue. Ironically, one way they do so is to develop and use an absolutist view in which they try to hide from themselves the awesome responsibility they have for deciding what is acceptable and unacceptable. An absolutist view overlooks the diversity of deviance. What people may react negatively to may vary greatly. Killing people has been acceptable. People have acceptably killed enemies, disobedient slaves, the seducers of wives, unwanted babies, and others. Sex has often been coercive. Parents have routinely beaten children, even severely, throughout history and the world. And in other times and places what has been accepted has been condemned. Stated rules do not adequately tell us what is deviant. Statements of required, accepted, or prohibited behavior may often give good guidance as to how people will react. If people have made the effort, often great effort, to establish rules that prohibit specific behaviors, then we can tentatively assume they will likely react negatively to those prohibited behaviors. But abstract rules do not handle completely adequately the complexity of people interacting with one another in specific situations. Not all members of a group may support the rules. Members may support the rules to varying degrees. Those who do support the rules must apply them in specific, often complex situations. For example, a university at which one of us teaches prohibits conduct that creates an “intimidating, hostile, or offensive environment for another person.” That abstract rule must

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be applied in specific situations. What in the abstract may appear to be obviously deviant may in the specific situation not be so. For example, much serious violence that seemingly violates rules prohibiting such behavior is often tolerated by American officials. When the offender and the victim are closely related, then assaults, even those resulting in severe bodily injury or death, often do not receive great attention. When arrests are made, prosecutions and convictions may not occur. In Houston several decades ago, 40 percent of people arrested for killing a relative were released without prosecution. Less than one-fourth of those arrested in 1969 for killing a stranger were released without prosecution (Black 1983, 40). We take up this example from a different angle in a later chapter. Instead of working from the abstract to the concrete, from the statement of a rule to its application in specific situations, it may be more useful to work from the specific to the abstract. How might we decide what are the rules group members use, if they use any rules at all? We may be able to decide by examining how people react to one another. By examining how people react to one another in diverse situations, we may be able to state more general patterns that fit our observations of their reactions. We may treat the general patterns as expressing the rules that the people are using, no matter what rules they have stated. To return to the example of Houston in 1969, a “rule” used by Houston officials was (“more or less”): Do not kill people, but particularly do not kill strangers. Rules are crucial for giving people guidance as to what members of their community will and will not accept. However, “published” rules may not state adequately how people react to one another’s behavior in specific situations. Crime does not define deviance. Making behaviors illegal is a powerful way to express disapproval. But we may react negatively to behaviors without making the behaviors illegal. Consider the disapproval expressed within families, among friends, in organizations, in clubs, among neighbors, and in many other social groups that does not concern crime. For example, much deviance done by students is not illegal. Universities attempt to regulate the behavior of their students through codes of conduct. Those codes do not only concern crimes. Crime is an important segment of deviance, but only a part. Most deviance is not illegal. Crime at times may not even be deviant. When people do not react negatively to what violates the law, then the apparent violations are not deviant, at

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least not to those who accepted what was done. Communities, including law enforcement agencies, often accept much violation of the law: violations of traffic, drug, alcohol, and prostitution laws, to mention a few. Harm is not the test of deviance. What people react to negatively may or may not be harmful. What is harmful may or may not be deviant. Until recently, a well-known university in Texas did not permit university-sponsored dances. Is dancing harmful? How so? To whom? A twenty-year-old who drinks alcoholic beverages can be arrested for underage drinking. The establishment that sold the alcohol to the young person can be punished, too. Will one glass of beer harm that young adult? Homosexuality is strongly condemned by many people. What harm do consensual same-sex relations cause? As has been widely publicized, about 400,000 people in America die annually from smoking cigarettes. While many people now condemn smoking and governments have regulated where people can light up, smoking has been accepted, even promoted, in past times, even though many were concerned about its harm then. (We discuss the deviance of smoking and tobacco in a later chapter.) Tens of thousands of workers die annually due to workplace hazards and diseases. Governments typically do not react very punitively, however. Businesses may be fined as little as a few hundred or a few thousand dollars for workplace safety violations that contributed to the deaths of employees (Reiman 2007, chap. 2). People may genuinely disagree on what is and is not harmful. Many of us think of deviance as that which violates the norms of society. The dictionary from which we took a standard definition of deviance states that deviance is a “significant departure” from the “norms of a particular society.” This is a useful way to think of deviance, but it is not completely satisfactory. Norms are the standards of acceptable and unacceptable conduct for a society or some group of people. The concerns that we raised for using rules or crime as a way to define deviance apply to norms, too. You may wish to review those limitations. Certainly, people, groups, and societies develop standards of conduct for themselves and one another. Violations of those standards, those norms, can be followed by significant negative reactions. Knowing the norms of a group can be a promising start for understanding what is deviant within that group. But the norms may not be clear, agreed to by all, or easily applied. To know what the norms are and how they are used, one should look at how people react to one another. This brings us back to the definition of deviance offered

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earlier and to the most direct way for deciding what is deviant when one uses that definition: negative reactions. CONCLUSION: CAN SOMETHING BE BOTH DEVIANT AND NOT DEVIANT?

To conclude this discussion, we raise a question: Can something be deviant and not deviant? Please formulate your response, then continue. An affirmative response doesn’t seem possible. An object cannot be both something and not that something. Yet deviance is that to which some people react negatively. Therefore, to those who react negatively, the behavior, thought, or attribute is deviant. To those who do not react negatively, however, the behavior, thought, or attribute is not deviant. It may even be laudable. Therefore, something can be both deviant and not deviant simultaneously, though to different people. These reactions can even be nested within one another (Goode 2005, 8). What is deviant within a broader population or jurisdiction may not be deviant to a segment within that broader group. The opposite could also be so. For example, throughout the United States, strong legal and moral opposition exists to same-sex marriages. It is deviant. Forty-three states legally define marriage as between two persons of the opposite sex. Approximately twenty states have constitutional amendments that bar recognition of samesex marriages. Nationwide, 60 percent of adults polled in a telephone survey (Mueller 2006) responded that an amendment to the Constitution banning gay marriage was a “good idea,” though a proposed amendment to the Constitution that would prohibit states from recognizing same-sex marriages was defeated in the U.S. Congress in 2006. Within this widespread opposition to gay marriage, a small number of states provide some kind of recognition of gay unions. For example, Massachusetts recognizes same-sex marriages and Connecticut, Vermont, and New Jersey offer equal rights through civil unions (The State 2007e). For a few months in 2004, the mayor of San Francisco directed the city clerk to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, which led to approximately 4,000 same-sex couples being married in San Francisco. In August of that year those same-sex marriages were invalidated by the California Supreme Court (Gordon 2004; Egelko 2005). Within states that legally prohibit same-sex marriage, some people support same-sex marriage, and some private businesses and some governments provide same-sex partner benefits.

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You can imagine how differences in reactions can lead to serious conflict— and they do. Consider the conflict over abortion, cigarette smoking, drugs such as marijuana, drinking by those under twenty-one years of age, homosexuality and gay marriage, and gambling. Americans disagree about accepting or condemning these actions and characteristics. People protest, sometimes violently, for or against present policies and practices allowing or prohibiting these behaviors. Everyday conflicts concerning what should or should not be deviant occur on a smaller, but still consequential, scale. Mothers and fathers may disagree with one another as to how their children should act. Teachers, school officials, and parents may disagree about how students should behave. Colleagues may respond differently to coworkers’ actions. Some friends may accept while others condemn the same actions of a mutual friend. Think about a conflict of which you are aware concerning what is deviant within your social groups. Social life would be simpler if some behaviors were “just” deviant. But that is not so—and social life is not simple. To conclude, let us return to the items you listed when you thought of specific behaviors and conditions that are deviant and to the possible instances of deviance we presented at the beginning of this discussion. Are your items or the ones we presented deviant? How would you know? Could they be both deviant and not deviant? What do you think? PROJECTS

1. Now that we have explored how deviance can be defined, you could return to some of the projects at the end of the introduction and retry them. For example, look again at the same newspapers to identify stories concerning deviance. Use the sociological approach that emphasizes negative reactions. Do you identify the same or different stories concerning deviance? Can you think of segments of your society that would not react negatively to what you take to be deviant in these stories? These or similar questions can be asked of other media that you could explore. 2. Ask people to mention as many items of deviance (items that they find wrong, bad, or unacceptable) that they can within a set time, say one minute. Compile the list. What items are mentioned frequently, which ones infrequently? To extend this project, develop a list of items that were mentioned frequently and add to that list items that you think could be deviant to some

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people. Ask a sample of people to indicate which of those items on the list they find wrong, bad, or unacceptable. Do you think any particular segments of the population are more likely than other segments to find particular items deviant or not deviant? If so, record information about your respondents that will enable you to place them into one segment or another segment, such as different age categories or different levels of education. What does your project show? 3. Over the next day, several days, a week, or some set time, observe what people with whom you interact make deviant. To what do they react negatively? What do they criticize or judge to be wrong, bad, or unacceptable? If you notice one person making something deviant, then explore whether other people also make that deviant. For example, if one person criticizes people for their smoking, ask others with whom you interact if they, too, find smoking offensive. Do you notice if people are consistent about what they make deviant? For example, do they react negatively to a particular behavior whenever they witness it? 4. Apply the various possible ways deviance could be defined that were discussed in this chapter to a particular group or organization of which you are a member, such as a work group, club, or family. Would similar or different items be deviant depending on the various ways in which deviance is defined? For example, would the items that are deviant based on the primary definition of negative reactions be the same as those based on the possible definitions of harm, illegality, or formally stated norms? Put another way, are some behaviors legal within the social group on which you are focused but reacted to negatively? Does it matter, then, how those of us interested in deviance define our topic? 5. If you have access to the results of opinion polls (perhaps through your college library’s online electronic resources), examine the results of polls in which respondents were asked their opinions about various topics and issues that are relevant to deviance. For example, we pulled up the results of a Roper Center poll where adults throughout America were asked by telephone from May 31, 2006, to June 4, 2006, whether they thought that “homosexual couples should or should not be allowed to form legally recognized civil unions, giving them the legal right of married couples in areas such as health insurance, inheritance and pension coverage.” The results: 28 percent reported “should— strongly,” 17 percent “should—somewhat,” 7 percent “should not—somewhat,”

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41 percent “should not—strongly,” and 7 percent had “no opinion.” You could work with these opinion results in various ways. For example, if you can find results for the same (or similar) opinion question over time, then how has America’s view about a topic related to deviance changed, if it has changed? Or take a look at whether Americans are more or less united or divided about various matters related to deviance.

2

Who Is Deviant?

When you think of deviants, who comes to mind? Please describe what images or people come to mind. When you are finished, then continue. Textbook covers, like all kinds of packaging, present images to the consumers of what is inside. Below we describe the covers of five textbooks on deviance. Perhaps the images or people that you described when thinking of deviants are similar to these textbook covers. One cover presents the drawn head of a man imprisoned in a cage. Another presents a black-and-white photograph of the back of a man who appears to be sitting on a curb, across from some parked cars. The scene is somewhat hazy, almost foggy. A third presents a stylized picture in fuchsia pink of a man’s elongated face that appears to be covered with a beard or ends in a jagged outline. We are not sure which it is. The distorted silhouette of a human figure, as if it is behind a translucent screen, adorns the cover of a fourth textbook. On the red cover of the fifth textbook, the first edition of Thinking about Deviance, was a gold image of Rodin’s masterpiece, The Thinker, with horns sprouting from the statue’s head.1 We return to these covers in a moment. If you listed people who are deviant, perhaps your list is similar to the following. Surely mass murderers and serial killers would be included, such as Dennis Rader, the BTK killer (Bind, Torture, and Kill), who pleaded guilty to killing ten people over a more than fifteen-year time span around Wichita,

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Kansas. Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and other ruthless tyrants who exterminate some of their own citizens are deviant. Terrorists and suicide bombers who kill innocent civilians are deviant, whether it be the terrorists of September 11, 2001, or terrorists throughout the world. Career offenders who rob and burglarize are deviant. Parents and other adults who burn children with cigarettes, stick their hands on hot stoves, strike them with electrical cords, or violently shake them are deviant. Homeless alcoholics are deviants. Those who hallucinate, hear imaginary voices, or experience other psychoses are deviant. Spouses who beat each other “black and blue” are deviant. Drug overlords who run international drug cartels are deviant. So, too, are the drug dealers who push drugs on young kids. So, too, is the crack addict. Police officers who take dirty money from drug dealers to let the dealers ply their trade are deviant. How about pornographers who make and sell smut, especially that involving children and youth, and do so nowadays over the Internet? They’re deviant, right? Gangbangers are deviant; prostitutes, too. Carjackers are obviously deviant, and so are many others. Let’s return to those five textbook covers. What images of deviants do those five covers suggest to you? Think about that for a moment before you continue. To us they suggest images that fit the list of deviants that we presented above. The textbook covers and the list presented above indicate that those who are deviant are unusual, odd, weird, even bizarre people. They may even be “nuts, sluts, and preverts,” as one sociologist remarked about the study of deviance (Liazos 1972, 103). Perhaps you noticed that the sociologist made a play on the spelling of the word pervert by changing it to prevert. Those who are deviant are part of the fringe of society according to these textbook covers. But are they? Who is deviant? Our answer is that we all are. We all are deviant in diverse ways and to differing degrees. Deviance is everywhere. It is not confined to a fringe segment of society. Therefore, when we think about deviance, we can learn more about ourselves and our worlds, not just about “those” people far removed from us. Recall that deviance is behavior, thoughts, and attributes to which others take offense. Deviance is what others react to as unacceptable, bad, wrong, at times criminal, or even immoral. People’s negative reactions may run from mild disapproval to harsh condemnation and severe punishment. Deviance encompasses a wide range of behaviors, thoughts, and attributes, all unac-

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ceptable to some observers. Of course, widespread negative reactions or negative reactions by those with great resources are likely to be more consequential for a society or any particular group than mild, idiosyncratic disapproval from a single person. Don’t we all act, think, or possess characteristics to which others at times take offense? Haven’t we all experienced others taking offense toward us? Haven’t all of us hidden some of our actions because we knew that others would condemn us? We are all deviant at times, though most of us are not deviant to the same extent as those with whom we began this discussion. However, we may be more deviant, even more involved at times in what observers would consider significant deviance, than many of us realize. EVERYONE IS DEVIANT

Consider ordinary people. Most of us are ordinary people; nothing wrong with that. Ordinary people go to school, work, shop, pay their taxes and their bills, raise families, have friends, worship, enjoy leisure activities, belong to civic and other clubs, donate to charities, and much, much more. Ordinary people are also deviant. For example, ordinary people commit crimes. Ninety-nine percent of the adults surveyed in New York City more than fifty years ago admitted to committing at least one of the forty-nine offenses listed on the survey. The average number of different types of offenses committed in adulthood was eleven for females and eighteen for males. For example, more than 80 percent of the men and women admitted to committing larceny; 26 percent of the men reported having stolen a car; over half of the men and 40 percent of the women admitted to committing tax evasion (Wallerstein and Wyle 1947). These were adults with no criminal record! Twenty-five years later, adults in New Jersey, Iowa, and Oregon also admitted to committing illegal acts. Twenty-one percent reported stealing something worth $5 within the past five years, 32 percent gambled illegally within that time frame, 11 percent admitted assaulting another individual, and 12 percent admitted having cheated on their income taxes within the past five years (Tittle 1980, chap. 2). Tax cheating is so widespread that if all the money owed the federal government was collected, the federal budget would be balanced and even run a surplus. Between $150 billion and $400 billion are lost to the federal government

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from tax cheating each year. Approximately 6.5 million Americans do not even file their federal tax returns each year (Vartabedian 1996; Sahadi and Geary 2004). Many people have been arrested by the time they are adults. The probabilities for arrest for a nontraffic offense over an American’s lifetime are 60 percent for males and 16 percent for females (Gabor 1994, 53). Forty-seven percent of 1,000 boys born in Philadelphia in 1945 and followed until they were thirty years old had been arrested at least once (Gabor 1994, 56). One in every four males from a large American city is likely to be arrested for a serious violent or property crime, such as robbery, burglary, or assault. English males have an estimated 44 percent lifetime chance of being convicted for a nontraffic offense. Crime, often one form of serious deviance, is not confined to the fringes of society (Gabor 1994, chap. 3). Most youth have committed illegal acts (Empey 1978, 146). For example, two-thirds of a sample of Utah boys admitted having been truant, 90 percent reported having stolen something worth less than $2, and two-thirds reported having destroyed property (Empey 1978, 146–48). Ninety-seven percent of male adolescents surveyed in Montreal, Canada, reported having committed at least one crime while an adolescent (Gabor 1994, 56). Even the commission of illegal behavior within one year may be higher among youths than most of us realize. Twelve percent of youths aged eleven to seventeen in 1976 reported being involved in gang fights. Almost 50 percent hit other students. Eighteen percent had stolen something under $5. One-fourth had damaged family property; 16 percent had damaged school property; 18 percent had damaged other property. Thirty-two percent had been disorderly in public; 14 percent had been drunk in public; and 31 percent had been truant. All of this for just one year (Flanagan and Maguire 1990, 322)! Thirty years later, youth continued to commit illegal and/or deviant acts. In a survey of almost 25,000 high school students in 2004, 22 percent reported stealing from a parent or other relative, 18 percent from a friend, and 27 percent from a store—within the past year. Ten percent brought a weapon to school. Fifty-four percent hit someone in anger; 58 percent bullied, teased, or taunted someone; 43 percent used racial slurs or insults; 61 percent committed acts in violation of their religious beliefs; and 23 percent cheated or “bent the rules” to win in sports (Srenuka 2004). Similar percentages of high school

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youth reported stealing from parents or relatives, friends, and stores in 2006 as in 2004 (Rich 2006). Most young adults today have tried illicit drugs, though most are not regular users. For example, by their late twenties, 60 percent of American adults have tried an illicit drug (Johnston, O’Malley, et al. 2005, 32). Yet “only” 19 percent of adults between the ages of nineteen and twenty-eight have used illicit drugs within the past thirty days, and “just” 5 percent smoke marijuana daily (Johnston, O’Malley, et al. 2005, 48, 53). Many youths have also tried illegal drugs and even more have drunk alcohol or smoked cigarettes. For example, by the end of the eighth grade, 30 percent of American students have tried an illicit drug (if inhalants are included), 43 percent of tenth graders have done so, and 53 percent of twelfth graders have done so. By the end of the eighth grade, 44 percent of students have drunk alcohol, 64 percent of tenth graders have drunk alcohol, and 77 percent of twelfth graders have done so. Twenty-eight percent of eighth graders have smoked cigarettes, 41 percent of tenth graders have done so, and 53 percent of twelfth graders have done so. Yet, “only” 11 percent of eighth graders, 19 percent of tenth graders, and 23 percent of twelfth graders have used any illicit drug (including inhalants) within the past thirty days. Further, less than 1 percent of eighth graders, 3 percent of tenth graders, and 6 percent of twelfth graders use marijuana daily. Similarly, less than 1 percent of eighth graders, 1 percent of tenth graders, and 3 percent of twelfth graders drink alcohol daily. Finally, 4 percent of eighth graders, 8 percent of tenth graders, and 16 percent of twelfth graders smoke cigarettes daily (though the percentages drop by about half for daily use of one-half pack or more) (Johnston, O’Malley, et al. 2005). American workers routinely commit deviance against their employers. (As we explore in another chapter, employers also commit deviance against their employees.) For example, 29 percent of a sample of retail employees reported misusing the discount privilege, 27 percent of hospital employees admitted taking hospital supplies such as linens and bandages, and 14 percent of manufacturing employees reported taking raw materials from their companies— all of this done within the past year of the survey. More than half of the employees in each of those three sectors reported taking unauthorized long lunches or breaks within the past year (Hollinger and Clark 1983, chap. 3). Almost half of surveyed supermarket employees (44 percent) reported stealing

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from their supermarket (Arbetter 1994). Employee fraud costs American businesses about $600 billion each year (Varca and Valutis 2004). Theft of time from employers, the “deliberate, premeditated stealing of paid time,” not an idle chat, costs American employers an estimated $150 billion yearly (Gabor 1994, 75–76). Almost half of more than 1,300 workers, managers, and executives surveyed admitted to committing in the past year unethical or illegal acts, such as cheating on an expense account, discriminating against coworkers, paying or accepting kickbacks, trading sex for sales, ignoring violation of environmental laws, and secretly forging signatures (Jones 1997). Those surveyed were asked to report whether they had committed one or more of twenty-five listed unethical or illegal acts due to “pressure” of long hours, personal debt, job insecurity, sales quotas, and other pressures. Fifty-seven percent of the respondents said that “they feel more pressure to be unethical than five years ago.” Forty percent reported that the pressure to be unethical had worsened in the past year (Jones 1997, 2A). Dishonesty, another form of deviance to many, is widespread. For example, 91 percent of Americans in a national survey reported lying regularly and 50 percent admitted to calling in sick when they were not (Gabor 1994, 64). More than fifty years ago, the honesty of garage, radio-repair, and watch-repair employees was tested. Sixty-three percent of the garages, 64 percent of the radiorepair shops, and 40 percent of the watch-repair shops charged for unnecessary repairs (Gabor 1994, 59). Most college and high school students academically cheat. They do so in a wide variety of ways, such as learning what is on a test from someone who has already taken the test, copying from another student during a test, helping someone else cheat on a test, working with others on an assignment to be done individually, turning in work copied from another, and obtaining a paper from a term paper mill (McCabe 2005). In recent surveys of 18,000 high school students at sixty-one schools, more than 70 percent admitted to committing one or more instances of serious test cheating, such as copying from another student during a test or helping someone else on a test; more than 60 percent admitted to committing some form of plagiarism; approximately half of the students admitted that they engaged in some kind of plagiarism using the Internet; and more than 30 percent admitted repeatedly cheating in serious ways on tests and exams (McCabe 2001; Center for Academic Integrity

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2005). The Center for Academic Integrity reports that on most of the eightythree college campuses that were surveyed from 2002 to 2005, 70 percent of students indicated committing some kind of academic cheating (Hutton 2006). Earlier research of high school and college students shows that academic cheating has been widespread for decades (Flanagan and Maguire 1990, 323, 356; Gabor 1994, 59, 63–64; Steinberg, Brown, et al. 1996, 67). Physical violence against family members is also widespread. For example, more than three million couples kick, punch, stab, and/or commit other severe violence against each other each year. One and one-half million children under the age of seventeen are kicked, punched, bitten, burned, scalded, or in other ways severely assaulted each year by their parents (Straus and Gelles 1988). Family violence, unfortunately, is as American as apple pie. Sexual violence occurs more than we may realize. More than one-fifth (22 percent) of women, age eighteen to fifty-nine, contacted in a national survey reported that they had been “forced to do something sexual that they did not want to do by a man.” Almost all of the men who forced these women to do something sexual were lovers, known well by the women, acquaintances, or spouses. Only 4 percent were strangers. In contrast, 2 percent of men reported being forced to do something sexual that they did not want to do (Michael, Gagnon, et al. 1994, chap. 12). College students may coerce partners to obtain sex. Eighty-two percent of college students in one study reported verbally coercing and 21 percent reported physically coercing dating partners within the past year to obtain sex. Both college men and women, though not necessarily to the same degree, use continual arguments, threats to end the relationship, threats of physical force, drugs and alcohol, and other coercive tactics to obtain sex from their partners (Oswald and Russell 2006). Mental health problems are more prevalent than our commonsensical, stereotypical images of mental disorders may lead us to believe. We may think that it is only those who hear voices, believe they are someone they are not, think that creatures have invaded their bodies, and the like who have mental health problems. Not so. Many people do. According to the National Institute of Mental Health (2006), an estimated one-fourth of Americans ages eighteen and older (more than fifty-seven million adults) experience a diagnosable mental disorder in any given year. Forty-five percent of these Americans with a diagnosable mental disorder meet the criteria for two or more disorders.

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Driving after recently drinking or under the influence of alcohol or drugs is not uncommon. Approximately 23 percent of U.S. drivers sixteen years old or older reported driving within two hours of drinking any amount of alcohol in 2001. Males were more than twice as likely as females to have driven within two hours of drinking, 32 percent compared to 14 percent. Young adults, ages twenty-one to twenty-nine, were the most likely drinker-drivers (37 percent for males, 20 percent for females). About 5 percent of the drinkerdrivers were estimated to have a blood alcohol concentration of .08 or higher, which is used in many states as a legal standard for driving while under the influence of alcohol (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration 2003). In 2002, an estimated 159 million instances of alcohol-impaired driving occurred among U.S. adults, 750 instances for every 1,000 U.S. adults (Quinlan, Brewer, et al. 2005). CONCLUSION

Who is deviant? Ordinary people are deviant. You, we, and other ordinary people are deviant in all realms of social life: the public arena, family and intimate relations, school, work, government, religion, sports, clubs and civic organizations, and elsewhere. We have presented some information to show how widespread is people’s involvement in deviance. Consider your actions. What deviance do you commit? In what realms do you commit deviance? What deviance have you committed in the past? What deviance are you engaged in now? Do you commit any deviance regularly, perhaps a couple of times each week, several times each month or each year? Perhaps you only irregularly commit deviance? Keep in mind that deviance need not be horrific, pathological, dangerous, or even very serious. For example, have you ever stolen from a store or your employer, drunk illegally, used illegal drugs, lied to someone, cheated on your income taxes, cheated in school, violated requirements of an organization, or committed other routinely disapproved acts? Have others important to you such as parents, other family members, or friends ever disapproved of the hours you kept, the way you acted or talked toward them, the effort you gave to some task, your attitude, or other actions, thoughts, or characteristics of yours? Do you possess some kind of attribute that others disapprove of? If you answer “yes” to any of the above, then you were deviant.

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We hope that you have not misunderstood us. We are not claiming that all of us are killers, burglars, abusers, and so on. All of us do commit deviance; many of us possess attributes that others disapprove of; most of us have committed illegal acts, and a significant percentage will be arrested for them; but relatively few of us commit many serious crimes. We are not saying that one form of deviance is equal to another kind—that, for example, taking supplies from an employer for one’s own use without authorization is equivalent to robbing a convenience store (though sometimes the amount of loss is greater in the former than the latter deviance). Yet, when we think about deviance, we should not just have in mind some “fringe” segment of society. When we think about deviance, we can usefully think about ourselves, too. PROJECTS

1. Create a list of deviant activities. Some may be criminal, some not. Some may relate to the sample of people who will respond to the list. For example, if high school students will constitute much of the sample, then include deviance such as academic cheating, cutting classes, and other school deviance. Have people respond anonymously to the list. Ask them if they have ever committed the deviance and, if so, how much. You decide whether to leave that second question open ended or to provide a small number of possible alternatives, such as once, two or three times, four or more, and the like. Compile your results. For example, did anyone claim not to have committed any of the listed deviance? Which deviance was most committed? Depending on how involved you wish to make this project, you could also include questions about the age, sex, and other social characteristics of the people in your sample. You could then compare your results for segments of your sample that vary by age, sex, or other social characteristics for which you have information. Does people’s involvement in the deviance you examined vary by these characteristics? You may even be able to compare your results with some of the results we mentioned in this chapter or with other surveys that you can locate through searching the Internet. 2. Get some paperback textbooks on deviance (or go to the websites of college textbook publishers where the covers of the textbooks are sometimes displayed along with other information about the textbooks). Examine the covers.

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What images come to mind? Ask people to examine the covers and report what images come to them. Do those images indicate that deviance focuses on what may be unusual, strange, exotic, and/or bizarre? Do the images suggest that deviance is ordinary, routine, or widely done by people? 3. This project may be difficult to do. Ask people to tell you whether they have committed deviance. If so, what deviance have they committed? Record their responses. Next, give them the definition of deviance presented in the first chapter. Ask them to think some more about the deviance they have committed. Then, show them a fuller list of deviant activities, asking them to check what they have committed that they had not previously reported. Ask them whether they consider themselves deviant. For each person, compare the several sets of responses (including the changing list of deviance that they indicate they have committed). What sense do you make of these responses? For example, as you invite people to think more carefully about their deviance, do they recall (perhaps reinterpret) their having committed more deviance? Do people who have committed deviance, even “quite a bit” of deviance, state that they are not deviant? If so, how do they explain that apparent inconsistency between their reported behavior and their self-characterization? NOTE

1. For those who may be curious, Rodin apparently originally intended The Thinker to depict the great Italian writer Dante in front of the Gates of Hell, thinking about his own masterpiece, Divine Comedy. This poem was Rodin’s inspiration for a commissioned work, which he called The Gates of Hell. While Rodin never finished that work, from it he drew The Thinker and many other works.

3

What Do We Need to Know to Understand Deviance?

Deviance is that to which people react negatively or would do so if they knew about it. Employees’ personal use of company computers, making lewd sexual remarks to a coworker, underage drinking, performance-enhancing drug use by athletes, espousing thoughts that are contrary to important beliefs of one’s group, vandalism, mental illness, plagiarism by professors and students, running a red light, corporate fraud, lying, adultery, setting off fire alarms in a school, being greatly overweight or greatly underweight, talking back to a person in authority, the shakedown of corporate donors by politicians, unauthorized release of hazardous waste, and much, much more may be deviant. Much may be deviant, yet to understand deviance, what do we need to investigate? In addition to exploring specific behaviors, thoughts, and attributes that are deviant, what broader topics should we explore in order to develop an adequate grasp of deviance? For example, we may believe that we should explore why people commit deviance, the causes of deviant behavior. Should we explore other topics in order to understand deviance well? Please think about this question, formulate your response, and after perhaps listing your ideas, continue. If you had difficulty deciding what we need to explore in order to understand deviance, don’t worry. It is difficult to consider what we need to know about any issue and certainly about deviance.

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Perhaps you listed that we need to know what is accepted and what is not in society. Maybe you wondered about different societies’ views of deviance. Perhaps you wondered about how much deviance exists. We imagine that you agreed with our example that we may wish to investigate why people commit deviance. “What causes people to commit deviance?” may be the major question that we need to address to understand deviance. Certainly it is an important issue for understanding it, yet, that is not all we need to know. We will enhance greatly our understanding of deviance if we enlarge our focus when thinking about it. Instead of solely (or even primarily) focusing on the people who commit deviance—on what causes people to act unacceptably—we might profitably explore how the rest of us participate in the dramas of deviance. Deviance is produced through the actions of all of us as we manage the challenges of living and acting together. We think it may be useful to consider the following processes (or actions that address particular challenges) through which we produce those dramas of deviance (Higgins and Butler 1982, chap. 1). PROCESSES PRODUCING DEVIANCE

First, how do people produce their understanding about deviance? How do they know that they have produced knowledge, not nonsense? At one time, people thought that biological abnormalities forced people to commit crime. Criminals were thought to be atavists, “throwbacks” to an earlier form of human. Today we take that knowledge as nonsense (Gould 1981, 123–43), though people’s biological functioning may matter in deviance (Wilson and Herrnstein 1985; Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990). Or, throughout this century, the interest in and acceptance of “broken homes” as a key cause of juvenile delinquency has waxed and waned (Wilkerson 1974). Nowadays, some social scientists have concluded that it is not as important as many might imagine (Wilson and Herrnstein 1985, chap. 9). Others continue to believe that a broken home does promote illegal behavior (Smith and Jatjoura 1988). How did that interest wax and wane, and why have some now concluded that broken families are not as important as many imagine? One specific issue within the challenge of producing understanding about deviance is to decide how much deviance exists. How much crime, school misconduct, mental illness, academic cheating, sexual harassment, and other kinds of deviance do we have in our society? We take up this issue of the

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prevalence of deviance more fully in a later chapter. When a newspaper reports that a specific amount of crime has occurred locally in the past year or that crime rates have increased or decreased, how should we evaluate that information? Deviance comes to exist for us, to have its shape and characteristics, through what we know about it. Second, how is it that something becomes deviant? How is it that some kinds of killing, making lewd sexual remarks to a colleague, drinking if under the age of twenty-one, dumping toxic wastes into a stream, same-sex marriages, belief in witches, and other acts, thoughts, and/or characteristics are deviant (if indeed they are deviant among a particular people at a particular time)? Perhaps it seems obvious to you. Some actions or characteristics are just deviant. But recall our earlier discussion of the shortcomings of an absolutist view. Deviance is not absolute, even if we may wish that it were. With further thought, you realize that what is deviant today in our society was not necessarily deviant in past times, and vice versa. None of the behaviors and conditions mentioned above has always been deviant. Therefore, how do people come to make some acts and characteristics deviant but not others? Certainly, we would want to know what causes people to commit deviance. Why do people use illegal drugs, assault, cheat, commit fraud, and so much more? Why have you committed deviance? We believe social scientists and citizens have been most interested in this question. Many explanations have been developed. If we understand why people commit deviance, goes the reasoning, then we may be more able to reduce or prevent it. Next, how do those who commit deviance do it? How do people who drink underage, cheat academically, mug, murder, hack computers, commit corporate fraud, and commit other deviance “pull off ” their deviance? What do they do to accomplish their deviant acts? Knowing what causes people to commit deviance does not tell us how they commit it. Law enforcement officers, mental health professionals, transportation safety officials, social workers, schoolteachers and administrators, and many other officials try to spot deviance and notice or uncover those who commit it. Officials must do so in order to handle the matter. Police officers patrol their beats, mental health professionals examine those who appear before them, transportation safety officials check passengers and their luggage, social workers investigate cases of suspected abuse, and schoolteachers and administrators look out for drug use and other deviance in their schools. How do

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these officials observe deviance? What procedures do they use? What challenges do they confront in trying to observe deviance? Moreover, is it just officials who encounter the challenge of spotting deviance? Might family members, friends, coworkers, dorm mates, and many others also experience that challenge? How do people recognize deviance? Once law enforcement officers, mental health professionals, transportation safety officials, social workers, schoolteachers and administrators, other officials, and everyday citizens have spotted deviance, they confront a difficult question: What kind of person is the individual who did the deviance? What is the person’s true identity? For example, juries that sit on capital punishment cases must decide whether to sentence those found guilty of murder to death or to life in prison. Their decision partly rests on what kind of person the convicted murderer is. Teachers and school administrators decide whether the student who misbehaves is basically a “good” kid or not. Knowing that someone has done deviance does not tell us what kind of person that offender is. How do officials and others decide the identity of those who commit deviance? We believe that most people are concerned to learn why people commit deviance in order to do something about it. How do officials, administrators, and ordinary citizens deal with deviance? What do they do, why, and with what consequences? What could they do instead? Those who are deviant are not passive bystanders in this drama of deviance. They manage their deviant status as they try to meet their concerns. They may hide or cover their deviance; participate with similar others in voluntary organizations or communities, such as gay communities; or try to become conventional through changing their behavior or changing the reactions of others. How do those who are deviant cope with conventional society and with what consequences? We need to know about all the questions we have just mentioned: How do people produce their understanding of deviance? How do people make some actions or characteristics deviant and not others? What causes people to commit deviance? How do people “pull off ” deviance? How do officials and others recognize deviance? How do they decide the identities of those who commit deviance? How do they deal with deviance? How do those who are deviant cope with conventional society? People create the dramas of deviance as they confront and handle these eight challenges. They also create the dramas of any particular kind of deviance, such as computer hacking, corporate

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fraud, and drug use, as they address those eight questions. We need to know much more about deviance than why people commit it. In the chapters that follow, we explore various issues that can be placed within these eight processes. Some discussions focus on issues in ways that are not obvious; others may be very disturbing. We hope that all are intriguing. However, we do not, nor could we, examine all that you and we might need to know about deviance. People have not developed all that they need to know. They never will do so because thinking about deviance is a never-ending challenge. Instead, the chapters are intended to invite you and to excite you to think about deviance in ways that you have not done before. HOW DO YOU PARTICIPATE IN DEVIANCE?

Now, how do you participate in the dramas of deviance? Please take some time to list specific ways in which you have participated in these eight processes that make up the phenomenon of deviance. When you finish, then continue. When we ask students to list anonymously how they participate or have participated in the dramas of deviance, they provide a wide variety of ways. They have mentioned smoking; lending out their IDs; using illegal drugs; driving recklessly; cheating on tests and on taxes; being bisexual; assaulting others; cursing; drinking heavily; stealing a birthday present at a party; stealing computer programs; telling a cashier that water, not a clear soft drink, was in the glass; and many other items. These young adults have participated in the dramas of deviance in diverse ways. However, do you notice anything else about the list? Look at it again before you continue. We notice that the young adults asked to list how they participated in the dramas of deviance have misunderstood the question. They have not yet expanded their view in thinking about deviance to include all eight processes. Instead, their focus is solely or primarily on committing deviant behavior. They have listed deviance they have committed. Perhaps you, too, solely or primarily focused on the deviance you have done. If so, then you might review the eight challenges that we explored and list once again the ways in which you have participated or at present do participate in the dramas of deviance. We all help to produce the dramas of deviance, perhaps much more than we realize. Consider each of the eight challenges. First, through reading, listening to others, classes you take, and your own experiences, you develop understanding

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about deviance. For example, you develop understanding about why people commit deviance or how best to commit some kind of deviance, such as the unauthorized downloading of songs from the Internet, underage drinking, or academic cheating. You may read about the warning signs of alcohol or mental health problems. You may learn from others how to handle people who have committed deviance. You also develop understanding about how much deviance exists. You may even participate in the production of those statistics. For example, when you report or do not report to the police that your book bag has been taken or that someone attempted to assault you, you have helped to create how much deviance is recorded. In diverse ways, you create understandings of deviance. Next, how do you participate in making some things deviant and not others? We imagine that you vote in elections for candidates who legislate what is acceptable behavior. You may even help in political campaigns to elect politicians. Perhaps you vote in referendums where you and other citizens pass or defeat legislation that shapes what is acceptable or unacceptable in your city, county, or state. Consider, however, the everyday worlds in which you live. Do you help to make, change, or oppose standards for behavior in your family, among friends, in clubs and organizations of which you are a member? Do you support, tolerate, or not think much about present standards, not challenging them? For example, are you involved in setting, accepting, resisting, and/or revising standards regarding the conduct of members of a group to which you belong? Now, what caused or causes you to commit deviance? All people have committed deviance. How would you explain your deviance? How people understand their commission of deviance, however, may not be adequate to social scientists who explore this question. While social scientists may be interested in learning how people understand their own deviance, social scientists may not accept people’s explanations as their scientific explanations. Are the social scientists being arrogant, simply dismissing the explanations provided by those who commit deviance? Perhaps the social scientists realize that all people act without necessarily understanding well how they come to act as they do. When you committed deviance, how did you “pull it off ”? For example, if you are underage and have drunk alcohol at a bar or elsewhere, which is common among many young adults, certainly among the young adults we teach, how did you do it? How did you obtain fake identification, prepare your ap-

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pearance, create your confidence, select the bar and even the time and date, present yourself at the bar, and so on? Even pulling off what some would consider to be a mild form of deviance, underage drinking, may take much more work than is first imagined. Have you ever become suspicious of a family member, friend, colleague, or someone else committing deviance? Perhaps you became suspicious of someone using illegal drugs, having an alcohol problem, stealing, and so on. How did you become suspicious? What did you do after becoming suspicious? Did you conclude that the person committed deviance or not? Perhaps you work as a sales associate in a store or as an employee in other businesses where you have organizational responsibility for noticing deviance. What training did you receive to spot deviance? What procedures do you use? Have you ever noticed someone shoplifting or committing other deviance at your place of work? Have you had the challenge of recognizing your own deviance? Perhaps you drank, dieted, or acted in other ways that became a “problem,” but it took you some time to realize that your actions had become deviant. Many people experience that challenge. If you did conclude that someone committed deviance, then what kind of person was the individual? Was the person who cheated, stole, did drugs, or committed some other deviance a basically good person or not? How did you decide who the person was “really”? We imagine that you have dealt with deviance in diverse situations and ways. As a family member, friend, organizational member, colleague, and in other ways, you have handled deviance. Have you ignored it, warned or tried to talk with the offender, tried to get help for the offender, retaliated, reported it to officials, and so on? Perhaps you dealt with it formally as an officer in a club or organization. Maybe you have volunteered in treatment programs or programs that try to prevent people from becoming deviant, such as youth programs. All people deal with deviance. As someone who has committed deviance or possesses an attribute to which others react negatively, how have you tried to cope with conventional society? Have you tried to counter others’ accusations about your deviance by vehemently denying that you were involved or by justifying what you did? Have you tried to hide your deviance, passing as if you were conventional? For example, coming home drunk, perhaps you tried to give your parents the impression that you were very tired. Did you participate with others who were similarly

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deviant, drawing support from them to cope with what you and fellow deviants saw as the cruelties of conventional society? Perhaps you simply gave up the deviance, returning to a conventional way of life. Have you participated in any self-help groups? Having committed deviance, or possessing attributes that are reacted to as deviant, everyone copes with conventional society. You may have been involved in the dramas of deviance in several ways for any specific episode. For example, you may have eventually discovered that a friend was doing drugs; concluded that the friend was experiencing painful relations with family members, thus, still a good person; and helped the friend get some treatment for the drug problems and family difficulties. You noticed deviance, identified what kind of person your friend was, and dealt with the deviance. Your participation in deviance may be quite complex. We encourage you to be aware of all the ways in which you participate in the dramas of deviance. CONCLUSION

Deviance is more complex than people typically imagine. Most people are curious about why people commit all kinds of deviance, particularly deviance that is heinous, bizarre, or other than what they themselves commit. The question of why people commit deviance is not the only important issue. Instead, through many interrelated processes, people produce the larger phenomenon of deviance. Now, what do you think needs to be explored in order to understand deviance adequately? PROJECTS

1. Explore how you participate in the phenomenon of deviance. How do you produce your understandings of deviance? Do you rely on the mass media, textbooks, experts, family or friends, or common sense? Do you check for yourself what you think you know about deviance? How do you help to contribute to the statistics about deviance? For example, do you report instances of deviance to appropriate officials? Second, how have you participated in making what is deviant within your group or community? Have you accepted, rejected, proposed, voted for, supported, and/or in other ways tried to have your group or community establish some action as offensive or resisted that being done? Third, what do you think has caused you to commit the deviance you have done? How would you explain that?

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Fourth, when you committed deviance, how did you pull it off? How did you pull off underage drinking, cheating on a test, shoplifting, or some other deviance that you committed? Examine carefully what you did to commit that deviance. You may be surprised how much work goes into committing even the “simplest” deviance. Fifth, when and how did you come to recognize that a family member, friend, colleague, or other person in your social world was involved in deviance? Or did you suspect that someone you know was involved in deviance but later came to decide that the person was not? How did that occur? Sixth, when you decided that someone was involved in deviance, what kind of person did you think the offender was? Did you believe the offender to be still quite conventional, or did you decide that the offender was quite deviant? Did others see the offender as you did or differently? Next, how have you dealt with family members, friends, colleagues, or other people who committed deviance? Did you warn, counsel, punish, urge treatment, or in other ways deal with the offender? Did you try a variety of strategies, one after the other, if previous approaches were not successful? Did you call officials? If you did, when and why did you call officials to take care of the deviance? Finally, how have you as a deviant coped with conventional society? Did you try to deny your deviance and assert your innocence/conventionality? Did you try to account for your deviance, lessening your responsibility or the seriousness of the deviance? Did you develop relations with others involved in the deviance as a means of avoiding those who would be offended by you and as a way of developing a set of beliefs and a social circle to shield you from others’ negative reactions? Did you try to change your deviance, perhaps through participation in a self-help group or through giving up the deviance? Did you try to present yourself to others as conventional, passing as someone who was not doing drugs, had not cheated on a test, and so on? Did you challenge the deviance status of what you did? For example, did you challenge the standards of your group that makes a particular behavior unacceptable, trying to get your group to revise what it makes deviant? How have you been involved in the complex phenomena of deviance? 2. Instead of focusing on yourself in the above project, you could explore how friends or others you know are involved in the phenomenon of deviance. This could be sensitive. Certainly, some of the processes that make up the phenomenon of deviance, such as what causes a person to do deviance, may be more sensitive for a friend to discuss than some of the other processes.

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3. Explore media stories about deviance, for example those in newspapers, to see which processes of deviance are more likely to be presented. We imagine that you will find some of the processes are much more likely to be presented than others. If so, how would you explain that? You might take a look at the media items of deviance that we include in the introduction. While we do not claim those are a representative sample of media items regarding deviance, what processes of deviance do those items present? 4. Ask others to tell you what topics and questions about deviance they believe need to be examined in order to have a satisfactory understanding about deviance. You may wish to provide to the people you talk with for this project a definition of deviance and some examples of deviance before pursuing the specific focus of this project. Be sure the people you talk with realize that you are not interested in what different behaviors they believe are deviant. You are interested in their beliefs about the topics about deviance that need to be explored in order to understand deviance well. What responses do you get? Do the people you ask primarily focus on the issue of causation, on why people commit deviance, or some other particular topic? Or do the people you ask provide a range of topics in their responses?

4

Is Deviance a Threat to, or Part of, the Foundation of Social Life?

Beating people, tattling, taking without permission, corporate fraud, underreporting one’s income for tax purposes, illegal drug use, unauthorized entry into a house to steal some of its contents, imagining that dead presidents are speaking to you, selling repaired merchandise as if it were new, nudity in a park, chronic tardiness for work, and much more are often deviant. Deviance is not welcomed, is even resisted, by those who find it offensive. The perpetrators may be shunned, kicked out, locked up, or handled in some other way that signals that their behavior is offensive. That seems obvious. Now, let’s think about deviance in ways that are not so obvious. Consider two views about deviance. First, it is a threat to social life, to people successfully living and acting together. Second, deviance is part of the foundation of social life, crucial, even essential, for people to be able to live and act together. What would it mean for deviance to be a threat to people successfully living and acting together? How would it be a threat? Next, how could deviance be part of the foundation of social life, an integral, even significant, component for social life? This second view of deviance, in contrast to the first view, seems odd at best. Think about each one of these views before you continue. DEVIANCE AS AN UNWANTED THREAT TO SOCIAL LIFE

The first view of deviance provides a reasonable, even commonsensical take on deviance. It indicates that deviance is harmful to social life. It hinders people’s

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ability to live and act together successfully. Without deviance, social life would proceed more satisfyingly. Let’s explore this view further. Many of us take social life for granted. We may not think deeply about it. We live it, not analyze it. We may assume that people naturally live and act together. Something inside them—perhaps their evolutionary development— or something outside them—perhaps divine will—makes that so. We realize that people do not always “get along,” but we may assume that they are “meant” to do so. If it were not for biological flaws, deviations from a divinely prescribed path, or some other aberrations that are not part of the essence of humans and of social life, people would live and act together successfully, according to this assumption held by many of us. If we could rid ourselves of deviance, of this offensive and unwholesome threat to social life, then people could live and act together successfully. Certainly this view presents some truth about deviance. Through deviance, people at times produce great harm to and heartache for one another. Deviance can be horrifyingly destructive. Think of serious violence, which harms the victims, the families of the victims, others significantly related to the victims, and perhaps even the fabric of social life. However, we think this first view does not encourage us to think more critically in nonobvious ways about deviance. The first view of deviance may suggest assumptions about social life that blind us to the challenges of living and acting together. DEVIANCE AS PART OF THE FOUNDATION OF SOCIAL LIFE

We find the second view of deviance to be more useful than the first. It encourages us to think in nonobvious ways about deviance. We certainly may abhor the destruction caused by some deviance, but deviance is fundamental to human life. Let’s explore how that is so. Social life is a never-ending challenge. Nothing dictates how people will act with one another. Nothing guarantees that they will live and act together adequately. Evolution has led humans to be social animals; people become fully human with others. Our nature as a species provides capacities, biological needs, and predispositions. It does not dictate how people will act within those capacities, needs, and predispositions. Each moment people create their lives; each moment they produce social life. The next moment waits to be made by people. It is not predetermined (Higgins 1994; Stewart 1998).

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Humans have great capacity to act in many ways. At any moment they could exercise any of those capacities. They could run, jump, move one way or another, sit, talk softly or loudly, remain silent, strike, caress, think, laugh, and on and on. Yet they do not have unlimited capacity. They cannot flap their arms and fly like an eagle. They cannot live for hundreds, even thousands, of years as some plants and animals do. Humans have biological needs that must be satisfied if they are to survive. Humans must nourish their body, maintain vital functioning, procreate. Those needs do not dictate what humans will do. Those needs do not force humans to meet the needs. People do fast for periods of time, even to death. People may be celibate for their entire lives. Humans have genetic, hormonal, and other predispositions. Scholars continue to investigate what those are. For example, it appears that males are biologically predisposed to be more aggressive than females are. Most people are predisposed to be sexually aroused by those of the other sex. But these predispositions do not compel people to act in any particular way at any moment (Gould 1978; Harris 1989; Sax 2005). Human social life is made moment by moment by people. People produce their lives and social life as they seek to meet their goals. We take up this point in a later chapter when we explore what causes people to commit deviance. Nothing dictates toward what goals people will strive. People create those goals. People also create whatever meaning their lives and social life have for them. People decide what is worthy, honorable, beautiful, horrific, and so on. Humans create the values, dreams, principles, and images that at times guide their efforts. Consider a simple example. Consider art. When some of us view a particular piece of art, or even a great deal of art, it has significant value to us. We experience the art to be intriguing, bold, exciting, thought provoking, pleasing, and so on. Others see it to be boring, ugly, puzzling, a waste of time. But the art is not any of that in and of itself. It becomes whatever meaning we have made for it. So it is for all of our world (Higgins 1994, chap. 3). Therefore, people continually face the awesome challenges of trying to live and act together, figuring out ways to do so, and in the process giving meaning to themselves and their world. They face these challenges when nothing

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dictates what to do, what meaning to give. They face the challenges when they have only themselves on whom to depend. We imagine that some readers may have become very upset. Some may take our words to mean that we are dismissing divine will and guidance. We are not. Instead, people together make powerfully, unquestioningly alive for themselves the divine will and guidance they strive to follow and take comfort in. That, too, is a challenge. Different people address that challenge in differing ways. Religions have varied greatly throughout human existence and do so today. Where, then, is the place of deviance in these never-ending challenges faced by humans? It is central to the challenges. People produce deviance as they try to meet the challenges of living and acting together and of giving meaning to their existence. Deviance would not exist if there were no challenges. But if there were no challenges, then human existence would be fundamentally different from what it now is. Deviance is a powerful means through which people try to confront the primary challenges of human existence. Consider: In the struggle to give meaning to life, people create understandings and feelings of what is honorable or not, of what is worthy or not, of what is acceptable or not. Those understandings become crucial components of what it is to be human. In creating those understandings, people are simultaneously creating what is deviant and the possibility for deviance to occur. The worthy is known in part by its contrast to the unworthy. The conventional and acceptable are known in contrast to the deviant. Behavior that is part of human capacity has now become deviant. People can use that deviant status as a means to try to arrange for one another to act in certain ways and not in other ways. It is a powerful means for narrowing how people act out of the enormous range of how they could act. “Don’t do that because it is wrong, immoral, illegal, unacceptable, unnatural, and so on.” People can also apply that deviant status to acts they contemplate as they decide what to do next. Deviance, then, is a crucial component in people’s struggle to live and act together, to make known to themselves and others how to act and not to act, to make themselves who they are (Higgins and Butler 1982, 48–50). For example, by creating some forms of sexual behavior as virtuous, people create other forms as deviant, and vice versa. Thus the deviance of what we nowadays call sexual assault may become a powerful way to proclaim how people are at present expected to live and act together. Recall, humans have a great capacity to act in a wide variety of ways. Nothing literally makes them

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act in any particular way. Through regulation, punishment, moral condemnation, and much more, the deviance of sexual assault becomes a means to direct people to live and act in specific ways, in ways in which people do not coerce sex from others. Of course, no means is completely successful. By making deviant some forms of sexual behavior, people are also shaping who they are as persons. They are giving meaning to their identities. They have become persons in whom the boundaries of their sexuality are drawn in certain ways and not in other ways. Even to consider engaging in that nowdeviant sexual behavior is to confront their identities as normal, ordinary people. Even if the negative reactions, the hallmark of deviance, were completely successful in getting people to act in appropriate ways, people would not have gotten rid of deviance. It would still be a crucial component of social life. Yes, people might not be committing that deviant behavior, for which many would be pleased, but deviance would still exist. The crucial feature of deviance is the negative reactions—actual and potential negative reactions. Even without deviant behavior, deviance would still be central to the challenge of social life. It would be through deviance—through actual and potential negative reactions—and much more (such as bonds of trust among people) that deviant behavior did not occur, that people acted in particular, acceptable ways. The people knew, however, what was acceptable by making deviant some potential behavior. The success in this case of making something deviant shows that deviance is a crucial component of social life. The same holds for every instance or kind of deviance. Through making some killing, some business transactions, some traffic behavior, some governmental action, some drug use, some mental functioning, some appearance, and on and on deviant, people are trying to figure out how to live and act together and to give meaning to their lives. Deviance is a crucial component in meeting those challenges of human existence. Deviance is a crucial component in confronting the challenges of social life in another, yet related, way. As we noted above and as we explore in a later chapter, people direct themselves to meet their goals. However, their goals may not be others’ goals. The goals of different people may clash. Deviance can be crucial to this conflict of goals. People can and do use deviance—both reacting negatively to some behaviors and doing those actions to which others react negatively—to try to meet their goals.

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Consider some businesspeople and the public. The public, or segments of it, may wish to have clean air and water. The businesspeople may desire to make their products with as little cost as possible. The public may also wish to be employed and to have products to buy. The businesspeople, too, may be concerned about their environment. Let’s not put anyone in a white or black hat. To produce their products at a low cost, the businesspeople may discharge waste into the environment. Perhaps certain kinds of discharge will become reacted to as deviant. The public, or segments of it, may protest, even violently, against businesspeople. Particular forms of protest may themselves become deviant. Whatever the scenario, which can become very complex, the businesspeople and the public can use deviance—both negative reactions to others’ unwanted behavior as well as their own behavior that others characterize as unacceptable—to further their concerns. Deviance is integral to human existence. CONCLUSION

What do you think? Is deviance a threat to social life or part of the foundation of social life? Is deviance to be wished away, or is it an integral, essential feature of social life. We certainly may wish to be rid of the harm and the destruction of some deviance. But deviance—the making unacceptable of some of human existence, of some human actions, thoughts, and attributes—is crucial to human existence. Deviance is one of the fundamental means by which humans live and act together. It is within social frameworks of what people make deviant or acceptable that people become who they are! Can you apply this argument to your more personal worlds: family, friendship groups, clubs, organizations, work, and so on? Are living and acting together and giving meaning to one’s existence never-ending challenges in those social worlds? Do you and the other participants use deviance in confronting those challenges, in telling one another how to be in those worlds, who to be in those worlds? For example, females in our classes who are in sororities have often written of how their sorority makes deviant such acts as “low” grades, smoking, underage drinking, missing meetings, not paying one’s dues, not participating in civic projects, and so on. The “respectable” sorority sister is not to engage in such behaviors. The “respectable” sorority sister is not a person who commits such acts!

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Is deviance important in your worlds as people pursue their concerns, concerns that may conflict with other participants’ concerns? Consider the conflicts between parents and their teenage children. The parents may react negatively to some of their children’s school-related actions or inaction (e.g., their study behavior), interpersonal behavior (e.g., with whom they socialize and what they do when they get together), and actions within the family (e.g., meeting or not meeting responsibilities at home). The children may take offense at their parents’ supervision of them. Each resists the others’ imputation that their behavior is deviant. Deviance is a tool in producing and managing these conflicts. People and social life cannot exist without the phenomenon of deviance. Therefore, look closely and think carefully about your worlds. You will see that deviance and its complexity are everywhere. PROJECTS

1. Deviance is an essential feature of social life. Groups do not exist without it. Examine closely a group in which you participate. How is deviance—the making of some behaviors, thoughts, or attributes unacceptable—used to define your group, to establish what it is to be a member in this group? Does your group have any formal mechanisms for making what is deviant or for deciding who has committed deviance and handling those offenders? How well displayed to the members are these mechanisms? For example, are new members clearly taught the “rules” of the group? Are deviant members made an example of to other members? If the official mechanisms for punishing members are secret, do members still learn of what has been done through that official mechanism? How so? Do members use informal means, such as ridicule and ostracism, or their obverse counterparts, praise and inclusion, to shape the members’ behavior and, thus, the group? How do members incorporate the standards of the group into their identities? How is deviance used within the group to enable the group to exist as an interacting collectivity of members, not as mere individuals who happen to come into one another’s presence? Do not try to do all that is mentioned in this project. Use it to stimulate your investigation. 2. In a “broad-brush” way, compare how your society defines itself and its members through what it makes deviant and what it does not make deviant with another society and with what that society makes deviant and does not

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make deviant. You may wish to focus on a small number of behaviors or attributes that are or are not made deviant such as drug behaviors, sexual behaviors, business behaviors, or governmental behaviors. Societies vary as to what they accept or make deviant in each of the four realms given as examples. As you learn more about your society and the other society, what thoughts do you generate about how each society defines itself? An alternative to comparing your society with another society is to compare your present society with its past. Does your society define itself differently now than it did in the past as revealed in what it makes deviant or does not make deviant in whatever realms you investigate?

5

It’s Disgusting, Isn’t It?

People may not realize the awesome power that humans wield in making deviance. To explore that issue, we ask you to consider carefully some behaviors, which may be very difficult to do. We will start by asking you to imagine the scenario presented below. Try to place yourself in that scenario. See, hear, feel, and in other ways experience yourself in that scenario. Make it come alive for you if you can. Imagine each sentence before going to the next. Don’t rush, but don’t linger as you move your imagination through the scenario. Of course, you may stop at any point in your imagination. Whenever you stop, please write down your thoughts, feelings, and reactions. Be sure to do this once you stop. Imagine that you are sitting at a table across from another person. That person is your age, sex, and ethnicity. You two are pleasantly talking with each other, smiling, even laughing. When you finish, you both rise and shake hands. Then you pat each other on the back. Before departing, you hug each other. You follow the hug with kisses on each other’s cheek. Next, you kiss each other on the mouth. This turns into a passionate embrace. Then, you . . .

Now, write your reactions. When you finish, continue reading. If you reacted as many of our students have reacted to this scenario, you stopped imagining before you got to the end. By the way, what do you imagine was the end in the scenario? If you reacted as many of our students have reacted, you were disgusted. You were appalled at what you were beginning to 51

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imagine. It was “sick” to imagine such intimacy with someone of the same sex. Not all of our students react this way, but most do. How would you explain this common reaction of disgust when people imagine this scenario? Please think about this question and then continue. If you wish, write your thoughts before you continue. Perhaps this reaction of disgust is common because intimacy among people of the same sex is unnatural. Therefore, people are disgusted when they imagine something that is unnatural, especially when they imagine being involved. Disgust would be a natural reaction to what is unnatural. We believe this is a common way to make sense of the widespread reaction of disgust. Nevertheless, this explanation may misplace responsibility for people’s reactions and for what disgusts them. Humans have much greater capacity to act in a wide variety of ways than we typically realize, perhaps even than we are willing to recognize. Sexuality is one of the capacities that humans have in abundance. As Marvin Harris (1989) notes, humans have great sexuality. They are one of the sexiest animals alive. While most humans are born with a predisposition to prefer opposite-sex relations, they are not born with a “predisposition to loathe and avoid same-sex relationships” (Harris 1989, 236–37). Similarly, the small percentage of people, perhaps just a few percent, who are born with a preference for same-sex relations are not born with an aversion to oppositesex relations. Humans are born with sexual preferences but apparently not with sexual aversions. Consider the Sambia of Papua New Guinea. Their society, like the societies of other people of Papua New Guinea, is based on warfare. Their society, as is typically so for societies based on warfare, is misogynist. Men are known to be inherently superior, and hostility is shown to women. Men’s strength and virility, their masculinity, are obtained from other men, from their semen. It is obtained through ritualized homosexuality. This ritualized homosexuality, only part of which we present below, is part of the complex processes through which the Sambia produce and reproduce the “identities of persons, social roles, clans, and intergroup relationships across generations” (Herdt 1984, 200). Ritualized homosexuality is part of process through which the Sambia become who they are! Young boys, from about seven to ten years old, are separated from the women and children and taken to live in an all-male hamlet for their next ten

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to fifteen years. During the years in the all-male hamlet, they regularly engage in homosexual activities. They first do so as the fellator in order to obtain the masculine-endowing semen from those who have it, older youths and young men. The Sambia believe that to become masculine, boys must obtain semen, and they can obtain it only from those who have it—men. The male body does not produce it, according to the Sambia. When older, they pass on their semen to the young boys as the fellated. When they marry, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, the young men engage in sex with their wives and with the young boys. When they become fathers, the men stop their homosexual activities with the young boys. The married men are careful not to “waste” too much of their precious semen with their wives. To do so could weaken them. Sambia men say that they prefer genital sex with their wives to oral sex with males. They also realize that “boys must at first be coerced into fellatio” (Herdt 1984, 189). Yet, preference need not entail unalterable avoidance (Herdt 1984; Harris 1989, 241; Goode 1994, 243–44). While the Sambia permit, even require, sexual behavior that is widely unacceptable, often illegal, in many societies, they do not permit every kind of sexual behavior. For example, the older male is always to be the inserter in sexual interaction. Sambia men who sought semen from other men would be stigmatized; to seek it from boys would be “morally unconscionable” (Herdt 1984, 191). Homosexual contact among clansmen and certain others is also prohibited. Adultery by husbands and wives is condemned (Herdt 1984). The Sambia are not the only people who engage in homosexual behavior that is approved, even expected, by their society. Many non-Western societies tolerate or even encourage some same-sex erotic behavior along with opposite-sex relations (Harris 1989, 237). WHAT UNDERSTANDING CAN WE CREATE?

We imagine that you may have had some difficulty reading about the Sambia. Their practices are likely very different from what you assume is obviously natural for humans. Their practices “are” disgusting, even revolting—to many people. Yet, what understanding can you develop from the practices of the Sambia and from your disgust in imagining the opening scenario? Please develop your reply, no matter how tentative, then continue. We think a useful understanding is the following: Much of the deviance that people most abhor is part of the natural capacity of humans as a species

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of animal. The deviance that people most abhor is not alien to human nature. Further, and perhaps equally difficult to recognize, much of the deviance that people most abhor has been permitted, even encouraged or required, within some societies. Normal members of those societies engage in the behavior that many others find most disgusting. Finally, humans have the awesome ability to transform what is part of their natural capacity into something that is an abomination, into something that is horrifyingly deviant. That ability to do so has been crucial for creating the life that a people take for granted. The description of the Sambia and their ritual sexual practices among males and the disgust that many people experience in reaction to the practices of the Sambia and to that imagined scenario support the points we have just presented. KILLING KIDS

Let’s think about two other behaviors that we abhor. They, too, support the points we have presented. First, imagine being a parent. You have just had a child. Instead of nurturing it, you suffocate it, abandon it, or in some other way kill it. It is disgusting to imagine killing one’s infant. As each of us is a father of two children, we find it hard even to write the preceding sentences. Americans are routinely shocked when they read in the newspaper or see on television reports about parents who have killed their children. For example, a number of years ago Americans were appalled when they watched and read about the unfolding saga of a young mother in our state, South Carolina, who first claimed that her two young boys were carjacked and then later confessed to strapping them into their car seats and rolling the car into the lake. Many Americans could not imagine how a mother could do that to her own children. The mother, who is now serving a life sentence with no chance of parole, must have been evil or mentally deranged, people surmised. Humans, however, have often killed their unwanted young. In eighty of eighty-six hunting and gathering societies for which information was obtained, infanticide was practiced. Parents kill as many as half of their newborns in hunting and gathering societies, according to some estimates (Nolan and Lenski 2006, 85). Unwanted girls are routinely killed in some societies. In nineteenth-century China, boys outnumbered girls four to one in some regions. Similar imbalances occurred in northern India. Europeans were horrified at how common infanticide was in Asia. Yet Europeans widely practiced it during the 1700s and 1800s, though often indirectly. Some mothers took

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their nursing infants to bed and “accidentally” rolled on top of them, suffocating them. Others used wet nurses to rid themselves of unwanted infants. Parents paid wet nurses to nurse their young, though the parents knew that the wet nurses would not have enough breast milk to nourish the many infants in their care. Parents also used government foundling hospitals to rid themselves of unwanted infants. More than 300,000 babies were left from 1824 to 1833 in France (Harris 1989, 210–14). Infanticide is not as prevalent today in Western societies. Nevertheless, people still rid themselves of their unwanted young. They do so before the young are born! For example, more than a million abortions have been performed each year in America for more than twenty-five years. In the most recent year for which information was reported, almost 1.3 million abortions were performed, approximately 319 abortions for every 1,000 live births (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2007, 74). Worldwide, approximately 45 million abortions, both legal and illegal, are performed annually (The State 1996; Henshaw, Sing, et al. 1999). We are not claiming that women should or should not have abortions. Abortions are, however, one way through which humans have routinely killed their unwanted young. Doing so is part of humans’ natural capacity. EATING PEOPLE

What could be more horrifying than killing babies? Consider drinking the blood of humans, eating their flesh and their organs. Consider cannibalism. Does just reading these words revolt you? Americans were horrified in the early 1990s to learn of Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed more than a dozen young men and ate parts of some of them. Dahmer was later murdered in prison as he served numerous life sentences. Many of us know of instances of survivors of shipwrecks and airplane crashes who ate fellow survivors. People, however, have more widely committed cannibalism than what is due to extreme, life-threatening emergencies or what has been done by extremely troubled perpetrators. Cannibalism has been widespread among small-scale band-and-village societies and chiefdoms. These small-scale societies had difficulty feeding their members. The societies could try to limit the size of their populations or their use of resources—forests, soil, and game—needed for survival. Limiting the size of their populations was difficult; limiting the use of resources would undermine their members’ health. An alternative was warfare with neighboring

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societies. By killing or driving away members of neighboring societies, more resources would be available to the victors. Enslaving the enemy, however, simply resulted in more people needing to be fed. Instead, the enemy might be eaten, which provided protein for the protein-starved people (Harris 1989, 302–4, 428–30). Not just so-called primitive people have eaten fellow humans. The flesh, blood, heart, and other parts of the human body were used for medicinal purposes from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century in England and elsewhere in Europe. Standard medical books recommended bodily parts for internal and external use. Executioners in seventeenth-century England sold the stillwarm blood of decapitated criminals to customers in the crowds of thousands who assembled to applaud and jeer the criminals. While the American medical community apparently did not officially approve of the medicinal use of humans, such use was made. A minister and lay physician who lived in England until his mid-twenties, when he emigrated to Massachusetts, administered medicinal remedies made from human corpses (Gordon-Grube 1988). Humans are not naturally averse to consuming their fellow humans. Doing so can even be part of sacred rituals (Harris 1989, 432–41)! DISGUST AND RESPONSIBILITY

Humans have great natural capacity to act in a wide variety of ways. Those behaviors that are most abhorred are part of that natural capacity. Those behaviors that people find loathsome have been permitted, even encouraged or required, by some societies. Normal members of those societies, our “ancestors” in some cases, not deranged individuals, engaged in those behaviors. Those behaviors that are most abhorred are not naturally disgusting. Humans also have the capacity to turn what is part of their natural capacity into that which is abominable. By making what some societies accept, even promote, unthinkably disgusting, horrifyingly unnatural, other societies decrease dramatically the likelihood that their members will express that natural capacity. These societies have also shaped their members to be very different people from those in societies that permit, even encourage, those abhorred behaviors. Consider again same-sex relations. Students who are disgusted by the scenario of increasing intimacy that we asked you to imagine are not necessarily intolerant of those who are gay (though same-sex behavior and being gay are not the same, something that many people confuse). Instead, many of the students say that those who are

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gay should be allowed to be themselves, to express their sexual identities—as long as they do not flaunt it, add some of the students. The private behavior of people is their business, claim the students. Some of the students know people who are gay; some have friends who are gay. Of course, some are gay. The students’ visceral disgust when imagining being involved in that scenario of increasing intimacy contrasts starkly with their personal expression of the growing public tolerance for those who are gay. The students, as almost all those in America, have become social beings in a society in which same-sex sexual relations are stigmatized, even disgusting. Same-sex sexual relations “are” disgusting because people continue to make that so, though less so today. We are not arguing, however, that people should or should not try to make acceptable same-sex sexual behavior, infanticide, cannibalism, or any other abhorred behavior that is part of the natural capacity of humans. We are not arguing that people should tolerate or promote the expression of all that comes naturally to humans. (A society cannot simply decide tomorrow to promote a behavior that it has long made, often without realizing it, unimaginably disgusting. That disgust is embedded in the way of life of the people of that society. Fundamental change is not so simple.) Not at all. We have no desire for people to champion the enslavement of humans, the burning of dissidents at the stake, the casual slaughter of enemies, the ritual sacrifice of children, and other atrocities (at least those acts are atrocious to us—and we know that they are atrocious to you) that humans have routinely done and, in some cases, still do. Instead, we are encouraging people to take responsibility with their fellow citizens for what disgusts them. Perhaps it is too frightening for people to accept what we have presented above. It is certainly more comforting to act as if some behaviors are naturally loathsome, alien to normal human nature, than to recognize the fundamental, continuing challenge that all people face. The challenge is to confront the capacity of human nature and to decide what of that capacity will be tolerated, accepted, promoted, discouraged, prohibited, made abominable. Nature cannot do that for people, no matter how much people may appeal to nature. People are left to confront who they become. CONCLUSION

Well, are homosexuality, infanticide, and eating people disgusting? We encourage you to think further about what a people make disgusting, even if it is not made to be as abominable as the three topics we discussed. Who is making the

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behaviors, thoughts, or characteristics disgusting? What meanings are used to make the behaviors, thoughts, or characteristics disgusting? What are the consequences of making these disgusting? How do people draw the line between what is disgusting and what is not? How do other groups of people handle these behaviors, thoughts, and characteristics? What is not being made disgusting? For example, sexual activities with someone who is “under age” are illegal— and to many people quite repugnant. (We are not saying that such behavior should not be repugnant.) If the person is one day older, however, then the same sexual activity is legal. In other societies, Iraq, for example, marriage and sexual activities with young girls may be quite common (Annin and Hamilton 1996). Apparently many Japanese men legally turn sexually to schoolgirls, over whom they feel in control. Yet, an editor of a magazine that presents pictures of naked schoolgirls says that only “maniacs” go for girls below the third grade (The State 1997). Even in early America the age of consent for girls was ten (Goodman 1996). To think about what is made disgusting is not intended to undermine what is cherished and what is abhorred. Instead, to think about what is made disgusting is to take seriously the responsibility that people have for deciding what to accept and what to condemn, for living and acting together, for creating their worlds. PROJECTS

1. If you dare, take the scenario that opens this chapter and present it to people you know. Ask them to write their reactions to it. Then ask them to explain their reactions. If people find that opening scenario disgusting, as we believe most will, why do they? Do they assume that such behavior is unnatural or an abomination against what the divine has decreed? Or ask people to respond to the other topics presented—infanticide and cannibalism. What are people’s responses and their explanations for their responses? Do many people, perhaps most people, take for granted that such behaviors are unnatural or an abomination? 2. Societies may develop very different standards as to what they accept and what they evaluate as detestable, even an abomination against their most sacred beliefs. For example, killing a cow is sacrilegious to Hindus. It may even be more detestable than killing a person. Before the Indian subcontinent was

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divided into India and Pakistan, Hindus regularly rioted in attempts to prevent Muslims from killing cows. The memories of those cow riots continue to strain relations between India and Pakistan. In contrast, many Americans enjoy eating beef, especially eating hamburgers at fast-food restaurants. To learn more about why Hindus venerate cows and make detestable their killing, read Marvin Harris’s (1974) discussion of “Mother Cow” in his Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches. How does Harris explain the disgust Hindus experience toward cow killing?

6

Is Deviance Harmful Or Helpful?

Is deviance harmful or helpful? What do you think? Are sexual assault, academic cheating, robbery, mental health problems, underage drinking, sexually explicit material, failure to pay organizational dues, gang violence, violating work rules, governmental misconduct, corporate fraud, and much more destructive or constructive? Think of your deviance. Is it harmful or helpful? Please take some time to consider this issue, then write your response. When you are finished, continue reading. The question is more complex than a first glance might lead one to believe. To address it, we may need to consider to whom deviance might be harmful or helpful, for what might it be harmful or helpful, when might it be harmful or helpful, and other issues. Perhaps we should explore whether specific kinds of deviance are harmful or helpful. In this chapter we do not explore all of that complexity. Instead, we invite you to think about deviance in some nonobvious ways. HARMFUL DEVIANCE

Deviance certainly can be harmful. Did you list ways in which deviance may be harmful? For example, drug use may damage users, murder ends life, robbery makes the victim poorer, and abuse traumatizes. Shoplifting and employee theft cost businesses and the public hundreds of billions of dollars annually (Gabor 1994; Hogsett and Radig 1994; Rich 2006). Through violations of

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workplace safety regulations or academic cheating, people create unfair advantages for themselves to the detriment of others. In these obvious ways, deviance harms the offender, the victim, and other people. Deviance can also harm social life. It can damage the ability of people to live and act together adequately. The colleague who drinks, the spouse who has mental health problems, and the committee member who sexually harasses staff make it difficult for the work group, the family, and the committee to function well. The same is so if a group is deviant. Its deviance may make it more difficult for the larger organization to perform adequately. Rogue police officers may taint the entire department. Deviance may lessen conventional people’s willingness to abide by the rules, to do their part, to contribute their share. If conventional people see that others are getting away with inappropriate behavior, then they may become resentful. They may question the fairness of what is happening. If cheating goes undetected or unpunished to the benefit of the cheaters, then more students may cheat. If coworkers goof off, then other workers may resent the extra work they must do. If businesses learn of other companies that violate regulations with few consequences, then the businesses may become less willing to “do what is right.” Most important, deviance undermines, even destroys, trust among people. Confidence in others to do what is expected, the assurance that one can depend on others, solidarity among people, all may be damaged through deviance. Parents become wary of their teenage children who deceive them. Spouses break up over unfaithfulness. After a rash of shoplifting, sales managers and staff become suspicious of shoppers, straining the relation with customers. Teachers eye students like a hawk during exams. Victims of crime, such as muggings or sexual assaults, may develop a pervasive unease that accompanies them everywhere they go (Lejeune and Alex 1973; Allison and Wrightsman 1993, chap. 8). Without trust, it becomes difficult to do anything with others (Collins 1992, chap. 1). One is always on guard (Cohen 1966, 4–6). Deviance can harm people and their ability to live and act with one another. HELPFUL DEVIANCE

Can deviance be helpful? Certainly. Some deviance can give advantage to the offender. Predatory crimes such as robbery or burglary, plagiarism, cheating, employee theft, corporate fraud, embezzlement, violation of workplace safety

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regulations, and many other forms of deviance benefit the successful perpetrator. This is obvious. Other benefits to the perpetrator may be less obvious. We briefly discuss that point in a later chapter on what causes people to commit deviance. Can deviance benefit more than the offender? Can it benefit those who are not deviant? Can it contribute to social life? We and others think it can (Mead 1918; Davis 1937; Durkheim 1966; Dentler and Erikson 1959; Coser 1962; Erikson 1962; Cohen 1966; Black 1983; Collins 1992). How do you think deviance could be constructive for, not just destructive of, social life? Please develop some possibilities, then continue reading. We now explore some of the ways in which deviance may be constructive. The first ways we mention in which deviance can be beneficial are less important for social life, though certainly significant to the people directly affected. Deviance is big business for conventional people. Millions of correctional officers, police officers, attorneys, social workers, juvenile justice staff, mental health professionals, drug-abuse counselors, and others make a living from deviance. So do professors who teach, research, and write about deviance! Billions of dollars are spent yearly to deal with deviance. Of course, that takes away from spending on other possible projects not related to deviance or from the taxpayer who might be taxed less. Community officials compete to have correctional facilities, mental health institutions, or other agencies that deal with deviance located in their communities because the “deviance facilities” may facilitate economic development and provide needed jobs. Are you employed or are you planning to work in the legitimate side of the big business of deviance? Do you know anyone who does or is planning to do so? We imagine that you do. Deviance is an important feature in the media—in news and entertainment. Deviance helps fill news space. Recall the deviance items with which we began the introduction to this book. Deviance is used to sell the news and entertainment media. Deviance entertains us. Perhaps we get a vicarious thrill through others’ deviance. Think about what programs and movies you watch and what books, magazines, and news stories you read. We imagine that many of them concern deviance. You could investigate how extensively and prominently the media display deviance. You may be surprised by what you learn (Denzin 1991; Best 1999; Zimmerman 2003; Callanan 2005; Desilet 2006).

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More important, we believe, deviance contributes in various ways to social life, to the ability of some people to live and act together adequately. As we explained in a previous chapter, deviance is an essential feature of social life. Through deviance, through the power of making unacceptable some forms of human existence and human capacity, people structure social life. They give meaning to who they are. They instruct one another about how to act. They give feeling to experience. Through evaluating part of human capacity as deviant, people try to meet the challenges of living and acting together when nothing dictates how they will act. Deviance makes clearer where the boundaries of acceptability lie. For example, a teacher may expect that students will not talk too loudly or disrupt class. But what is too-loud talk or disruption? When a teacher warns or punishes students, the teacher is making clearer to all, at least for the moment, what is acceptable and what is not. When a police department cracks down on street prostitution, it (and the community) may be signaling to those involved that they have become too brazen in their behavior. They need to become more circumspect in their sexual transactions. Deviance can become a concrete example that makes clearer more abstract values and standards. Deviance enables people and groups of all kinds to establish, even enhance, their moral worth. By contrasting themselves to those deviants, people and groups tell themselves that they are not like those others (making the boundaries of individual and group identity clearer) and that they are better than those others. The well-behaving young children feel superior to the children singled out for misbehaving. The citizens of a small town with little crime feel safer and superior to those in the dangerous big city. The members of a group on campus believe they are morally better than those who are members of another, possibly rival, group who act in ways that the members of the first group find peculiar, even inappropriate. Of course, in enhancing one’s own moral worth, one is also lessening the moral worth of others. Likewise, those who commit deviance may use their deviance to set themselves apart from, even superior to, those who do not commit deviance. Those who commit deviance may create part of their identity in contrast to those who are conventional. Those who commit deviance may view those who are conventional as square, lame, or in other derisive ways. Deviance provides an opportunity for people to strengthen solidarity among themselves. Through reacting in similar ways toward the deviant—

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with outrage, horror, pity, disgust, fright, amusement, and so on—people create shared experiences and feelings. Through collaborating to deal with the deviant and deviance—perhaps to punish, reform, or prevent—those who are not deviant join in a common purpose that can unite them. They may be united against the deviant or even with the deviant. Colleagues may work together to help a coworker who has a problem with drinking. Family members may unite to try to help another family member who has a drug problem, eventually bringing that troubled family member closer to them. A neighborhood group may organize itself to stop a rash of burglaries. An entire country may grow more cohesive to defend itself against a hostile country. Deviance can provide an enemy against which to rally, or it can provide troubled people to assist and problems to tackle. Change may be produced through deviance. Some deviance directly challenges the legitimacy of the present social order, the conventional ways of acting or accomplishing some aspect of social life. If successful, the deviance has been a catalyst for creating new ways of living and acting together. New fashion may be initially considered unacceptable and only later become quite conventional. Same, too, with musical, literary, and other artistic efforts. Unconventional work that is despised, even banned, may later revolutionize the field. Scientific advancement may be produced through scientists challenging the present understandings and ways of doing science, but the scientists and their challenge may be viewed as heretical until finally accepted (Bryson 2003). Certainly the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, which challenged the unequal legal status of African Americans, led to important changes in America. Other groups of individuals (and their supporters) such as women, those with disabilities, and gays and lesbians have also challenged what they experienced as unjust and unequal policies and practices, and, in doing so, have promoted significant change in America. This is also true in other countries where civil protest has occurred, such as South Africa. The American and South African protesters were deviant. The defenders of the status quo reacted harshly, sometimes violently, toward the protesters. But their protests became catalysts for significant social change (Higgins and Butler 1982, 231–35; Morris 1984; Higgins 1992, 242–49; Rimmerman 2001; Louw 2004). Deviance can be constructive for social life. We explored several ways in which it can be: as big business, in the media, for establishing the boundaries

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of acceptability and doing so concretely, for moral worth, and as a catalyst for social change. Deviance is more complex than we typically imagine. To end this discussion, we briefly discuss the ambivalence that low-income communities may experience about gangs in their communities. That ambivalence points in specific ways to how deviance can be constructive, not destructive, of social life. CONCLUSION: COMMUNITIES’ AMBIVALENCE TOWARD GANGS

We can readily understand when communities organize to oppose gang activity or ask for the police to curtail gangs. Many communities throughout the country are concerned about gangs. In a “State of the City” address (much like a State of the Union speech), the mayor of our city directly mentioned gangs as a problem that the city, local law enforcement, and others must work to control (Copeland 2007). However, we may be surprised when communities appear to tolerate gang activity or complain that the police are too forceful in their response toward gangs (Jankowski 1991, 317–18). Residents of some low-income communities may be ambivalent about gangs. Certainly they oppose the destruction and harm caused by gangs. However, their responses to gangs and their feelings about gangs are more complex. Part of the ambivalence is the good that community residents see coming from gangs. Gangs provide protection from others, including other gangs, who would prey on the residents. Having existed for years, perhaps even decades, the gangs have become social institutions in the communities. They provide a means for low-income boys, and perhaps girls, to make the “rite of passage to adulthood” (Jankowski 1991, 318). Finally, residents may believe that without a so-called gang problem, city officials and other authorities would provide few resources or give little attention to the neighborhoods. Deviance does harm. But it may also help. It may help not only the offender but also conventional citizens. In the next chapter, we explore how deviance may not only help social life but may be the opposite of what it is commonly taken to be. How is the deviance in your social world harmful? How is it helpful? PROJECTS

1. Deviance may not only harm social life, it may also help. Deviance may be big business for conventional people. Many people work legitimately in the deviance arena as police officers, social workers, drug counselors, and in other

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ways. Explore how important deviance is in your community for providing legitimate work. Contact those agencies that in some way manage deviance— police departments, mental health agencies, child protection units of social service departments, judicial courts, private security companies, and so on. You may be able to get this information through the Internet. Learn how many people work in those various agencies, offices, and companies. This procedure will overlook people who work in deviance but do so within agencies that otherwise do not focus on deviance, such as a drug specialist for a large school district. You could obtain the number of people employed in your community from your local government to calculate the percentage of local employees who work in the deviance business. How important is the deviance business for your community? The flip side of this employment in deviance is that money spent on the employees and their agencies could be used elsewhere if it were not spent on deviance. If budgets are available, try to calculate how much money is spent in your community on the “business of deviance.” You may be able to obtain budgets from your local and state governments. Examine the budgets to see how much is appropriated for those agencies and offices that primarily deal with deviance. What percentage of the governments’ budgets is spent on deviance? 2. If a present episode of deviance and its handling is occurring in a group of which you are a member, or a recent one has occurred, investigate how that episode and its handling contribute (or contributed) to the production or destruction of social life. For example, are conventional members creating conflict among one another concerning how the offender and the offense should be handled? Or are they creating common interests concerning the deviance, and thereby creating greater solidarity among themselves? Perhaps through the deviance and their reaction to it, members of the group have made clearer to one another what is and is not acceptable. What have been the consequences of the episode of deviance for the group? 3. Explore how widespread deviance is in the media. If you wish, you could focus on the news media, perhaps newspapers, television, or Internet sources. For example, you could watch a sample of your local or national televised news programs, recording how many stories in some way related to deviance were presented out of the total number presented. You might consider recording a brief statement to identify the focus of the stories that concerned deviance. What do you learn from examining deviance in news media? A similar

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project could be conducted that investigated deviance in your local newspaper or newspapers that are national in reach such as USA Today, the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal. You might examine deviance in entertainment media by calculating the percentage of prime-time television programs that have deviance (typically crime) as their central focus. You decide which television broadcast companies (i.e., channels) to include in your investigation. You could expand this project by examining the content of television shows in order to explore such issues as the kinds of deviance that are presented, the kinds of participants in deviance who are presented, whether offenders are presented as successful or not, and other issues. Television shows that do not focus on deviance still contain events that concern deviance. You could examine comedies to see what and how deviance is presented within programs that otherwise do not focus on deviance.

7

Can Deviance Be Intended to Promote Morality, Not Violate It?

We may profit from viewing deviance in ways other than it is commonly seen. Instead of being an attack against what is acceptable, deviance may be intended to promote what is appropriate. We may usefully think of deviance as a means of social control. We may view deviance in other ways, too, as we suggest at the end of this chapter. Consider basketball. Perhaps you play it or enjoy watching it. Imagine that you are playing in a game. An opponent begins to shove, push, elbow, or in other ways play “dirty” or rough against you. You tell the opponent to stop it, but the opponent does not do so. As the referees apparently don’t see it, you let them know what the opponent is doing. The referees, however, do nothing about it. Maybe one of them even tells you to stop complaining and just play. What might you now do about the opponent’s continuing “dirty” or rough play since the referees will not do anything about it? Why? Please consider your response, even write it, and then continue. We present another scenario. Imagine that you are back in elementary school. A classmate annoys you by messing with your papers, pencils, books, and other school materials. You tell the classmate to cut it out, but the classmate messes with your things later that day and the next day. You continue to tell the classmate to stop, but the classmate doesn’t. You do not go to your teacher because the teacher has told the class not to tattle on classmates. What might you do and why? Think about your response, then continue.

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We wonder if you decided to handle both scenarios in ways that may have been deviant, but for which you had good reason. Return to the basketball game. Did you, as basketball players at times do when in the same situation, retaliate against the opponent who pushed, shoved, elbowed, or in other ways played dirty against you? Did you shove the opponent, surreptitiously grab the opponent, or in other ways block the movement of the opponent? If you did, then you may have been whistled for a foul, as are players who do that in actual games. Perhaps you got away with your retaliation. Were you seeking an unfair advantage, or were you trying to get the opponent to play fair? The players who retaliated in actual games and were called for their fouls were not necessarily seeking unfair advantage. Instead, frustrated by the continuing dirty play of opponents, the players took matters into their own hands. They were not trying to undermine the standards of the game, the fairness of the competition. Instead, they were trying to uphold the standards and the fairness. However, their attempts to do so were whistled as deviant by the referees. Consider again the annoying classmate. How did you handle that scenario? After not succeeding in asking the classmate to stop, did you take matters into your own hands? Did you give the annoying classmate an ultimatum and then back it up if the classmate continued? Perhaps you took something of the classmate’s, messed with some of the classmate’s things, or in other ways retaliated against the classmate. If you did so, was it because you were trying to disrupt the classroom or because you were trying to uphold appropriate conduct among students in the classroom? If you retaliated, you can certainly imagine trying to keep your retaliation undetected by the teacher or if the teacher saw you retaliate, then you may have been punished for your misbehavior. In both scenarios, you may have acted in ways taken to be deviant by those in charge—the referees or the teacher. You may have been punished in consequential ways. Yet, you were not trying to undermine the standards of the basketball game or the classroom. Instead, you were trying to uphold morality. At times, deviance, even serious deviance such as crime, may be usefully understood as attempts to promote the standards of the group, not undermine them. DEVIANCE AS SOCIAL CONTROL

Donald Black (1983) argues that much crime, even serious predatory crime, can be understood as self-help attempts to control the deviance of others

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when formal means of social control are perceived to be inadequate (or unnecessary). Much serious deviance is social control. Consider running away. Much of it is done when youths can no longer put up with the perceived unacceptable behavior of their families or their schoolteachers and officials. Committing this juvenile delinquency is their attempt to right the wrong (Black 1983, 38; Ek and Steelman 1988). Look at vandalism. Some observers think vandalism is done without purpose. However, people may vandalize property because they believe the owners have offended them. Perhaps a driver has parked in a curb-side parking place cleared of snow by someone else but knows that the one who clears the space has, by custom, the right to use it (Black 1983, 37). A business owner may have refused to hire local youths for summer employment, even harassing them when they entered the owner’s establishment. Perhaps a neighbor threatened to call the police on some youths who were innocently standing and talking good-naturedly and loudly on the sidewalk outside the neighbor’s house. In all these situations, vandalism may be committed as a response to the perceived injustice of what was done earlier by the person who is now the “victim” of the vandalism. Even predatory offenses may be attempts to uphold community standards, not violate them. An older brother may beat up someone who has bothered his sister. An individual may illegally enter a former roommate’s apartment to get back disputed property, especially when the ex-roommate stiffed the individual with back rent. Robberies may concern disputes over money and other valuables among acquaintances. Even murder, as we explore in another chapter, may be an attempt to reassert one’s honor and dignity in the face of what is experienced as overwhelming, never-ending disrespect (Katz 1988, chap. 1). People may resort to deviant, even criminal, self-help when they perceive that the formal means of addressing disputes have not worked or are not available or appropriate for them. For example, parents and teachers may not intervene when siblings or classmates have disputes with one another. The siblings or classmates may then use deviant self-help. Consider that the law is not readily available for participants to settle disputes concerning gambling debts, drug sales, and other forms of illegal acts. Those involved in illegal activities may use illegal self-help in order to achieve what they see to be justice. And if it were not for the illegality of the original behavior, many conventional citizens would not condemn as strongly the illegal self-help used by those involved in crime to right the perceived wrong.

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Some people more than others may believe, based on their experience, that formal or conventional means for managing disputes are not readily available. Who do you think may more likely believe that formal, conventional means for managing disputes are not readily available to them? Think about this question, then continue. Those with less status—poor people, minority citizens, those who live on the streets, and the young, among others—may not have as much access to the police and other formal means of handling disputes as those with more resources, or at least they may believe that they do not. Officials may not take as seriously the complaints of people with relatively little status. Similarly, those in intimate relations, such as spouses, may come to see that their disputes will be treated as private matters to be avoided by officials, not public matters for officials to handle. Consequently, they may handle disputes among themselves, instead of unsatisfactorily summoning law enforcement. In all these situations and more, people may use deviant self-help to promote justice, to uphold community standards. Ironically, deviance, that which people make to be unacceptable, may be done at times in order to stop or punish the offensive behavior of others (Black 1983). Deviant self-help may constitute a social movement instead of being the response of individuals to their own perceived injustices. As we noted in the previous chapter, the civil rights protests in America and South Africa certainly attempted to extend what a society held dear to segments of the citizenry that believed they had been denied those rights and benefits. Many officials and citizens reacted to those civil rights movements as deviant and countered them with violence. Is deviant self-help, then, noble? Not necessarily. Much of it may create great harm. People are hurt or killed; property is damaged or taken. We are not urging people to take matters into their hands. However, when people do take matters into their own hands, when they use deviant self-help to redress perceived wrongs, the community at times may be more tolerant of them and their deviance than it would be otherwise. For example, behavior that could readily be seen as assault is less likely to lead to an arrest when the combatants are intimately related than when they are strangers. Presumably combatants known to one another are addressing perceived wrongs (Black 1983, 40).

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CONCLUSION

Instead of a being understood simply as a violation of morality, deviance may be understood as an attempt to uphold morality. We may usefully understand deviance in still other ways. How else might we understand deviance? Some deviance may be appropriately understood as recreation. For example, the deviant use of drugs may have much in common with the legal use of alcohol. Both may be part of creating a “good time.” Crime, then, becomes play or leisure activity (Richards, Berk, et al. 1979). Other deviance can be understood as economic behavior. For example, fencing stolen merchandise may be more similar to retail sales than to assaults, drug use, or other kinds of deviance (Letkemann 1973; Klockars 1975; Plate 1975; Black 1983). Graffiti artists may be committing a crime, but they may also be creating art, expressing their identities, journeying from adolescence to adulthood, defining friends and enemies, and more (Phillips 1999; Macdonald 2001). Tattooing is illegal in some jurisdictions, and body marking and piercing are deviant to many people. Yet, body marking may be similar to other means of self-presentation, group affiliation, even spiritual awakening (Hewitt 1997, chap. 4). If we view deviance as leisure activity, economic behavior, art, selfpresentation, or in other ways, then we need to explore deviance differently. We need to raise questions about deviance that we would raise about other leisure activities, economic behavior, and so on. For example, if we view drug production and distribution as economic behavior, then we may explore the social organization of how drugs are produced, how dealers obtain their stock, how customers are developed, how sales are made, and much more (Inciardi 1992; Adler 1993). Deviance may be more than we first imagine it to be. That which offends at least some people is deviance. But deviance may also be usefully understood as a means of social control, play, economic behavior, perhaps even artistic expression, and still other forms of behavior. How else do you think deviance may usefully be understood and examined? We encourage you to think about the deviance that you commit and about the deviance done by others of which you are aware. Is it useful to think about that deviance as something more than, even other than, that which is offensive?

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PROJECTS

1. Through talking with people who have committed deviance, investigate what morality, if any, the offenders believed they were trying to uphold through their deviance. Was their deviance a means for controlling or responding to the offensive actions of others? For example, perhaps someone committed employee theft in response to the perceived unfair treatment received from the manager. Talk with people who have committed assault, employee deviance, shoplifting, or other deviance. The people who have committed the deviance may provide self-serving justifications for their actions. We believe it may be difficult to make a useful distinction between a self-serving justification and a sincerely presented account of the moral good the offenders thought they were protecting. Media stories of deviance may present offenders’ accounts of their behaviors that also can be examined for the moral good that the offenders believed they were upholding. What are your reactions to these “morality tales”? 2. Have you engaged in deviant self-help that was intended to right a perceived wrong? If you can recall when you engaged in deviant self-help to right a perceived wrong, then examine those situations, what happened, what you did, and what wrong you were attempting to right through your deviant selfhelp. What understandings and new questions do you develop about how deviance may be used to promote morality? 3. If you cannot recall engaging in deviant self-help, the scenarios below give you the opportunity to think about how you might react to perceived wrongs, perhaps using deviant self-help to address those wrongs. Write about how you might respond to each of these scenarios and why you might respond as you believe. You could present these scenarios (and/or ones you have developed) to a sample of individuals to learn how they would respond to these possible injustices. A. Your roommate eats your food, uses your detergent, and generally treats your stuff like it is hers or his. The roommate continues to do so even after you have talked with her or him. You are not able to get out of your lease for another six months. B. Your employer at a retail store consistently makes you “clock out” and continue to work cleaning up the store. C. Your boss denies you a raise, although several other employees who were no more productive than you received raises. D. A reckless driver cuts you off, causing you to swerve and barely miss another car. When you park, you see the reckless driver’s car parked and unattended.

8

Once Deviant, Always Deviant?

When we think about the social world, we may often take for granted the present. The present appears to us as natural, as that is how the world is meant to be. We all know that some things change, such as technology, fashion, and pop culture, but other realms of the social world may seem more fundamental, more steadfast. Let’s explore this issue as it concerns deviance. Think about what is deviant today. For example, taking a person’s life is deviant; so too are coercive sex and beating one’s wife. We typically take for granted that these have always been deviant. But have they always been so? Think about this question and then continue. All three behaviors we listed above have not always been deviant. At times, they have been acceptable, even expected. For example, in ancient Rome, a man could kill his wife if he believed she had committed adultery. No trial or proof was required. This was not murder, nor was it deviant. Until recently, married American men could “take” sex from their wives as part of their marital rights. Marital rape did not exist (Coontz 2005). In the Middle Ages, men not only could beat their wives, but were expected to beat their wives. If a man did not regularly beat his wife, men of the village would beat him for failing to do his duty (Coontz 2005). What we take for granted as deviant today may not have always been so. As we explored in chapter 1, deviance is that which people evaluate as offensive and react negatively to if they know about it. Behaviors, thoughts, and

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attributes are not inherently deviant; they are not offensive in and of themselves. While people may take for granted what is deviant, they have made what is deviant for them. Making something deviant may be complex and contested. Once something is made deviant, people must maintain it as deviant if it is to remain deviant. Otherwise, others may eventually transform what was once deviant into something now tolerated, unremarkably accepted, even promoted. Making something deviant and then perhaps making it not deviant can take twists and turns over many years, even centuries or longer. Fundamentally, making behaviors, thoughts, and attributes deviant or not deviant is a never-ending process. We examine the complex and contested status of tobacco, cigarettes, and smoking as deviant or not deviant over centuries to explore this point. TOBACCO AND CIGARETTES: UP IN SMOKE IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA

Tobacco is indigenous to the Western Hemisphere. The native people of South and Central America and the Caribbean Islands had used tobacco for thousands of years before the first European explorers made contact. The first Europeans to smoke tobacco were two of Columbus’s crew in 1492. By the mid-sixteenth century, tobacco had been introduced into several European countries. By the 1600s, tobacco smoking had spread across Europe and Asia and had reached Japan (Gilman and Zhou 2004). Tobacco soon became both a medical and recreational drug. Physicians claimed it could cure a variety of diseases. The working class, as well as some of the upper class, began smoking in increasing numbers. However, English opponents, headed by King James I, attacked tobacco. Recreational use was criticized as irresponsible and likened to drunkenness. Excessive use was hazardous to smokers’ health, critics charged. It was “religiously offensive” and a habit of “low prestige.” It was foolish to trade English gold for tobacco, the best of which was imported from Spanish colonies and would soon be burned (Best 1979). Government regulation and prohibition followed public criticism. King James added a 4,000 percent increase on the import tax on tobacco in order to discourage its recreational, nonmedical use. Austria, France, DenmarkNorway, and other northern European countries forbade trading in tobacco and/or smoking it. However, southern Europe and the states that now comprise Italy never prohibited tobacco. Being the first countries to learn of to-

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bacco, perhaps they did not legislate against tobacco because they had already created a profitable trade in tobacco before criticism rose against it. In spite of governmental prohibition, tobacco spread throughout Europe. Smuggling tobacco became common and profitable, just as illicit drug smuggling is today. English tax collectors, who leased from the king their right to collect taxes, pressured James to reduce the import tax on tobacco so that they could make a profit. After the king did so, tobacco imports rose dramatically. Later, the king set the lease for the right to collect taxes at four times its previous rent. Tobacco was becoming a respectable revenue producer. By the end of the 1600s, it became legal throughout Europe (Best 1979). European nations experienced financial difficulties during the 1600s. As they tried to expand their authority throughout the world, they had difficulty increasing their revenues. The tobacco trade became one way, although a small way initially, for European nations to ease their financial burdens. For England, the tobacco trade also became a way to protect Virginia and its other colonies. Having become a one-crop colony, Virginia’s welfare depended on a successful tobacco trade. Later English colonies also turned to growing and trading tobacco for their financial health. While James I and his successor, Charles I, morally objected to tobacco and complained to the governors of their colonies about their colonies’ reliance on tobacco, the crown also protected the tobacco industry. Through controlling Spanish imports, adjusting taxes to minimize smuggling, and by controlling their colonies’ production of tobacco so as not to glut the market, the crown protected its financial wellbeing. As England came to rely on reexporting tobacco to other countries for its revenue, it successfully encouraged other European countries to repeal their prohibitions against tobacco and to reap the benefits of the legalization of tobacco. The European countries did so. By the end of the 1600s, tobacco had been vindicated. It was now a recreational drug whose taxation was an important source of government revenue (Best 1979; Higgins and Butler 1982, chap. 3). Smoking tobacco became a fashionable activity and daily habit for untold numbers of people throughout Europe. Smoking clubs sprang up throughout Europe in the 1700s. Like bars and nightclubs today, these smoking clubs became popular places for socializing. While cautions about the health problems smoking posed were voiced, smokers ignored these claims (Gilman and Zhou 2004).

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Over time, tobacco use shifted from pipe smoking to smoking cigars and cigarettes. In the 1850s, American tourists visiting England brought back the use of cigarettes to America. Cigarettes became a standard military ration during the Civil War. However, controversy and opposition to tobacco continued in America. Cigar manufacturers defamed cigarettes as poisoned garbage. Religious and moral criticism blamed cigarettes for males’ delinquency and school failure. Health ills were attributed to the “little white slavers” or “coffin nails,” as cigarettes were derogatorily termed. Between 1895 and 1921, states throughout America either completely banned cigarettes or regulated their sale to and use by minors. A member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) nearly ran a 1920 presidential campaign on a moralistic antitobacco platform. Part of this anticigarette sentiment may have been due to the status of the early users, many of whom were urban immigrants, a group looked down upon by middle-class Americans (Nuehring and Markle 1974). Over the next several decades, attitudes and laws regarding smoking changed such that by the end of World War II smoking had become accepted, even expected. A machine that mechanically rolled cigarettes at an unheardof speed became widely used in the later 1800s and early 1900s. This machine, along with tobacco that provided a light-tasting smoke, enabled the tobacco industry to market cigarettes that could be quickly smoked and enjoyed. Cigarettes became seen as suited to the fast pace of modern, urban life. The tobacco industry advertised widely; one brand was even touted as providing cooling relief to irritated throats. Cigarettes began to appeal to weightwatchers and women. All fourteen states that had prohibited cigarettes repealed their laws by 1927. Cigarettes were a standard issue to soldiers during World War II, as they had been during World War I and the Civil War. States “rediscovered” the revenue that could be gained by taxing cigarette sales. Cheap, plentiful, and highly addictive, cigarettes became integral to the American way of life by the end of World War II (Nuehring and Markle 1974; Courtwright 2001). However, in the 1950s and continuing to today, scientists, medical professionals, and many others have renewed their concerns about the health risks that cigarette smoking poses to the user and, nowadays, to those in the user’s presence. In 1964, the surgeon general of the United States released a “landmark” report claiming a link between smoking and lung cancer and heart disease among various other illnesses. For example, heavy smokers were twenty

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times more likely to develop lung cancer than those who did not smoke (Wolfson 2001). In 1989, the surgeon general reported that secondhand smoke was a danger to nonsmokers, especially children. Smokers were no longer just harming themselves; they were also harming innocent bystanders. In 2006, the surgeon general emphatically concluded that millions of Americans continued to be exposed to secondhand smoke; secondhand smoke was harming the health of children and adults, causing disease and premature death; no riskfree level of exposure to secondhand smoke existed; and eliminating smoking in indoor spaces fully protected nonsmokers from the exposure to secondhand smoke (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2006). Since the release of the landmark report in 1964 by the surgeon general, the tobacco industry has been under attack in America. Tobacco use and tobacco advertising have become increasingly regulated. Cigarette smokers have come to feel personally under attack. The industry and users have fought back. In the past forty years in America, many medical and business organizations, government agencies, political action groups, concerned citizens, tobacco companies, smokers, and others have contested the status of tobacco, in particular, cigarettes, as deviant or not deviant. Regulations and restrictions have been proposed and opposed, enacted and defeated (Markle and Troyer 1979). In 1965, Congress passed legislation requiring a health warning on cigarette packages. However, through the efforts of the tobacco industry, the legislation also prohibited the Federal Trade Commission and other federal agencies from regulating cigarette advertising and nullified all similar state and local regulations. Most members in Congress from states that grew tobacco supported the legislation. In 1967, the Federal Communications Commission, through the prodding of a young New York lawyer, ordered radio and television stations to broadcast antismoking advertisements under the equal-time doctrine (which provided for opposing viewpoints to be broadcast on the nation’s airwaves). While network officials and some members of Congress protested, the antismoking advertisements appeared on television in 1968. As television networks, the tobacco industry, antismoking factions in the U.S. Senate, and other interested parties maneuvered in the late 1960s over the pending expiration of the 1965 legislation, it came out in congressional hearings that the television networks had failed to monitor cigarette advertising as they claimed they had been doing. Under increasing pressure from the antismoking faction in the Senate, broadcasters agreed to phase out all cigarette advertising by 1973. The tobacco

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industry retaliated by threatening to withdraw all of its advertising from television by fall of 1970, a potential loss of $200 million for the television industry. Once the smoke settled, federal legislation in 1970 banned all cigarette advertising on the air by January 1, 1971. Cigarette advertising on television, which had been ubiquitous for those growing up after World War II, has now become a forgotten relic of the past (Higgins and Butler 1982, chap. 3). Just as cigarette advertising was regulated, so, too, were the places where smokers could light up. Many public places, including airplanes, interstate buses, schools, restaurants, government buildings, hospitals, and other public places have become smoking free. The tobacco industry; owners of restaurants, bars, and others concerned that their business would be hurt by the regulations; and smokers often opposed these prohibitions, sometimes successfully. While during the past twenty-five years increased regulation of tobacco and cigarette smoking has occurred, those opposed to more regulation have thwarted at times the efforts of the antismoking forces. Out of this ongoing conflict came the 1998 settlement of a lawsuit between the four largest tobacco companies in the United States and forty-six states and six American territories. (Four states had previously settled with the tobacco industry.) In what is known as the Master Settlement Agreement, the tobacco industry made seven major concessions. The industry agreed to pay $300 million over five years to education programs to reduce youth smoking. Second, the industry agreed to pay each year until 2008, $25 million to help reduce teen smoking. Third, the industry agreed to dissolve their “propaganda” organizations, including the Tobacco Institute, Council on Tobacco Research, and the Center for Indoor Air Research. Fourth, the industry agreed to pay $195.9 billion to the states to use as they please. The final three concessions were an acceptance of restriction on lobbying, full disclosure of documents, and a restriction on direct aid to tobacco farmers (Wilson 1999). This Master Settlement Agreement is not the end of the conflict. The contested status of tobacco and cigarettes continues. Some critics of the tobacco industry claim that the industry has failed to live up to its agreement; others argue that it has. For example, critics charge that the tobacco industry’s advertising strategies reach youth more so than adults. Hot-pink-trimmed boxes, cigarettes advertised as “light and luscious,” and candy-flavored cigarettes appeal to the youth, not adult, market. Further, the levels of addictive

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nicotine in cigarettes have increased since the settlement, charge critics (Jackson 2007). States, cities, and other local jurisdictions have prohibited or are discussing prohibiting smoking in additional public places. According to Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights, twenty-one states ban smoking in workplaces, bars, restaurants, or all three. Two states ban smoking in cars if a passenger (i.e., a child) is in a child seat, according to the nonsmokers’ advocacy group (Hill 2007). In recent years most states have increased their taxes on cigarettes to raise revenues and to discourage smoking. The governor of our state of South Carolina, a state that historically has supported its tobacco farmers and its cigarette smokers with one of the lowest state taxes on cigarettes in the nation, proposed in 2007 to increase cigarette taxes to provide tax relief. As we write this, a U.S. senator, with thirty cosponsors, is developing legislation to give the Food and Drug Administration the authority to control the cigarette industry from its “chemicals to advertising.” While other tobacco companies oppose the legislation because they believe it will hurt their ability to compete, Philip Morris, the largest tobacco company, welcomes it. The legislation may unintentionally help Philip Morris maintain its dominance within the tobacco industry (Jackson 2007, A7). At least one antismoking advocate is worried that the legislation may inadvertently lead smokers to believe mistakenly that cigarettes are less harmful if the federal government is regulating their manufacture. The increase in cigarette taxes (along with the increased stigmatization of smoking and warnings about the health risks of smoking) appears to be working. Fewer Americans are smoking. Today, approximately one-fifth of all adults in America smoke cigarettes. A decade ago, about one-fourth smoked. In 1955, more than half of all adult Americans smoked (Centers for Disease Control 2005; Lohn 2007). In 2005, states taxed 2.8 billion fewer packs of cigarettes than they did in 2000. Cigarette tax collections have brought in less money for the federal government since 2002 and less money for some states in the past several years even with increased taxes. However, some state legislators are concerned that as fewer people smoke and cigarette taxes bring in less revenue, states will experience financial difficulties, as many states rely significantly on taxes from cigarettes to fund education, health care, and other government services (Lohn 2007).

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CONTESTING CIGARETTES

Our brief presentation of the contested status of tobacco and cigarettes over the past 400 years in England and then in America illustrates that people make what is deviant to them. What was once deviant or not deviant is not always so. Often through conflict, people transform behavior, attributes, and thoughts into and out of deviance. Think about what you have just read regarding tobacco and cigarettes. What features or processes can you extract from the trials and tribulations of tobacco that may apply more widely to any instance of people making something deviant or not deviant? You may even wish to review what you read before continuing. From the history of tobacco and cigarettes, we see, among various processes at work, the following: economic interests; the power, though not necessarily unopposed power, of the state; organizational interests; moral entrepreneurs; moral stories; and the overarching conflict among these various interests and participants. Economic interests have been crucial throughout the history of tobacco and cigarettes. Among these have been the economic interests of: the colonists who grew tobacco; tax agents who collected taxes on the import of tobacco in England; the European governments and the American federal and state governments that raised revenue through taxing tobacco; the tobacco industry (including the tobacco companies, farmers, and distributors); cigar manufacturers, who felt threatened by the popularity of cigarettes; owners of restaurants and bars concerned about the potential loss of business if cigarette smoking was prohibited; the television industry, which was worried about losing advertising revenue from cigarette advertisements; and American state governments concerned with their high health care costs for low-income citizens due to cigarette smoking. These economic concerns primarily, though not solely, point toward promoting tobacco use and opposing or limiting its regulation. The state, whether the crown in England; the governments of other European countries (and of other countries throughout the world); or the federal, state, and local governments in America, have participated and continue to participate in making tobacco and cigarettes deviant or not. Governments, however, have had various interests regarding tobacco and cigarettes, which may conflict with each other, as did the English crown and the state governments in America. Economic interests, health interests, and even moral con-

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cerns of governments regarding tobacco and cigarettes have conflicted and continue to conflict. Governments have also been pulled in competing directions by various factions within their societies in regard to tobacco. Governments, themselves, are not necessarily monolithic. The concerns of one agency or set of government officials have clashed with the concerns of other agencies and officials regarding tobacco and cigarettes. For example, representatives from tobacco-growing states in America have clashed with those from states where tobacco has not been an important crop. Many organizations have attempted to promote their interests through involvement in the trials and tribulations of tobacco. At times they have done so in ways that may seem surprising. The American Cancer Society, the American Lung Association, the American Heart Association, and the American Public Health Association actively lobbied federal officials to produce the surgeon general’s report in 1964. Those health organizations also provided research and other assistance to the surgeon general regarding the science of smoking and cancer (Wolfson 2001). However, fearing the loss of free public-service announcements from the networks, the American Cancer Society did not offer the FCC direct support in 1967 when it ordered television stations to broadcast antismoking advertisements. The American Medical Association, which received $18 million in research subsidies from the tobacco industry, supported tobacco interests during the 1960s. It felt that the less aggressive Congress, not the more aggressive federal commissions, should regulate the tobacco industry. It argued that warning labels on cigarette packs would be ineffective. It was not a member of a national coalition of government agencies and health organizations concerned about the health effects of tobacco, established in 1964. The AMA joined the antitobacco movement after widespread sentiment developed about the harmful effects of tobacco. Television networks, the FTC and the FCC, business associations, and other organizations have also participated in the continuing conflict over the status of tobacco. For example, the FTC, which had been struggling with the tobacco industry over advertising violations in the mid-1960s, gained more control over the tobacco industry, and it and the FCC asserted their regulatory powers vis-à-vis Congress through the federal legislation regulating tobacco and advertising in the 1960s and 1970s (Nuehring and Markle 1974; Higgins and Butler 1982, 72–73).

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Out of their concerns, some organizations and individuals attempt to persuade others to define as deviant what troubles these concerned parties. These moral entrepreneurs create images about the harm of what bothers them as a way of arousing support for their position from those less aware or less upset (Becker 1963; Pfuhl 1980, chap. 4). King James, the WCTU, health associations, and others have portrayed tobacco use and cigarette smoking as intolerably harmful, immoral, repugnant, reckless, the gateway to further drug use and delinquency, and in other offensive ways. Pictures of cancerous lungs harmed by smoking vividly depicted the dangers of smoking. More recent criticism of smoking has presented the unrepentant smoker more as an “enemy” than a friend to be brought back into the fold (Markle and Troyer 1979, 612). Pro-smoking forces have countered in the past and counter today with their own moral stories. For example, following the 1964 report from the surgeon general on smoking and health, the tobacco industry placed more images of doctors in their cigarette advertisements. Doctors assured the consumers that smoking was not harmful; they were smokers themselves (Gardner and Brandt 2006). This tactic harkened back to the tobacco industry’s claim in past decades to the health-enhancing effects of tobacco. The tobacco industry has sponsored investigations—whether they were pseudoscience, involved the withholding of negative results, or were outright deceptions—to show that reasonable doubt about the dangers of tobacco existed (Courtwright 2001; Freudenburg 2005). Smoking as an individual choice and/or an individual right has become another moral storyline to counter the critics of tobacco (Wolfson 2001). The tobacco industry effectively used the contention that smokers choose to smoke as part of its defense when they were sued in the 1980s (Wolfson 2001). Today, Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment (CLASH) argues that smokers, too, have rights. The antismoking forces do not merely want to protect the health of nonsmokers by eliminating secondhand smoke, warns CLASH, they want to outlaw smoking, just as the temperance movement outlawed alcohol. Incrementally, with one ban after another, the antismoking forces want to eventually take away the rights of smokers to smoke, claims CLASH (Silk 2000). Conflict has repeatedly marked the status of tobacco and cigarettes. Governments, organizations of various kinds, and individuals have worked with and against one another to make tobacco and cigarettes deviant or acceptable. We have little doubt that the struggle will continue.

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CONCLUSION

People make what they take to be deviant. They transform behavior, thoughts, and attributes into that which is offensive. Others may oppose those efforts to make deviant what once was not. Through the campaigns and stories of moral entrepreneurs; the pursuit of organizational interests; and the attempts to persuade the power of the state to act in one way or another, often with economic interests at play, people make what is deviant or contest that making. The ongoing conflict over the status of tobacco and cigarettes illustrates the complex twists and turns in making something deviant. Behaviors, thoughts, and attributes may be made deviant or acceptable over long periods of time. However, even when stable, widespread agreement exists about the status of some matter as deviant or not, that stability has not always existed and may not exist in the future. “Once deviant, always deviant” or “once acceptable, always acceptable” misleads us. Those sayings mislead us about how people exercise a responsibility that they cannot escape even if they wished they could—the responsibility to make acceptable or deviant the behavior, thoughts, and attributes of humans. While citizens do not equally participate in this drama of deviance nor are they equally effective when they do participate, all citizens, at least those in democracies, have the legal opportunity and right to participate in making what is deviant or resisting that making. Through voting for their representatives and even running for office if they wish; by writing letters to the editors of their newspaper; by calling into talk radio shows or voicing their views in other ways; by helping to establish, joining, or contributing to socialaction organizations; and in many other ways, ordinary citizens can participate in the complex process of making what is deviant. Even not getting involved is a form of participation, though a form that allows others to make decisions that may importantly affect those who are uninvolved. Think about whether you have participated or how you might participate in making what is deviant. PROJECTS

1. While smoking is regulated and often presented in very derogatory ways, Americans still smoke, though not to the extent that they once did, as we noted above. A greater percentage of American young adults, age eighteen to twenty-two, smoke than do American adults generally. Thirty-one percent of

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college students, eighteen to twenty-two, smoke; 43 percent of noncollege adults of the same age smoke (Straw 2005). Ask young adults whom you know, whether they are or have been college students or not, about their views and behaviors regarding smoking. For example, if they do not smoke, what are their attitudes toward those who do? How do they act toward those who do smoke? How do they manage the possibility of being around smokers? For those who do smoke, how do they view smoking? How do they view the attitudes and behaviors of nonsmokers? Do they alter their smoking depending on where they are and with whom they are? What experiences have they had regarding the actions of nonsmokers toward them? What are your thoughts regarding how individuals personally experience the controversy about smoking? By the way, more than one billion people worldwide smoke tobacco regularly (Cox 2000). The controversy over tobacco is increasingly becoming a global phenomenon. 2. Investigate a matter whose status as deviant or not deviant is presently being contested, such as global warming, the prevalence of trans fats in restaurant food, the immigration of undocumented aliens, the civil or marital union of gays, or a local matter in your community, even at your college. Use information in newspapers, on the Internet, and elsewhere. If the issue is local, consider talking to or observing some of the parties involved. Identify the organizations and individuals involved in this deviant-making contest. What are their interests? What approaches are they using to promote their interests? What moral stories are they telling to justify their position and to encourage others to support their position? How do you react to and evaluate this deviant-making contest? Have you taken a position on this issue? If so, how did you come to take your position? If you are involved in this matter, in what way are you and how did you become involved? 3. Think about behaviors, attributes, and thoughts that could become deviant (or more strongly deviant) in the future, perhaps in the next five to ten years or whatever time frame you wish to use. Consider behaviors, attributes, and thoughts that are now deviant that may become less deviant, even acceptable, in the future. Local and national media sources may help you think about these future possibilities. List some of these matters whose status as either deviant or acceptable you think may change. Why do you think the status of these phenomena may change? What do you notice happening now that may lead to future change? Discuss your thoughts with fellow class members.

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How Much Deviance Is There?

How much deviance is there? Please think about this question, then continue. Did you think that there is a lot of deviance, more than in the past, too much, you don’t know, or something else? You could not be expected to know the exact amount of deviance. You are not likely to know the latest statistics on deviance. Neither were we, until we searched for them. Why should we be concerned about how much deviance there is? We should be concerned because we and others use deviance statistics. They are important in our lives, even if we do not realize it (Pfuhl and Henry 1993, chap. 2; Best 2001; 2004). Let us present some headlines from our city’s newspaper about deviance. What is your reaction to these headlines? After thinking about the headlines, continue reading our discussion of the significance of deviance statistics. “1 in 5 Women Assaulted at [southern college]” (Marrow 2006). “Teen Girls Surpass Boys in Smoking, Drug Abuse” (The State 2006l). “Millions Have Misused ADHD Drugs” (Vedantam 2006). “Domestic Violence Rates Down” (The State 2006f). “U.S. on Pace for Rise in Violent Crime for Second Straight Year” (The State 2006m).

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First, statistics are taken by many of us as “hard” information. People’s statements are “just” their opinions; numbers are the facts. While perhaps nowadays we are more skeptical, even cynical, than in the past, many of us still take statistics as telling us what is so, if not completely so (Pfuhl and Henry 1993, 27–28; Best 2001). For example, did you interpret the headlines presented above as if the statistics (or implied statistics) told you what were the facts? Or did you react cautiously, skeptically, to the statistics? Second, to the extent that we take statistics as factual, we may use them to tell us about the moral order of our world (Pfuhl and Henry 1993, 28; Best 2001). How moral or decadent is our world? How safe is it? Is the world worsening or improving? Deviance statistics not only tell us how much deviance exists, but the statistics may also tell us where deviance is most likely to occur, who is most likely to commit deviance, and other information. We may become more or less fearful, more or less morally concerned about our world or about segments of it, because of statistics, the stories based on them, and our interpretation of the statistics and stories (Liska and Baccaglini 1990; Beckett 1994). When reading the newspaper headlines listed above, did you feel that the world was less safe, more safe, even less or more moral? Third, researchers and citizens use statistics on deviance to develop, evaluate, and decide about explanations for the causes of deviance (Pfuhl and Henry 1993, 28). For example, if we interpret statistics of deviance to show that those who are impoverished commit more deviance than those who are not impoverished, as statistics often have been interpreted, then we may develop theories trying to explain why that is so (Merton 1957). Finally, government officials, service providers, and activists use statistics in developing and proposing legislation and programs to combat deviance, requesting and allocating funds for programs to combat deviance, and evaluating the results of the programs (Pfuhl and Henry 1993, 29; Best 2001). We might think about how much deviance there is (and about other issues concerning the amount) because deviance statistics do make a difference in our lives. Once again, how much deviance is there? What do you think? We’ve inadequately posed that question. It is much too general. We need to specify the kinds of deviance, the location, the time period, and even more qualifications before addressing the question. Let us rephrase the question, make it more specific, and bring it closer to “home.” How much crime occurred on your college campus in the past year? How do you know?

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At the University of South Carolina in Columbia, where one of us teaches, 597 violent crimes and property crimes occurred in a recent year. You might ask how we know. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) tell us so (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2005, 192). You can look at that report to see how much crime has occurred on your college campus. How does the FBI know? Since 1929, the FBI has collected information on crimes known to local law enforcement agencies through its UCR program. Since the late 1980s, colleges and universities receiving federal funds have been required by federal law to collect and report information on crime on their campuses. The FBI collects information on the violent crimes of homicide, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault and on property crimes of burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson. The bureau calls this its crime index. The bureau collects but presents much less information on other crimes, such as embezzlement, drug-abuse violations, gambling, forgery, and drunkenness. OFFICIALLY COUNTING DEVIANCE

The FBI’s UCR statistics are official counts of deviance. Local law enforcement agencies collect, record, and present information about the crimes and criminals that they officially handle. Many other agencies also record official counts of deviance. Departments of mental health collect official counts of those who have mental health troubles. Divisions of natural resources or wildlife in state governments may record official counts of those who violate wildlife regulations. Offices of student affairs or disciplinary boards at colleges collect official counts of student infractions of the colleges’ regulations. Departments of social services prepare official counts of child abuse. School officials formally record statistics on student deviance. Many agencies provide official counts of deviance, and the media may report them. The last of the headlines presented at the beginning of this chapter regarding the recent rise in violent crime is based on an official count. Do you have any questions about these official counts of deviance? We imagine that you may object to using the UCR information to know how much crime has occurred on your campus. Likewise, you may object to using official counts of all kinds to know how much deviance exists. Why may you object to using official counts of deviance? Please consider your response, then continue. You may object that many crimes are not reported to the police. Therefore, the UCR information is not accurate. Likewise, you may object that many

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people with mental health difficulties do not come to the attention of officials within departments of mental health, violations of wildlife laws are not always known by wildlife enforcement agencies, students may violate the regulations of their colleges without authorities finding out, much child abuse never comes to the attention of social service agencies, and school officials may be clueless about students’ deviance. This is an important objection made by many critics of official counts. If official counts are not accurate, then how else could we count deviance? If you are not satisfied with the FBI’s official record of crime at your college, then what could be done to learn how much crime has occurred at your college? List some possibilities before continuing. UNOFFICIALLY COUNTING DEVIANCE

Perhaps you thought of one or both of the two ways of counting deviance that we next explore. Both have been widely used for learning the amount of different kinds of deviance, who commits it, and other related issues. First, students could be asked to report about their criminal behavior at college for the past year (or any time period of interest). For example, a questionnaire that asks students to report on their commission of crimes listed on the questionnaire could be distributed to students (or a sample of students). This is a self-report study. Scholars use self-report methods to learn how much crime people commit, about people’s sexual behavior (some of which is deviant), about their mental health difficulties, about deviance they have committed against their employers, about academic dishonesty, and much more. People can report their deviance through distributed questionnaires, in face-to-face interviews, by telephone, or in other ways. Do you have any questions about this self-report method? Perhaps you wonder whether people will be honest in their reporting. Social scientists who have examined this possibility have had mixed results. For example, youths will report committing crimes, they will report crimes not known to officials, and they are very likely to report crimes known to officials. However, those who have high rates of official delinquency are less likely than those with low rates of official delinquency to admit to crimes known to the police (Hindelang, Hirschi, et al. 1981, chap. 11). Self-reports, therefore, may work best for counting the deviance of those who are least seriously involved.

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Do you have other questions? We imagine so. You might object that people forget. People forget they committed some deviance, how much deviance they committed, when they committed deviance, and so on. No doubt, that occurs. Researchers know this. Therefore, investigators may ask people to report about their recent behavior if they are trying to obtain a specific count of deviance. You may also object that even if college students honestly respond about their criminal conduct, the count will still be inaccurate because some crimes on college campuses are committed by people who are not students. Further, some crimes committed by the students are committed away from their colleges. Good point. Self-report counts cover the deviance of a group of people better than the deviance in a particular place. Instead of using self-reports, what could we do to learn how much crime occurred on a college campus? We could ask students to report about their victimization. The questionnaire could ask, for example, if the student has been a victim of crime on his or her college campus in the past year (or some other specified time period). The first headline mentioned above concerning the sexual assault of women at a college in our state is based on a victimization survey. Here you may raise some of the same objections that you did to self-report counts. Students may not wish to admit that they were victimized. Citizens who are not students may have been victimized on the campus. Some students may have forgotten being a victim. For example, they may have forgotten being in a fight. Crimes such as drug use or underage drinking would not be reported because no victims are involved. And so on. Again, scholars are aware of these concerns and try to take them into account when using victimization surveys. Victimization surveys are used to explore sexual harassment, domestic abuse, and other deviance in which people are victimized. For example, since 1973, the Bureau of Justice Statistics has conducted the National Crime Survey, now called the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). U.S. Census Bureau personnel interview approximately 75,000 people twelve years of age and older in a nationally representative sample of approximately 42,000 households. The households remain in the sample for three years and are interviewed every six months about their victimization (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2004). The next-to-last headline mentioned at the beginning of this

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chapter regarding domestic violence is based primarily on information from the National Crime Victimization Survey. These self-report and victimization studies produce unofficial counts of crime and deviance. The counts are not based on the records of official agencies that handle people who have committed crimes or deviance. Instead, individuals report their criminal or deviant conduct or their victimization. Even though a federal agency, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, conducts the NCVS, the count it obtains is unofficial. Certainly, some crime and deviance that are reported on self-report studies and on victimization surveys have also been officially recorded. But official counts are based solely on the records of official agencies. WHICH METHOD SHOWS MORE?

Which method, official or unofficial, do you think provides the larger count? Scholars agree that unofficial methods generally provide the larger count, sometimes much larger. For example, the UCR reported 417,122 robberies, 862,947 aggravated assaults, and 2,154,126 burglaries for 2005 (Mueller 2006). The NCVS reported 624,850 robberies, 1,052,260 aggravated assaults, and 3,456,220 household burglaries for 2005; figures that are 50 percent, 22 percent, and 60 percent larger than the official counts (Catalano 2006, 2). However, the UCR reported 1,235,226 motor vehicle thefts for 2005, whereas the NCVS reported “only” 978,120 motor vehicle thefts in 2005. One possible explanation for the smaller number of motor vehicle thefts reported by the NCVS compared to the UCR is that the NCVS asks individuals about personal or household victimization. Motor vehicles stolen from businesses would not be reported in the NCVS. Another reason is that if a car was reported stolen and later the owner realized that a family member or friend had borrowed it, that incident would appear in the UCR count, but less likely in the NCVS count. You can see this result for yourself. Ask friends to report whether they have committed several kinds of deviance within a particular time period (e.g., within the past year, at college, or since entering high school), or think about whether you have done so. Then ask them to report how much they have committed or think about how much you have committed. For this demonstration, you need not try to be precise. You could ask them to give you a definite figure or to just estimate their involvement. Perhaps they have committed the particular deviance a few times, several times a week, often, or some other fre-

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quency. You can consider the same rough estimate for your own deviance. Of course, if we wished to be precise, then we would not use such vague categories. When friends have committed a particular form of deviance, ask them whether they know of any official records that exist about their involvement in that deviance for the same time period. Arrest records and disciplinary board hearings are two kinds of official records that might exist for some of the friends. If official records do exist, then how many exist for each particular kind of deviance? Again, you can consider whether official records exist for your own deviance. This is a simple, indirect way to obtain official counts of your friends’ and your own deviance to compare to self-report counts. We have asked students to ask their friends about cheating in school, assaults of others (i.e., fights), alcohol violations, shoplifting, and other forms of deviance. What do you think our students’ investigations showed? Their investigations showed that many of their friends have committed the various kinds of deviance queried, sometimes quite often. Yet very few of the friends knew of any official record of their deviance. Unofficial counts typically show much more deviance than official counts do. PRODUCING COUNTS

Let’s return to the question that opened this chapter: How much deviance is there? How do you now reply? Perhaps it is difficult to respond. You realize that neither official nor unofficial counts present the “true,” complete amount of deviance. (Those counts do not report the “true” amount of deviance for a fundamental reason more complex than we have explored here. We take up that reason as we explore in a later chapter another puzzling issue in deviance: What happened?) Yet, people do collect and use official and unofficial counts of deviance. Those counts matter, too, as we discussed earlier. We think a useful response is this: For all practical purposes, as much deviance exists as officials, researchers, and other interested parties produce through their official or unofficial procedures. No amount exists until someone produces that amount (Best 2001, chap 1; 2004, preface). Once produced, the amount becomes how much deviance exists for those who use the statistics. Important questions such as the following can then be asked: How are official and unofficial counts produced? Can they be produced otherwise? Are they useful for the purposes to which they are put? We do not take up all of these and other questions.1 Instead, we end this chapter on a brief discussion of how

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official counts of deviance are produced. If we are to use official counts of deviance (as well as unofficial counts) wisely, we may wish to know how they come to exist. Official counts of deviance are socially created (Kitsuse and Cicourel 1963; Best 2001; 2004). As officials and citizens manage their concerns, they produce official counts of deviance. If they change their concerns or change how they manage their concerns, then they may produce different official counts (McCleary, Nienstedt, et al. 1982). For example, the official count of 597 violent and property crimes at the University of South Carolina in Columbia during a recent year would have been produced through the following or similar actions. First, the state legislature made illegal the acts that constitute the violent and property crimes. A law enforcement agency was created and staffed at the university to handle those offenses and other matters. Students and others on campus acted in ways to which someone took offense. Property may have been missing; cars may seemingly have been broken into; students and others may have pushed, shoved, and struck one another; people may have apparently used or threatened to use force to take property or cash from others; and so on. These offensive acts were interpreted by individuals as requiring the intervention of the university law enforcement officials. Perhaps while patrolling the campus, police officers noticed some of the events. More likely, victims or witnesses reported the events to the campus police. The police decided to investigate. Law enforcement officials do not typically investigate all matters that come to their attention. The campus police concluded that crimes had occurred and wrote official reports. The crimes in the reports were coded as specific crimes and recorded (then sent to the FBI for inclusion in its Uniform Crime Reports). Many officials, students, and others produced through their actions that official count of 597 violent and property crimes. To understand how the official count of 597 violent and property crimes came to exist, we would need to explore each of those actions. Listing them is not enough. We would need to know how people created the concerns that they have and how and why they managed their concerns as they did to produce each of those actions. If the parties involved change how they manage their concerns, then the official count may change, too. For example, if the police change their patrol practices, they may notice more or less behavior about which they become suspicious. If students become more willing to report

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troubling or offensive behavior such as unwanted sexual behavior, then the official counts may change. If the university changes its prevention and awareness programs concerning crime, the official counts may change. If the university reduces the student drinking on campus, then the amount of damaged property, assaults, unwanted sexual actions, and other behavior toward which students and others may take offense may decrease (Weschsler, Davenport, et al. 1994). Legislators, university officials, students, and others produce the official counts of college crime as they manage their concerns. ORGANIZATIONAL PRACTICES AND THE PRODUCTION OF OFFICIAL CRIME COUNTS

Consider briefly how organizational practices in law enforcement agencies lead to the production of official crime counts (McCleary, Nienstedt, et al. 1982). Changes in these organizational practices may lead to changes in the production of official counts of crime. In one major southwestern city, when sergeants were removed from supervising the dispatch bureau of the police department, the number of “service calls” increased greatly, as did the official crime. A service call is a “citizen call for assistance which results in the dispatch of an officer to the scene” (McCleary, Nienstedt, et al. 1982, 367). If a citizen calls the police department for service, but the dispatcher does not dispatch an officer to the scene, then no official crime will be recorded at that time. If the dispatcher receives an inquiry about sanitation or a call that reports a crime in progress, then the dispatcher is quite certain whether or not to dispatch an officer to the scene. Other calls, however, appear questionable to dispatchers. For example, a call reporting that an auto has been stolen may be a repossession by the finance company or a tow-away. A call reporting a burglary may be a civil matter among disputing family members. These calls appear not to concern threats to safety, so they are not urgent to the police department. They are not serious, “real” crimes. Dispatchers are reluctant to send officers to the scenes in such cases. If they cannot reach a compromise with the caller, such as referring the caller to some other public agency, the dispatcher will turn to the supervising sergeant. Dispatchers do that, in part, to protect themselves from civil suits, internal investigations, or other consequences. When sergeants were removed from supervising dispatchers, the dispatchers were left without this important protection. Hence, they increased their likelihood of dispatching

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officers to the scenes of the calls. With an increase in officers being dispatched, the official counts of crime increased. In a police department in another southwestern city, the official count of burglaries increased 20 percent during the second half of the year after a formal job offer was made to the police chief. News of the chief ’s retirement spread quickly through the police department, though it was kept hidden from the public for many months. The shake-up in the administration caused by the retirement directly affected the coding of incident reports by clerks in the coding bureau. The coding bureau was supervised by a sergeant, who reported to a commander of the research and planning division. The commander reported to an assistant chief. All three were replaced in the shake-up. Before the commander left, he was not around the department as much as he typically had been. Perhaps he was looking for a new job. Even when the commander was at the department, he did not spend as much time in the office. The commander demanded that coding be done his way, even if some of the guidelines he used may have been wrong. He let coders know if they had not done it his way. If coders were uncertain, they were expected to go to the sergeant, who would check with the commander. With less oversight, which decreased even more when the sergeant was replaced a few months later, the coding clerks were freer to make their own decisions. A slight change in how field reports were coded made a significant change in the official crime count. A change of two or three burglaries each day led to that 20 percent increase experienced in this southwestern city. Finally, when the police department in the first southwestern city mentioned above instituted an experimental program for investigating all burglary complaints, official burglary counts dropped “abruptly” and rose abruptly when the experimental program ended. Normally, uniformed officers investigated burglary complaints and wrote simple field reports when they responded to service calls. Detectives did not follow up with their own investigations if the field reports contained no leads, which typically they did not. Coding clerks then coded the field reports. During the experimental program, detectives investigated all burglary complaints, and clerks coded the crimes after the detectives investigated the complaints. These changes led to a decrease in officially counted burglaries. They did so for three reasons. First, detectives have a better understanding of the complex UCR definition of burglary. For example, a building must be broken into and entered. An

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enclosed garage is a building; a carport is not. Breaking through a fence to steal something does not meet the UCR definition of burglary. When only uniformed officers investigated the complaints, some of their “mistakes” in classifying the crime were not “caught” by the coding clerks. Second, officers exercised discretion in classifying the crimes they investigated. For example, was the construction of a building far enough along for the crime to be a burglary or some other offense? Coding clerks were not always able to check the results of the officers’ discretion. During the experimental program, the decisions of the detectives superseded the discretion of the officers. Finally, with all burglary complaints being investigated by detectives during the experimental period, double counting was minimized. Double counting could occur when a complainant realized that more items had been taken, called the police department again to request that an officer be sent, but did not inform the officer that a previous complaint had already been made. The smaller number of detectives investigating the burglary complaints would be more likely than uniform officers to know whether a previous complaint had been made (McCleary, Nienstedt, et al. 1982). Organizational procedures are important in producing official counts of deviance. CONCLUSION

Return to the opening question: How much deviance is there? We think that as much deviance exists as interested parties “count” and use to meet their concerns. Through official and unofficial counts, interested parties produce the amount of deviance that exists. The counts do not present a “true” amount. Nevertheless, these counts can be useful. If we know how the counts are created, then we can begin to decide how to use them. For example, if we know that official counts of school misbehavior are being produced in similar ways over time, then we can decide whether the misbehavior of students is changing over time. Perhaps the school implements a new program to improve the relations among the children and between children and teachers. If the official counts of misbehavior then decrease, and if we have no reason to suspect that official counts are being produced in a different way, perhaps a way that would show a decrease even if students’ behavior had not improved, then we can be confident that the new program is working. However, we need to know how the counts are produced.

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The next time you read or hear a report concerning the amount of some kind of deviance, or changes in that amount, question critically the report. Try to evaluate how the numbers were produced and for what purposes. You can then decide how useful that count is. PROJECTS

1. Go to an agency that has official responsibility for handling deviance. Such agencies produce official information about deviance, perhaps including the amounts of different kinds, the characteristics of the offenders, conditions of the offenses, and other information. Local and college law enforcement agencies, departments of mental health, child protection units of social service departments, school boards, the offices of superintendents of education, and many other agencies produce official statistics of how much deviance has occurred. Obtain the official statistics for some kind of deviance in which you are interested for a recent time period, probably the past year (or academic year). Talk with an official or staff member about how the official statistics are produced. What must officials within that agency do to produce the official statistics? For example, in order to have an official count of fighting within a school district, who must take what action that leads to an event being officially recorded as an instance of fighting? According to what you can learn, where in this process of constructing official statistics are possible instances most likely not to be included? For example, do teachers report to their principals all instances of what they believe to be or suspect to be fighting? Do principals forward all such instances that come to their attention to the appropriate official in the district office? And so on. What may be some of the reasons for possible instances of deviance not being officially recorded? How are these official statistics used? By whom? How adequate are they for those purposes? Can you think of a practical means for creating unofficial statistics about the deviance on which you focused in this project? What may be some of the challenges of unofficially counting that deviance? 2. Think about the following scenarios involving deviance and official agencies’ efforts to control the deviance. How might organizational practices affect the counts that are produced?

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A. A new police commissioner is elected as the tough-on-crime candidate. During the campaign, the candidate pointed to the corruption and ineptitude of the current police department. The new commissioner also made many comments during the campaign that officers better do their job or get out, and that criminals should fear the police because the department will deal with them harshly. What may the official numbers look like the next year? B. The county sheriff and the city police chief have very different ideas about what a gang is. The sheriff proclaims that if youth show a gang sign or wear gang colors, then they and their friends are gang members. Gang members are a threat to the community, and the sheriff will not tolerate them. The police chief sees racial profiling in this definition of gang members and fears that any black youth wearing a red shirt will be labeled a gang member. The police chief cautions the officers not to jump to conclusions. What impact may the sheriff ’s and the police chief ’s approaches toward gangs have on the officially reported size of the gang problem in the two jurisdictions? In which official amount should the public have the most confidence? C. The federal government is offering large grants to medium-size and small communities to fight their drug problems. These grants will pay for additional officers, prosecutors, drug-detection dogs, and new surveillance cameras. Your local law enforcement agency has received the grant. It hires the new officers, uses the drug dogs at the local schools, and posts surveillance cameras in “drug neighborhoods.” What may the drug crime rate do in the next year, the next five years? 3. Develop a short survey, either a self-report survey or a victimization survey, to distribute anonymously to students at your college. The survey may be distributed in one of your classes (with the permission of the instructor). On the survey, ask a short number of questions about the commission of specific acts of deviance or being the victim of specific acts of deviance. For example, your survey may focus on academic cheating, underage drinking, illegally downloading music, being the recipient of unwanted sexual attention, or whatever interests you. If you believe that some category of students is more likely to commit or be the victim of the deviance that you are investigating, ask one or more questions to learn whether the students fit that

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category or not. Collect your information and tabulate your results. What do your results show? What challenges did you experience in trying to unofficially count deviance? NOTE

1. You may wish to read Joel Best’s intriguing works on “damned lies and statistics” to learn more about how counts and statistics about deviance and other topics of public interest are produced, presented, and used (Best 2001; 2004).

10

What Causes People to Commit Deviance?

What causes people to rob, assault, cheat on their income taxes, defraud the government, murder, violate environmental regulations, take bribes from lobbyists, violate securities regulations, and commit other deviance? If some of these acts of deviance seem distant from your world, then consider the following: What causes youths and young adults to cheat on their academic work, to drink underage, to use false IDs, to beat up others, to take drugs, to shoplift, to cheat their employers, to drink and drive, to vandalize buildings and homes (including one of the authors’), to engage in sexual activities as minors, and to commit other deviance? What do you think makes people act in deviant ways? Please take some time to consider your response, even to write your response, then continue reading. COMMON EXPLANATIONS

Many possible explanations for what causes people to commit deviance have been proposed. Some explanations focus on characteristics of individuals that cause the individuals to commit deviance. Other explanations focus on characteristics of the social conditions in which people live that make them engage in deviance. These two important approaches focus on kinds of people or kinds of social conditions (Cohen 1966, 41–47). The individualistic, kinds-ofpeople explanations assert that defective characteristics of people cause them to commit deviance. Some people are seen to be evil. Their fundamentally

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flawed selves, selves that embrace or are controlled by the “dark” forces of existence, are the root of their deviance. Traditional notions of being possessed by demonic spirits are the clearest expression of this explanation (Goode 2005, 54–55). In more mundane terms, people who commit deviance are thought to be bad or no good. Others explain deviance by pointing to psychological defects of people. Mental illness, low self-esteem, a lack of self-control, or some other psychopathology causes deviance. Perhaps a sociopathic personality compels people to act in deviant ways (Hare 1993). If not defective personalities, then perhaps some kind of abnormal biological characteristic is the cause of deviance. Some people may be born more impulsive than others or less able to think through the consequences of their behavior. An abnormal biology may even be the basis for the psychological defects. Kinds-of-people explanations focus on various traits of individuals, typically defects, that cause people to commit deviance: evilness, psychological problems, biological abnormalities (Higgins and Butler 1982; Wilson and Herrnstein 1985; Katz 1988, introduction; Collins 1992, 87–89; Link, Andrews, et al. 1992; Andrews and Bonta 1998; Stark 2007, chap. 7). Social scientists are more likely to propose that the social conditions within which people live or have lived may make them commit deviance. Some assert that social strains such as poverty, inequality, or an unhappy family may push people into deviance. Others emphasize that people learn to act in deviant ways through social influences. Family members, friends, and even the larger society, whether intentionally or not, shape people to commit deviance. For example, children who see their parents drink and use other drugs are molded differently from those whose parents abstain, even if the drug-using parents tell their children not to take drugs. The media may also provide deviant messages. Some social scientists focus on ineffective controls that fail to keep people from acting in deviant ways. Serious, certain, and swift punishment may keep people from committing deviance. Or the consistent concern of loved ones restrains people from acting unacceptably. Without these or other effective controls, people will commit deviance. These and other social scientific explanations emphasize inadequate social conditions that cause people to commit deviance (Higgins and Butler 1982, chap. 6; Goode 2005, chap. 3). Sometimes kinds-of-conditions and kinds-of-people explanations are combined to explain what causes people to commit deviance. People who grow up in “unhealthy” social conditions may become “defective” kinds of

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people who commit deviance. The social condition produces the individual defect that causes the person to act in deviant ways (Cohen 1966, 41–47). And still more explanations, which can become quite complex and may not be either pure kinds-of-people or kinds-of-conditions explanations, have been proposed to account for what causes people to commit deviance (Cullen 1984; Link, Cullen, et al. 1989; Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990; Sampson and Laub 1993; Felson 2002; Goode 2005, chap. 3). Look at your list of explanations for what causes people to commit acts of deviance. Do your explanations focus on individual traits or defects, such as psychological problems? Maybe you listed “destructive” motivations, such as need, revenge, and the like? Did you propose unhealthy social environments, such as a “broken” family, peer pressure, the “deviant way of life” of a neighborhood, poverty or economic pressures? You probably listed a variety of explanations, though we imagine that many of them may have been stated as reasons why people commit deviance. Some may fit the various approaches we mentioned. Some perhaps do not. You may be wondering which of these explanations are correct. Maybe none is correct? Perhaps several of them are right? Or perhaps some in combination with one another are correct, as our students have told us. We and others believe that none of these thoughtful explanations is adequate. Nevertheless, they can become quite useful if they are rethought. They are not at present adequate because they address a poorly stated question. The problem is the question that opened this discussion: What causes people to commit deviance? The simple answer for almost all deviance is that nothing causes people to commit deviance. INADEQUACIES OF CAUSES

It is not helpful to search for the causes of deviance. None exist for most deviance that is committed—at least that is the argument made by some social scientists. However, even though a search for “causes” may not be productive, that does not mean that we should not try to explain how people come to commit deviance. Some social scientists have developed intriguing ideas. We briefly mention one at the end of this discussion. Before reading our explanation as to why, in general, the search for causes of deviance is not useful, try to think what arguments you might present to question the adequacy of causes to understand deviance, then continue.

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Cause generally means a condition that produces an effect. For example, a lack of water caused the houseplant to die. The genes caused the individual’s eye color, dropping the glass on the patio caused it to break, the virus caused the illness, and so on. However, does any condition cause people to commit deviance? No, not for almost all deviance that is committed.1 Consider Jack Katz’s (1988, 3–4) argument for abandoning the question of what causes people to commit deviance. Katz makes the following argument against the concept of cause as useful for understanding people’s commission of deviance. Many people who experience the proposed individual or social causes of deviance, such as particular hereditary characteristics or poverty, do not commit deviance. Others who do not experience those proposed causes do commit deviance. And still others who do experience those proposed causes sometimes commit deviance but for long periods of time do not commit deviance, even though they still experience the proposed causes. For example, consider a person who has close friends who are involved in deviance, a cause of deviance proposed by differential association theory (Sutherland and Cressey 1978). At one moment, this person with friends involved in deviance does not commit deviance, but at the next moment, this same person does commit deviance. How can one argue that having friends who are deviant caused the deviance? If you follow Katz’s argument—and you may wish to reread this paragraph—then we think you will consider giving up looking for the causes of deviance. You might object. We hope you do. You might object by responding that Katz’s argument merely shows how difficult it is to discover the causes of deviance. Instead, you might argue that perhaps various conditions work in complex combinations under different situations to cause people to commit deviance. Perhaps, but doesn’t the objection to abandoning the concept of cause stated in the previous sentence suggest that nothing makes people act in deviant ways? No condition, no matter how complex or subtle, determines that people commit deviance. Let’s give up the concept of cause when thinking about how people come to commit deviance. Instead, why not consider that, fundamentally, people move themselves to act, whether conventionally or not. Nothing (typically) within or outside of people compels, forces, dictates, makes, or causes people to act one way or another (Higgins 1994, chap. 4). Nothing causes people to eat or not to eat, to go to work or to call in sick, to read a book or to watch television, to buy a car or

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to hold on to their present car another year, to study for a test or not to study, to yell at another person or to talk quietly, to come in from the rain or to get wet, to cheat on one’s income tax or not, to assault another or to turn away, to drink and drive or to have a sober friend drive, to rob a store or not, and so on. Human behavior is not caused. Instead, humans behave. People behave as they attempt to meet their concerns or their goals. When people experience a gap between their concerns and their present conditions, they may direct themselves to act to manage that gap. People may or may not be well aware of their concerns or of how they are directing themselves to act, but nothing causes people to act, not even their concerns. People have many concerns or “desired states” toward which they move themselves to act. Some are physiological states, such as the biochemical balance of one’s body, of which people are not consciously aware. Others are mundane concerns, such as having a meal to eat. Still others are deeply held goals. People develop most of their concerns as they live and act with one another. People can often move to meet their concerns in various ways. For example, one can eat different kinds of food in order not to experience being hungry. A student could take easy courses, study hard, cheat, or act in other ways in order to try to get acceptable grades in courses. People can even change their concerns in order to manage the gap. Disappointed in the progress being made in one career, a person may come to embrace another line of work as a goal. A student may come to decide that exploring new ideas and developing new skills are more important than getting certain grades in courses. Some concerns are more important to a person than are other concerns. The actions that people contemplate to meet their various concerns may clash. For example, people may be interested in developing successful careers through putting in long hours but also be interested in successfully raising families by giving their attention to their families. Those who commit deviance may initially experience a clash between maintaining an honorable self-image and the shame experienced in committing deviance. People move themselves to act conventionally or to commit deviance. They do so without necessarily being able to explain to themselves satisfactorily how they came to act one way or the other at this moment. Even when they can explain satisfactorily to themselves how they came to act as they did at this moment, we who are also interested in that issue may or may not accept their explanations as adequate for understanding their behavior.

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Thus, the question needs to be restated. Instead of asking what causes people to commit deviance, the better question is: How do people come to move themselves into deviance (and out of it)? Social scientists have developed explanations for that question (e.g., Douglas 1977; Higgins and Butler 1982, 179–200; Athens 1989; Pfuhl and Henry 1993, chap. 3). We do not think that any of these explanations is fully satisfactory, but they are promising. SEDUCTION INTO DEVIANCE

Jack Katz (1988) has developed an intriguing approach for explaining how people move themselves into deviance. We summarize and illustrate it. We think that his approach is provocative, if also unusual. To us, it is one of the best approaches so far developed to explore how people move themselves to commit deviance. Katz proposes that people seduce themselves into deviance. They create powerful feelings and understandings that at the moment seem to compel the people to act. It is as if the people could not have done otherwise, though they are the ones who created those compelling feelings. In doing so, however, they may not be well aware of how they did so. In fact, to be well aware of how they created these compelling feelings would be to make the feelings less compelling. Instead of being “caught up” in the moment and in the powerful feelings, those who were aware of producing those powerful feelings would be at least slightly “outside” of their self-seduction, thinking about it. People create these powerful feelings and understandings in response to challenges to their selves, as they understand and experience those challenges. Thus, moral concerns, concerns about who they are, matter most to people, not material concerns, concerns about what they have. These challenges to their selves arise out of the social worlds within which people make their lives. Thus, social conditions are important, but not as causes. Instead, social conditions are important for the challenges that people experience within them. Finally, those who seduce themselves into deviance must act, they must manage the practical requirements for successfully committing the deviance (Katz 1988, introduction). Sounds unusual, doesn’t it? Yet, consider the following. Have you ever become so mad, enraged even, at what another person said or did that you verbally assaulted that other person? Have you ever “worked yourself up” into an “uncontrollable” anger, making yourself madder and madder, perhaps as the

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other person continued to act in ways that you could not tolerate, screaming at the other person or heaping one criticism after another on that person? After you stopped, perhaps exhausted from your anger, you realized that you should not have done that, but it seemed as if you couldn’t stop yourself during that rage. That rage may have lasted a short time, perhaps well less than a minute. If you have had such an experience, try to recall it. If you can recall it, then do you remember powerful feelings and understandings that “gripped” you, ones that perhaps now you realize you created? Did these feelings and understandings concern maintaining your self-respect in the face of what you took to be the other’s intolerable belittling of you? After calming yourself, did you wonder how you could have become so mad? Perhaps you were surprised at the ferocity of your anger. You did not realize that you could act that way. Or perhaps you realized that what the other did was nothing to become so enraged about. However, at the time, you did enrage yourself. RIGHTEOUS SLAUGHTER

The scenario we have just sketched, one that many people have experienced in differing ways and degrees, is similar to Jack Katz’s explanation of how individuals come to commit what he calls righteous slaughter. Righteous slaughter is an “impassioned attack” in which the assailant reasserts his or her honor by violently attacking the one who dishonored him or her (Katz 1988, 18). The violence of the attack attests to the depth of the dishonor that was done. For example, a wife whose husband abuses her and/or tauntingly cheats on her may come to feel that her fundamental self-worth is being stripped from her. Being abused once again and/or catching her husband in yet another episode of infidelity, one that he does not deny but rubs her face in by boasting how he and the other woman were together, the wife may experience profoundly degrading humiliation. She cannot imagine how she can go on like this. She may then transform this humiliation into rage through a sense of righteousness that blinds her to any future consequences. Through a violent attack on the husband, perhaps accompanied by shouting and cursing, the wife attempts to obliterate the degradation and the one who degraded her. Whether the husband dies or not, the fury of the attack reasserts the wife’s dignity—at least for the moment. The fury of the righteous slaughter attests to the wife’s worthiness that the husband had defiled.

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The husband’s abuse and degrading infidelity did not cause the wife to feel humiliated. Her humiliation did not make her enraged. Her righteous rage did not force her to attack her husband violently. Through these powerful feelings and understandings created by the wife, she moved herself into deviance. She did so in a way that for the moment may have seemed beyond her control. While more investigation is needed, righteous slaughter appears most likely to be committed by those with relatively few resources, those who are poor or “working class.” Their worlds may provide many, even continuing, occasions to be humiliated. Work may be demeaning, and intimate relations may be peppered with disrespect. Those with few resources may have few options for managing their humiliation successfully. When those with more resources are humiliated, they may be able to retreat to private offices, escape from hell at home by going to work or taking business trips, immerse themselves in civic activities, buy the consumer appearance of respect, and so on. If righteous slaughter is done in defense of one’s moral worth, then under what social conditions is people’s moral worth most likely to be challenged, and when are those challenged people likely to have relatively few possibilities or capabilities for successfully managing that humiliation? Yet, the social conditions do not cause the slaughter. Instead, people may experience profound challenges to the self within those social conditions. In creating powerfully compelling emotions that address those challenges at the moment, people may seduce themselves to commit righteous slaughter. SNEAKY THRILLS

Different instances of deviance may involve different moral concerns, different challenges to people’s selves, different emotions and understandings, and different practical requirements for successfully committing the deviance. For example, committing righteous slaughter is not the same as shoplifting, stealing a car for joyriding, sneaking underage into a bar, vandalizing a neighbor’s house, or committing other sneaky thrills. We briefly present this second example, sneaky thrills, a kind of deviance perhaps more familiar to you. Have you ever committed a sneaky thrill? Many, perhaps most, people have done so. Try to remember what you did and your experience as fully as you can. After doing so, then continue. The example we give concerns a teenage female’s shoplifting. Males shoplift too, but Katz’s investigation of sneaky thrills primarily concerned women.

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A teenage female goes shopping. She may or may not have gone with the intent to “take” something. As she browses in a store, a bracelet “catches” her attention. It seems to call to her. She cannot take her eyes off it. She has to have it. Even though she has the money to pay for it, it would be so easy to take it. The “taking” of the bracelet gives it an appeal that as a mere object it does not have. But what if she is caught? She would “just die.” The teen moves back and forth between the excitement of taking the bracelet and the horrifying thought of getting caught. Her ambivalence and oscillation increase the attractiveness of the object, of the deviant project she is contemplating. The excitement and tension increase. The lure of the object, of the deviant taking, grows stronger. The teen begins to act out the thrilling larceny in her heart while concentrating on maintaining a conventional appearance. But how should she act like a shopper when her desires are anything but honorable? What she previously did with ease as an honest shopper now becomes a challenge to manage, as her intent has turned deviant. The young woman may produce one or several emotions. She may experience a thrill of courting danger but also the presence of mind and control to overcome it; the excitement of exploring and committing what would be profoundly humiliating if others sensed her deviant desires; the exhilaration of competing against the “other” (i.e., the store and perhaps particular store personnel) and winning; the rush, perhaps almost a sexual rush, as the tension of the deviant action builds and then is released with its successful commission; the satisfaction of asserting one’s self against the constraints of conventionality; and the euphoric realization that her self contains more possibilities than she imagined, but without committing herself to a deviant future. It was just playful. All of these and more emotions make sneaky thrills profoundly moving. The teen may never use the bracelet or may throw it away. She may vow never again to do such a “crazy” thing. She may feel ashamed for what she did—or perhaps not. The store may be transformed forever, no longer just a place to shop, but now having a magical quality of where she pulled “it” off. The sneaky thrill may be remembered and emotionally reexperienced for years, perhaps even a lifetime. We can still recall decades later some of our sneaky thrills. While adults engage in sneaky thrills, youths may find sneaky thrills particularly appealing, enabling them to manage challenges to their selves. Youths are often self-conscious. Everyone seems to be watching them. What do those observers see? Do the youths measure up? They may feel that they do not and

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wonder how easily others can see that. Can others notice their inner inadequacies and their devious desires? Are their private selves publicly visible? How well can they manage the appearance of their selves? If their inner selves are easily seen by others, then what the youths can do, what they can get away with, becomes greatly curtailed. Sneaky thrills enable youths to test their capacities for presenting and concealing their selves, for being devious and getting away with it. Sneaky thrills provide opportunities for discovering the possibilities of their selves in a “playful” way that does not commit themselves to a “truly” deviant path (Katz 1988, chap. 2). Consider deviance you have committed. Did you move yourself into deviance to meet your concerns? How did you seduce yourself into deviance? For example, what understandings and emotions did you create for yourself if you cheated academically, bought alcoholic beverages illegally, stole from your employer, beat up someone, or sped “wildly” over the speed limit? The emotions may not have been as charged as those involved in righteous slaughter or as euphoric as those involved in sneaky thrills, but perhaps they were adequately compelling to enable you to commit deviance at that moment when you did not do so the previous moment. To what challenges to your self was your deviance a response? Did anything cause you to act in a deviant way? We don’t think so. What do you think? LINKING SEDUCTIONS, SOCIAL CONDITIONS, AND KINDS OF PEOPLE

You may not be satisfied with Katz’s intriguing approach. However, his approach provides us with one way of beginning to make sense of how people come to commit deviance when nothing causes them to do so. It does not ignore the social conditions that some social scientists present as the causes of deviance. Instead, it begins to link those social conditions to the challenges to their selves that people experience, to the moral challenges to which deviance may be a response. Thus, righteous slaughter becomes linked to the humiliation of poverty or working-class existence, sneaky thrills to the concern with the contours of one’s self experienced in adolescence. While Katz does not make the connections, we can even begin to see links between kinds-of-people explanations for what causes people to commit deviance and his approach that explores how people move themselves into deviance. For example, people with lower self-esteem or with lessened biological capacity for self-control may more easily or quickly seduce themselves into some kinds of powerful feelings and understandings.

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However, we should not take the example we just presented to mean that Katz believes that seducing oneself into deviance is a sign of being defective. Not at all. Self-seduction is a very creative act that can explore and expand one’s possibilities, as in sneaky thrills. Yet self-seduction can also be creatively destructive as in righteous slaughter. We may also be able to combine kinds-of-people and kinds-of-conditions explanations and link them to Katz’s self-seduction approach. That is, the social conditions of people’s lives may act as a catalyst for people to develop different capacities and orientations, which then enable them to more or less easily seduce themselves into deviance. For example, the creation of dangerous, violent criminals who ruthlessly attack others may be understood in this way. Out of previous social experiences of being brutalized, those who become dangerous, violent criminals may become belligerent, resolving to attack others physically who provoke them. They resolve never to be brutally humiliated again. With success in attacking those they feel to be disrespectfully provoking them and with the admiration and fear of others, those who become dangerous, violent persons embrace their resolve to use violence, even against those who do not provoke them unduly. They become malevolent, brutalizing others as they once had been brutalized. However, they conjure up the powerful feelings and understandings of malevolence at a particular moment—and, through those compelling feelings and understandings, they move themselves to attack violently another person at that moment (Athens 1989). CONCLUSION

Through Jack Katz’s approach, we can begin to think about the causes of deviance in a different, more useful way. We will not abandon the common explanations of kinds-of-people or kinds-of-conditions. Instead, we will transform the kinds-of-people approach into capacities and orientations with which people manage the challenges to their selves. The kinds-of-conditions explanations point to differing social conditions people experience and out of which challenges to their selves may arise. As people move to meet their concerns, they possess various capacities and encounter differing challenges. Let’s return to the question that opened this discussion: What causes people to commit deviance? The simple answer is that nothing does so. However, from our discussions of that simple answer and our presentation of one alternative—Katz’s examination of seduction into deviance—we hope you realize

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that how people come to commit deviance is not simple at all. What do you think? PROJECTS

1. By examining your commission of deviance (or a friend’s), investigate the compelling emotions you created, your understandings of how others viewed you, and the practical requirements you managed as you moved yourself into deviance at the particular moment that you did. To what moral challenges to yourself do you think your deviance and its compelling emotions were a response? This may be difficult to do. To analyze the magical qualities of seducing oneself into deviance requires one to distance oneself partially from the magical moment in order to reflect on it. The magic then loses some of its spell; the deviance may be aborted. Yet, if the deviance was accomplished, then one may have been caught up in the deviance to such an extent that one cannot usefully report on what one was thinking, feeling, and doing when committing the deviance. Friends may try to explain why they committed the deviance instead of what they thought, felt, and did during the deviance episode. Good luck. 2. Terrorist groups are complex phenomena in our current world. Examine a terrorist group, for example Shining Path (in Peru) or al-Qaida. Can the concept of righteous slaughter developed by Katz to explain an impassioned, violent attack against an individual the attacker believes has deeply dishonored him or her be of use in thinking about terrorist groups? What are the justifications presented by the terrorist group for its actions? How do the history and conditions of the terrorists tie to their justifications and explanations for their violence? NOTE

1. Conditions that are deemed deviant may be caused by genes, hormones, disease, and other conditions that directly affect the body. Disabilities, which are often reacted to negatively, including mental illness, may be caused by various conditions that affect the functioning of the body. Certain kinds of drug use can impair or alter the body functioning, which then may be implicated in deviant acts that the impaired person commits, such as vehicular homicide. However, typically, nothing causes people to commit deviance.

11

How Does Meaning Matter in Committing Deviance?

Have you ever been mugged? Has someone you know been mugged? What happened? Recall if you can, then continue. Perhaps something similar to the following happened. A stranger, typically a young male, came upon you. The young male may have asked you for the time or a dime or directions, then he told you to “give it up.” He may have flashed a weapon or intimated that he had one. Perhaps the young male grabbed your purse and ran. Or did he grab, push, or hit you when he took your wallet, purse, watch, or other valuables? Muggings can be terrifying experiences. While the citizens who are victimized realize that muggings do occur, perhaps even often in their communities, they typically are not expecting to be mugged. The citizens carry out their everyday activities with some comfort and ease. They are unprepared for what befalls them. Their safety is threatened; their property is taken. They become chillingly vulnerable. Those who are mugged may come to mistrust their world. Places and people become suspect. They may alter their routines in order to guard against future victimizations. They may do so to the extent of imprisoning themselves in their homes. If they did not resist, they may be angry, even ashamed. Their world and their place in the world may not be the same for a long time afterward (Lejeune and Alex 1973). Now, consider muggings from the stance of the muggers. What capabilities or characteristics may be important for a successful mugging? Please think about that, even write your response. When you finish, then continue. 113

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We imagine that you may have mentioned physical prowess, fearlessness, size, willingness to hurt others, or some other attribute of those who mug as crucial for mugging successfully. Perhaps you mentioned catching the victim off guard and unprepared or having a weapon in order to be in charge. All those characteristics can be important in mugging. However, meanings are crucial, too. How participants interpret the situation is important in muggings. Meanings—interpretations and emotions—are important in many acts of deviance. We explore how meanings matter in the commission of deviance. MEANINGFUL MUGGINGS

Consider muggings. Successful muggings—successful at least to the muggers— depend on the meanings that participants produce. While citizens may fearfully imagine muggings—being ripped off by a stranger and perhaps harm being done—those who mug, especially novices, may be afraid and uncertain. Those who mug confront a risky, uncertain situation. They do not know whether they will succeed or whether they, not the victim, will be harmed. Citizens, after all, may carry a can of pepper spray, a pistol or other weapon, or forcefully resist. Those who mug confront the challenge of creating meanings for themselves and for the victims such that they (1) satisfactorily reduce the fear and risk that they experience and (2) gain and maintain control over their victims so that the victims cooperate in the muggings. Those who mug, especially novices, are often scared. They don’t know what may happen to them. Will they successfully pull off the mugging? Will they be caught? Will the victim resist? Does the victim have a weapon? Will they, the muggers, be hurt? Those who mug develop meanings to reduce that fear. Early successes embolden those who mug. Muggings come to be seen as less risky. Initial muggings may be done in a group. Comrades give heart to one another as they hide their fear from each other behind a shaky bravado. Afterward, they recount their exploits, reliving close calls, bragging about what they did, and congratulating themselves on their successes. Some may get high on drugs to control their fears. Others may never control their fears well. Those who mug are concerned about the police, witnesses, and victims. All pose a risk to them. Victims are especially important, as those who mug confront them directly. Selecting victims can lead to favorable meanings for muggings. If you were to mug, on what personal features would you focus in picking a victim? Consider this question before you continue.

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You may likely wish to mug someone you believe will not resist much and will have something worthwhile to take. Those who mug may use these two commonsensical principles—or at least say they do when they talk about their muggings. However, those who mug are likely to do so when “on the stroll,” when walking through areas with which they are familiar and in which they will not be obtrusive. For inner-city males this means inner-city areas. Therefore, while they may wish to mug those who seem to pose little risk and have valuables to make it worth their while, whoever is available may be the ones they rob. When those who mug confront potential victims, their challenge is to get and maintain control of the victims and of what is being done. The muggers attempt to catch their victims off guard so that the victims cannot prepare to defend themselves or flee. Thus, those who mug may dress conventionally, in ways that do not fit the stereotypes that people have of criminals. They may unthreateningly or less threateningly approach victims, asking for directions, cigarettes, or loose change (though nowadays any approach by a stranger may be experienced as threatening). However, the muggers also must make clear their intentions. They must define to the victim that this is a mugging, that they are serious and capable, and that the victim should “willingly” participate in the mugging. It may seem easy to define clearly to the potential victims that they are about to be mugged. “Give me your purse” is clear. Yet, that may not be so. Victims are not expecting to be mugged, even though they may know well that muggings are not infrequent. Being caught off guard, they may not quickly realize what is taking place. Ironically, the practices of muggers to catch their victims off guard may make it more difficult for them to define quickly and successfully that they are mugging the victims. Thus, potential victims may smile, joke, wonder if the muggers are kidding, express surprised disbelief, or in other ways not immediately define the action as muggings. When potential victims do not quickly realize that they are being mugged, then those who mug must make extra efforts to define for the victims what is about to happen and the victims’ role in it. Muggers may repeat that this is a “stick-up” or “rip-off.” They may flash weapons or forcefully claim that they are serious. They may grab or push the victims in order to make clear that what is about to happen is no joke. Those who mug need to control the potential victims in order to mug successfully. They do so by showing that they are tough and/or by using physical

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force. Mugging in a group, brandishing a weapon, playing on the fears that many citizens have of young black men, talking and appearing tough, and other practices may enable those who mug to make clear to their victims that they should cooperate. Some muggers use physical force or weapons to show that they mean business. Inexperienced muggers may hit victims or grab victims in order to get control without first telling the victims that they are being mugged. Some muggers may react to what they perceive as the victims’ resistance by using force, by hitting the screaming victim or the victim who claims to have no money. Through a posture of toughness and/or the use of force, muggers attempt to define clearly to the victims the seriousness of what is happening and to direct the victims in the role they are to play in their muggings. This brief sketch, based on the work of Robert Lejeune (1977), was not intended to gain sympathy for those who mug because their task is risky and difficult. The sketch shows the importance of meanings for muggings. Those who mug and those who are mugged create meanings—beliefs and feelings concerning what is about to happen, what is happening, and what may happen—and have meanings presented to them that matter in the muggings. Muggers are most successful when they create meanings that enable them to reduce their fear and uncertainty, define clearly for the victims what is occurring, and gain and maintain control over the victims. Meanings matter in committing deviance more generally, not just for muggings. Now, consider homicide, domestic violence, and telemarketing fraud. Homicide and domestic violence concern coercive deviance, deviance in which offenders use force or threaten to use force against victims. Our last example concerns fraud in which the offenders deceive the victims as to the value received in the exchange. Meaning matters for all kinds of deviance (Best and Luckenbill 1994). HONOR IN HOMICIDE

Consider homicide that is not done in the commission of a robbery or other crime. Consider the killing between family members, friends, acquaintances, and coworkers. One way of making sense of such murders is to view them as “character contests” (Luckenbill 1977). In the character contest, the murderer and/or the murdered are trying to establish, save, or regain “face” (i.e., one’s dignity) at the expense of the other as each stands up to the other’s disrespect. If the adversaries do not back down, neither one apologizing for the disrespect that

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the other experienced, then they may escalate the character contest to murder. Other participants at the confrontation—friends, colleagues, onlookers—may supply meanings to the character contestants that, if acted on by the contestants, escalate or lessen the confrontation. For example, two friends are driving in a car. The passenger tells the driver that while the driver’s parents are great people, he, the driver, is a leech, who always sponges off his parents. The driver, called a leech by his friend, could back down and, in effect, accept that verbal slap to his face. Or he might yell at or curse the friend who acted disrespectfully toward him. The friend could apologize, which would likely end the contest at that time. However, the friend may continue to put down the driver, whom he called a leech. If others are in the car, they may try to cool down the combatants or perhaps intentionally or inadvertently egg them on, potentially escalating the seriousness of the character contest. If neither contestant backs down, then they may create the mutual understanding that violence will be used. The outcome of that mutual understanding may be murder. This example may seem trivial, but it is based on an actual murder (Luckenbill 1977). Respect and disrespect are crucial for many homicides. Even if some character contests seem to be about meaningless, trivial matters, meaning matters greatly in murder. INTERPRETATIONS IN WOMAN BATTERING

Consider domestic violence, specifically woman battering. Millions of women experience violence in their marriages and intimate relationships. You might expect that after the first episode of violence, women would leave their husbands or mates. However, they usually do not. They typically endure more violence, sometimes for months or years. They are not masochistic. They do not enjoy the battering. Instead, they deal with complex and confusing emotions, understandings, opportunities or the lack thereof to make their lives without the abusers, and other features of their situations. They may have strong, important feelings for the men who batter them. After all, the men are their husbands, mates, or intimate friends. If they have children, they may be uncertain they can support them without their husbands or mates. They may wonder whether the battering is temporary. They may wonder what the men will do if they, the women, do leave. These and other considerations make battering relationships complex (Ferraro 1997; Sev’er 2002).

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Battered women typically stay for a time in the battering relationship. They do so, in part, through interpretations that they create and use. These interpretations make the battering less serious, perhaps absolve the men of some of the responsibility for the violence, and in other ways lessen the urgency to do something drastic about the battering, such as leave the batterers. These interpretations give very different meanings to the events than observers looking from the outside might give to them (Ferraro and Johnson 1983; Sev’er 2002, chap. 10). For example, women who are battered may claim that their husbands or mates batter them because of alcoholism, work pressure, or some other external force, not with an intent to harm the women. Further, the women need to save their mates to help them get over the difficulties that push them to batter. Some interpret the harm they suffer as tolerable, or they give little attention to it, focusing on the bulk of their time with their mates that is satisfactory. Others define themselves as somewhat responsible for being beaten; perhaps they should not have nagged their mates to the point where the mates battered them, they should have put the children to bed before their husband arrived home, or they should have cooked a better meal. Some believe that they have few options. Where will they go? How will they support themselves and their children? A battered relationship is better than none, they reason. Acting upon meanings supplied by their society, others believe it is their duty as wives or their religious duty to support their men. Outsiders may supply meanings that make it difficult for battered women to define the situations as intolerable. In-laws may not provide a sympathetic ear, or they may actively discourage women from interpreting the events as intolerable violence. All of these and more interpretations enable women to remain in battering relationships long after the first act of violence. Interpretations, however, can be changed. Battered women may create new meanings that serve as a catalyst for them to leave the battering relationship at least for the moment (Ferraro and Johnson 1983; Ferraro 1997; Sev’er 2002). With a change in the level of violence, perhaps from the use of fists to pulling the trigger of what turns out to be an unloaded gun, battered women may reinterpret their relationships and leave. As options become available, such as a shelter for battered women, the battered women may redefine their future as one in which they can succeed without their mates. Or, if the mates’ remorse decreases and the women experience long periods devoid of affection, they

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may come to believe that they must make a dramatic change. Family members, friends, or others may help women to redefine their relationships as intolerable and encourage them to do something about them. Shelter workers may impress on battered women who reluctantly or ambivalently consider leaving their mates the seriousness of the situation (Loseke 1992). Through the meanings supplied by others, the women may redefine their relationships and leave. However, when they create future meanings such as becoming weary of their abusive mates’ persistence in locating them, extracting promises from their mates not to abuse them again, or making their children who may remain with their mates their first priority, they may return to their abusers (Baker 1997). The “violent” acts of the mates do not themselves produce the meanings held by the women. As battered women deal with their complex, possibly confusing relationships and situations, they create and use meanings that matter greatly. TELEMARKETING FRAUD THROUGH TALK

Fraudulent telemarketers cost American consumers more than $41 billion annually (Shover and Coffey 2005). The skillful fraudulent telemarketer deceives customers into believing that they are legitimately selling a product or service. Fraudulent telemarketers trick customers by using techniques that are similar to the techniques that legitimate telemarketers use to sell to customers. However, even legitimate telemarketers may persuade customers to purchase products and services that the customers later regret buying or that do not measure up to what they understood they were buying. Deviant telemarketing need not be illegal! The voice is the “primary weapon” used by telemarketers, fraudulent or legitimate. Through clear enunciation, correct pronunciation, and appropriate vocabulary, fraudulent telemarketers present themselves as knowledgeable, middle-class professionals who are confident and enthusiastic. Through their upbeat tone, they convey excitement about what they are selling. They have a product or service that the customer should be pleased to learn of and have the opportunity to purchase. Through their speech, telemarketers present themselves as trustworthy individuals offering customers an appealing opportunity (Penoyer 1997, 29). However, many potential customers may resist or object to buying the product or service. Fraudulent (and legitimate) telemarketers may use a combination

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of techniques to counter the objections: remaining quiet until the potential customer has completed the entire objection, pausing for a few moments at the end of the objection, handling objections with a well-thought-through response, confirming that the potential customer’s objection has been successfully countered, and taking the opportunity to close the sale. The telemarketers use these techniques to kindle or rekindle the potential but hesitant customer’s interest in the product or service. For example, by pausing, the telemarketers try to give the impression to the potential customers that the callers are thoughtfully considering the objection before replying. However, the potential customers are unlikely to know that the telemarketers have a list of objections and standard responses to those objections that they and their managers have developed (Walkup and McKee 2006). When telemarketers pitch their services and products, they try to increase the allure of what they are offering and the confidence the potential customers can have in them. They may announce that the potential customers have won a prize, which can be quite effective in overcoming the customers’ initial reluctance (Horvitz and Pratkanis 2002). Offering free premiums, typically worthless items that no one else wants, may induce potential customers to stay on the phone. Providing product guarantees, such as money-back-if-notsatisfied guarantees, and claiming membership in the local Better Business Bureau, even if not true, can increase the potential customers’ confidence in the telemarketers and what they are selling (Stevenson 1998). Fraudulent (and legitimate) telemarketers also try to target the right people to whom to pitch their products and services. They “qualify the buyer.” The telemarketers try to ensure that they are speaking to those who have the authority to make the purchase or will be the ones to make the purchase. No reason to make the pitch to an assistant of the purchaser or to a family member who is not the one who will make the decision whether or not to buy. Qualifying the buyer also involves selecting the appropriate products to pitch to the potential customers. For example, fraudulent investments are typically best pitched to males over fifty. Men typically manage the family’s finances. Men are also more willing than women to take a risk for a potentially large financial reward (Stevenson 1998). By skillfully using their voice and speech, having a standard set of responses to customers’ objections, pitching their products in an enticing way, and qualifying the buyer, telemarketers manipulate the understandings of potential

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customers. When successful, the fraudulent telemarketers have deceived the customers into purchasing goods or services that are either nonexistent or whose costs far exceed their value—and they have done this just with spoken words! CONCLUSION

Force is an important feature of muggings, homicides, domestic violence, and other coercive deviance. But force is not the only crucial component of coercive deviance. It is not even the most important component. The meanings— the understandings and emotions—that the participants create for themselves and for one another are crucial in committing deviance. Meanings also matter for telemarketing fraud and other forms of deceptive deviance. While we have primarily examined coercive deviance, meanings are important for all deviance. We urge you to explore how meanings that participants produce for one another are important in doing drugs, cheating (in academics, athletics, intimate relations, and elsewhere), employee deviance, shoplifting, police graft, corporate crime, and so on. For example, have you purchased an alcoholic drink when underage, or do you know people who have? If so, then you know that those who are underage often manipulate how they appear so that those who check identifications believe they are of legal age. Underage drinkers try to create false meanings. How they do so can be quite ingenious. Deviance does not “just happen.” Instead, offenders, victims, and others meaningfully commit deviance. PROJECTS

1. Offenders and others involved in deviance produce meanings—interpretations and feelings—that enable deviance to be committed. One form of interpretation involves “techniques of neutralization” (Sykes and Matza 1957). These are interpretations that those who commit deviance use to lessen the sting of the negative reactions from others who would condemn them, including themselves. These techniques of neutralization can be understood as after-the-fact justifications. They can also be understood as interpretations that enable offenders to lessen the offensiveness of what they are doing while they contemplate doing the activity, in doing the activity, and afterward in anticipation of future deviant actions. Offenders may deny that they are responsible for what they did; deny that any harm was done; deny that the so-called

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victim was actually a victim but was, instead, someone who got what was coming, asked for it, enjoyed it, or in other ways was not victimized; criticize as hypocrites those who condemn the offender for ignoring their own faults; and/or appeal to the loyalty of friends or the upholding of some other virtue. Talk with people who have committed deviance—cheating, underage drinking, illegal drug use, shoplifting, or other offenses. Explore with them how they understood their deviance. Perhaps ask them if they thought what they did was wrong (or terribly wrong) in order to encourage them to think about how they understand their deviance. What, if any, kinds of techniques of neutralization do they use? Instead of talking with others, you could explore your own deviance and the understandings you developed about it. 2. Ask these same people to explain how they came to commit deviance at the time and place that they did. Why had they not done it earlier or at another nearby place? These questions will invite the people to explain their reasoning, their meanings, that moved them into deviance at that moment. Don’t force the people to provide responses if they have difficulty answering, however. They may not have thought much about their deviance at the time they did it or afterward. And even if they can provide responses to your questions, you should wonder whether that is how the people understood their actions at the time of the deviance, not days or weeks later in talking to you. Instead of doing this project about others’ deviance, you can explore your own deviance. 3. What follows is a set of similar but slightly different scenarios. After reading each one, ask yourself: What does this mean? What will you do? a. You are asleep at home; you awaken to hear a noise. After listening a few minutes you definitely hear a person walking around downstairs. You are not expecting anyone. b. You are out late one night and a friend invites you over to his house. You both have had too much alcohol. He pulls into the driveway and tells you to go in and he will be there in just a second. You walk into the house and you hear a noise upstairs. c. You are house-sitting for a professor while she is out of town. After a late night of watching movies, you go to the guest room and fall asleep. You are awakened sometime later when you hear a noise of a door opening and closing. You suddenly are very awake.

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d. You need money! An acquaintance has a nice house in a good part of town. You have been there a couple of times and notice a lot of nice things such as a DVD player, game system, and a new hi-def TV. He tells you he is going skiing this weekend. You wait until late Friday night and go over to the house. You pry the backdoor open and go in. Suddenly, you hear a noise upstairs. Remember, with all four scenarios ask yourself, what is going on and what will you do? How does the meaning change for each version? Does your plan of action change when the meaning changes?

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What Happened?

Was it shoplifting? Did sexual assault occur? Was the killing murder? Did the student cheat on the test? Did the actions of the CEO and other executives constitute illegal price manipulation? When the witness made a false statement during the trial, did the witness commit perjury? Sometimes what happened seems obvious. At other times, it is not at all clear what took place. Whether obvious or not, what happened may be a more complex matter than most people realize. How what happened comes to exist and who is “responsible” for what it is that happened may be surprising. We present four different events. All occurred. As you read each event, please write what happened. FOUR INSTANCES OF DEVIANCE—MAYBE

First, we recount an incident one of us witnessed when out with his family at a family-style restaurant. Customers stood in line behind a waist-high railing as they moved toward the counter to obtain silverware and plates and order their meal. A family arrived: father, mother, and their son, who appeared to be about five years old. (Actually, it was assumed the people were a family; they were not asked.) The young boy stood on the lowest rung of the railing, which was a few inches off the ground. His dad called to him to rejoin the family. When the boy did not do as his father commanded, the dad repeated his order. The boy did not comply. The father took hold of one of his son’s arms and firmly, but

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not harshly, pulled the boy toward him, away from and off the railing. A moment later, the boy slipped free of his father’s grasp and returned to the railing. The father then hit his son hard on the boy’s back with the knuckles of his closed hand. The son cried loudly. Now, what happened? Reread our account if you wish, then formulate your response. We will return to this event after presenting three other incidents. This second event occurred in Austin, Texas. The account is based on newspaper articles. On September 16, a twenty-five-year-old woman returned home from a party a little before 3 a.m. She undressed and went to bed. Awakened by her barking dog, she turned on a light and confronted twenty-sevenyear-old Joel Valdez, armed with a knife. The woman locked herself in her bathroom and began to call 911. Valdez broke down the door, knocked the phone out of the woman’s hand, assaulted the woman, and ordered her to take off his pants. The woman thought that he was going to kill her. According to both the woman and Valdez, he told the woman not to worry, as he did not have AIDS. The woman replied, “How do you know I don’t?” Valdez answered that he didn’t have any condoms. The woman gave him one. Valdez then had sex with the woman for almost one hour before she escaped from him, ran from her house without clothes on, and summoned help from a neighbor. Valdez was arrested the next day and charged with aggravated sexual assault. According to a police report, Valdez admitted that he entered the woman’s house, “held a knife to her and had sex with her.” However, he denied that he raped her. “There was no rape to it,” he said. “She’s the one gave me them condoms. She’s the one took my pants off and put it on me. She told me to put the knife down and I did. After that, she started telling me about AIDS, then reached into her purse and put on the condom” (Garcia 1992; Milloy 1992). What happened? A third incident. This occurred in a school in our city. Again, it is based on newspaper accounts. On a winter day, a high school student, James Dunbar (names have been changed), fought with friends of another high school student, Frank Black. Black was not involved in the fight. Nevertheless, Dunbar blamed the fight on Black and slapped him in the face. Conflicting testimony was presented that Dunbar also pulled a gun on Black and threatened to kill him. Dunbar had been expelled the year before for bringing a gun to school. Testimony was presented that Dunbar was a “violent troublemaker.” That night Black got a gun, test-firing it to make sure it worked.

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The next day at school, Dunbar approached Black in the crowded hallway of their school as students changed classes. According to Black, Dunbar aggressively crossed the hall toward him, not stopping even after Black pulled out his gun. Though the unarmed Dunbar did not try to strike Black nor did Black see Dunbar with a gun, Black began shooting Dunbar when Dunbar was a few feet away. Black shot Dunbar four times. Disputed testimony was given that Dunbar was shot in the back (Greene 1995). What happened? Make your response, then continue. The final incident is similar to what happened to one of us. A student turned in a course assignment. The student’s work followed the directions for the assignment as it was given in a past semester, which differed in some small, but significant ways from the present directions. When asked about this, the student claimed to have misplaced the directions and asked a friend who had taken the course in a previous semester. Is that all that happened? What do you think? Let’s return to the first event in which the father struck his son. What do you think happened? When we have asked students what happened, they have responded in various ways. Some replied that what happened was a father disciplined or punished his misbehaving child. Others said that the father punished his son in an inappropriate way. Still others answered that what occurred was child abuse. We do not know what “really” happened. Yet one of us was as much an eyewitness as anyone in the restaurant, not more than a few feet from the incident. Whatever happened, it was troubling to him. He briefly talked about it with his wife while they ate. But he did not do anything about it. He did not say anything to the father. Most observers who believe that an adult has gone “too far” in punishing a child do not confront the adult. If they do, they may be challenged by the confronted adult, who believes the matter is not their business (Davis 1991). Later, the one of us who witnessed the incident telephoned the county office of our state’s department of social services and talked to a social worker within the child protection unit of the agency. The social worker explained that under state law “abnormal” punishment is child abuse. What was witnessed could have been abnormal punishment; hence, it could have been child abuse. But what was witnessed was not child abuse. How do we know? Let us explain near the end of the chapter.

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Recall the second incident that occurred in Austin, Texas, in which a knifewielding intruder had sex with a woman after the woman put a condom on the man. What do you think happened? The intruder obviously sexually assaulted the woman. Rape is what happened, according to our students who have been presented with the information. The grand jury hearing the case, however, voted not to indict the man for sexual assault. Although grand jury proceedings are secret and no reason was given, one participant reported that some jurors believed that the woman, protecting herself by putting a condom on the intruder, may have implied her consent. An assistant district attorney thought that the grand jury simply made a “mistake.” It had heard 550 cases over three months and had already considered 30 cases the day it decided not to indict Valdez. A month later, another grand jury hearing the case did indict the intruder on charges of aggravated sexual assault and burglary with intent to commit sexual assault (Phillips and Garcia 1992; New York Times 1992, A15). So, what really happened? Based on what we have presented so far, we do not know what happened. We will explain why we do not know what happened near the end of the chapter. In the third incident one student shot an unarmed student four times in a crowded school hallway, killing the young man. Murder, right? No. What happened was not a criminal homicide. More than one and one-half years after it occurred, the killing became what it was. How can that be? Again, we will answer this at the end of the chapter. In the fourth incident, did the student turn in a friend’s assignment, hiding the plagiarism by claiming to have gotten the directions for the assignment from a friend who had taken the course in a past semester after the student lost the directions? Or did the student innocently assume that the directions were the same from one semester to the next? It depends. We’ll explain at the end of the chapter on what it depends. Let’s explore the four incidents for insights about the occurrence of deviance. TRANSFORMING EXPERIENCES INTO WHAT HAPPENED

A father strikes his child, a knife-wielding intruder has sex with a woman who puts a condom on him, a teen shoots and kills an unarmed student, and a college student turns in an assignment that follows directions from a previous semester. These four events do not announce to us what they are. No labels

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come attached to tell us whether the father’s striking his child is abuse, whether the knife-wielding intruder’s sex with the woman is rape, whether the killing of the unarmed student is a criminal homicide, or whether the student turned in a plagiarized paper. People classify their experiences of these four incidents as one or another kind of event. Experiences may be direct, indirect, or a mixture of both. One of us directly observed the father striking his son. You had indirect experiences from reading our account of those experiences. Both grand juries in the alleged case of sexual assault in Austin, Texas, had indirect experiences of the incident. You (and both of us authors) had experiences that were even more indirect than the grand juries’ experiences, experiences based on newspaper accounts and our reports of the newspaper accounts. The jury that found the teenage student not guilty of criminal homicide had indirect experiences of the incident. Once again, you and we had experiences even more indirect than the jury’s experiences. Your experiences of the college student’s possible cheating were indirect, while the one of us who was the professor in this matter had experiences that were both indirect and direct. People do not transform the incidents into one or another kind of deviance or nondeviance. They transform their experiences “connected” to the incidents into what happened or did not happen. To know what happened—to understand whether a specific instance of this or that kind of deviance occurred—we must explore the transformation of people’s experiences into what happened. The following are some of the issues we might examine in that transformation. We may be interested in learning who is involved in that transformation. Participants, witnesses, officials of various sorts, and still others may be involved in transforming their experiences of incidents into what happened. For example, in order for the incident in Austin, Texas, to become a legal sexual assault, the woman, police, prosecutors, a grand jury, and eventually a jury (if the case went to trial, which it did) would have to transform their experiences into rape. Don’t think, however, that all instances of deviance involve officials transforming their experiences of events into what happened. The second and third examples we presented did involve officials in various ways. Much deviance, however, does not. The first and fourth examples presented above did not. Family members, friends, colleagues, and other ordinary citizens are often the only ones who experience the challenge of deciding what happened in any

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particular case. When officials are involved, they become involved typically only after ordinary citizens have transformed their experiences into instances of deviance and then reported “what happened” to officials. We might explore how the various participants transform their experiences. For example, what understandings do participants use in transforming their experience? Perhaps some members of the first grand jury reviewing the incident in Austin, Texas, made the assumption that by supplying the intruder with a condom, the woman was giving her consent to the sex. Members of the second grand jury apparently did not make that assumption. Consider assumptions made by prosecutors in one West Coast jurisdiction when handling alleged sexual assaults. They may become suspicious of apparent inconsistencies in the claims of women who report being sexually assaulted. A woman typically tells her story to several criminal justice officials. If prosecutors notice differences between the versions that they cannot account for as a result of the woman’s being confused or upset after the assault, then the prosecutors may not believe the woman. Or, if the woman’s account of what happened does not fit the prosecutor’s knowledge and experiences of such cases, then prosecutors may also question the credibility of the woman (Frohmann 1991). For example, a deputy district attorney in a West Coast prosecutor’s office questioned the credibility of one victim’s allegations because of what the deputy district attorney took to be inconsistencies between the victim’s account given to police and the account given to her. In the police report, the victim stated that all three men involved in the incident kissed her. In the interview with the prosecutor, the victim said that this was not so. The prosecutor also wondered about the inconsistency between the police report that stated that the victim and the assailant sat on the couch and watched television when they reached the assailant’s room and the victim’s interview statement to the prosecutor that she was forced into the assailant’s bedroom immediately after arriving at his room. The deputy district attorney thought that the differences in the police report and the statements made by the victim to her were “strange because there are things wrong on major events like oral copulation and intercourse.” The prosecutor assumed that the police are not going to make such mistakes in writing a report and that these discrepancies involve “major events” about which a victim would not make mistakes (Frohmann 1991, 16). The prosecutor then questioned the credibility of the victim.

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The context within which the participants transform their experiences may be important. For example, what concerns do the participants face? When the West Coast prosecutors mentioned above evaluate a sexual assault claim, they know that conviction rates are used by their superior to assess their competence. A pattern of not-guilty verdicts points to the incompetence of prosecutors. That pattern also points to prosecutors’ lack of commitment to the “organizational concern of reducing the case load of an already overcrowded court system.” Finally, judges may question the competence of prosecutors if they continually pursue cases that, according to their unsuccessful outcomes in court, should have been rejected (Frohmann 1991, 215). Within this organizational emphasis on convictability, prosecutors transform their experiences of women’s allegations of sexual assault into what happened. Part of the context within which people transform their experiences may be the larger social understandings of what constitutes this or that kind of deviance. For example, people’s beliefs about what constitutes sexual assault have changed greatly in the past several decades. When more than 200 women, eighteen years or older, living in a southern town, were surveyed thirty years ago, 19 percent said that the following event was rape: A woman and man who have been dating for three months are at the man’s apartment. After kissing and embracing for some period of time, the woman tells the man that she wants to stop. The man continues and “after a struggle, he has sexual relations” with the woman. Twenty-one percent thought that possibly rape had occurred, 16 percent were uncertain, 23 percent thought that rape probably had not occurred, and 21 percent thought that it had not occurred (Klemmack and Klemmack 1976, 139). What is your judgment as to whether the event described above is rape? Even though the description of coerced sex presented above could easily be understood as meeting the legal definition of rape, social understandings were such that it did not constitute rape to many ordinary citizens thirty years ago. When one of us asked our students to ask their friends about this incident, almost all the friends of our students said that rape had occurred. Understanding how people transform experiences into what happened may involve our exploring who transforms the experiences, assumptions that are made in transforming the experiences, the context in which the experiences are transformed, the social understandings people use in transforming their experiences, and more.

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CREATING WHAT HAPPENED

We believe that our discussion leads to the probably uncomfortable conclusion that we can never know what “really” happened. Our discussion leads even a little further. Not only can we never know what really happened, but what happened does not exist independent of what people claim happened. People create what happened as they classify their experiences as this or that kind of deviance or nondeviance. They may do so easily; they may do so with great difficulty. They may do so with consensus or with significant disagreement. To the extent that people do so easily and with widespread agreement, they are more likely to believe that they have truly recognized what happened. That certainty is comforting. That certainty is also important for people to be able to live and act with one another, to decide how to handle the offender (or nonoffender) who has committed whatever it is that happened. However, it is a certainty that masks the responsibility of those involved for transforming their experiences into what happened. No matter how certain people are, they cannot check their claims of what happened against what the event “really” is. They can check their claims against others’ claims. They can use commonsensical assumptions, such as assumptions about who is likely telling the truth, for deciding the adequacy of their conclusions about what happened. They can use very sophisticated procedures for deciding what happened. However, the event is not anything until people transform their experiences into what happened. Do not misunderstand us. We are not saying that “nothing” happened when the first grand jury did not indict the knife-wielding intruder in Austin, Texas, who held a knife to the young woman and had sex with her. We are not saying that the woman did not experience an event that terrified her and harmed her. After all, we have her report to that effect and, to an extent, the intruder’s report too. That event, however, was transformed by many people in various ways. It did not become officially a sexual assault until the defendant was convicted eight months after the incident occurred (Phillips 1993). Did the first grand jury make a “mistake”? Yes, but the first grand jury did not make a mistake because the event was “really” a sexual assault. The first grand jury made a mistake only after the second grand jury and the trial jury had officially classified the event as a sexual assault. Once classified, that is what happened—for all official purposes. Based on what we learned in the newspaper accounts, we believe that classifying it as a sexual assault is very

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sensible. We imagine that most people would agree that the event should be classified as a sexual assault. CONCLUSION

Now you should be able to explain our conclusion to the four incidents with which we began this discussion. How do we know that when one of us witnessed a father hitting his son, he did not see child abuse? After the second grand jury indicted the Austin intruder on a sexual assault charge, how could it still not be known what happened? How did the killing of the student in a crowded school hall become a legal killing, not a criminal homicide, more than one and one-half years after it occurred? What factors determine whether the college student’s paper was plagiarism or an innocent, mistaken assumption? How would you now respond to those four questions? Our responses are: The father did not abuse his son when he struck him. He did not do so because our state department of social services did not transform that incident into an instance of child abuse. Except when one of us called the county office of the agency and spoke to a professional hypothetically about that incident, the agency had no experiences of that incident. They had nothing to transform into child abuse. The father did hit his son and likely hurt him. The one of us who observed the incident thought then and still thinks now that what the father did was wrong. Yet, what the father did never became an (official) instance of child abuse. When the second grand jury indicted the intruder for sexual assault, that incident had yet to be officially transformed into a rape or something else. An indictment is a legal accusation, not a finding of guilt. The defendant went to trial, was found guilty of rape, and faced a sentence of up to life in prison. At the moment of guilt, the incident became rape, at least officially so. The killing of the unarmed student did not become what it now is—a legally defensible homicide—until more than one and one-half years after the teenager’s death. It became what it legally is when the jury returned a verdict of not guilty of either murder or the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter. Whether the college student’s paper was plagiarism or an innocent mistake depends on who transforms the experience into what it is. In this instance, to the one of us who was the professor, what happened was an innocent, but mistaken assumption that the directions from the two semesters were the same.

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Events can become instances of one or another kind of deviance or nondeviance only after they occur, not when they occur. The future always decides what happened in the past. To think about what happened is to explore how people in the events’ future transform the events of the past into what they presently are. Thus, you, each of us authors, and all others who transform their experiences are “responsible” for what it is that happened. We are not responsible for the actions of the parties involved. But we—as family members, colleagues, officials, teachers, administrators, and in many other capacities—are responsible for transforming our experiences of events into what those events become. We produce what it is that happened. It can be a troubling responsibility if we think about it. But no matter how troubling, it is a responsibility that we cannot escape. PROJECTS

1. What happened in deviance is produced through the interpretations and actions of those concerned with what occurred. Participants, observers, and others who learn of an event may decide what happened. Officials who become involved always construct what happened. They must in order to do their job. Observe the proceedings of traffic court, criminal court, or some official board that decides what occurred concerning some alleged deviance. Colleges have various boards that decide whether students, faculty, or other members of the college have violated college policy. Those boards are likely to proceed in secrecy, however; the public is not admitted. Many cases of what happened will not be contested in traffic court or criminal court. Traffic violators will not contest their citations; criminal defendants will plead guilty. The important work of constructing what happened has already occurred before the case is disposed of in court. However, you will be able to observe some of the construction of what happened during trials or hearings. Criminal trials may take longer than you are able to observe. Traffic cases are likely to be concluded more quickly. Examine how the opposing parties try to construct what happened. What arguments do they present? What information do they present to support their claims of what happened? How do they, if they do, try to discredit the presentation of the opposing party as to “what happened”? If you are able to talk with any of

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those involved in the court cases, you might try to explore what they did to prepare for constructing what happened in court. 2. Juries are charged with deciding who did what—beyond a reasonable doubt. Juries’ verdicts are official declarations of what happened. Obtain a mock trial transcript (readily available off the Internet). Perform the trial in class with students as the jury. The student jury should attempt to reach a verdict. This may be difficult to do. After the jury reaches a verdict, if it does so, the class can discuss with the jury members how they decided what was true. Class members, whether on the jury or not, can discuss how they decided what they thought happened.

13

What Kind of Person Is the Offender?

When a person commits deviance, family members, friends, colleagues, officials, and others may try to learn why the person committed the deviance. In exploring that question, the family members, friends, and others will likely try to discover what kind of person the offender is. Is the offender primarily a conventional individual who happened to commit deviance? For example, in a moment of panic and under great pressure, a “good” kid may cheat on a test without having planned to do so. Or is the individual a deviant kind of person, this offense being a result of the individual’s unacceptable character? An unemployed high school dropout may commit a robbery of a convenience store, the latest in a string of robberies, muggings, and thefts. Who is the offender? This issue may be more puzzling than first imagined. For example, a pastor in our metropolitan region was arrested for sending pornographic messages and pictures of himself over the Internet to someone he thought was a teenage girl in a neighboring state. The “girl” was a police officer pretending to be a teenage girl. The pastor was charged with eleven counts of sexual exploitation of children. Neighbors, friends, and members of his congregation were “shocked” about the pastor’s arrest. They described him as a “loving, kind, caring individual,” who “loves his church and his family” and is a good father. One church official noted that because the pastor grew up in the community where he lives and pastors, what he is charged with is something “no one expected” (Riddle 2007, A1, A10). Is the pastor the kind of

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person his neighbors and friends portray him to be, or is he someone other than who they thought he was? We take up this question of what kind of person the offender is by examining a crime that happened in our state. WHO IS SUSAN SMITH?

Consider the following nationally publicized case. A twenty-three-year-old mother strapped her two sons, three years old and fourteen months old, into their car seats, drove to a nearby lake, and rolled the car into the lake. The boys drowned. For nine days, she claimed to law enforcement officials and to the nation that a black man carjacked her car with her two boys in the back seat. She pleaded for the man to return her sons. As law enforcement officials investigated and began to suspect that she had killed her sons, the young mother confessed to what she had done. This tragedy occurred in our state, South Carolina. What kind of person is this young woman, Susan Smith? What kind of person must Susan Smith be to kill her two sons and then lie to a nation for more than a week? What do you think? Please consider this question carefully, perhaps write your thoughts, then continue. Let us tell you more about Susan Smith. Accusing her husband of being unfaithful, Susan Smith sued him for divorce three years after they married. Accusing Susan of adultery, her husband later countersued. During this marital strife, she became involved with the “most eligible” bachelor in town, the handsome son of a wealthy businessman in whose company Susan worked. They lunched together, and they went to be alone to the house she and her estranged husband had bought as newlyweds. The man, however, was apparently not as serious about their relationship as was Susan Smith. Seven days before Smith drowned her sons, she received a “Dear Jane” letter from him. He wrote that he was ending the relationship with her because, among other reasons, he was not ready to assume the responsibility of raising her young sons. Susan Smith ran into her ex-lover at a restaurant the day before she killed her sons. The ex-lover, sitting with some women during happy hour, sent Susan a beer. A few minutes later, she left upset, according to bartenders. The next morning, the day that she drowned her sons, she approached her ex-lover and told him that she had had an affair with his father while both were in New York on business. Later that morning, she told her ex-lover that she had made up the story of the affair with his father.

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That night, Susan Smith drove eight miles to a deserted lake into which she rolled her car with her sons strapped in their car seats, drowning them. What do you think now? Is Susan Smith horribly evil, willing to kill her sons in order to regain the attention of her wealthy boyfriend? Please consider what you first thought about Susan Smith. What do you now believe? Let us tell you some more about Susan Smith. When Susan Smith was six years old, her parents divorced. Her mother won custody of Susan and Susan’s two older brothers. The following month, her father, taking the breakup with his high school sweetheart hard, killed himself with a shotgun blast. Susan was told that her father was happy and in heaven. From then on, she wanted to join her father in heaven, according to her testimony at her trial. The next year, Susan’s mother married a prominent businessman in town, and Susan and her family moved to one of the nicer neighborhoods in the city. Her life seemed to go well until she took an overdose of aspirin when she was thirteen. When she was sixteen, she told her mother and sheriff ’s deputies that her stepfather repeatedly molested her for months. He would often come into her bedroom late at night and molest her. One time, after being molested for six months, she asked her stepfather to hand her a towel while she was in the bathroom. He then spied on her while she was in the shower. According to a Department of Social Service file, her stepfather later admitted to sexually assaulting Susan. Both were ordered to undergo counseling, and the stepfather was ordered to move out of the house. Susan and her mother did not press criminal charges. A year and a half later, when eighteen, Susan overdosed again on aspirin. She was hospitalized for eight days for depression and adjustment disorder. Sixteen months later and two months pregnant, Susan married her husband. The marriage was turbulent. Her husband admitted cheating on Susan and striking her at least twice. They had terrible fights, according to Susan’s husband. He once chased her into their yard and tackled her. She became disinterested in having sex with him. Tight money created discord. Susan left her husband when their older son was five months old; later she returned. He left her when their younger son was two or three weeks old. Susan was involved in several destructive sexual relationships. The incestuous relationship with her stepfather, begun in her adolescence, continued into Susan’s marriage. The last time was two months before the death of her sons. When she was eighteen, she was involved with two male coworkers, forty and

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thirty years old. She attempted suicide when she thought she was pregnant from one of those relationships. She continued to have sex with her estranged husband. She was also involved with the wealthy father of her lover, the “most eligible bachelor” in town. She became depressed when her estranged husband threatened to tell the wealthy man’s wife that her husband, old enough to be Susan’s grandfather, was involved with her. When Susan Smith confessed to killing her sons, she stated that she planned to kill herself, too, but backed out (Decker 1995; O’Shea, LeBlanc, et al. 1995a, 1995b, 1995c, 1995d). Now what do you think? What kind of person is Susan Smith? Is she a profoundly troubled woman who has been abused and used by older men? Is she the perpetrator of a horrible deed, but not horribly evil herself? Or is Susan Smith a truly wicked person, who calculatingly killed her children in order to further her desires? Does it matter who Susan Smith is? Does it matter whether she is a deeply emotionally disturbed woman who killed her two sons, whom she loved, as she grappled with her lifelong troubles and with more immediate crises? Does it matter whether she is a manipulative, highly skilled deceiver who put her desire for rekindling the affection of her wealthy lover above the lives of her children? Certainly it mattered to the prosecution and the defense attorneys. It mattered to the jury. The kind of person Susan Smith is was important in the jury’s deliberations to sentence her to life in prison or to death. Who is Susan Smith? The prosecutors portrayed her to be a conniving woman who tried to improve her social position by drowning her sons in order to regain the affection of her wealthy ex-lover. The defense attorney presented Susan Smith as a deeply mentally troubled woman, whose emotional problems grew from the time her father committed suicide. The tragedy she created grew out of her tragic life. The jury came to know Susan Smith to be a severely depressed, disturbed individual, who had an “irrational” way of seeing things, according to one juror. She needed help for her “mental illness,” according to another juror. She knew what she was doing when she killed her sons, but she was emotionally troubled, not horribly evil. Hence, the jury unanimously voted on its first ballot to sentence her to life in prison (Warren and LeBlanc 1995). The kind of person the offender is, is crucial for the phenomenon of deviance. When officials and others grapple with what to do to the offender, they consider the offender’s identity (Higgins and Butler 1982, chap. 4 and 5). Of-

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ficials and others do not react only to the offense. They react also to the offender. If the offender was acting under duress, is truly remorseful for the offense, has led a fine life, or in other ways is generally conventional, then officials and others react less harshly toward the offender. However, if the offender freely chose to commit the deviance, does not care about the harm caused, has a history of deviant behavior, or in other ways is generally offensive, then officials and others react more harshly toward the offender. Who the offender is matters greatly, as it did in the trial of Susan Smith. But who is this offender, Susan Smith? What kind of person is she? Do you think the jury was right, that Susan Smith is a profoundly emotionally troubled woman who needed help? Or was the jury wrong? Is Susan Smith primarily a manipulative, deceptive person who chose to involve herself in unhealthy relationships and who killed her sons in order to enrich her life? How can we know? CONSTRUCTING THE OFFENDER’S IDENTITY

No one can know what kind of person Susan Smith “really” is. No one can know what kind of person any offender really is. Instead, people construct the identities of offenders. However, people typically do not realize the great responsibility they have for who others “are” (Higgins 1994, chap 3). Instead, people likely believe that they are trying to discover who the offender is. People assume that the offender is a certain kind of person, with a definite set of traits. Their attempt to discover that identity may be difficult. It may be difficult to sort out conflicting information and to judge the genuineness of statements by or about the offender. It may be difficult to evaluate the impact of life events on the offender. The offender may be complex. People’s attempts to discover who the offender is may not be fully successful. People assume, however, that they are looking for an identity that exists within the offender. Consider a different approach to the question of who the offender is. The offender is whoever the observers “make” the person to be. Officials, jury members, media reporters, family members, friends, colleagues, and others give an identity to the offender. Observers do so as they piece together the information they have concerning that offender. They piece it together within a social context of assumptions about what individuals are like, of relations they have with the offender and with other parties involved in the issue, and of concerns that they are trying to manage.

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It is not possible to discover the identity of the offender or of anyone. Instead, people have experiences “of ” the offender. They may have personal involvement with the offender and/or they may learn about the offender through what others present about the offender. They have experiences of what the offender did and said and their reactions to that. People fashion an identity for the offender out of their experiences. Even people’s experiences of what the offender did and said are not pure representations of what the offender “really” did and said. People can witness the “same” event but see what happened quite differently. People can hear the “same” testimony but understand what was said very differently. What the offender did and said must also be constructed. Recall the previous chapter, “What Happened?” People cannot compare the identity they constructed for the offender to the offender’s “true” self. They cannot do so because no true self exists independent of people constructing selves for others—and even for themselves! Just as people construct identities for the offender, the offender constructs an identity for herself or himself. At best, people can compare the identity they constructed of the offender to other experiences they have concerning the offender—future experiences, new information, what others now present to them, and so on. People may be able to decide whether the identity they attribute to the offender is useful for their purposes. For example, a parole board decides that an inmate has reformed himself (most inmates are men) and is interested in making a law-abiding life for himself (Carroll, Galegher, and Wiener 1982; Carroll and Burke 1990). The board paroles the offender. The members of the parole board create meanings about why the prisoner committed the crime, the prognosis of the prisoner’s rehabilitation, and the risk that the prisoner will commit future crimes (Carroll, Galegher, and Wiener 1982). Together, these meanings create an identity for the prisoner. The parole board members can then evaluate somewhat the identity they gave to the inmate in light of how he does when paroled. (The parole board is unlikely to see its actions as “giving” an identity to the inmate; instead, it is trying to uncover the identity the inmate has.) If the inmate succeeds on parole and afterward, then the parole board members will be confident that the identity they gave to the inmate served their purposes well. If the inmate violates parole through committing new crimes and is returned to prison, then the parole board members may

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question greatly the identity they gave to the inmate and how they came to give that identity to him. They may decide to change how they assess inmates who come up for parole review. The construction of an identity for an offender, however, cannot be true. It cannot be false, either. To be true or false would imply that people can know the actual identity of the offender and then can judge the accuracy of their construction. That is not possible. Instead, we should ask other questions concerning the identity of the offender. For example, who is interested in constructing an identity for the offender? Why are these people interested? What are their relations to the offender? What are their goals in constructing an identity for the offender? What resources are available to them for doing so? How are they doing so? For example, how are they selecting some information, not other information; how are they interpreting the information; what assumptions are they using? How useful is the identity constructed of the offender for the people who constructed the identity? For example, does the identity construction enable the constructors to meet their concerns well? To understand who is an offender, we need to explore how people construct the offender’s identity. ORGANIZATIONALLY CONSTRUCTING OFFENDERS’ IDENTITIES

Organizations, not just individual observers, create the identities of offenders. Through their organizations’ procedures, within the goals and concerns of their organizations, and with the organizations’ available resources, organizational staff use their professional beliefs in creating identities for offenders (Goode 1984; Holstein 1993; Solomon 2003). The identities that the staff give to the offenders are consequential for what is done to the offenders. Consider drug courts. More than 1,200 drug courts have been established in the United States since the late 1980s, and many others have been developed throughout the world to try to help drug-using offenders stop using drugs and quit committing crimes (National Drug Court Institute 2004). As drug court staff do their job, they give identities to drug-using offenders. The staff in those courts that have flexibility as to whom they admit decide whether the offenders are worthy of their services. Specifically, they may decide whether the offenders have a significant drug problem, are sufficiently motivated to change, do not pose an unacceptable risk to the program’s support in the community, and have the capacity to benefit from the program. If

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staff decide that the drug-using applicants are those kinds of offenders (and if treatment space is available), then the staff will admit those offenders to the program. During the program, the drug-using clients are provided a variety of services that may include group and individual drug counseling and employment and housing assistance. The clients will be tested for drugs and may be expected to pay a fee to participate in the program or restitution to a victim. Clients may participate more or less adequately in the program. Some clients may miss mandatory counseling, test positive for drug use, not pay fees, come to counseling sessions but not talk about themselves or their drug use or do so in ways that counselors interpret as inadequate, and provide reasons for their failures that are deemed to be excuses and lies. Other clients may participate in ways that the professional staff evaluate as showing progress. Over months, even years, of interaction with the clients, the drug court staff give identities to the clients. Clients may come to be known as Slick, Criminal, BFL (Big Fat Liar), or in other ways as unworthy. Others who are seen as progressing satisfactorily are identified as Stepping Up, Working Hard, Leaders, and so forth. How staff identify clients has consequences for how they deal with clients. Staff monitor more closely clients whom they have come to identify as unworthy. They do so through more frequent drug testing and more frequent counseling. They may punish more harshly clients whom they have identified as unworthy when the clients test positive for drug use or miss meetings. Eventually, the staff may recommend to the drug court judge to dismiss the unworthy drug-using offenders from the program and return the offenders to the criminal court. The worthy clients will eventually be recommended for graduation from drug court and have their offenses expunged from their records. To manage drug-using offenders, drug court staff give the offenders identities of more or less moral worth (Mackinem 2003; Mackinem and Higgins 2008). CONTESTING IDENTITIES

The construction of the offender’s identity, whether by individuals or within organizations, is quite evident when parties contest the identity of the offender. At times, drug court staff disagree about what kind of individual the

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drug-using client is. When they disagree, the staff ’s construction of an identity for the drug-using offenders is most obvious. Accusers and defenders may create starkly contrasting identities for the offender (Emerson 1969). The prosecutor and defense attorney did so in the trial of Susan Smith. The attorneys did so in the trial of another young woman in our state, whose child died a year before the tragedy of Susan Smith and Smith’s two sons. Mary Alesia Sonnier was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to unlawful neglect in the death of her three-year-old daughter. The battering of the child led to her being brought by ambulance to a local hospital where she remained on life support for twenty-nine months until she died. The prosecuting attorney portrayed the young woman to the judge as a neglectful mother who allowed her child to be battered worse than any child had been battered that the prosecutor had seen. The prosecutor could not understand how a mother could have allowed her child to be so badly battered—to have her ribs broken in fifteen places, her arm broken, both shin bones bruised, her leg broken, her head and abdomen beaten, and her thumbs bruised and swollen. The child was unresponsive to most stimuli during her twenty-nine months on life support, which was “evidence of the most extreme degree of brain damage,” according to the prosecutor. Mary Sonnier’s attorney depicted her as a strikingly different person. The young mother was a child herself, dominated by a “boyfriend” twentyseven years older than she. The high school student dropped out of the eleventh grade when pregnant and was sent to Texas by her family to have her baby. While in Texas, she was called for several months by Donald Kelley, who was known by Mary’s mother. After the birth of her baby, Sonnier’s mother brought Mary back to South Carolina and “effectively” into the hands of Donald Kelley, said the attorney. Kelley was married but also lived with a “number of women,” the attorney said. The attorney claimed that Mary Sonnier was Kelley’s “doll, his toy.” Kelley was “insanely jealous.” He abused Sonnier, “beating her in the head with a pistol until she lost sight in one eye.” The attorney implied that Kelley had been the one who abused the baby, not Sonnier. Instead, Sonnier was a “victim, and she was a child.” After Kelley’s death from a heart attack, Sonnier had “turned her life around.” She lived in an apartment and worked as a computer operator. While we do not know what identity the judge gave to Mary Sonnier, the judge sen-

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tenced Mary Sonnier to five years in prison, half the maximum sentence (Zupan 1994). CONCLUSION

Constructing the identity of the offender occurs often during the dramas of deviance. Whenever people manage the offender, they construct an identity of that offender. They decide what kind of person this offender is and how they should handle the offender. Teachers construct identities for their misbehaving students; law enforcement officers do so for those they confront; mental health professionals predict if individuals referred against their will for services are or are not dangerous to themselves or others; juries may try to decide whether the accused is the kind of person who could commit the offense; judges consider the remorse of the convicted offender in passing sentence; parents wonder about the character of their children who have acted unacceptably; and so on. Who, then, is Susan Smith? Like any offender, Susan Smith is whoever the involved parties have created her to be. That is an awesome responsibility, which most people are not willing to recognize as theirs. Whether or not people recognize that responsibility, they cannot avoid it. When you are involved in the dramas of deviance, encountering those who have committed deviance, consider carefully how you and others construct identities for the offenders. PROJECTS

1. Dennis Rader was arrested in February 2005 and pled guilty in June 2005 to killing ten people dating to 1974 in the Wichita, Kansas, metropolitan area. He was sentenced in August 2005 to serve ten consecutive life sentences. Rader styled himself as the BTK strangler for his modus operandi—bind, torture, and kill. Rader appears to be an undeniably evil man. But was he only that? What kind of deviant was he? Go to www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/ special_packages/btk/ and decide for yourself. 2. We do not uncover the identity of the offender. We construct it. Participants may clash in their construction of the offender’s identity. You can witness how participants construct the identity of the offender and the clash between detractors and defenders by observing the sentencing phase of criminal court cases (or other disciplinary hearings). During that phase, prosecutors will likely try to convince the judge or jury that the offender deserves a

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particular sentence because of the heinous nature of the offense and the offender. The defense lawyer is likely to present the offender as a less offensive kind of person, one deserving of more understanding or compassion. How do opposing attorneys construct the identity of the offender? What strategies and reasoning do they use? What information, such as character witnesses, do they present? If you are able to talk with the attorneys, then you may be able to explore how the attorneys prepare for this important production—the production of the offender. If you can talk with whoever decides the punishment, you can examine how the decision maker(s) make sense of the identities presented and what identity the decision maker(s) fashion for the offender. 3. If a group to which you belong is dealing with a member who is considered to be acting inappropriately, explore how the other group members identify the offender. Do group members give the offensive member a deviant identity? Do other members give the offensive member a more conventional identity? If so, then how do those members explain why the offensive member is acting inappropriately? Do members who disagree about the offender’s identity try to persuade one another or try to convince undecided members of the offender’s identity? Can you make any sense of why some members give the offender a more deviant identity than others? For example, are those who give a deviant identity to the offender not close in their relation to the offender? What else can you explore about this identity construction?

14

Images of Harm or Harmful Images?

To start, we ask you to think quickly, without reflection, then write your response to two questions. After you read the first question, quickly write your response. When you finish, then read the second question and quickly write your response. After writing both of your responses, then continue reading. Are you ready? First question: When you think of crime, what specific crimes come to mind? Quickly list them. Second question: When you think of a criminal, what visual image of the criminal comes to mind? Quickly, describe that visual image as well as you can. When we ask our students to respond to these two questions or to have their friends respond to them, the responses typically have much in common. Maybe your responses are similar to theirs. When you thought of crime, did you respond as our students and their friends typically do, by listing murder, robbery, assault, rape, burglary, drug addiction, and other “street offenses”? Did you list corporate fraud, embezzlement, political corruption, violations of securities laws (i.e., insider trading of stocks and other manipulations of stocks, bonds, and other financial products), workplace safety violations, price fixing, and other “suite offenses”? Our students do not typically mention these suite offenses done by seemingly respectable people within mainstream companies and organizations.

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When you pictured a criminal, did you describe, as our students and their friends typically do, a male, perhaps young, likely low income, maybe scruffy or tough looking? Did you give the criminal an ethnic or racial identity as a “minority” individual? We know that issue is particularly sensitive. Or did you picture a woman, someone dressed in a business suit, an executive, government official, or professional? We imagine that you likely did not. Few of our students or their friends do so. THE TYPICAL CRIME AND THE TYPICAL CRIMINAL

Many people have acquired an image of the Typical Crime and the Typical Criminal (Reiman 2007, chap. 2). When people think of crime, they usually think of predatory offenses done intentionally by one or a small number of offenders against one or a small number of victims. These could be called street offenses, though they are not done only “on the street.” When people think of a criminal, they typically imagine a young male who is tough looking, not financially well off, and perhaps even a member of a racial or ethnic minority. People are much less likely to think of illegal behavior that indirectly victimizes people done by those who are seen as respectable members of the community. These might be called suite offenses to distinguish them from those that typically come to mind. Research on the stereotypes that people have concerning crime and criminals supports Jeffrey Reiman’s argument and the results we have obtained from hundreds of students. For example, Thomas Gabor (1994) asked graduate students in criminology to select the two men out of a choice of six men they thought were most likely to have committed an armed robbery. None of the men pictured had committed an armed robbery. The students overwhelmingly selected among three men who “looked” the toughest or scruffiest—one had long hair, another had a clean-shaven head with a dangling earring, and the third looked like a young Fidel Castro. Gabor also asked the students to select the two men who were least likely to have committed armed robbery. Again, the students overwhelmingly selected among the other three men who “looked” to be the mildest, most “mainstream” individuals. Another investigator found that when asked to select photographs of people most likely to have committed armed robbery or murder, individuals typically selected pictures of people’s faces that had been consistently rated as unattractive by a previous panel of raters (mentioned in Gabor 1994, 29–30).

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Much other research indicates that people have facial, social-class, and ethnic/racial stereotypes of who is a criminal (Gabor 1994). This research supports well Jeffery Reiman’s notion of the Typical Crime and the Typical Criminal. To the extent that racial profiling occurs, then this law enforcement practice further supports Jeffrey Reiman’s claim about a Typical Criminal. Racial profiling is law enforcement action that targets individuals at least in part due to their race, ethnicity, or national origin. In “hard” racial profiling, law enforcement relies solely on the race, ethnicity, or national origin of individuals in deciding whom to stop, search, and/or arrest. In “soft” racial profiling, law enforcement uses race, ethnicity, or national origin as one of several characteristics along with characteristics and behavior directly related to possible criminal activity, such as suspicious behavior, traffic violations, and such. “Hard” racial profiling violates the constitutional provision for equal protection. Unless prohibited by a law, “soft” racial profiling appears to be constitutional. While many anecdotes exist about being stopped due to “driving while black or brown” (also referred to as “DWB,” a takeoff on DWI, driving while intoxicated) or “flying while Arab,” the research does not conclusively show that racial profiling is widespread (Pampel 2004). Jeffrey Reiman and others argue that our images of crime—the Typical Crime and the Typical Criminal—are displayed to us by the media. When politicians talk tough on crime and campaign for votes, they, too, focus on the Typical Crime and Typical Criminal. Some of you might object. The Typical Crime and Typical Criminal, you object, are not figments of people’s imagination or illusions presented by the media and politicians. Instead, you might argue that most crimes are street offenses done by low-income, often minority males. Millions of street offenses are reported to the police each year. Poor minority males are more likely to commit such offenses than are those with other social characteristics, though scholars debate this issue. However, many individuals who are not poor minority males commit such offenses, and most who are poor minority males are not high-rate offenders (Elliot and Ageton 1980; Reiman 2007). While who is more likely to commit street offenses provides some basis for the Typical Crime and Typical Criminal images, those images may greatly mislead us. They may mislead us in many ways. We discuss two ways. First, the Typical Crime and Typical Criminal images encourage us to view crime as

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done by a certain segment of citizens, a segment with fewer resources and respect. These images overlook that crime is widespread. Recall chapter 2, “Who Is Deviant?” People from “all walks of life” commit crime. Most people have committed behaviors that clearly fit the legal definitions of crime, even if they have never been caught or punished (Gabor 1994). Have you drunk when underage, tried an illegal drug, stolen something from a store, taken an item from an employer, cheated on your income tax, assaulted (hit) someone, or committed other crimes? Probably so. While most people have committed crimes, most do not regularly commit serious offenses. Nevertheless, the Typical Crime and Typical Criminal images mislead us to think crime is committed by a certain segment of people, not by a wide range of people. Typical Crime and Typical Criminal images mislead us in another, related way. These two images tell people that they have most to fear from those who are least successful in society. These images encourage people to look “below” themselves when they are worried about their safety, not to the “side” or “above” themselves in society. Would you be surprised to learn that most harm to people and to their property is done by executives, managers, professionals, white-collar workers, and other successful people (Reiman 2007)? Americans have more money stolen from them through white-collar offenses than by street criminals. A conservative estimate is that more than $400 billion was stolen in America in 2003 through consumer fraud; bribery, kickbacks, and payoffs; embezzlement and pilferage; computer- and Internetrelated crime; insurance fraud; securities thefts and frauds; and other whitecollar crimes. This theft from white collar crime is more than twenty-four times the $17 billion in property crime that the FBI reported in its Uniform Crime Report for 2003 (Reiman 2007, 123–27). We know we have been victimized when our CD system is stolen from our car or we are mugged. Whitecollar offenders pick our pockets without our typically realizing it. The shareholders in the now defunct corporation Enron, many of whom were employees, learned too late of the massive fraud that its top executives committed. Enron’s management used deceptive partnership arrangements, treated loans as revenue, and misled its employees and the public among other deceptive practices to conceal its losses. As members of Enron’s management did this, some sold up to $1 billion in Enron stock. Employees, however, were not allowed to sell their shares in Enron due to administrative changes to their stock plan. When Enron went bankrupt, its investors lost about $60 billion in

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the value of Enron stock, including the retirement savings of up to 20,000 employees. (However, had Enron management not used deceptive practices, its stock value would have likely been much less.) Enron was one of a number of high-profile companies such as AOL-Time Warner, Kmart, Rite Aid, telecommunications company WorldCom (now MCI), and Adelphia (a large cable company before it declared bankruptcy) where management was alleged to have committed or was found guilty of committing one fraud or another (Reiman 2007, 131–37). More people die or are physically harmed each year through the hazards of their work than are murdered or assaulted. For example, in 2003 approximately 16,500 people were killed through murder or nonnegligent manslaughter. Approximately 850,000 aggravated assaults occurred, according to law enforcement. During that same year, a conservatively estimated 55,000 deaths occurred as a result of occupational disease and injury, and 2.3 million work-related disabling injuries or serious job-related illnesses occurred. Much of this occupational harm and many of the deaths reflect the failures of management to provide safety features and government to enforce safety standards (Reiman 2007, 82–87). While occupational and criminal harms are underreported, occupational harms may be more likely underreported than criminal harms (Reiman 2007, 84–85). Further, only about half the American population works, whereas all citizens are at risk of being a victim of crime. Therefore, the figures for crime need to be halved or those for occupational harms doubled in order to compare the likelihood of citizens being harmed “on the streets” (and in homes) or “in the workplace.” HOW TYPICAL IMAGES ARE CREATED

According to Jeffrey Reiman (2007), the criminal justice system operates so that it helps to produce and maintain a “visible” class of criminals, the Typical Criminals who commit Typical Crimes. How does it do so? It does so by not dealing with known sources of crime, by primarily focusing on only some of the harm that people commit, and by not enforcing the law as vigorously against those who are most successful in society as against those who are not successful. First, society and the justice system do not seriously address what are some of the important sources of street crime: the impoverishment of hope and opportunity that many low-income people experience; the failures of prisons to

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reform; the widespread availability of guns; and, for Reiman, a misguided war against drugs. This war against drugs increases the cost to obtain the drugs, which increases the likelihood that users and addicts may steal and rob to obtain the money to buy the drugs, the profit to be made in selling the illegal drugs, and the use of violence to protect the illegal businesses and profits. Not all scholars agree with Reiman’s assertion of these sources of crime. You might look at chapter 10, “What Causes People to Commit Deviance?” Next, by focusing primarily on one-on-one street harms, such as murder, robbery, and assault, rather than on indirect harms, such as occupational hazards, chemical assaults on citizens (through pollution, food additives, and even smoking), and unnecessary and dangerous medical practices, society narrowly defines what is crime or what is serious crime. It does not proclaim that these indirect harms are serious enough to use the full force of the state to control them. Third, by more likely arresting, prosecuting, and imprisoning poor, minority offenders than white-collar, professional, and corporate offenders, the criminal justice system fills society’s prisons with only some of the people who harm Americans. Have you ever visited a prison? We encourage you to do so. However, do not be misled. The typically poor, minority men that you will see in prison are only a portion of those who harm their fellow citizens. Through these three processes, the criminal justice system creates a visible class of criminals who, indeed, typically have harmed others. Typical Crime and Typical Criminal images help protect the advantaged position of those who are successful (to varying degrees) in America. First, when concerned about their safety and their property, most people fear those who are unsuccessful. Citizens, politicians, and other officials do not give comparable attention to the harm done by those who are successful. When politicians talk tough about crime, they are primarily talking about street crime, not harm from the suites. The harmful practices of executives, professionals, white-collar workers, and other (relatively) successful people who enrich themselves may go uncontrolled or at least not as carefully controlled. Second, the unequal opportunities for becoming successful in society are not seriously addressed, either. When the Typical Criminal is found guilty, the criminal’s individual responsibility is stressed. Society is let go. Social conditions, such as the impoverishment of hope and opportunity that many poor people experience and that may be mitigating circumstances, are judged not

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to be important. Further, as the Typical Criminal is responsible for his crime, so he is seen as responsible for his poverty. He and others like him are viewed as part of the dangerous class. They are a danger to the safety and well-being of America and its moral citizens. Unequal opportunities, such as the great inequality in schooling and job opportunities (Kozol 1991, 2005; Wilson 1996), are downplayed as sources of crime and poverty. Finally, those who have the greatest capacity to change the justice system—those who are most successful—may have little reason to do so. They, too, accept the images of the Typical Crime and the Typical Criminal and benefit from those images being widely held (Reiman 2007). Most who are successful do not routinely, seriously harm their fellow citizens. Similarly, most who are poorly educated and marginally employed if employed at all do not routinely harm their fellow citizens. Many who work in the criminal justice system are dedicated and compassionate. Yet, people with good intentions can create or help maintain harmful arrangements. CONCLUSION: IS THE JUSTICE SYSTEM CRIMINAL?

To end this discussion, let us raise the following question posed by Jeffrey Reiman: Is the criminal justice system just or is it criminal? That may seem like a harsh question. Yet, is every system of law just? Do you believe that the legal systems in Nazi Germany, the former Soviet Union, South Africa when it embraced apartheid, China, and other countries are or were just? Was the American legal system just when it promoted slavery and then discrimination? The criminal justice system and crime both use force. They may even use deadly force. Criminals use force to coerce people to act against their own interests and for the interests of the criminals. The criminal justice system presumably uses force to coerce some people to act in order to protect the interests of all in freedom and security. To be superior to crime, the justice system must use force fairly applied to all who harm in order to protect equally all of the other citizens. To the extent that it does not, then the criminal justice system is less just and more criminal (Reiman 2007, conclusion). The creation, use, and consequences of the images of the Typical Crime and the Typical Criminal indicate that the criminal justice system at present falls short of being a system of justice. To conclude, do our images of crime and criminals capture well the harm to which we are exposed? If not, are those images harmful to a more useful understanding of how our well-being is threatened? What do you think?

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PROJECTS

1. Ask a sample of friends or fellow students to list quickly what crimes come to mind when they think of crime. Give people perhaps thirty seconds. Ask them or another sample of people to describe quickly what image comes to mind when they think of a criminal. They should include any physical description that comes to mind. Compile the list of crimes. Examine the images of the criminal. Do these fit the notions of the Typical Crime and the Typical Criminal of which Jeffrey Reiman writes? Do any contradict these notions? Do some responses point, instead, to suite deviance, such as corporate fraud committed by successful citizens? 2. Examine a sample of issues of a newspaper. (You might try to examine a sample over a month or a year instead of over a few days in order to have a more representative sample of what the newspaper typically presents.) Identify all articles about crime. What crime or crimes are the focus of each article? If pictures of the defendants are presented, note their race, sex, and, if possible, their (probable) social status. Such information may be included in the articles. Compile this information. For example, what percentage of articles discuss typical street crimes; what percentage discuss corporate, professional, and other suite offenses? Recall, street crimes, such as murder, can be committed by professional people. What percentage of the pictures present minority or nonminority offenders? What percentage of the articles concern lower-status offenders compared to middle- or higher-status offenders? What do you conclude are the images that newspapers present about harm and who commits it? 3. You can explore other media, such as television or movies, for the images they present of crime and, more generally, deviance such as alcoholism and mental illness (Denzin 1991; Zimmerman 2003). Use the directions for project 2 to guide you.

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Who Could Cause Such Harm?

What kind of people could knowingly, physically harm others? What kind of people would cause others such harm that those harmed would scream in pain, would cry out not to be harmed? What do you think? Please write your response, then continue. Perhaps you wrote that disturbed, emotionally troubled, or evil people would act so cruelly. Maybe those with mental health problems or who had been seriously abused as children might commit such harm. Such people might be sadistic, enjoying the torment of others. Let’s explore this issue further by examining some well-known research. THAT’S SHOCKING

Imagine that you are asked to participate in research concerning memory and learning conducted by a professor at your campus. You will be given about fifteen dollars as compensation for your participation. Do you think you might be willing to participate, especially if it took only about one hour? If you do, when you arrive at the designated place for the research, you are greeted by the professor. The professor explains to you and another volunteer that he, the professor, is interested in the effects of punishment on learning. To explore those effects, one of the volunteers will be the learner; the other volunteer will be the teacher. Any time the learner makes a mistake in the learning activity, the teacher will electrically shock the learner. With each mistake

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made by the learner, the teacher will be expected to increase the intensity of the shock by 15 volts to a maximum of 450 volts. The levels of shock are labeled with terms such as “slight,” “moderate,” “strong,” and even “XXX.” While the shocks can be “extremely painful,” they produce “no permanent tissue damage,” says the professor. Through the luck of the draw, you are selected to be the teacher; the other volunteer will be the learner. The professor shows the equipment to you and the other volunteer and provides a sample shock to you (labeled 40 volts on the shock generator) so that you know how it feels. Would you now participate? Would you shock the other volunteer when that person made a mistake? If so, how far would you go in shocking that other person? Would you throw the switch thirty times, going to the maximum shock, 450 volts? Please consider your response and your reasoning for your response, even write your response, then continue. We imagine that you responded that you would not shock the learner to the highest level when the individual made a mistake, assuming that you were even willing to participate. Perhaps you were willing to shock the learner mildly, but then stop after a few shocks. That is what college students, psychiatrists, and middle-class adults told Stanley Milgram (1974), the Yale professor who conducted this well-known research. Everyone he asked replied that they would not shock the learner to 450 volts. They would stop well before that level. The vast majority, 90 percent, responded that they would stop before level thirteen, 195 volts, labeled “very strong shock.” They also believed that most people would stop well before the highest level of shock. Only a tiny percentage of people, less than 1 or 2 percent, would shock the learner to the highest level, thought these adults. Most people are decent, caring individuals. They would not harm others by shocking them, certainly not for making a memory mistake. Disturbed people would harm others, not decent people. Thus, the responses of the psychiatrists, college students, and middle-class adults should not surprise us. They are decent people, and they know that most people are decent. Indeed, Milgram encountered difficulties in doing his research. In developing the specific procedures for his research, he struggled to create a procedure in which every volunteer assigned to the role of teacher did not continue to the highest level of shock! Almost every volunteer in the role of the teacher shocked to the highest level when the learner was placed in a room separate from the teacher and the learner did not protest the shocks. Mild protests

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from the learner were also inadequate. Milgram eventually strengthened the protests to include references to a heart problem, repeated shouts to be let out, and agonized screams. By the way, while ethical criticisms were made of Milgram’s work, the learner was not actually shocked, though the teacher did not know that during the research. The learner was a confederate of Milgram’s who posed as another volunteer. Through a rigged draw, the confederate was always selected to be the learner. Milgram conducted many versions of his research. The learner typically sat in a room separate from the teacher, but in some versions the learner was in the same room as the teacher. The researcher usually sat in the room with the teacher, directing and prodding the teacher to continue with the research if the teacher hesitated to continue. In another version, the researcher left the room after giving the initial instructions to the teacher and by telephone continued to direct and prod the teacher to continue. In still another version, the research was done at an office in Bridgeport, Connecticut, not at Yale University, where most of the research took place. In another setup, the researcher was unexpectedly called from the room before explaining what shock levels to use when the learner made mistakes. While gone, a third volunteer (actually Milgram’s confederate), who was to record times from a clock at the researcher’s desk, “got” the idea that the teacher should increase the shock level each time the learner made a mistake. Throughout the experiment, this apparent volunteer insisted that his suggestion be followed. In a different version, the teacher chose the level of shock to administer. Milgram developed still more versions of his experiment (Milgram 1974). The percentage of teachers who shocked to the highest level varied among the different versions of the research. For example, when the learner was placed in a room separate from the teacher, groaning, screaming in agony, and pleading to be let out (with his protests tied to particular shock levels), and then not responding to the questions after 330 volts were administered, 63 percent of the teachers went to the highest level of shock. When the learner was placed in the same room as the teacher and screamed as in the previously mentioned setup, 40 percent went to the highest level. “Only” 30 percent went to the highest level when the learner was in the same room as the teacher and the teacher had to place the learner’s hand on a shock plate at the 150-volt level or beyond, because the learner would not put his hand on the plate.

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When the teacher chose the level of shock, 3 percent chose the highest level (Milgram 1974). What do you think about Milgram’s research? In particular, from Milgram’s research, what thoughts do you have about who can harm others such that those harmed scream in agony? Please consider your response, then continue. We believe Milgram’s work suggests several insights about deviance, insights that question our common sense about deviance. ORDINARY DEVIANTS

Many people view deviants as dramatically different from ordinary individuals. People may take for granted that those who commit deviance, especially serious deviance, are different kinds of individuals than they are (Goode 1978, chap. 5; 2005, 92). Ordinary people could not do that. For example, ordinary people could not seriously harm others. Milgram’s work challenges this common sense. Instead, humans have great capacity to harm others as well as to help others. If people can compellingly experience harming others as reasonable, sensible, necessary, unavoidable, deserved by the others, “no big deal,” a duty to be carried out, and so on, then they can harm others. People may make harming others compellingly experienced as doable in many ways. We do not explore the variety of ways in which it is done. In chapter 10, we explored how people create powerful feelings and understandings that enable them, compel them, to commit righteous slaughter (Katz 1988, chap 1). Lonnie Athens (1989) explores how people come to be dangerous, violent persons with a (horrific?) willingness to harm others violently. However, people also harm others in more ordinary situations. For example, most parents in past decades hit (i.e., used corporal punishment on) their children, which was often likely painful, though a recent study indicates that less than 10 percent of parents admit to spanking their children ages two to eleven (Straus 1991, 1994; Scelfo 2007). The volunteers who became the teachers in Milgram’s research were ordinary people. Recall that in one version of Milgram’s research, the teachers chose what shock level to administer. Just one out of forty volunteers chose the highest level. Thirty-eight of the forty volunteers chose a level no higher than 150 volts, level ten. These forty volunteers resemble the volunteers who participated in the other versions of Milgram’s research. These were ordinary people who had no pathological desire to harm others.

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A diverse group of ordinary people participated in Milgram’s research. These ordinary people varied in their biographical experiences, personalities, and in other ways. It did not take a certain kind of person to inflict apparently agonizing harm on the learner. For example, it was not “weak-willed” people or “brutal” people who shocked the learner. With the “help” of Milgram and his assistants, who played various parts in the research, the ordinary citizens made shocking the learner compellingly doable. From the moment they responded to the advertisement to participate in the research, they created a willingness, even a sense of obligation, to continue what they had started. They created the willingness, even the obligation, acted on it, had it reemphasized for them by the researcher, shifted responsibility to the researcher or to the learner for the learner’s being shocked, questioned whether they should continue, wrestled with that powerfully felt obligation as they experienced the resistance of the learner, and at times abandoned that obligation and stopped. Ordinary people did all this (Miller 1985; Higgins 1994, 16–17). While ordinary people are capable of committing great harm, ordinary people hold to a different common sense. Recall that Milgram asked psychiatrists, college students, and middle-class adults whether they would shock the learner and whether people in general would shock the learner. These “other” ordinary people—who did not participate as the teacher in Milgram’s research but were asked to respond about their and others’ possible participation—could not imagine that they or others would shock the learner. They thought only a small percentage, 1 or 2 percent at most, would shock to the highest level. These ordinary people saw a wide gulf between themselves and those who would shockingly harm others. They were dramatically wrong. Their common sense failed them. Ordinary people have great capacity to harm others. By typically thinking otherwise, by separating normal people, themselves, from “those” deviants when thinking about who harms others, ordinary people protect themselves from seriously confronting their capabilities. Their common sense, which holds that normal people would not commit serious deviance, comforts ordinary people. For example, they look abroad to the horrors inflicted by warring factions on one another in a distant country, to the slaughter of tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people. They ask themselves what kinds of people must those distant people be to do such horrors? They answer that those people must be savages, just look at them.

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UNREMARKABLE HARM

In looking at those seemingly backward, brutal savages, ordinary people fail to look at themselves, at the horrific harm that ordinary people do commit and their ordinary ancestors have committed. For example, during the European colonization of the Americas (or might it be called invasion) between 60 and 80 million indigenous people in Central America, South America, and the Indies perished before the seventeenth century. As many as 95 percent, even 99 percent, of indigenous people were exterminated in various parts of Central and South America in less than one hundred years. While much of this genocide resulted from the spread of European diseases, the Europeans also worked the enslaved Amerindians to death or mass murdered them. European explorers chained the native people together at the neck, marched them to mines to labor, and decapitated those who did not walk fast enough. Those who reached the silver mines typically toiled for three to four months before they died. The slave drivers figured that it was cheaper to work tens of thousands of native people to death and then replace them than to support a permanent enslaved workforce. The explorers also “sliced off women’s breasts for sport and fed their babies to the packs of armored wolfhounds and mastiffs that accompanied the Spanish soldiers” (Stannard 1992, 430). The destruction of the native people in North America was as complete as it was in the lands to the south. Between the 1500s and the late 1800s, 97 percent to 99 percent of the native population of 7 million to 18 million was exterminated. Again, much of the destruction resulted from the spread of disease. However, the native people were also systematically killed so that the colonizers could control the land. The colonizers burned Indian towns and the surroundings, poisoned communities, murdered the native people, and sold Indian women and children into slavery in the Indies. William Bradford, the Governor of Plymouth Colony, wrote of the reaction of settlers to one mass immolation: It was a fearful sight to see (the Indians) frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed sweet sacrifice, and (the settlers) gave praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them. (Stannard 1992, 432)

The effort to eradicate the native population of North America continued with the founding of the United States. Almost all of America’s early leaders

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supported that extermination. Andrew Jackson particularly seemed to relish the challenge. He called native people “savage dogs,” boasted of keeping the scalps of some of the native people he killed, and supervised the mutilation of about 800 Creek Indian corpses. The noses were cut off to document the number killed. Long strips from the bodies were sliced, tanned, and made into bridle reins. Another time, Jackson ordered his troops to kill all the Indian children they could find, along with the men and women, so that the Indians could not reestablish their population (Stannard 1992). This mass killing was “unremarkable,” not because it is not horrific—at least to those who read of it today—but because it was relatively ordinary to those who committed it or were associated with those who committed it. People throughout the world today, not merely European colonizers of the Americas or early American explorers and officials of past centuries, commit this unremarkable harm. Tens of millions of people perished in Stalinist Russia. The Nazis and their allies exterminated millions of Jews and other “despised” people. America, Great Britain, and their allies killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in the firebombing of Dresden, Germany; in the bombing of Tokyo, Japan; and in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, during World War II. The Japanese military and government brutalized, raped, tortured, and killed millions of people in China and Asia, before and during World War II, as well as committed unspeakable horrors against captured U.S. and other Allied armed services personnel. In the past several decades ethnic and political conflict has led to the systematic slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people, even millions all told, in Rwanda, the Sudan, and elsewhere in Africa; in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Middle East; in Cambodia, Indonesia, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia; in the former Soviet Union, in the former Yugoslavia, and in other countries and regions of the world. BECOMING GENOCIDAL KILLERS

Ordinary people have helped to kill hundreds of thousands, even millions, of other ordinary people in genocidal killings in the past several decades throughout the world. How can we understand how ordinary people become participants in mass killings? James Waller (2002) offers an intriguing explanation. Through the combination of four processes, ordinary people may be able to commit mass killings: an ancestral shadow, identities of the perpetrator, a culture of cruelty, and the social death of the victims.

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Successful societies (and other social groups) develop cultural patterns that allow them to succeed and thrive. These ancestral shadows emphasize ethnocentrism, a belief in the superiority of one’s own society or social group; xenophobia, the fear of outsiders who could harm one’s own society; and a social desire to dominate other societies and groups, which can lead to aggression and violence against outsiders. Ancestral shadows provide the societal orientation within which ordinary people may become perpetrators of genocidal killings. However, not all members of societies that develop such ancestral shadows participate in mass killings. Through cultural beliefs, moral disengagement, and rational self-interest, some members may develop identities of a perpetrator. Some members may experience cultural beliefs that direct them to look to others, such as government officials or religious leaders, to make decisions instead of accepting responsibility to make their own decisions. Through moral disengagement, a subgroup of individuals comes to be seen as socially unworthy outsiders, not covered by traditional moral obligations. Finally, violence toward the morally unworthy may come to be understood as rationally serving one’s professional, organizational, and/or personal interest. With the development of these identities, ordinary people have become more willing to obey authorities who direct them to use violence against unworthy outsiders. As ordinary people develop identities of a perpetrator, some come to be members of or participants in specific organizations and groups, such as military and paramilitary organizations. These organizations may socialize their ordinary members into a culture of cruelty whereby the members gradually develop a professional callousness toward violence and death. Through pressure from and dependence on their comrades, the ordinary people remain attached to their organizations that embrace cultures of cruelty. Finally, through producing the social death of the victims, ordinary people who have become potential genocidal killers are more easily able to physically kill the victims. By taking away the humanity of the victims through derogatory labels and identities, ordinary people can more easily commit mass killings without any moral qualms. If killing others rids your society of a harmful disease, for example, then the killing is justified, even honorable. Ordinary people do become perpetrators of horrible evil. Waller provides one explanation of how that may occur. To recognize humanity’s potential for perpetrating such violence points us to the never-ending challenge of countering that potential.

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HONOR KILLING

In a more personal way, not just on the scale of mass extermination, ordinary people also commit “unremarkable” harm. Honor killing is the murder of a woman who has violated her family’s honor according to the customs of the society. The violation typically involves the woman having some kind of personal or intimate relation with a man that is not sanctioned by the woman’s family. The honor killing is intended to cleanse the family of the stain its daughter brought upon it and restore its honor. Uncles, fathers, and brothers typically carry out these murders. These men are not evil, but they kill anyway. For example, according to Human Rights Watch, a minimum of fifteen to twenty women (although exact numbers are difficult to determine) are killed each year in Jordan by family members because the women have violated the family’s honor. In one instance, a seventeen-year-old Palestinian woman fell in love with a Jordanian man. They kept the relationship secret for several years. After the two had become sexually involved, they turned themselves into the police because they wanted to get married. The police notified the now twenty-fiveyear-old daughter’s family and the local governor. The father refused permission for her daughter to marry. After staying at the police station overnight, the woman met with the governor and told him she wanted to get married. Her father still refused to give his consent. In the presence of the governor, her father said, “If you marry him or leave here, I will kill you.” This may seem strange to Americans and other westerners, but family honor is so important in the Middle East that a father may kill a daughter who has dishonored the family. This father is an ordinary man who can commit great but unremarkable harm. By the way, the woman was placed in prison for her protection; for how long, we do not know (Mayell 2002; Peratis 2004). CONCLUSION

Ordinary people, not just deranged, psychotic people, commit tremendous harm. They do so when they create powerfully compelling understandings and feelings. Some of those compelling understandings and feelings may be widely accepted, legitimate. The harm then is not deviant, but perhaps even honorable. The perpetrators may be heroes. At other times, the compelling understandings and feelings are viewed by authorities and citizens as unacceptable,

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wrong, criminal, even abnormal. The offenders are punished, even executed. Certainly some who commit great harm are appropriately and usefully understood to be deeply disturbed. Yet, ironically, the harm that those who are deeply disturbed commit is often much more limited than that done by ordinary people and their powerful leaders and governments in the name of a “just cause” (Higgins 1994, 1–2). Serial killers, even those like the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed seventeen people from late 1978 to 1991 and ate parts of some of his victims, are no match for the killing machine of European explorers, colonists, Stalinist Russia, the Nazis, Imperial Japan, or other countries or warring factions throughout the world today. Those deranged individuals are no match for the harm committed by the ordinary people who have become the “willing executioners” for governments and factions bent on domination (Goldhagen 1996). And the leaders and citizens of other countries not committing the atrocities have been bystanders to the horror committed elsewhere without intervening (Sobran 1997). Ordinary people also commit more “mundane” harm, assaulting one another without too much reflection or concern. For example, much domestic violence is not taken to be violence at all (Straus 1991; Straus and Donnelly 2001). Until recently it was smart business practice to sell products that were known to be injurious to the health of their users, such as cigarettes or poorly designed automobiles, and even to attempt to get their users “hooked” on the products. Mundane harm occurs “everywhere,” committed by almost anyone. Compared to past eras, at least in some ways, people are harming one another less (Higgins 1994, 144, 150–53; Straus and Donnelly 2001, chap. 2). For that we can be grateful. Now, what would you do if you were the teacher asked to shock a learner who made mistakes? Are you having second thoughts? PROJECTS

1. Ask a sample of individuals these questions: Who would knowingly and significantly physically harm others? Who would do so to the death of the people harmed? Ask the individuals to write and explain their responses. Examine the responses. Can you usefully group the responses into different kinds? For example, maybe some responses focus on traits of the individual, such as mental health problems. Perhaps others stress reasons, such as seeking

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revenge. Some responses may point to experiences earlier in the people’s lives that turn them into kinds of people who seriously harm others. You decide whether it is useful to group responses into categories that you create. Are some responses more prevalent than others? What proportion of the responses indicates that disturbed, abnormal people are the ones who seriously harm others? Do these responses that focus on disturbed people give any indication that more than the disturbed quality of the people is important when harm is committed? Did anyone indicate that ordinary people seriously harm others? What insights do you now have? 2. Explain Milgram’s research to a sample of people, as we did to you. Ask that sample of people what they would do in the situation. How far would they shock the learner? Ask them what percentage of people they believe would shock to the highest level. Request that they explain their responses. Compare people’s responses to Milgram’s results. How able are people to imagine their actions in seemingly novel situations? If they explain deviance by referring to people with deviant traits, then are they likely to imagine that they and other ordinary people could commit the deviance? Does an explanation that stresses deviant traits separate “those” deviants from “us” conventional people? Does it lessen the likelihood that people will examine how individuals create meaningful experiences such that they commit deviance? 3. Examine the local newspaper for one week (or for a sample over a longer period of time) and record all the violence reported in the paper. This violence would include items listed under a “Police Blotter” section, which many newspapers have, as well as nationally and internationally reported violence. Categorize the perpetrators of the violence as to whether (as presented in the newspaper) they appear to be “quite deviant” or “rather ordinary” or somewhere in between. For example, you would categorize an offender with a long criminal record who robs a local business as quite deviant. A first-time offender who committed nonaggravated domestic violence would represent a rather ordinary perpetrator. Reflect on who commits the violence reported in the news. 4. Ask people, perhaps other college students, whether they have ever physically, perhaps seriously, harmed another person. Consider whether you have ever done so. This harm could have occurred in a fight, but maybe it occurred elsewhere. Various kinds of athletic competition, such as football, basketball, wrestling, and even soccer, provide the opportunity to harm opponents. Parents

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and others may corporally punish children to where the children are temporarily hurt. When someone admits to physically harming another individual, learn from the person the circumstances in which the person committed the harm and how that harm came to be committed. Reflect in the same way on any physical harm you have committed. What ideas do you develop about how ordinary people can harm others?

16

Do You Get the Time Because You Did the Crime?

Imagine that an acquaintance of yours was recently put on probation after being arrested and pleading guilty to shoplifting. You encounter a friend who also knows the acquaintance and tell the friend that the acquaintance is on probation. The friend asks why the mutual acquaintance was put on probation. What’s your response to your friend? Please formulate your response, then continue reading. Did you respond to your friend in the following or similar way? The acquaintance was given probation because the acquaintance shoplifted? If you did, that seems reasonable. We imagine that you have read, heard, or uttered statements similar to the following: The offender got (here can be put whatever the punishment was— expulsion, fine, imprisonment of a certain length, probation, after-school detention, etc.) because the offender did (and here can be put the offender’s deviance). For example, the young student received detention because the student disrupted the class. Or the club member was expelled because the member did not pay the membership dues. Or the defendant was imprisoned because the defendant burglarized a home. These and similar statements are unremarkable. People casually utter them and hear them. But do people think much about what they mean? Let’s do so. What do those statements above mean? More specifically, what do those statements claim is the cause of the punishments to the offenders? After considering your response, please continue. 169

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The statements above claim that the offenders’ deviance caused the punishments the offenders received. For example, the student received detention because the student disrupted the class. The disruption of the class was the cause of receiving the detention. That is obvious, right? Yet, does it actually make sense? Does the offender’s behavior cause the punishment given by others? We don’t think so. Let us explain. THE CRIME DOESN’T CAUSE THE TIME

First, the actions of one person cannot cause others to behave in any specific way. Unless people are literally physically forced to act by a person, that person cannot make people act. The person can demand, urge, threaten, promise, and much more—but that person cannot cause or make others act. People can always do otherwise, even if they may experience some unpleasant consequences (Higgins 1994, chap. 4). Therefore, the actions of the offenders—disrupting the class, not paying dues, burglarizing a home—cannot compel others to punish the offenders in any particular way or to act in any specific way toward the offenders. Others can always act toward the offenders in a variety of ways, the specific punishment given this time being just one way. You might object to our argument. You might complain that the statements do not claim that the offenders’ behaviors literally caused others to punish the offenders in particular ways. Instead, the statements claim that the offenders’ behaviors were the reasons for the punishment. On account of the offenders’ behaviors, others detained, expelled, or imprisoned the offenders. This seems to be a promising objection. However, we don’t think it works. In attempting to soften the determinativeness of cause, this objection attributes to the offenders and their behavior what rightly belongs to those offended. Notice where responsibility for the punishment is put. The punishment is due to the offensive behavior. The offenders and their behavior are responsible for the punishments, according to this seemingly promising objection. This objection, however, misplaces responsibility for the punishment. How can offenders be responsible for what punishers do to them? Offenders certainly can be responsible for what they do, but not for what others do to them that the offenders did not even wish to be done to them. When people assert or accept that the individuals were punished because they committed some acts, we have obscured what we believe we have ex-

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plained. The individuals’ acts do not explain why or how the punishers handled the offenders as they did. Consider the student who disrupted the class. Sometimes teachers detain students who disrupt their class. Sometimes teachers punish students who disrupt class by withholding recess or in other ways. Sometimes teachers do not punish the students but counsel them or have a meeting with their parents. How, then, can disrupting the class be the reason for or the explanation for the detention when apparently at another time disrupting the class is the reason for a different punishment or even the reason for no punishment. This reason or explanation is surely operating in an odd way. We present an extended example to make the point that it is not useful to assert that the deviance is the cause of, the reason for, or the explanation for the punishment. The assertion presents what needs to be explained as if it were the explanation. Instead, we need to examine how and why those who become offended respond as they do to the offenders if we wish to understand the punishment or other response the offenders received. AMERICA’S “WAR” ON DRUGS

Consider drug use. America’s policy toward drug use has been complex and varied. We present a few highlights of that policy. America has promoted drug use, tolerated drug use, become intolerant of drug use, and prohibited the use of various drugs throughout its history. It has treated and punished drug offenders. For example, throughout the 1800s opium and cocaine were sold openly in America. Opium and its derivatives were ingredients in painkillers available at the time. They were available without prescriptions in hundreds of medicines. Cocaine became popular as a tonic for sinusitis and hay fever and as a cure for opium, morphine, and alcohol habits. It became a favorite ingredient of medicines, soda pop, and other beverages (Meier 1994, chap. 2; Musto 1999, chap. 1; Courtwright 2001; Inciardi 2002). The first national drug laws prohibited the importation of opium for smoking in 1909. The federal prohibition followed the actions of California and other western states. In the latter 1800s, local ordinances in California prohibited the smoking of opium. In 1881, California banned smoking opium. Seventeen other western states also prohibited smoking opium. Notice that consuming opium by means other than smoking or importing opium for purposes other than smoking remained legal. Why?

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These prohibitions were aimed at Chinese immigrants. The laws were part of an effort to drive out the Chinese or in other ways control them. Chinese immigrants had been brought to the western United States in the latter 1800s to help build the railroads and work in the gold and silver mines. When the railroads were finished and the mines became no longer productive, a depression ensued. With jobs scarce, the Chinese immigrants became an economic threat to American workers. The local and state prohibitions were part of an effort to control or eliminate that threat. A small number of Chinese immigrants brought with them the practice of smoking opium. The employers of the Chinese immigrants encouraged that practice. Working conditions were unbelievably hard. Immigrants were without their families. Medical care was rare. Opium smoking lessened the psychological and physical pain of the workers. Employers profited from selling opium to the laborers. Finally, by threatening to withhold the opium, the employers were able to make the workers more compliant, lessening their expressed discontent (Chambliss 1977). The Chinese practice of smoking opium had been cultivated by British and, to a lesser extent, American traders to China in the 1800s and by Portuguese and other European traders during the previous several centuries. The opium trade was profitable for the British colonial empire. The British government in India “raised one-half of its operating revenues from the export of opium to China” (Meier 1994, 24). The Chinese, eventually realizing that they were trading away silver, silk, tea, and other important commodities for opium, tried to resist the importation of opium. From 1839 to 1842, Great Britain fought and won the infamous Opium Wars with China in order to preserve its “right” to import opium to China. As part of the settlement of the conflict, Great Britain was given possession of Hong Kong. In 1997 Great Britain returned Hong Kong to China. The United States enacted the federal prohibition against opium primarily because of economic concerns, not moral concerns. Elimination of the opium trade would reduce the British domination of general trade with China, increasing opportunities for American trade. The prohibition would improve relations with China, perhaps encouraging China to do more business with American firms. China was willing to reduce the immigration of its citizens to America if America helped reduce the importation of opium to China. The need for cheap Chinese labor had declined by the latter 1800s. The continu-

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ing immigration of Chinese workers had become the basis for economic conflict in the West. The United States organized a convention to restrict trade in smoking opium. During the convention, to show its good faith and to save face because it had no national prohibition, the United States quickly prohibited the importation of smoking opium (Chambliss 1977; Meier 1994; Reinarman 1994; Musto 1999). American authorities criminalized opium as a means to control “troublesome” people (i.e., people who are already seen for one reason or another as a threat to the dominant segment of society) during troubling times. The criminalization of other drugs can be understood similarly (Reinarman 1994). The continuing controversy (though somewhat diminished within the past several years) concerning the disparity in sentences given to those convicted of selling or using powder cocaine compared to those convicted of selling or using crack cocaine speaks to the inadequacy of claiming that the deviant behavior is the reason for the punishment. Federal statutes and the statutes of approximately a dozen states treat more harshly the possession of crack cocaine than powder cocaine (United States Sentencing Commission 2002). Responding to a “national sense of urgency surrounding drugs generally and crack cocaine specifically,” Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 (United States Sentencing Commission 2002). As a result of this legislation, federal law required “100 times less crack cocaine than powder cocaine to trigger five- and ten-year mandatory minimum penalties” for federal offenders (United States Sentencing Commission 2002, iv). For example, for the sale of five grams of crack, “barely a teaspoon,” federal guidelines mandated a minimum sentence of five years for a first-time offender (Isikoff 1995). A first-time offender would have to sell one hundred times that amount of powder cocaine, 500 grams, to be subject to the same federal sentence (United States Sentencing Commission 2002, iv). Five grams of crack cocaine produce ten to fifty doses and cost between $225 and $750. Five hundred grams of powder cocaine produce 2,500 to 5,000 doses and cost between $30,500 and $50,000 (United States Sentencing Commission 1995, viii). Federal guidelines mandated for a conviction of a first offense of simple possession of five grams or more of crack cocaine a minimum sentence of five years in prison. Federal guidelines provided for the conviction of simple possession of powder cocaine and any other drug by a first-time offender a maximum sentence of one year in prison (United States Sentencing Commission 1995, iii).

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The harsher sentencing imposed on federal crack cocaine offenses compared to powder cocaine offenses was justified, in part, by various beliefs. Among these beliefs were that crack cocaine was more harmful than powder cocaine, especially on the fetus of a pregnant woman who used; that an epidemic of crack cocaine use by youth was materializing; and that crack cocaine use more so than powder cocaine use was associated with violence. These beliefs are not now supported by the evidence (United States Sentencing Commission 2002). The average prison sentence for a federal conviction of trafficking in crack cocaine from October 1, 1992, to September 30, 1993 (fiscal year 1993), was ten and one-half years; the average prison sentence for trafficking in powder cocaine was eight years. Eighty-eight percent of crack cocaine trafficking offenders were black; 4 percent were white. Thirty-two percent of powder cocaine trafficking offenders were white; 27 percent were black. The average prison sentence for a federal conviction of simple possession of crack cocaine was 30.6 months for fiscal year 1993; the average sentence for simple possession of powder cocaine was 3.2 months. Eighty-five percent of convicted offenders of simple possession of crack cocaine were black; 10 percent were white. Fifty-eight percent of convicted offenders of simple possession of powder cocaine were white; 27 percent were black (United States Sentencing Commission 1995, chap. 7). The disparity in sentencing between crack cocaine and powder cocaine users has continued. In 2000 the average sentence for federal convictions of all crack cocaine offenses was 44 months longer than the average sentence for federal convictions of all powder cocaine offenses (118 months compared to 74 months). Eighty-five percent of federal crack cocaine offenders were black; 9 percent were Hispanic; and 6 percent were white. Fifty-one percent of federal powder cocaine offenders were Hispanic; 18 percent were white; and 31 percent were black (United States Sentencing Commission 2002). The differences in sentencing for the sale or possession of crack cocaine compared to the sale or possession of powder cocaine and the relation between those differences and who is convicted for those offenses—blacks, Hispanic, or whites—have concerned some citizens and officials. Even though no discriminatory intent may exist, black drug offenders are subjected to harsher sentencing than are white and Hispanic drug offenders (in part) due to the differences in the sentencing of crack cocaine and powder cocaine offenders

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(United States Sentencing Commission 1995, xi; 2002). That concern led to recent changes in federal policy and practices toward drug offenders. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in December 2007 that federal trial judges can use their own judgment in sentencing federal drug offenders rather than being strictly bound by federal sentencing guidelines, which became advisory, not mandatory, three years earlier. A day later, the U.S. Sentencing Commission unanimously decided that its new guidelines enacted earlier in the year, which reduced the disparity between sentences for crack and powder cocaine, would retroactively apply to those already in federal prison. Federal judges, however, would make the final decision when inmates sought reductions in their sentences (Doyle 2007; Lavoie 2007). America’s policy toward drug use has typically been a mix of punishment and treatment. Even as differences in federal punishment toward crack and cocaine offenders alarmed some observers, America began to move toward treatment. As we mentioned in chapter 13, since the late 1980s more than 1,200 drug courts have been established in the United States, with others developed in countries throughout the world, to help drug-using offenders stop using drugs and to stop committing crimes. Offenders who may have been incarcerated or put on probation before the rise of drug courts may now be accepted into drug courts. Drug courts provide benefits to successful participants in addition to helping them to stop using drugs. Successful participants may be granted early termination of probation, dismissal of charges, or expunction of the charges. As America’s policies and practices toward drug use and drug users have changed, drug users who have offended in similar ways have been handled differently (Mackinem 2003; Mackinem and Higgins 2008). Given these few developments in America’s drug policy that we have presented, how useful is it to claim that people are imprisoned because they use narcotics? Such a simple statement overlooks America’s changing policies toward drugs and the contexts and concerns out of which America changed its policies. Such a simple statement overlooks that for much of America’s history, people who used narcotics were not punished. Narcotics use was not even deviant. Let’s accept the present state of the historically changing drug policy in America as given (not as something to be explained) and focus on the handling of drug offenses. Even then, the claim that particular people are punished in whatever way they are punished because of their drug offenses does

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not explain the punishments. Such a simple statement overlooks the local context and concerns in which officials, law enforcement officers, judges, users, attorneys, and others produce punishments at this time for these offenders. It overlooks the actions, reactions, and interactions of the participants as they produce the particular punishments. It overlooks what may be a system of justice designed to control and discipline the “urban underclass,” those “who are perceived as dangerous” because of their marginal ties to conventional society and their involvement with the criminal justice system (McConville and Mirsky 1995). CONCLUSION

Casually, unthinkingly, we use and are told the “explanation” that people are punished because of their deviance. The ordinary person who thinks himself or herself to be a world leader is committed to a mental health facility because of the delusion. The child is sent to his or her room because of the sassy backtalk. The employee is fired because of the drinking problems. The driver is fined because of failing to stop at a stop sign. The student is expelled because of bringing a weapon to school. The convicted killer is executed because of the double murder. And on and on. These statements do not help us understand how and why people who acted in various ways were punished. They are comforting, however. The statements tell us that the people punished “brought it on themselves.” By putting the responsibility for the punishment on those punished, these statements deflect our attention from the concerns, interests, and maneuverings of the punishers. Don’t misunderstand us, however. We are not arguing that those who commit deviance are not responsible for their actions. We are not arguing that offenders should or should not be punished. We are trying to encourage you not to be satisfied with “explanations” that do not explain. We are trying to encourage you to think carefully and critically about how people who act in various ways come to be punished. Their actions do not explain the punishment. To explain what is done to an offender, we need to look at those who take offense. We may wish to examine how those who took offense made the behavior of the offender deviant. How did those who took offense establish particular punishments for the offender’s behavior? Finally, how did those who had responsibility for dealing with the offender decide on the specific punishment that was given to the offender this time for this offense?

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When you next encounter the claim that someone was punished because of his or her deviance, try to investigate that punishment. Investigate who participated in producing that punishment. What were their concerns as they managed the incident? What reasoning did they use in their management? What policy existed to “cover” the situation? How was that policy used? What could the participants have done in handling the offender? Whose interests were served in producing the particular punishment? These and other questions can guide your thinking about the punishment of deviance. Return to the question that this chapter poses: Do you get the time because you did the crime? What do you think now? PROJECTS

1. Examine the options that judges, members of disciplinary boards, or others who deal with deviance have for handling cases that come before them. Do they have only one option for handling cases of the “same kind”? Do they have a variety of options? If you can talk with judges, members of disciplinary boards, or others who deal with deviance, such as school principals, discuss how and why they dealt with particular cases of deviance as they did. This could certainly be difficult to discuss. Questioning people about their decisions may imply that you are criticizing their decisions. Also, people may not be able to recall well, have reflected carefully on, or be able to explain how and why they dealt with deviance as they did. You might compare how judges, members of disciplinary boards, or others who have responsibility for dealing with deviance do so in one place compared to another. For example, you could compare how two school boards deal with infractions of school district policy or how two principals do so. Have someone else help you with the investigation for this comparison. If apparently similar instances of deviance are handled differently in different places, then can you conclude that the punishment was only the result of the deviance? If not, then can you investigate what may have led to the differing ways that officials in different organizations deal with seemingly similar instances of deviance? What insights do you develop? 2. Below is a list of behaviors that many would evaluate as deviant. Use this list, a portion of this list, or one that you develop for this project. Decide what you think is an appropriate way for a fellow student committing the behavior to be handled. You may decide that some kind of official, formal handling is appropriate or some kind of informal approach is best. If you think some kind

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of punishment is appropriate, what should it be? Ask other students to decide what an appropriate response to a fellow student who committed the behavior would be. a. Gets drunk every weekend. b. Cheats on tests. c. Tells others some of the secrets of a Greek organization (fraternity/sorority). d. Takes a laptop from another student. e. Steals money from a faculty member’s desk. f. Lies on college financial aid forms. g. Uses marijuana daily. h. Uses a date rape drug on dates. i. Borrows roommate’s car and returns it out of gas. j. Spreads ugly and hurtful rumors about fellow students and “friends.” As you and other students decided what should be done in each case, you and they may have started speculating about the circumstances of the events listed. You may have started to create a “story,” however tentative, for the offender and the offense. Perhaps you recalled people you know who committed such offenses. Do these “stories” that provide a fuller context for the offensive behavior matter in deciding what should be done? How and why did you and other students decide on what should be done to the offender? After each individual student has decided on how the offender should be handled, a group discussion could be useful for exploring the different reasonings used in deciding what should be done. Does the deviance determine how it is dealt with?

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Can We Deal with Deviance without Discriminating?

Many people are concerned that officials and authorities of all kinds deal with deviance in discriminatory ways. People are concerned that officials and others who deal with deviance show favoritism for or bias against offenders due to characteristics other than the offense. Consider the following items: The late Richard M. Nixon, former president of the United States, was pardoned for any offense he committed in connection with the scandal known as Watergate. Virglio Gonzalez, one of the men who broke into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate complex, served fifteen months in prison (Reiman 1995, 130–31). Charles Bazarian, convicted of “swindling” $20 million from two California savings and loan institutions and other frauds, served less than two years in prison (Reiman 2007, 151). The typical convicted robber will serve an average of five years in prison (Reiman 2007, 148). Charles Owens, president of an investment firm, who pled guilty to securities fraud in which he misled 8,000 investors who lost $278 million, received a sentence of eight years in prison when he could have received up to 196 years. He will be eligible for parole in sixteen months (Werner 2005). His wife, the former vice president of the bankrupt firm, received ten years in prison, suspended to ninety days. After serving ninety days, she will be on probation for five years (Werner 2006). The husband and wife who tried to scam Wendy’s restaurant chain by claiming to have found a human finger in a bowl of chili, which they had 179

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actually placed in the chili, received nearly the maximum punishments possible. The husband, Jaime Plascencia, was sentenced to twelve years, four months; his wife received a sentence of nine years (The State 2006o). Yet, Bernard Ebbers, former CEO of WorldCom, the telecommunications giant, was convicted of fraud and conspiracy and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison in connection with an $11 billion accounting fraud scheme that led WorldCom into bankruptcy. Shareholders lost billions of dollars in stock value and more than 15,000 people lost their jobs in the collapse of WorldCom. Ebbers could have received eighty-five years in prison. The federal appeals court that upheld Ebbers’s conviction noted that the twenty-five-year sentence was lengthy for a white-collar crime, “longer than the sentences routinely imposed by many states for violent crimes, including murder” (Washington Post 2006). However, “the methods used (in the fraud) were specifically intended to create a false picture of profitability even for professional analysts that, in Ebbers’ case, was motivated by his personal financial circumstances” (which had begun to deteriorate due to the declining value of WorldCom stock) (Masters 2005; Caruso 2006; CBC News Online 2006). Was Ebbers treated leniently, or was he treated harshly as part of the apparent growing outcry against executives who perpetrated massive business frauds in the late 1990s and early 2000s? Finally, consider Sylvester Adams, a mentally retarded black man who had been severely abused growing up. He was executed in South Carolina for killing a sixteen-year-old neighbor. At the time of the murder, Adams was twenty-three. Less than a month before Adams’s execution, Susan Smith, a twenty-three-year-old white woman well known in her South Carolina community and whom we discussed in an earlier chapter, was sentenced to two life terms in prison for drowning her two young sons by strapping them in their car seats and rolling the car into a lake. Her case received national attention (Greene and Allard 1995; O’Shea, LeBlanc, et al. 1995d). Many people are concerned that the criminal justice system discriminates. Many believe that if you wear a business suit and steal millions of dollars, you may serve at most a few years in prison. More likely, you may plea-bargain to receive probation and to pay a seemingly large fine of tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars that you may not actually pay. However, if you wear a mask and steal a few thousand dollars, you may be put behind bars for years or even for the rest of your life (Reiman 2007).

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Others look to the disparate federal sentences mandated for the possession or sale of crack cocaine compared to the sentences mandated for the possession or sale of powder cocaine as further evidence of discrimination in how deviance is handled. Recall our discussion of the disparate sentences in the previous chapter. The U.S. Sentencing Commission recommended to Congress that penalties for dealing crack cocaine be made more similar to penalties for powder cocaine, but Congress and the president rejected the recommendation (The State 1997; United States Sentencing Commission 2002). In 2007, the U.S. Sentencing Commission did decrease the disparity in advisory sentencing guidelines between users of crack and powder cocaine. The controversy over racial profiling—“driving while black or brown” or “flying while Arab”—also speaks to the concern that observers have about whether deviance is handled impartially (Pampel 2004, 3). Other observers disagree that officials discriminate when handling deviance (Wilbanks 1987). Even a characteristic that is seemingly only “skin deep,” people’s attractiveness, may matter in how they are handled when they act offensively. For example, student teachers are likely to evaluate the misbehavior committed by attractive children as less serious than similar misbehavior done by plainlooking children, and attractive defendants are treated more favorably than less attractive defendants, receiving shorter sentences (Dion 1972; Stewart 1980; Webster and Driskell 1983). Whether one agrees or disagrees that discrimination is pervasive within the criminal justice system and within other arenas where deviance is handled, most observers assume that officials and others who deal with deviance should not discriminate. “Identical” deviance should be handled in “identical” ways. That’s fair! Perhaps in past eras people intentionally discriminated, but officials and ordinary citizens are trying to, or should be trying to, root out all discrimination. Discrimination has no place in dealing with deviance, according to this well-meaning sentiment (Black 1989, chap. 1). Perhaps a different, nonobvious view is needed concerning discrimination and how we deal with deviance. This contrasting view reminds us that deviance is an integral feature of social life. Social life cannot exist without deviance. Further, this alternative view emphasizes the strong bond between the structure of social life and the structure of dealing with deviance. Each grows

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out of and gives rise to the other. We develop this view more fully after we present a hypothetical situation. HOW WOULD YOU HANDLE THIS?

Consider the following hypothetical situation. Put yourself in the position of the person below, who must decide what to do. Some people will have experienced such a situation or learned of such a situation. Others will have experienced very similar situations. Of course, what people think they might do and what they indeed do when involved in an actual situation may be very different. Here is the situation: You drive with a friend (consider one of your closest friends for this scenario) to a nearby store to buy a (you fill in the blank). While looking for that item and at other merchandise, you notice that your friend has picked up a (you fill in this item), casually examined it, and stuck it in her or his pocket. The friend does not return the item to the counter. Instead, the friend starts to walk out of the store with it. What do you do? Take the hypothetical example seriously. Write your response, explain it, and then continue. We imagine that you may have had some difficulty deciding what to do. Maybe you couldn’t believe what you saw. Thinking you were mistaken, you decided just to ignore what may have happened. Perhaps you considered confronting your friend about the item shoplifted. Maybe you decided to talk with your friend, urging her or him to return the item. Perhaps you decided not to get involved. Did you consider telling store personnel about your friend’s shoplifting? Probably not. We think it would be hard to decide what to do. Now imagine a similar scenario: You have gone into a store to buy some merchandise. You see a stranger about your age pick up an item, examine it, then pocket it. Near you is a store clerk or manager who did not witness the event. What do you do? Please consider this scenario carefully and what you would do. When you are finished writing and explaining your response, continue reading. Again, did you have some difficulty deciding what to do? Did you decide to stay out of it? If so, why? Or did you decide to intervene, perhaps telling the store employee what you had seen? Perhaps you stared at the stranger, hoping that your disapproval would shame the stranger into returning the item. We doubt that you decided to tell the person who shoplifted that you had seen her or him and that she or he should put back the item.

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Compare how you thought you would handle the two shoplifting scenarios involving your friend and the stranger. Did you decide to handle the two scenarios differently? For example, did you decide to “go easy” on your friend but turn in the stranger who shoplifted? If so, how do you feel about not handling the two situations in the same way? To see how a variety of people may respond to these two scenarios, you can conduct some research. Write up the two scenarios. Provide some alternatives for handling the situations from which the respondents can select. Or allow the respondents to decide without any alternatives listed how they will handle the situations. Present one or the other scenario, not both, to a sample of people. For example, perhaps ask twenty people to respond to the shoplifting that involves the friend, another twenty to the shoplifting that involves the stranger. We imagine that you will find that people in general respond less harshly to the friend than to the stranger. That is what we found when we asked students to respond to one of the scenarios. Just one of the seventeen students who responded to the scenario involving a friend said that he or she would tell store personnel about the friend’s shoplifting, and this would be done only after talking to the friend and the friend’s refusal to return the item. Many of the students who read the scenario in which they witnessed the stranger shoplifting also would not tell store personnel. As some wrote, it is not their business, or one never knows how the stranger may react. But 35 percent of the students (six out of seventeen) said that they would tell store personnel. If you find what our results showed—and that is what Donald Black (Black 1976; 1989) would expect, whose ideas we will take up momentarily—then what might you say about whether ordinary people, not just officials, discriminate when dealing with deviance? JURISPRUDENTIAL VERSUS SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW OF HANDLING DEVIANCE

Many people are concerned that how officials and others deal with deviance is discriminatory. Identical deviance appears not to be handled in identical ways. Who you are and who you know seem to matter, according to many critics of how deviance is handled. This concern applies to the criminal justice system, the mental health system, the juvenile justice system, disciplinary boards, as well as other realms in which deviance is handled. For example, some observers of the army a few years back were concerned that African American

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drill sergeants were being targeted and discriminated against as the army investigated and prosecuted officers who had been accused of violating military regulations governing sexual conduct with enlisted soldiers, including sexual assault (Ruane 1997). While some observers disagree that how deviance is handled is discriminatory (Wilbanks 1987), we believe that the evidence strongly indicates that “unequal” handling of deviance occurs (Black 1976; 1989; 1998; Reiman 2007). The title of this chapter poses a question: Can we deal with deviance without discriminating? It is a more perplexing question than whether or not we discriminate. To us, the evidence indicates that discrimination occurs—and not so infrequently that we can dismiss the discrimination as insignificant. The question of whether society can deal with deviance without discriminating points to a more fundamental basis for the existing discrimination. If the question did not point to a more fundamental basis for why unequal treatment occurs, then the “quick-and-easy” response would be that, of course, people can handle deviance without discriminating. All people need to do is discover where it occurs and put a stop to it. We do not think a “quick-andeasy” response is adequate. It would be comforting if it were adequate. We imagine that you do not believe that the “quick-and-easy” response is adequate either. We believe that the more adequate response is that it is almost impossible for society to deal with deviance without discriminating. But why? To explain why the “quick-and-easy” response is not satisfactory and that the “almost-impossible-not-to-discriminate” response may be more adequate if also troubling, we briefly present two contrasting views of the law, a jurisprudential model and a sociological model. Our discussion uses the work of Donald Black (Black 1976; 1989, chap 1; 1998). While our discussion focuses on the law, these two views can be applied more generally to any means intended for rationally dealing with deviance. After explaining these two contrasting views, we indicate how we can apply them to other realms for dealing with deviance. The jurisprudential model of the law emphasizes that law is a logical process. “The facts of each case are assessed in light of the applicable rules, and logic determines the results” (Black 1989, 20). The same facts of the offense should result in the same legal outcome. Law is meant to be universal. It is available to all and meant to be applied in the same way at all times. This jurisprudential model emphasizes how cases should be decided within rational, logical law.

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Discrimination in handling deviance is an aberration as understood by this jurisprudential model. Discrimination is an unwelcome deviation from rational, logical law. It should be corrected. Only the facts of the case and the rational application of the law should matter in dealing with deviance. In stark contrast to the jurisprudential model of the law stands the sociological model. The sociological model regards the law not merely as an abstract, rational body of rules. Instead, law is what people do when they “legally” handle (or do not handle) people’s behavior (Black 1989, 20). A sociological view does not assume that law is rational, universal, or impartial. It does not focus on how deviance should be handled. Instead, a sociological model seeks to explain how deviance is handled. It explores how people legally act. Do witnesses or victims call the police or not? Do the police respond when called? Do the police arrest a suspect or warn a suspect? Do prosecutors plea-bargain or take the case to trial? Do juries convict or acquit? What, if any, punishment does the judge dispense? A sociological model argues that how deviance is legally handled depends importantly on the social structure of the case. The social structure of the case is the web of social relations among the parties involved in the case. Let’s focus first on a complainant and the person against whom the complaint is lodged, such as the victim of an alleged burglary and the alleged burglar. What is the social status of the victim and the alleged offender? Social status describes one’s standing in the community. Wealth, education, and respectability may be thought of as three dimensions of social status. Other dimensions could be explored. Social status varies. People may have more or less social status—more or less wealth, education, and respectability. Some observers claim that those with low social status are discriminated against by the criminal justice system. For example, poor people or minority citizens are discriminated against, critics claim. Other observers argue that such discrimination does not occur or is not widespread. The critics and the defenders of the justice system are overlooking the social structure of the case. The social structure of the case does not focus on the social characteristics of the parties as individuals. Instead, it focuses on the social characteristics of the parties in relation to one another. It focuses on the web of relations. Thus, do the complainant and the offender have (approximately) equal social status? If so, is it equally high or equally low? If their social statuses are different, then who has the higher social status, who the lower? The victim and the offender

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may both be unskilled laborers. Or the victim may be an upper-middle-class professional, and the offender may be someone who has not held a regular job for years. Perhaps the victim is working class and the offender is middle class. How deviance will be handled depends on the relative social status of the parties involved. The relational distance among the parties involved is another feature of the social structure of the case. How socially close are the parties involved? Are they family, friends, acquaintances, or strangers? Deviance is likely to be handled less formally, less harshly, when intimates are involved than when strangers are involved. When family members assault one another, the police are less likely to arrest than when strangers assault one another (Black 1976, chap. 3). Recall how you handled the theft by your friend and the theft by a stranger. The difference between the two incidents in the relational distance of the involved parties would suggest that you or others would be less likely to turn into the police a friend than a stranger. That is what we found when we asked students to respond to one of the two scenarios. Social structure can be thought of in still other ways, such as how organized the involved parties are. A company is more organized than an individual. The more organized a participant is in a dispute, the more likely that the participant will succeed in the dispute (Black 1976, chap. 5; 1989, chap. 3). The social structure of the case, however, involves more than the complainant and the party against whom the complaint is made. Other parties may be involved, and their relative social characteristics are important for determining the social structure of the case. Lawyers, supporters, witnesses, judges, and juries all bring their social status, relational distance, and other social characteristics to the case. The social structure of the case becomes more complex. For example, the victim and the accused may be strangers. Yet, the victim may be well known by the jury in a small town, but the offender may be a stranger to the jury. The sociological model of the law assumes that how a case of deviance is handled “always reflects the social characteristics of those involved in it” (Black 1989, 21). The social structures of cases that are “technically” identical can vary greatly. “Technically” identical cases are likely to be handled differently when the social structure of the cases varies. Social diversity underlies the differences in how deviance is handled.

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Thus, the sociological model does not see discrimination as an aberration or as an unfortunate deviation from how the law should work. Instead, the sociological model sees discrimination as something to be expected when social diversity exists. A sociological model does not condone discrimination. However, a sociological model understands discrimination to be embedded in the social diversity of society. CAPITAL PUNISHMENT AND THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF HOMICIDE

We present an investigation that illustrates that how deviance is dealt with depends on the social structure of the case. Consider capital punishment. Controversy surrounds its use. A significant part of that controversy is the differential use of capital punishment. Discrimination may occur in prosecutors’ decisions to charge defendants with a capital offense, in who is found guilty, and in the sentencing of juries and judges. Do you think the race of defendants in capital punishment cases matters for the punishment the defendants receive? Please consider this question, then continue. In Georgia, Florida, and Illinois from 1976 through 1980, white homicide suspects were more likely to be sentenced to death than black homicide suspects (Gross and Mauro 1989). Other, more recent studies have also found that white homicide defendants were more likely to be sentenced to death than black homicide defendants (Baldus and Woodworth 2003). Does that make sense? Perhaps the criticism that black people are more harshly treated by the justice system than are white people is simply wrong. Recall, however, that the relationship among the parties involved is crucial, not just the characteristics of specific individuals. Black people who killed white individuals in Georgia, Florida, and Illinois were more likely to receive the death penalty than white people who killed white individuals in those three states. In Georgia, 20.1 percent of black defendants who killed white people received death sentences; 5.7 percent of white suspects who killed white people received the death penalty. In Florida, 13.7 percent of black defendants who killed white victims received a death sentence; 5.2 percent of white defendants who killed white victims received a death sentence. In Illinois, the comparable percentages were 7.5 percent and 1.9 percent (Gross and Mauro 1989, 45). Studies in other states such as Kentucky and Maryland have also found that black defendants who killed white victims were the defendants most likely to receive the death penalty (Baldus and Woodworth 2003).

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The differences in percentages may seem small, but we might focus on the ratio of the percentages, not their differences. In Georgia, black defendants who killed white people were three and one-half times as likely as white defendants who killed white people to be sentenced to death. In Florida, black defendants who killed white victims were two and one-half times as likely as white defendants who killed white people to be sentenced to death. Black defendants in Illinois who killed white people were almost four times as likely as white defendants who killed white people to be sentenced to death. Black defendants who killed white people were more likely to be sentenced to death in those three states than were white defendants who killed white people. Donald Black (1976; 1989) argues that when someone of lower status commits deviance against a person of higher status, the deviant is more likely to be handled harshly than when someone commits deviance against a person of equal status. Using race as a measure of status in America, those who are white generally have higher status than those who are black. Blacks committing deviance against whites would generally be handled more harshly than whites committing deviance against whites, following Donald Black’s argument. Consequently, Black would expect, and the research results support him, that death sentences would more likely be given when black defendants kill white victims than when white defendants kill white victims (with all else equal, such as the aggravating or mitigating circumstances of the crime). More generally, Black argues that deviance by a low-status person against a high-status person will receive the most use of law; deviance by a high-status person against another high-status person will receive the next most use of law; deviance by a low-status person against another low-status person will receive less law; and, finally, deviance by a high-status person against a lowstatus person will receive the least law. This more sophisticated understanding of how the structure of the case affects how deviance is handled can help us understand what appears to be puzzling: white defendants who kill are more likely to receive the death penalty than blacks who kill. The reason for this apparently puzzling finding is that murder primarily occurs between defendants and victims of the same race. Whites primarily kill other whites. Blacks primarily kill other blacks. According to Black’s explanation about the structure of the case, when whites kill other whites, a high-status person has committed an offense against another high-status person, which is more serious and receives greater use of the law than when blacks kill other blacks, which is a low-

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status person offending against another low-status person (Baldus and Woodworth 2003). Recall once again that Black argues that the structure of the case is important for how deviance is handled. That structure of the case is the web of relations among all the parties involved, including the lawyers, the judge, the jury, and still others, not just the victim and the offender. The research that has explored the use of capital punishment in Georgia, Florida, Illinois, and elsewhere examines only part of that web of relationships. We may be appalled that death sentences are more likely to be given when a black person kills a white individual than when a white person kills a white individual or when a black person kills a black person. Yet, as Black (1989) points out, every legal system handles cases differently according to the web of relationships among the parties involved. We should not expect cases that involve “identical” deviance but differ according to the structure of relations to be handled the same. Instead, we should expect discrimination, according to Black, and that is what we observe everywhere! For example, the Code of Hammurabi, compiled 4,000 years ago in Babylonia, provided a different response to violations based on the structure of relations among the parties involved. A man who struck someone his equal was required to pay one mana of silver. However, a man who struck his superior would be publicly whipped sixty times with an ox tail. Among the Nuer of Sudan, the killing of a stranger, especially a foreigner who does not come within the “most extended form of the social structure,” is not wrong. The killing of a fellow tribesman, which is a private wrong, may require retaliation or restitution. The closer the relation between the killer’s and the victim’s tribal segments, the more likely restitution will be appropriate. Among close blood relationships, restitution becomes less necessary, as the people who assist the offender to pay are the recipients of the restitution. Finally, if a man kills his wife, which is very rare, he would pay nothing because the restitution would be paid to himself (Black 1989, 98–99). Not only does the law discriminate, but so, too, does every system for dealing with deviance (Black 1989, 102). Wherever people have created differences among one another—differences of social status, relational distance, and other social characteristics—the handling of deviance reflects the web of relations of the parties involved in the deviance. It reflects the relations among the deviants, victims, witnesses, supporters, advocates, and controllers of the

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deviance. We should expect that how school officials handle student deviance, how the juvenile justice system handles the delinquency of youths, how disciplinary boards handle the deviance of the members of the organization, how the mental health system handles the aberrant behavior of citizens, and how people handle deviance in whatever realm will reflect the web of relations among the parties involved. SHOPLIFTING AND THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF THE CASE

Let’s return to shoplifting and explore how the social structure of the case matters in dealing with deviance. More than thirty years ago, two social scientists observed how shoppers reacted to (staged) instances of shoplifting (Steffensmeier and Terry 1973). The social scientists were not interested in whether people responded differently to friends or strangers who shoplifted. All the shoplifters (actually assistants of the social scientists) were strangers to the customers. Instead, they were interested in whether shoplifters who appeared to be “hippies”—soiled, patched jeans; well-worn shoes with no socks; long and unruly hair—were more likely to be reported than those who appeared to be “straight”—neatly pressed slacks, sport jacket and tie, short hair if a man, or dress, fur coat, and well groomed if a woman. Whom do you think shoppers were more likely to report to store personnel, the hippie shoplifters or the straight shoplifters? If you think shoppers were more likely to report hippie shoplifters, you are right. Now, how can you make sense of this in terms of the social structure of the case? Please consider your response, then continue. The shoppers were middle-class, conventional citizens. Based on appearance, the hippie shoplifters had less social status than did the shoppers; the straight shoplifters had similar social status as the shoppers. When responding to hippie shoplifters, the middle-class, conventional shoppers were responding to someone with less social status. When responding to the straight shoplifters, they were responding to someone with similar social status. The social structure of the case—as it concerned the offender and the witness— differed when the shoplifter appeared to be a hippie or straight. Complaints are more likely to be made against someone lower in social status than against someone similar or higher in social status (Black 1976, chap. 2).

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THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL LIFE, THE STRUCTURE OF HANDLING DEVIANCE

As we noted at the beginning of this chapter and as we explored more fully in an earlier chapter, deviance is an integral feature of social life. Social life cannot exist without deviance. Through deviance, through making some human activity unacceptable, people create meaning for themselves and structure how they will act. All members of a group arrange themselves in relation to one another. They organize themselves “above,” “below,” and equal to one another; “near” to and “far” from one another; and in other ways. All social life is structured through patterns of relations (Black 1998, appendix). No group of people treats one another as if all are the same. For example, those in authority give orders; subordinates follow orders. To give orders that others accept makes the order giver an authority and the order followers subordinates. Or one does favors for an intimate that one would not do for a stranger. To treat a stranger exactly as one treats an intimate would make both of them the same, neither stranger nor intimate. To almost all of us that would be absurd! How people deal with deviance reflects and helps create the structure of social life. Handling deviance differently depending on the web of relations among the parties involved reflects and supports the existing structure of social life. What can people do if they wish to reduce or eliminate that discrimination? Often people wring their hands and proclaim that all people must be treated equally. To be treated equally often means that equally harsh punishment must be given to all. The idea is to use more law to improve the shortcomings of law (Black 1989, chap. 5). Would people eliminate differential handling by using more law than they presently do? Probably not. As long as cases are socially diverse, composed of differing webs of relationships, the handling of those cases will be discriminatory. How, then, can people reduce or eliminate discrimination in the handling of deviance? If differential handling reflects social diversity among cases of deviance, then social diversity may need to be eliminated. To the extent that cases are socially similar, then with all else equal, how they are handled will be similar, too. But how can people create cases that are socially similar?

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Perhaps they could manipulate the social characteristics of the parties involved so that social diversity is reduced. For example, individuals who bring complaints against organizations or have organizations bring complaints against them are at a great disadvantage. Individuals have fewer resources to pursue their complaints or defend themselves compared to organizations; individuals’ credibility is questioned, and they are less effective in supporting their interests. Perhaps legal co-ops could be established so that, in becoming members, individuals could enjoy the benefits of organizations in dealing with deviance. Individuals would become more socially similar to organizations. With social diversity lessened, discriminatory handling of deviance would decrease (Black 1989, chap. 3). Perhaps knowledge of social characteristics could be lessened or eliminated. Even though social diversity among the participants would exist, if those deciding the cases knew little or nothing of that diversity, then differential dealing would decrease. That seems to happen already—with parking tickets. While one may draw some conclusions about the social characteristics of the drivers from the parked cars, cars are much less informative about the social characteristics of their drivers than are the drivers themselves. Thus, parking justice may be much less discriminatory than other kinds of justice. However, in a small town where police often know who drives what car, social diversity of parking violators is more apparent and differential handling more prevalent (Black 1989, 62–63). If society can develop ways to reduce the amount of information that those who handle deviance have about the web of relationships among the parties involved, then discrimination in handling deviance would decrease, according to Donald Black. Some means already exist. For example, judges may bar some social information from testimony as immaterial to the case, and “shield” laws exclude some information, such as information about a sexual assault victim’s sexual history (Black 1989, 68). Can you think of other means for reducing the information that those who handle deviance have about the social diversity and structure of the cases of deviance? A completely different approach toward the issue of discrimination based on the social structure of the case is the movement toward gathering and making available more information about offenders for those who decide how the offender will be handled. Presentencing investigations and problem-solving courts are two important approaches in this movement. For example, presen-

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tence investigations, which have become common, increase the social information about offenders available to judges. Probation or parole agents collect information about the defendants and give this standardized information to the sentencing judges. This may include employment history, family structure, community involvement, addictions, religious attendance, and other social information. Presentence investigations provide judges much more information than in traditional courts. The judges will be able to tailor the sentences to what they consider to be the unique strengths and needs of the defendants (Stinchcomb and Hippensteel 2001). Similarly, thousands of drug courts, domestic violence courts, community courts, mental health courts, DUI courts, juvenile drug courts, and other specialized courts have been developed in the past fifteen to twenty years. These problem-solving courts address the offensive behavior and the needs of particular populations of people that have not been adequately handled by the traditional criminal justice system, whose failures undermine society’s safety. Problem-solving courts operate with the intent of serving justice and safety through court-supervised treatment and management of individuals who break the law and do so out of personal, psychological, social, and other problems they experience. Problem-solving courts address the problems of the individuals, of the individuals in their community, and of the traditional justice system. Problem-solving courts provide an alternative to traditional courts and criminal justice (Berman, Feinblatt, et al. 2005). Using Black’s argument, presentencing investigations and problem-solving courts increase the information known by judges and other officials about the social structure of the case, at least as it pertains to the defendant. Consequently, presentencing investigations and problem-solving courts could increase the possibility of discrimination. CONCLUSION

Can we deal with deviance without discriminating? Yes, but only with great effort. Discrimination in handling deviance occurs as people create differences among one another. Discrimination reflects and supports the diversity of social life. People deal with deviance within a web of relations that may vary from one instance of deviance to another, seemingly identical, instance. To reduce discrimination people must reduce the basis for that discrimination.

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People could try to reduce what those who handle deviance know about the web of relations among the parties involved. Or they can try to change the structure of social life so that differences in the webs of relations among people decrease. That is an awesome challenge! However, people have done so. Compared to past eras (consider the era of slavery as a stark example, but consider your lifetime, too), Americans do not interact with people who have different social characteristics than themselves as unequally as they once did. For example, Americans interact nowadays with people of different ethnicities more closely to how they interact with people similar in ethnicity than in the past. For example, half a century ago most white Americans thought that black people “should only get jobs whites didn’t want. Now, almost no one feels that way” (Samuelson 1995, 215). Black and white Americans are more likely now to have a “close” personal friend of the “other race” than in the past (Samuelson 1995, 215). Finally, “only a fifth of white married couples ha[ve] husbands and wives of the same ethnic background” (Samuelson 1995, 215). Today, people of different ethnicities intermarry much more than in past eras. Americans also interact today with people of different social statuses more closely to how they interact with people of similar social statuses than they once did. In important ways, Americans are structuring social life less unequally, less differentially than in past eras. Consequently, discrimination in dealing with deviance may have lessened (see Tittle, Villemez, et al. 1978, though they do not focus clearly on the structure of the case). Yes, people can deal with deviance without discriminating. As people structure social life less differentially, as they give less significance to ethnicity, race, social class, and other social characteristics in how they interact with each other, they will discriminate less when dealing with deviance. As social life becomes more equal, discrimination in dealing with deviance will decrease. PROJECTS

1. Try to investigate to what extent social communities or groups in modern society have explicitly stated the use of different punishments for offenses that involve different social structures. For example, examine the criminal law of your state to see whether different punishments are mandated for killing a fellow civilian compared to killing a law enforcement officer or other officials of the state. Does threatening a governor call for a different sanction than threatening a fellow civilian? You might examine the stated (or perhaps customary)

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penalties in a school district when a student hits another student or when a student hits a teacher or school official, or when a student steals from another student or steals from a teacher or school official. A disciplinary or honor code for colleges may also state different punishments for offenses with different social structures. 2. Create hypothetical scenarios of offenses in which you develop two different versions of the same offense. Make the two versions differ according to the social structure of the case. For example, a twenty-year-old man assaults his eighteen-year-old brother (don’t use the word assault, but describe a fight where the older brother beats up the younger brother), or in a bar a twentyyear-old man “assaults” an eighteen-year-old man who is a stranger. Have people read one or the other version of the pair. Provide possible responses as to what should be done or ask them to give you their responses. Tally the responses for the two separate versions. Compare your tallies. Does the social structure of the case make a difference? The example we describe in this project involves the relational distances among the parties involved in the offense. You may wish to alter other social characteristics that affect the web of relations of the people involved in the incident of deviance. 3. Donald Black’s argument about the social structure of the case is supported by the Implicit Association Test. This test measures the favorable or unfavorable associations individuals hold about people who vary by social characteristics such as their race, sexual orientation, and size. Individuals do not necessarily know that they hold such associations. You can explore your own automatic, unrecognized associations by going to the following website and taking the Implicit Association Test: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/. An informative article about the IAT and some of the research and controversy that surrounds it can be found online (Vedantam 2005).

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Each Case of Deviance Is Different, Isn’t It?

Judges, officers, disciplinary board members, principals, teachers, supervisors, officials of all kinds, and many other people have the difficult responsibility of handling those who have committed deviance. Judges and others who have that responsibility may do so regularly, as a routine part of their responsibilities. Do you think that those who regularly handle deviance should handle each case on its own merits? Each case should be considered carefully, then dealt with in the most appropriate manner. Problem-solving courts and presentencing investigations that we discussed in the previous chapter point to the desire to provide more individualized justice. Let’s explore this issue. Can each case be handled “on its own merit”? Imagine the following situation. You are a family court judge. Before you is a thirteen-year-old male. You have adjudicated him delinquent for breaking into a school and vandalizing several classrooms with two older youths, ages fifteen and sixteen. The damage is estimated at several thousand dollars. The youth had been detained for shoplifting when he was eleven, but he was let off with a warning when store officials decided not to prosecute, according to a police officer. The youth had also been put on community supervision last year for six months after being adjudicated delinquent for participating in taking a car to joyride. The car was driven around town until an officer spotted it weaving across lanes, pulled the driver over, and found several youths in it. The juvenile officer who evaluated the youth tells you that he lives with his

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aunt who cares deeply for him, but that she works two jobs and is not home much. How will you handle the youth? Will you put the youth on community supervision, perhaps with stricter requirements for reporting to his supervisor and for his conduct? Might you send him to the state’s juvenile justice facility where he will likely spend about five to eight months? The state has just opened some alternative facilities, so the youth could go to a wilderness camp instead of to a traditional institution. Would you like more information about the youth—about his family life, his school conduct, his attitude about life, his plans for the future, his behavior in his community, and so on—before you decide? Would you like to talk with him in depth in order to get to know him before you make up your mind? Please think about how you would handle the youth, then continue. Imagine that you decide to send him to one of the new wilderness camps run by the juvenile justice department. Months later, you learn that many of the youths sent to that wilderness camp seem to be doing well. Few disruptions occur at the camp; the first “graduates” of the camp have returned to their hometowns and local schools and have done satisfactorily. You are pleased with alternatives that the state now provides for dealing with delinquent youths. Let’s continue this hypothetical situation. The following year, a fourteenyear-old youth comes before you. You adjudicate him delinquent for shoplifting some expensive sneakers. Eight months earlier, he had been put on community supervision for shoplifting some clothes. According to a police officer, he has been stopped for underage drinking a couple of times and released to the custody of his mother, a single parent with four children. She cleans office buildings downtown from 10 p.m. until 6 a.m. Her oldest child, eighteen, is expected to look after her siblings, but the eighteen-year-old is busy with school and a part-time job. How will you handle the youth? Will it be community supervision again or confinement to one of the facilities of the juvenile justice department, perhaps one of the wilderness camps or other alternative facilities? Please think about what you will do, then continue. Let’s keep your imagination as a family court judge going a little further. Imagine that many youths come before you each week, perhaps dozens do. Many present situations that remind you of the two youths above. Others appear quite different. How will you handle each of these youths, each of these

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cases? Will you handle each of them as unique cases, making your decision based on the particulars of each situation? That would seem fair to do. After all, each child is unique; each case is different. Many people may imagine that judges, officers, disciplinary board members, principals, and others who routinely handle deviance should treat each case as the unique situation it is assumed to be. When we ask our students whether they believe that each case should be handled as unique, they typically tell us that each case should be. Is it possible, however, to do so? Would it be wise to try to do so? What do judges and others who regularly handle deviance do? Do they handle each case as if it is unique? EACH CASE IS DIFFERENT—OR IS IT?

Is it possible to treat each case of deviance and each offender as a unique situation and a unique individual? No. Fundamentally, we don’t live in a world of uniqueness; we live in a world of generalizations, of categories in which we organize our experience. When we speak of and act toward “tree,” “tomato,” “beach,”“child who is running,”“fantastic,” and all the other ways in which we categorize our experiences, we are no longer treating each experience as unique. We give the experiences meaning through the categories we use to shape the experiences, organize them, understand them. The categories ignore all the particulars of the experiences. The categories gloss over whatever differences we could identify among the instances placed in the categories and tie those instances together through a common meaning. Categories downplay uniqueness. The child who is running is moving her or his body in some particular way. We organize our experience of it by calling it running. In doing so, we do not emphasize the uniqueness of the child’s movement. Instead, we stress its fundamental similarity to other children and adults when they “run.” When we state that children are running, we are treating all of the children’s movements as if they were the same. We are not attending to whatever differences we could otherwise notice. The same is so for deviance. Consider the hypothetical examples we asked you to imagine above. We spoke of such actions and objects as shoplifting, joyriding, vandalism, a thirteen-year-old youth (not adult), and so on. By using those categories in our hypothetical examples, we presented particular actions and people, not in their uniqueness, but in their similarities to other actions and people similarly

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categorized. This categorization is also done officially, as in the charging of a youth with shoplifting. Acts officially labeled shoplifting vary in unlimited ways. For example, incidents of shoplifting vary by the day and time they are done; where they are done; the item(s) shoplifted; the skill of the shoplifters; the ages of the shoplifters by year, month, and day; the intended use(s) of the stolen items; the color and size of the items; and more. Can you think of still other ways by which shoplifting varies? Officially labeling diverse acts as shoplifting deemphasizes uniqueness in favor of similarity and generality. The family court is organized to treat people of certain ages, typically sixteen or under, as similar in one important respect—they are not adults. So, fundamentally, it is not possible to treat each instance as unique. We do not organize our experiences that way. We do not live our lives that way. We certainly create differences between our experiences, in this instance between different cases of deviance. However, we do so along dimensions by which we organize our experiences. We may create differences along such dimensions as what we see as the seriousness of the offense, the character of the youth (e.g., whether the youth is remorseful), the support the youths have from their families, and still other dimensions. Those dimensions become the ways we understand the cases and the offenders, and they become features on which we partly decide how to handle the offenders and their offenses. Again, the many particulars that we could take into account are not taken into account. To try to treat each case as unique (even though fundamentally that is not possible) would not make sense. To try to do so would mean that each time judges, officers, members of disciplinary boards, principals, or whoever must handle deviance had a case to handle, the decision makers could not use their experiences. They could not use how they handled previous cases and the outcomes of how they handled those previous cases in deciding how to handle this instance. They could not do so because each case would be understood to be and treated as unique. Therefore, experience with prior cases would be of no use for handling present cases. If all cases are unique, then present cases have nothing in common with prior cases. Nothing can be learned from how previous cases were handled. The judges, officers, members of disciplinary boards, principals, and other handlers would be starting from “scratch,” uninformed, inexperienced each time they handled cases if they tried to treat each case as unique. Do you find that absurd?

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Instead, we expect those who handle deviance to handle similarly cases understood to be similar. (We discussed in a previous chapter, however, the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of handling offenses that are similar when the social structure of the offenses vary.) We also expect those who handle deviance to learn from their experiences in order to handle future cases more successfully. Both these expectations indicate that we do not act as if cases are unique. Cases may differ, but they are not unique. When we expect those who handle deviance to handle similar cases similarly, we are asking that fairness be upheld. A problem, however, is how to decide what cases are similar. Cases may be understood as similar in terms of the official categories of deviance in which they are placed, the amount of monetary loss, the degree of harm to people (e.g., how many people are hurt and to what extent), the prior record of the offender, the age of the offender, the social circumstance of the offender, the culpability of the offender, and on and on. Observers may see great similarities where others know that the differences are important. Therefore, how cases are handled may be seen as just or unjust depending on how observers see the cases as similar or different. The controversy over the greater sentences given to those convicted of possessing crack cocaine as compared to powdered cocaine, which we have written about in other chapters, speaks, in part, to the conflict over what is similar or different. We expect those who handle deviance to learn from their prior experiences when they handle present cases. The only way to learn from their prior experiences is to be able to decide how present cases are similar to or different from prior cases. Doing that necessarily lessens whatever we mean by uniqueness in favor of categories, generalizations, comparability. Return to the hypothetical scenario that started this chapter. When you learned that the wilderness camp was working well for many of the youth sent to it, did you use that information in deciding how to handle the second youth whose offense and situation could be seen as similar to that of the first youth? If so, then you were using prior experience in making your present decision, something that we expect when we are expected to be rational. To ignore prior experience would be foolish, perhaps even the basis for wondering about one’s competence. It might even lead to one being treated as deviant. Even if we believed that each case handled by judges, officers, members of disciplinary boards, principals, and others who deal with deviance should be handled uniquely, those who handle cases do not do so. Instead, they develop

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and use guidelines, rules of thumb, typical procedures for handling cases. In some fields these are officially mandated, as in federal and state sentencing guidelines. These and other guidelines, whether formal or informal, are used flexibly, not unthinkingly, mechanically. For example, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, pursuant to federal law in 1984, has created and continues to revise a manual that provides guidance to federal courts in sentencing federal offenders. Until rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005, the guidelines were mandatory. Now they are advisory (United States Sentencing Commission 2005). As part of the manual, the commission has created a sentencing table that provides the range within which courts must sentence (until the guidelines became advisory) each class of convicted offenders unless atypical features are present. The sentencing table presents a grid of minimum to maximum sentences depending on the offense level of the charges for which the defendant was convicted and the criminal history category of the defendant. The offense levels run from 1 to 43. Criminal history categories run from category I to VI. For example, the guideline sentencing range for a defendant with an offense level of 21 and a criminal history category of III is forty-six to fifty-seven months’ imprisonment. The sentencing commission determined “base offense levels” for federal offenses, which then could be adjusted up or down depending on particular features of the offense. For example, the base offense level for aggravated assault is 14. If the assault involved more than minimal planning, then the offense level will be increased by 2. If a firearm was discharged during the offense, the offense level will be increased by 5. The criminal history category classifies the defendant according to the defendant’s prior record. The commission states that a prior record increases the culpability of the defendant for the present offense and makes the defendant more deserving of greater punishment. Repeated criminal behavior also indicates the lessened likelihood of successful rehabilitation. For example, for each prior sentence of imprisonment of more than one year and one month that the defendant has received, 3 points are to be added. If the defendant committed the presently charged offense while under criminal justice sentence, such as while on parole or probation, then 2 points are added to the criminal history score. Thus, a defendant on probation with one prior sentence of imprisonment for three years who was convicted in federal court of aggravated assault in

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which more than minimal planning was involved and in which a firearm was discharged (with no other features of the offense or of the defendant’s prior record relevant to sentencing) would have an offense level of 21 and a criminal history category of III (4, 5, or 6 points). As mentioned above, the appropriate sentence range in this case would be forty-six to fifty-seven months’ imprisonment. Had the defendant not been on probation when the aggravated assault was committed, then the defendant’s criminal history score would be 3 points, putting the defendant in category II (2 or 3 points). The defendant’s offense level remains 21. Therefore, the appropriate sentencing range in this second case would be forty-one to fifty-one months’ imprisonment (United States Sentencing Commission 2005). THEORY OF THE OFFICE

Officials use what has been called a “theory of the office” (Rubington and Weinberg 1978). They develop, learn from one another, and use a set of understandings, informal procedures, and unofficial routines in order to get their work done and in order to make sense of what they do. The theory of the office enables officials to give order to what otherwise could be chaotic. Some of the theory of the office may concern how to handle identified cases of deviance. For example, several decades ago, judges in one municipal jurisdiction handled in a few hours the cases of as many as 250 people convicted for public drunkenness (Wiseman 1979, 85–100). Cases were disposed of in as little as thirty seconds. How was that possible? It was possible through a theory of the office in which judges treated each offender as one of about seven different types of “drunks,” with routine dispositions for each type. Judges classified those who were publicly drunk primarily on three characteristics: (1) general physical appearance (dirty, bloody, trembling, shaking, or not), (2) past performance (nature of past record of arrests for being drunk), and (3) social position (job, marital status, permanent address or not, down-and-out appearance). Judges created about seven different types of drunks based on combining these three features. Each type was likely to receive a particular disposition. For example, judges typically suspended the sentence for transients or put them on probation if they would leave town. They also typically suspended the sentence for “middle-aged repeaters” who had not come before them for a while, but they required the repeaters to attend alcoholism school or gave them

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to the custody of Christian missionaries. The “derelict drunk” who is not gravely ill but is dirty, perhaps suffering withdrawal, and who may be malnourished was likely to be sentenced to jail in order to dry out. And so on. Or consider how police in one southwestern city handled domestic violence several years ago (Ferraro 1989). The department adopted a presumptive arrest policy for domestic violence. Officers were directed to arrest domestic violence violators even when the victim did not desire prosecution. When probable cause existed, officers were expected to arrest the offender even if a misdemeanor offense was not committed in the officers’ presence. Officers, however, used their discretion in deciding how to handle domestic violence cases. For example, officers divided citizens into those who are “normal” and those who are deviant. Normal citizens work, have a family, don’t typically become drunk, and keep their home at least modestly clean. They are understood by the police in this city to be white heterosexuals who speak English. Deviant citizens are unconventional, unacceptable. They are publicly drunk or high from drug use, homeless, involved in crime, live in dilapidated houses, have unusual family situations, and may not speak English well. Problems are a continuing part of their lives. Police believe that arrest has substantially different consequences for normal citizens and deviant citizens. Normal citizens are typically law abiding. They are shamed when arrested. Their deviance reflects situational stresses. Therefore, if the police arrest normal citizens who have committed domestic violence, the normal citizens may be less likely to commit domestic violence in the future. However, violence and deviance are a way of life for deviant citizens, according to officers. Arrest is not unusual to them. It causes no shame. Therefore, arresting those who are termed “scum,” “low-lifes,” or “those kind of people” is a waste of time. It will not do any good, believe the officers. Consequently, officers may be less likely to arrest deviant citizens who commit domestic violence than those who are seen to be normal citizens. (By the way, do the conclusions of this research about how police handled domestic violence in a southwestern city support or not support Donald Black’s reasoning about the social structure of the case, which we explored in the previous chapter? Recall, Black argues that officials handle more seriously deviance committed by someone of high status against another high-status individual compared to a similar offense committed by someone of low status against another low-status individual.)

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Research evaluating the consequences of arresting domestic violence offenders or handling the matter in other ways supports these officers’ theory of the office, however distasteful its characterization of different segments of a community may be. Men who have a greater stake in the conventional, mainstream community—through work and marriage—are less likely to commit domestic violence after being arrested compared to not being arrested. Those who are unemployed or are not married, however, increase their domestic violence after being arrested (Berk, Campbell, et al. 1992; Sherman, Smith, et al. 1992). Perhaps these less “conventional” citizens are not shamed by arrest but are angered by it, as the theory of the office used by police officers in the southwestern city indicates. Finally, consider offenders who are clients in drug court in one southeastern city that we explored. Drug courts work to enable nonviolent offenders who have a serious drug-using problem to stop using drugs and committing crimes. Drug court officials and judges handled the clients in routine ways when the clients first violated the requirements of the program. While participating in the program, the drug offenders may miss required counseling sessions, take drugs, or violate other program requirements. The drug court professionals in this southeastern city did not treat the clients when they first violated program requirements as if the clients and their violations were unique. Instead, similar violations were punished similarly. For example, all drug court clients received four hours of community service when they tested positive for using drugs for the first time as a client. Community service doubled to eight hours with the second positive test. By the fourth “dirty urine test,” the drug court judge routinely sentenced clients to twenty-four hours in jail (Rich 1999; Mackinem 2003). CONCLUSION

Now, how would you handle cases of deviance? You may think that you should handle each case as unique. As we have explored, however, that is neither possible nor desirable. That is also not how officials of all kinds handle deviance. Instead, they use their and others’ experience to handle cases routinely when possible. As they do so, they may classify cases into different kinds and handle cases they similarly classify in similar ways. Or they may use various understandings and procedures for dealing with cases. However, they do not typically

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treat each instance of deviance as if it is unique. To understand how officials handle deviance, we need to explore the theories of the office that they use— and much more. PROJECTS

1. Talk with police officers, prosecuting attorneys, principals, disciplinary hearing officers, or other officials who routinely deal with deviance. Ask them to discuss how they handle various instances of deviance. Do they use any “rules of thumb” in deciding how to deal with offenders? These rules of thumb may concern features of the cases and other issues in addition to characteristics of the offenses committed. Officials may categorize offenses and offenders as similar (or as different) based on features of the offenses and offenders, the offenders’ social situation, and other matters and deal with “similar” offenses and offenders in similar ways. 2. Does your university’s student-conduct board or similar body use a set of guidelines for how it disciplines students who have violated university regulations? If so, obtain a copy. Examine the guidelines for the suggested penalties for various violations. Those guidelines provide standards for how violations that are categorized as similar are to be handled. How do those guidelines classify cases as similar or different and prescribe corresponding punishments? 3. Create one or more pairs of scenarios of deviance and how the official or individual in charge handled the deviance. For example, create two scenarios involving academic cheating that in your judgment are similar in whatever ways you think are important but then vary in ways that you believe are not important (but not absurd) for how the professor or disciplinary board should handle the offenses. In your pairs present how the professor or disciplinary board handled each case. Have the handling of the cases be importantly different. Show the pair of cases to others (for example, other students) and ask them to comment on how the two cases were handled. How do the others respond to the differences in handling? What thoughts do you develop regarding whether cases can be or are expected to be handled as if they are unique? 4. Within the class, create groups of four or five members. Read the scenario presented below and determine as a group the proper punishment. Record the reasoning that is used in deciding the punishment. The punish-

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ment can range from one year’s probation to detention in a juvenile facility until the youth’s eighteenth birthday. John is a thirteen-year-old boy who was arrested in school by a school resource officer. The boy was reported to have shown a gun to other students. When the officer approached the boy, the child tried to run away. After a very short run, the officer grabbed the child and found the gun. After making its decision, each group can add its own details to enrich the scenario. For example, the youth cried, the youth pointed the gun at the officer, the gun was loaded, or other details. Add details to the scenario that might make the offense more or less serious, then trade the case that has been embellished with another group. Now make a determination of the proper punishment based on the embellished case. As a class, list all the factors that went into each group’s determination. From this list, identify the elements of the case that all groups paid attention to. What elements did groups see as important? What features of the event did groups evaluate as unimportant or irrelevant? To what extent did groups use similar reasoning? What thoughts do you have regarding whether those who deal with deviance treat instances of deviance as unique or not or whether they begin to develop routine ways of handling deviance?

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How Can We Get People to Do What We Want Them to Do?

Deviance is that to which people take offense. To those who are offended, deviance should be stopped, eliminated, changed, contained, or in some way minimized. It should be controlled. How can people control others? How can people get others to do what they want them to do? At a minimum, how can people get others to act appropriately and not in deviant ways? Beyond the minimum, how can people get others to give their best effort? As parents, teachers, bosses, coaches, officials, friends, family, and in other positions, how can people get others to act acceptably, even to give their best effort? More generally, how can society get its members to act appropriately, even to contribute to society? Imagine you’re a boss. You want your employees to be to work on time and to work with good effort and a good attitude. You want them to cooperate with other employees. You want them to work honestly, not stealing from the business, whether it is stealing objects or stealing time through goofing off at their computer should they work at a computer. As a boss, you may have still other expectations for your employees. Imagine that some employees are not acting as you expect them to act, or you want to be sure that employees do not begin acting unacceptably. What might you do to get your employees to meet your expectations, to not act inappropriately, perhaps even to give their best effort? Give some thought to this issue—and you may wish to write some of your thoughts—then continue.

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Before we explore three approaches that can be used, we want to remind ourselves that we cannot typically make people do anything, as we discussed in chapter 10. Unless we apply direct force of some kind to people’s bodies, for example, a parent holds the arm of a child and maneuvers the child to where the parent wants the child to be, we cannot make people act. Even if we directly apply force to people’s bodies, as the parent may do with a child, we cannot get much worthwhile accomplished. People direct themselves to act. We cannot make them do so. People direct themselves to act. They could act in a variety of ways. We want them to act in a way that meets our expectations. While some of us may be uncomfortable with the term “control,” that is what we are doing when we aim to get others to meet our expectations. We are trying to control their behavior. The boss expects the employees to work industriously and to follow directions. An employee may prefer to work in a more relaxed manner. Therefore, getting people to do what we want them to do is always a challenge. So, what have you decided to do as the boss? THREE CONTROL APPROACHES

As a boss, we can try three approaches to control our employees: force, payoffs, or commitment (Collins 1992, chap. 3; Higgins 1994, chap. 4; Kohn 1993). We may likely use a mixture of these approaches. Force is the use of harm or the threat of using harm to control others. The boss threatens to fire an employee. When bosses use payoffs, they reward their employees, perhaps giving them a raise. Commitment relies on a profoundly meaningful bond between the boss and the employees and among the employees, such as mutual respect. When bosses use force to control their employees, they harm them or threaten to harm them if the employees do not act as the bosses command. If you, the employees, do not act as we say, the bosses threaten, we will harm you. Nowadays, the harm is less likely to be physical than in past eras. Instead, the bosses threaten to fire the employees, dock the employees’ pay, manipulate the hours the employees work to the employees’ detriment, assign the employees less desirable jobs, or in other ways treat the employees unpleasantly. Did you consider using some kind of force to control your employees? No employee would wish to suffer such unpleasant consequences. Therefore, when forced by their bosses to perform, employees will do as they are

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told, won’t they? Perhaps they will, perhaps not. Employees could respond to force in various ways. Complying with the bosses’ order (or is it threat?) is only one of the possible responses. It may not even be the most likely response. Now, instead of being a boss, imagine that you are an employee threatened with harm from your boss if you do not do as your boss orders. How might you respond to this force? Consider the different ways you might respond before continuing. You might comply with your boss’s threat, but would you do so energetically and creatively? Instead, might you comply but do so only grudgingly and only with sufficient effort to keep the boss from enacting the harm the boss threatened? If your boss is not present to monitor your activities, might you reduce your efforts, particularly if your boss is not able to evaluate later what your efforts were while the boss was away? Might you act as if you are doing your best in order to deceive your boss? Perhaps you would explain to the boss why the boss’s order could not be carried out, though through no fault of yours. You may resent your boss, especially if the boss continually threatens you. Maybe you would call in sick in order to separate yourself from the unpleasantness. If you think you could get away with sabotage, perhaps you would try that. If you are not the only employee who is being threatened, maybe you and your coworkers would band together to resist the boss’s threats. Perhaps you would quit, especially if you believed you had other job options. Force and the threat of force, especially the more they are used, breed resentment and resistance. They undermine cooperation. Employees who are harmed or threatened to be harmed may comply, but they are not likely to work their best. They will hold back some of themselves in order to preserve some of their dignity that the boss’s threats and harms seek to take from them. Bosses may need to use some force as a later or last resort, such as firing employees who simply will not do what they are asked to do, but bosses who rely heavily on force may be surprised by how unsatisfactorily their employees work and behave. If force is not so promising for controlling others, including employees, then perhaps payoffs will work better. When bosses use payoffs, they promise to provide rewards to the employees if the employees do as the bosses want. If you, the employees, do what we tell you to do, say the bosses, we will provide various rewards. The bosses may provide a one-time bonus, a salary raise or

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other enhancements, better working hours, more desirable responsibilities, better accommodations or resources, opportunities for promotion, and/or other benefits desired by the employees. Did you consider rewards for controlling your employees? Offering employees payoffs appears to be more promising than threatening to harm them. Who wouldn’t wish to receive a bonus, salary raise, promotion, or other benefit for doing what the boss told them to do? Employees, however, may act in a variety of ways; working with determination to meet the boss’s goal is only one possible response. Once again, consider how you might respond to a boss who promises payoffs for doing what the boss tells you (and other employees) to do. Do you see any challenges or shortcomings of using payoffs? Certainly, you may work industriously to accomplish what your boss has directed you to do in order to receive the payoff. However, complications could arise. Perhaps the reward promised by your boss is not sufficiently appealing compared to the (extra) effort that is required. Either the reward is too little or the (extra) effort is too great. Next, you and your boss may disagree as to whether you have accomplished what the boss wanted. You may disagree about the quality, quantity, or both the quality and quantity of what was to be accomplished. If the boss tells you to produce more, you may do so, but the quality of what you produce could suffer, especially if the quality is difficult to evaluate. You may feel manipulated and cheated if you do not receive the payoff that you believe you earned. For you to accomplish what the boss wants may require the efforts of others. You may not receive the payoff due to what others fail to do. If the boss has only a limited supply of rewards, then you may be competing against your coworkers for the payoffs. The payoffs may sour the relationships among coworkers, perhaps turning them into competitors. Why should one coworker help another who may then get the payoff? If you have trouble meeting the boss’s expectations, will you inform the boss of your difficulty? To do so may further jeopardize the promised reward. The boss’s reliance on rewards overlooks the reasons that you and the other employees may not be performing as well as the boss wishes. Training, resources, work arrangements, and other matters that the boss could manage better may be important for your performance. Payoffs do not speak to those work conditions.

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The boss’s reliance on rewards may lessen the willingness of you and other employees to take risks, to try different approaches, which could prove to be more effective and efficient. To try a different approach could also fail. If the rewards are received only for success, then why jeopardize what presently works? Finally, a heavy focus on rewards may lessen your and other employees’ interest in the tasks. Increasingly, the only reason to do the tasks is because of the promised payoff. Any sense of accomplishment, feeling of using one’s talents, pleasure, or other meaningful experiences that arise from your doing the tasks is dampened by the focus on the payoff. If the payoff should no longer be provided or not as much of it be provided (or if the payoff ’s appeal has decreased), then less or no reason now exists to do the tasks (Kohn 1993). If some of the complications discussed above continue, then you may seek employment elsewhere. Notice, we have presented complications of using payoffs primarily from the employees’ perspective. Bosses also face challenges in using payoffs to get their employees to perform. For example, bosses must consider how much they can provide in payoffs for what level of performance. If they provide too little, they may lose their employees. If they provide too much, then they may exhaust their resources and hurt their profits. They also need to consider how their payoff scheme will affect relations among the employees. Will it breed resentment that some employees are receiving greater payoffs than others? Bosses face still other considerations when using payoffs to control their employees (Collins 1992, chap. 3). Bosses will need to use payoffs to attract employees. Employees will not work for free. However, while payoffs appear appealing, using them to improve the employee’s performance and behavior is more complicated and may not work as well as we first imagine (Collins 1992; Kohn 1993). In addition to or instead of force and payoffs, bosses can foster commitment between themselves and their employees and among the employees. Bosses may try to develop a meaningful bond between themselves and their employees. Bosses may try to promote mutual respect between themselves and their employees and among the employees. They show genuine concern for their employees, seek their input and give them meaningful responsibility for making various decisions, give them opportunities to develop their skills within the business, and share the good and difficult times with the employees. While

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bosses set expectations for their employees, perhaps with their employees’ input, they do not threaten employees. Difficulties become occasions to explore what can be done differently, not times for deciding who will be punished. While bosses provide benefits to their employees, they do not attempt to manipulate them through payoffs. When times are good, everyone shares in the success. When times are difficult, the boss takes the first cut. A mutual sense of care and obligation is fostered. Did you consider using commitment with your employees? Commitment may elicit outstanding effort from the employees. However, do you see any possible complications when bosses try to promote commitment as a way to get the employees to perform? Think about this and then continue. Commitment takes time and effort to develop. It does not easily appear. When employees differ with the boss, the boss may be tempted to simply declare the decision. However, declarations, especially repeatedly made, undermine commitment. Instead, employees are importantly consulted, even given opportunities to make significant decisions without being second-guessed. The boss is giving up some unilateral authority in order to promote mutual decision making. Commitment can be taken advantage of. If the boss primarily expects the employees to be committed to the company but is not equally committed to the employees, then the boss can use the employees’ devotion to the company’s advantage, not to the benefit of the employees and the company. The boss may come to expect the devoted employees to sacrifice for the company without the company sincerely supporting the employees. Once employees realize this, and sooner or later they will, they will come to resent their boss and be skeptical of any future attempts by the boss to develop mutual commitment, no matter how genuine the future efforts may be. In a similar manner, employees who are not as committed may be able to free ride on those employees who feel a duty to the company. The employees acting in bad faith allow the employees who are committed to do more than their share. Force, payoffs, and commitment are three ways for bosses and for anyone to try to get others to perform well. Typically bosses will use a mix of these three forms of control. However, a too-heavy reliance on force and/or payoffs will undermine commitment. Force and payoffs encourage those being controlled to be concerned primarily with themselves. What can they do to keep

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from being harmed, or what can they do to receive the payoff? Genuine commitment, however, looks away from the self toward others. Committed individuals put others, the group, ahead of themselves. Force and payoffs damage commitment. While we have discussed force, payoffs, and commitment through the example of bosses and employees, we can apply this discussion to wherever control is exercised. Parents control their children as they raise them. Organizations control their members. The state controls its citizens. Force, payoffs, and commitment are used in each of these realms to get children, organization members, and citizens to refrain from deviance, to act appropriately, even to give their best effort. PARENTS, ORGANIZATIONS, AND THE STATE

Parents (and other guardians) raise their children day by day. They aim to help their children become competent individuals who contribute to their society in an acceptable manner. When you become a parent or if you are a parent, you will know or do know how demanding and important that responsibility is. Parents act in many ways toward their children. Before continuing, you might consider how you act toward your children if you are a parent, or if you are not a parent, consider how your parents acted toward you when you were growing up (if you can remember) or how you think you may raise your children when you become a parent. Parenting styles may parallel the three forms of control that we have discussed. Parents may primarily use authoritarian, permissive, or responsive forms of parenting, though parents who primarily use one of these styles may at times act in ways that fit the other parenting approaches. Authoritarian parents expect their children to submit to them. They dominate their children and may enforce arbitrary and rigid rules. Permissive parents care about their children and act warmly toward them; however, they indulge their children. They allow their children to have their own way because to limit their children may lead their children to be unhappy, or so they think. Responsive parents are warm and affectionate with their children, establish clear expectations for (and even with) their children but are not harsh, and emphasize their children’s developing autonomy by supporting their children’s increasing responsibility and self-direction. Children who have been raised by parents who use a responsive approach generally do better than those raised by authoritarian

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or permissive parents. They become more cheerful, confident, poised, and responsible. They are less likely to use and abuse drugs and to commit delinquency. They are more likely to do well in school (Steinberg, Brown, et al. 1996). Organizations also vary in how they use force, payoffs, and commitment to control their members. They do so in part according to the structure and purpose of the organization. Coercive organizations, such as prisons, jails, (at times) mental hospitals, and even the military (when citizens are drafted or, in part, once citizens have enlisted), remove people from everyday society and closely control their actions through the threat and use of physical force. Utilitarian organizations such as private businesses, government agencies, and unions rely more on the provision of desirables such as salary, health and retirement benefits, and the ability to bargain for those desirables, in the case of unions, in order to attract, retain, and control their members. In voluntary organizations, such as charitable organizations, special interest groups, and religious organizations, members typically enter and leave as they wish. Members often have a strong commitment to the voluntary organizations and their mission. A mix of controls may be used in these various kinds of organizations even when a particular method is central, and different controls may be used depending on the social positions of the participants in the organizations. For example, force and the threat of force may be primarily used upon inmates, but payoffs are an important control used for the correctional officers. Further, the wise prison warden will ensure that the inmates are treated respectfully, if also firmly, so that the inmates develop some commitment to helping the warden and the prison staff run the prison with as few problems as possible. Variation and complexity in control occur in utilitarian and voluntary organizations as well. Can you use your own experiences in such organizations to think of some of these complexities (Turner 2006, 183–84)? Finally, consider the state and its political power. The state and its leaders may maintain their political power through coercion, manipulation of material incentives, and the use of symbols that support their legitimacy to govern. Leaders may threaten or use physical force against the members of their society to subjugate them. However, coercion is costly to use: “People must be constantly monitored, a standing force loyal to leaders must be supported, and administrative structures must be elaborated to keep tabs on who is doing what and to imprison or kill those who fail to conform” (Turner 2006, 281).

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Far short of tyranny, states use their laws and their power to induce people to conform. The severity, certainty, and celerity (i.e., promptness) of the punishment may make a difference in how likely people are to violate the laws (Tittle 1980; Tittle and Paternoster 2000, 510–28). Leaders will also use material incentives to encourage the members of their society to do as the leaders wish. After taxing the population, leaders return some of those resources to elicit conformity. In advanced societies, the government offers subsidies or tax incentives to encourage various activities such as development of new energy sources, donations to charitable organizations, and home ownership. Separate from the leadership, material incentives may be built into the structure of societies. For example, to the extent that a society is meritocratic, it emphasizes that through people’s talents and efforts, they can become successful no matter the status of their parents. Education and the economy are structured in meritocratic societies so that those who perform better go further. The better that people perform, the more likely they will be admitted to college, especially selective colleges; receive college scholarships; obtain betterpaying jobs; and advance further in their careers. Therefore, the structure of meritocratic societies provides payoffs to induce its citizens to conform and to be productive. Leaders and government also appeal to symbols that move people to act. These may include traditions, religious beliefs, national identity, and founding documents such as a constitution. These symbols represent the ties that bind together the people of the country (or a segment of the people). When used artfully, these symbols support the legitimacy of the leaders to govern (Turner 2006, 281–82). Loyalty, a form of commitment, has been created between the state (and its leaders) and its citizens. Recall, just as commitment can be taken advantage of by a boss, the loyalty of citizens can be taken advantage of by the state and its leaders. CONCLUSION

Employers, parents, teachers, coaches, officials, leaders, and many others continually experience the challenge of how to get people to act as those in charge wish the people to act—to act appropriately, to not commit deviance. Control is a never-ending challenge. Even leaders in deviant enterprises experience the challenge of getting fellow participants to act as the leaders expect, to not act

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in ways that the leaders of the deviant enterprises find offensive. Since controllers typically cannot make those they wish to control act in any particular way, they experience the challenge of getting others to direct themselves to act as the controllers wish. Controllers can do this in three ways: force, payoffs, and commitment. Controllers are likely to use a mix of these approaches. While commitment may be the most powerful of these three forms of control—people do give up their lives for what and whom they are committed to—it, too, has its shortcomings, as do the other two forms of control. As we discussed in chapter 10, one way of understanding how people commit deviance is to look at how they create powerful emotions and understandings that enable them to move themselves into deviance. The emotions and understandings are experienced as so compelling that the people feel they could not act otherwise. Through these emotions and understandings, people respond to challenges to who they are. Thus moral concerns may be crucial in committing deviance. Likewise, perhaps the most powerful way to get people to act appropriately may be through developing profound meanings that tie people to something larger than themselves. Through the bonds of commitment, people give of themselves to that which gives meaning to who they are. In the service of something beyond themselves, their self is realized. PROJECTS

1. Examine closely a workplace, team, club, organization, or some other social group in which you participate. Identify those who are in charge, who have formal responsibility for controlling the other participants. How do those in charge try to get the participants to act as those in charge wish, to act appropriately, to not commit deviance, to even perform well? What strategies do they use? How do the participants react to the control used on them? Can you develop some possible strategies that those in charge might try in order to improve control? 2. Make a short list of all the clubs (including fraternities or sororities), organizations, and jobs you are or have been involved in. Prioritize the list from the best to worst regarding your experiences in that group. Beside each club, organization, and job, list the primary way those in charge tried to control their members. What thoughts do you have based on this exercise?

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3. Examine closely where you exercise control over others. Try not to rely just on your recollection, but observe yourself as you attempt to control others. Where do you exercise control? What approaches do you use? How do those whom you are trying to control respond to your approaches? Might you try different approaches or a different mix of approaches in the future? What thoughts do you develop about control from examining your own attempts at control?

Conclusion

Deviance fascinates us and troubles us. We hold many assumptions about it. We may not consider carefully what we think about it. We have invited you to think more deeply about deviance, in ways that challenge what people take to be so. To do so may have been difficult, even troubling. To do so may ultimately be more useful. In particular, through your reading you have thought about the following: Chapter 1: We may assume that some acts and attributes are inherently deviant, that the very nature of the acts and attributes makes that so. However, it may be more useful to consider that through their negative reactions, people make acts and attributes deviant. How, then, do people come to react negatively to some behavior and not other behavior? Chapter 2: Our first impression may be that people on the fringe of society are the ones who are deviant. Yet we all act, think, or possess characteristics to which others have reacted or do react negatively. We, ordinary people, are the deviants. We may be surprised to know that a significant percentage of ordinary people are even involved in deviance that is widely seen as serious— crime, alcohol problems, mental health difficulties, and illegal drug use, to name four. Thus, to think about deviance is to think about us, not just “them.” Chapter 3: Many of us wonder about why people commit deviance. In order to understand deviance more fully, however, we may wish to examine how people produce and participate in the phenomenon of deviance. We may wish

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to explore the processes through which people create deviance. What consequences do we create through those processes and for whom? Chapter 4: Our first thoughts about deviance may be that it is a threat to social life. It harms and undermines social life. However, we can also consider deviance to be a powerful means for creating social life, for enabling people to live and act together, for giving meaning to their lives. Social life cannot exist without deviance, which is part of its foundation. How, then, do people use deviance to mold social life? Chapter 5: Some behaviors, such as cannibalism and infanticide, disgust us. Yet, these behaviors that are obviously horrendous to us are part of the natural capacity of humans. Moreover, some societies have accepted, even expected, their members to commit such behaviors. Other societies, however, have transformed these behaviors that are part of humans’ natural capacity into an abomination. What awesome ability people have to shape what is human! How do people make disgusting what is part of humans’ natural capacity? How do other people make it required? Chapter 6: While we may agree that much deviance harms people and social life, we may not realize that deviance may also be helpful. It can contribute to the production of social life. How so? Do people unequally benefit from this contribution? Chapter 7: Further, instead of seeing deviance primarily as a violation of morality, we can also understand much of it as an attempt to uphold conventional morality. Even serious deviance may at times be usefully viewed as a means of social control, controlling the unacceptable behaviors of others. How do observers and officials react to this moralistic deviance? Through what other lenses can we view deviance? Chapter 8: We often take much of our world for granted. We assume that much of what presently is always was. We do this for deviance, too. However, behavior, thoughts, and attributes are not inherently deviant. Instead, people make deviant what they take to be deviant. People may contest the status of a phenomenon as deviant or acceptable over years, even centuries, as has been done with tobacco, cigarettes, and smoking. What interests and processes come into play as people produce what is deviant or acceptable? Chapter 9: Knowing the amount of deviance that occurs is important for officials, policymakers, scholars, and citizens. They use that amount and related information in trying to explain deviance, control it, and in other ways.

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Many of us realize that trying to learn the true amount of deviance is difficult, if not impossible. It may be impossible because no actual amount exists independent of people who are interested in that issue. Officials, scholars, and other interested people produce the amount of deviance that they claim exists. How is the amount produced, how could it be produced, what difference does it matter how it is produced, and what are the consequences of producing the amount one way or another? Chapter 10: What causes people to commit deviance? Social scientists have developed various explanations. However, the concept of cause may not be particularly useful. Instead, how do people move themselves into deviance? What compelling feelings and thoughts do people produce at this moment and place that enable them to commit deviance? How do those feelings and thoughts enable people to manage challenges to their selves that arise out of the larger social circumstances within which the people live? Chapter 11: Offenders must act, they must do something, in order to commit many kinds of deviance. The deviance does not just happen. Nevertheless, a crucial part of committing deviance is producing meanings—understandings and feelings—that enable participants to accomplish deviance at this place and time. Deviance is committed not only through movement but also through meaning. But how? Chapter 12: We are likely to assume that either an instance of deviance occurred or did not occur, even though only the participants may know what really happened. A nonobvious approach may be more useful. An event does not announce to observers—or to its participants—what it is. Instead, observers, and even participants, always face the troubling responsibility of giving meaning to the events, of deciding what happened. Only after the event has occurred, sometimes years later, does what it is—a kind of deviance or no deviance at all—come to exist. How do observers—and participants—decide what happened? How do they manage conflicts concerning this issue? Chapter 13: Officials, counselors, family members, and many others who interact with offenders often wonder who the offender is. What kind of person is the offender? The offender “is” who the officials, counselors and other interested parties “make” the offender to be. Interested parties give offenders their identities. Defenders and detractors of the offenders may participate in identity contests, striving to have their proffered identities accepted as the true identities. How are the identities of deviants constructed?

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Chapter 14: Without realizing it, we have and use images of harm. For example, when we think of crimes, we are likely to think of robbery, burglary, assault, and other street offenses. When we think of criminals, we are likely to think of young, low-income, often minority men living in the city. These typical images are the product of the workings of our society and of our justice system. However, these images deflect our attention from equal, if not more serious, harm done elsewhere by businesspeople, professionals, government officials, and others who are successful. How do people use these typical images in furthering their interests in deviance, and how are we diversely affected by these typical images? Chapter 15: Most of us cannot imagine seriously, intentionally harming others. Only disturbed people could do so. As Stanley Milgram’s famous research indicates, however, ordinary people have a great capacity to harm others. The history of harm that people of one ethnic, religious, tribal, or other group have done to those of another group also points to the great capacity of ordinary people to inflict tremendous harm on others. Yes, harm is committed by people who are widely recognized as psychologically disturbed, but most harm is not. Most harm is committed by ordinary people who encounter and create social situations in which committing harm is understandable, doable, even laudable or necessary. How can ordinary people come to commit unspeakable harm such as genocidal killings or honor killings? Chapter 16: You have likely heard, read, and/or used the statement that the offender received the time (i.e., punishment) because the offender did the crime (i.e., the deviance). However, does such a statement explain why and how the reaction came to be, or does it obscure what it is meant to explain? A person’s behavior does not dictate how others will react to it. For example, seemingly similar drug use has been over time and is at present handled in diverse ways. Can we then usefully claim that the similar instances of drug use caused the different punishments? How do citizens and officials come to handle particular behaviors as they do? Chapter 17: Many people believe that we should not discriminate when dealing with deviance. Those who commit similar deviance should be handled in similar ways. As long as people differentiate themselves, creating differences among themselves, such as differences in status or in relational distance, people will also create differences in how they handle seemingly similar deviance. People deal with deviance within a structure of relationships among the par-

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ticipants. If the structure of the relationships differs from one instance of deviance to another seemingly similar instance of deviance, reactions will likely differ, too. Discrimination in dealing with deviance expresses the differentiated relationships that people have created. Such discrimination also helps to reproduce that differentiation. What can be done to reduce discrimination when dealing with deviance? Chapter 18: In our society, which stresses individualism, with a heavy emphasis on the uniqueness of each individual and on the responsibility of people as individuals to make their own way, we may believe that each instance of deviance is unique, that each should be handled on its own individual merits. Yet, is that possible? Is it desirable? Deviance, like life, exists through generalities, through categorizations, not uniqueness. How do those who manage deviance come to understand and handle specific events as instances of one kind of deviance but not another? How do they make routine the handling of deviance? Chapter 19: Deviance is that which offends us. How can we get people to act acceptably, even to perform with their best effort? How can we control people when we cannot literally make them do much of anything? We may think that force, while distasteful, would be effective. However, how well does it work? Do payoffs, which appear more appealing than force, work any better? Both control approaches encourage people to look out primarily for themselves. Instead, fostering commitment, a bond with others where people put ahead of themselves something beyond themselves, may be the most powerful way to control others. However, commitment, too, has its shortcomings. How is controlling people a never-ending challenge? PRODUCING DEVIANCE, AN UNRECOGNIZED RESPONSIBILITY

All the chapters point to deeper ways of thinking about deviance. Woven throughout them is a common thread. This thread may at first have been overlooked. Once pointed out to us, we may be able to see it easily. However, we may see it simply, not recognizing its complexity, not recognizing its profound implications for us. The common thread in thinking about deviance and the most nonobvious way to do so is to examine continually, doggedly how people produce deviance. Deviance and all that it involves, all of its processes, do not somehow just happen. Neither nature nor the divine dictates what people produce. Neither conditions of the environment nor characteristics of people produce deviance.

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Instead, people do. We are completely responsible in every way imaginable for deviance. People create deviance as they try to live and act with one another when nothing compels how they do live and act together. They create deviance as they give their lives meaning when nothing forces them to give any particular meaning to their and others’ existence. The next moment in the drama of life, in the drama of deviance, is always made, not predetermined. People produce deviance without the benefit of ever being able to compare what they have done to some absolute standard of what should have been done. Whatever certainty people create in the dramas of deviance, they must create and maintain for themselves. People also grapple with their inability to create that certainty. However, each person does not do all this on her or his own. Instead, individuals produce deviance within social worlds—worlds of families, organizations, societies, and more. These worlds have been made, are maintained, are challenged, and even are changed by the individuals and by others. Individuals enter those worlds—at birth, when going to school, when making a new group of friends, when joining an organization, and in other ways. Individuals become who they are within these worlds. As they do so, they and the others produce the dramas of deviance. People produce deviance, each moment, often without much awareness of the awesomeness of their handiwork. They are caught up within the social life of their worlds. They do not step back to observe and think about what they and others do to produce deviance within those worlds, which they also fashion. Perhaps this book will help you to step back and think about deviance. We think about deviance in order to think about ourselves, about our particular self and about our fellow producers of this awesome drama of life. By doing so, we may be able to produce more satisfying lives for ourselves and others. What do you think? PROJECT

1. As you think about deviance, what questions do you now have about deviance, especially ones that you did not have before? What assumptions or beliefs about deviance that you had before reading this work do you now question? Why? Have you discarded any? If so, why so? If not, why not? What are you now thinking about deviance?

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2. Take as seriously as you can the idea that people have never-ending responsibility for deviance, for all that it is, was, or will become. Can you begin to apply that perspective to your life and your involvement in the dramas of deviance? For example, how do you exercise responsibility for accepting, challenging, or not thinking much about what your society or social group makes as deviant? Or how do you exercise responsibility when you or a group in which you are member decides to handle someone evaluated as deviant? What do you think about this never-ending responsibility?

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Index

Amerindians, destruction of, 162–63 battered women, 117–19, 145. See also domestic violence BTK strangler (Dennis Rader), 23, 146 cannibalism, 55–56, 57. See also Jeffrey Dahmer capital punishment, 187–89 child abuse, 6, 29, 89, 90, 127, 133 cigarettes, 18, 27, 76–85, 166. See also tobacco cocaine, 171, 173–75, 181, 201. See also drugs control, three approaches of, 210–15. See also parenting styles corporal punishment, 160 crime: counts, 95–97; deviance as, 17–18; deviant self-help, 71–72; images of, 149–55; and punishment, 169–77; stereotypes, 150–51; “typical,” 150–56; white-collar, 152–54, 179–80. See also specific crimes

criminal justice system, 153–55; as criminal, 155; and “deviant self-help,” 71–72; discrimination in, 151, 180, 181, 183, 185, 191–94; organizational practices in recording crime, 95–97; and racial profiling, 151, 181. See also drug court; drugs, war on; law Dahmer, Jeffrey, 55, 166. See also cannibalism deviance: absolute view of, 15–16, 35; causes of, 101–11; committed by ordinary people, 25–31, 160–66; controlling, 209–18; as crime, 17–18; definition of, 12; and discrimination, 179–94; by employees, 27–28; explanations for, 101–3, 106; as foundation of social life, 44–49; as harmful, 43, 48, 61–62; as helpful, 62–66; and identity of offender, 36, 141–46; jurisprudential v. sociological view of handling, 183–87; measuring of, 247

248

89–98; natural capacity of humans to commit, 53–57; “ordinary,” 160; processes in production of, 34–37; as rule violation, 15–18; “seduction” into, 106–12; as social control, 69–73; by students, 26–30, 197–200; as threat to social life, 43–44; transforming experience into, 125–34 deviant offender. See identity discrimination, 179–94; in criminal justice system, 151, 180, 181, 183, 185, 191–94; deviance and, 179–94; and deviant self-help, 71–72; racial profiling, 151 domestic violence, 121, 166; police handling of, 204, 205. See also battered women drug court, 144, 175, 193, 205; and the construction of offenders’ identities, 143–44 drugs: cigarettes, 18, 27, 76–85, 166; cocaine, 171, 173–75, 181, 201; opium, 171–73; tobacco, 18, 76–85; war on, 171–76 fraud, telemarketing, 119–21; qualifying the buyer, 120; techniques used, 120; voice as weapon, 119 gangs, 66 genocide, 162–64. See also Amerindians Hitler, Adolf, 24 homicide, 128, 129, 133; and “character contests,” 116–17; honor in, 116–17; of infants or children, 54–55, 57 (see also Susan Smith); prosecution of, 17; as “righteous slaughter,” 107, 108,

INDEX

110, 111, 160. See also capital punishment; honor killing homosexuality, 15, 18, 20, 52–53, 57; ritualized, 52–53 honor killing, 165 Hussein, Saddam, 24 identity, 137–46; constructed by organizations, 143–44; constructing offender’s, 140–44; contesting, 144–45; contrasting, 145 immigrants, 3, 78; Chinese, 172 infanticide. See homicide, of infants or children Jackson, Andrew, 163 law: jurisprudential model of, 184–85; sociological model of, 184–87; unavailability of, 71–72. See also capital punishment; criminal justice system; deviance, as rule violation; drug court; drugs, war on; homicide, prosecution of; political power; tobacco; typical crime and criminal; U.S. Sentencing Commission media, 63, 89, 102, 141, 151. See also televison mental illness: measurement of, 89–90; prevalence of, 29 Milgram, Stanley, 158–61, 167 mugging, 62, 113–16, 121 Nixon, Richard, 179 occupational harm, 153 opium, 171–73. See also drugs organizations, control in, 216

249

INDEX

parenting styles, 215–17. See also control political power, 216–17 punishment, crime and, 169–77. See also capital punishment; corporal punishment Rader, Dennis. See BTK strangler “righteous slaughter,” 107–8 sexual assault, 46, 47, 61, 62, 91, 126, 184, 192; prosecution of, 128–33 shoplifting, 61, 182–83, 190, 197–200. See also “sneaky thrills” Smith, Susan, 138–41, 145, 146, 180 smoking. See drugs; tobacco “sneaky thrills,” 108–11 spanking. See corporal punishment television, 5, 7; regulation of tobacco advertising on, 79–84. See also media “theory of the office,” 203–5

tobacco, 18, 76–85; regulation of, 79–84. See also drugs typical crime and criminal, 150–56 Uniform Crime Report (UCR), 89, 92, 94, 96–97, 152 U.S. Sentencing Commission, 173–75, 181, 202–3 victim, 17, 61–62, 71, 91, 130–31, 144, 145, 152, 153, 185, 186, 204. See also capital punishment; child abuse; domestic violence; genocide; mugging; occupational harm victimization survey, 91, 92, 99 violence. See cannibalism; child abuse; domestic violence; genocide; homicide; honor killing; mugging; “righteous slaughter”; sexual assault white-collar crime, 152–54, 179–80 women, abused. See battered women; domestic violence

About the Authors

Paul Higgins, Ph.D., is professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. He has published more than a dozen books and monographs about deviance, disability, and sociology. These include works about deaf people and their communities, rehabilitation professionals, educating deaf and hearing students together, the puzzles of social life, the school-year experiences of an elementary school student, and the social processes that produce deviance. Mitch Mackinem, Ph.D, is assistant professor of sociology at Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina. After twenty years of working in the addictions treatment field, he has witnessed many aspects of deviance from the ordinary to the unusual. Using his experiences as a drug court administrator, he recently published Drug Court: Constructing the Moral Identity of Drug Offenders with Paul Higgins. He is currently working on an edited collection about problem-solving courts, as well as other projects exploring alternatives within the criminal justice system.

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