Week 6 · Chapter

Chapter 6 — Deviance, Crime & Social Control

Introduction to Sociology Free sample edition

The module's primary reading · ~35–45 minutes · Objective 4 (explain social interaction, groups, and organizations — status and role, dramaturgy, primary and secondary groups, conformity, and bureaucracy — and compare the functionalist, conflict, and interactionist explanations of deviance and social control, reading crime data as rates rather than counts), building on Objective 1 (apply the sociological imagination — connecting personal troubles to public issues — and the three major theoretical perspectives (structural functionalism, conflict theory, symbolic interactionism) to interpret a social phenomenon, naming the level of analysis each works at and placing the discipline's founders with the ideas and works they are known for) and Objective 2 (describe and evaluate the major sociological research methods (surveys, experiments, field research and ethnography, secondary-data analysis), distinguish reliability from validity and a population from a sample, and read a social statistic critically — what it measures, over what population and period, what it shows and does not, and whether it is a correlation or a cause) · Read it first this week; the lecture, the slide deck, the tutorial, the quiz, and the Sociology in Action Workshop all build on it.

In plain language

Every group you belong to has rules, and someone in every group breaks them. This week asks what counts as breaking the rules and who gets to decide. You will meet deviance (breaking a group's norms) and crime (breaking a law), and see that they differ. You will learn how groups use social control (the ways a group keeps people in line), how three perspectives explain rule-breaking, and how to read crime data by rate and by source.

Why you already care about this

In 2024, the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey found 23.3 violent victimizations for every 1,000 people age 12 or older in the United States. Only 11.2 per 1,000 were reported to police. That means about half of the violent crimes people told the survey about never reached a police record.

You have probably seen a headline that said "crime is up" or "crime is down." You may have wondered whether to report something yourself: a stolen bike, a shove in a parking lot, a threat in a group chat. Maybe you decided it was not worth the trouble. Each of those private choices helps decide what a police count can and cannot show.

Rule-breaking is also closer to home than a headline. A coworker pads a timesheet. A teammate fakes an injury to stop the clock. A neighbor parks a work truck where a new rule says not to. In each case, a group has to decide whether this is deviance, what to do about it, and who gets the label.

By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

define deviance and crime, explain how they overlap, and show how the same act can be deviant in one setting and expected in another;
tell informal from formal social control and name the three parts of the criminal-justice system;
explain Durkheim's functions of deviance without reading them as praise;
sort an example into Merton's five responses to strain;
explain the conflict account's question of who defines deviance;
tell primary from secondary deviance and apply labeling theory, differential association, and control theory to a case;
compare places by crime rate rather than count, and read the 2024 victimization survey four ways, with the arithmetic shown.

Carry this line with you: deviance is a judgment, not a property of the act.

Where we are

Already covered: Week 1 gave you the three perspectives and rates versus counts. Week 2 showed how to read a study four ways. Week 3 named norms and sanctions, Week 4 the self, and Week 5 the pull of a group.
This week: what happens when people break a group's rules, how groups respond, how three perspectives explain rule-breaking, and how to read crime data.
How they connect: deviance breaks Week 3's norms, social control uses its sanctions, and a label can reshape Week 4's self. Week 1's rates and Week 2's questions read the crime figures.
Where we're going next: Week 7, Social Stratification & Class, asks how a society ranks people into layers, read with the same care as this week's crime figures.

Week 3 is the chapter this one leans on most. There, norms were the shared rules for how people are expected to behave, and a sanction was a reward or a penalty a group uses to enforce a norm. This week asks what happens when someone breaks a norm. Week 1's levels of analysis matter here too. Durkheim, Merton, and the conflict account mostly work at the macro level of whole societies, while labeling theory works at the micro level of face-to-face reactions. And Week 1's two towns return in Section 7, this time with crimes.

1. Define deviance: the rules, the setting, and the law

Picture two crowds cheering at the top of their lungs. One is in a stadium during a playoff game. The other is in a hospital waiting room at 2 a.m. The noise is the same. The reaction is not. In the stadium, a silent fan stands out. In the waiting room, the cheering fan gets glares, a nurse's warning, and maybe a security guard.

The act did not change. The setting did. You will come back to that starting point all week.

Deviance is behavior that violates the norms of a group, whether or not it also breaks a law.

Because norms belong to groups, deviance does too. What your group expects, another group may condemn.

The relativity of deviance is the principle that whether an act counts as deviant depends on the time, the place, the culture, and the group, so the same act can be expected in one setting and condemned in another.

Deviance shifts along three lines. Place: cheering is expected in a stadium and deviant in a waiting room. Time: in an illustrative office, the first employees who worked from home drew a manager's warning, and a few years later working from home was written into the office's policy. Culture and group: a loud, overlapping conversation at one family's dinner table shows warmth, while at another family's table it reads as rude.

Crime is a narrower idea.

Crime is behavior that violates a formal law, a narrower category than deviance because it covers only the norms a state has written into law.

Worked example — sorting four illustrative acts. For each act, you ask two questions. Does it break a group's norm? Does it break a law?

Cutting into a long line at an illustrative food truck. It breaks a norm, and people in line will say so. It breaks no law. Deviant, not a crime.
Driving a little over the speed limit on an illustrative highway where nearly every car does the same. It breaks a law. Other drivers do not react, because the group's norm matches the behavior. A crime that the group around it does not treat as deviant.
Stealing a phone from a classmate's bag. It breaks a law and a strong norm. Deviant and a crime.
Wearing a costume to a job interview. It breaks the norm of the setting and no law. Deviant, not a crime.

In words: deviance and crime overlap, but neither one contains the other. An act you sort can be either one, both, or neither.

Misconception check — "deviance and crime are the same thing." Students often use the two words as if they meant the same thing. That is tempting, because news stories about deviance are usually about crime. But deviance is about a group's norms, and crime is about the law. Cutting in line is deviant without being a crime. The cure: ask the two questions separately, "Which norm?" and "Which law?"

Notice also that "deviant" is not the same as "bad." A person who refuses to join in when a group mocks a newcomer is breaking that group's norm. In that group, kindness is the deviant act.

Memory hook: same act, different room — different verdict.

2. Name how groups keep order: social control

Think about the last time someone gave you a look that said "stop that." Maybe you were talking during a movie, or scrolling your phone during a family meal. Nobody wrote you a ticket. The look was enough.

That look is a small piece of something every group you belong to does.

Social control is the set of ways a group encourages conformity to its norms and discourages deviance, from a disapproving look to an arrest.

Social control comes in two forms, and they match the sanctions you met in Week 3.

Informal social control is social control carried out by ordinary people in everyday life, such as a stare, a joke at someone's expense, or a cold shoulder.
Formal social control is social control carried out by official bodies acting under written rules, such as a school's discipline office, an employer, the police, or a court.

For crime, a society uses its most formal kind of control.

The criminal-justice system is the set of formal agencies a society uses to respond to crime: the police, the courts, and corrections.

Worked example — the illustrative group chat and the illustrative campus. Sort each response as informal or formal social control.

A member of a hobby group chat posts the same ad five times. Others reply with eye-roll emoji and one writes, "We get it." Informal: ordinary members, no written rule.
The chat's moderator removes the posts under the group's posted rules. Formal: an official role acting under written rules.
A student who plays loud music in a dorm hallway at midnight gets a knock on the door from a neighbor. Informal.
The residence office later issues the student a written warning under the housing contract. Formal.
A shoplifting arrest that leads to a court date. Formal, and it runs through the criminal-justice system: the police, then the courts.

In words: informal control comes from the people around you, and formal control comes from an office with written rules behind it.

Most social control in your life is informal. A frown, a laugh, or a friend's raised eyebrow does most of the work on you. Formal control steps in when informal control fails or when the stakes are high.

Misconception check — "social control means police." Students often hear "social control" and think only of police and prisons. That is tempting, because formal control is the visible kind. But most social control is informal and happens between ordinary people every day. The cure: before you name a formal body, ask what the people nearby did first.

Memory hook: a look before a law; most control is informal.

3. Read deviance as functional: Durkheim

Picture an illustrative recreational soccer league. Late in a close game, a player fakes an injury to stop the clock. The other team protests. The league reviews the video and suspends the player for two games. At the next league meeting, every coach talks about the rule, and players on every team say they would never do that.

Notice what happened. One player broke a rule, and the whole league ended up more united about the rule than you might expect.

Émile Durkheim saw that pattern long before recreational leagues. In The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), he argued that crime is a normal part of every healthy society and can prepare the way for moral change. In The Division of Labor in Society (1893), he argued that punishing crime reaffirms the shared norms it offends and so strengthens social solidarity.

The functions of deviance are Durkheim's account of the useful work deviance does for a society: crime is normal in every society, it can prepare the way for moral change, and punishing it reaffirms the shared norms it offends.
Social solidarity is the bonds of shared norms and belonging that hold the members of a group or a society together.

Durkheim was writing as a structural functionalist. Recall from Week 1 that this perspective works at the macro level and asks what job each part of society does. Durkheim's surprise was that deviance has jobs too.

Worked example — two functions in the illustrative league. You match each scene to a function.

The suspension and the league meeting. Players and coaches restate the rule and agree on it. That is punishment reaffirming shared norms, which strengthens social solidarity.
A new league rule, two seasons later. Some players had started kneeling to tie a loose shoe during play, which the rules did not allow, and referees kept stopping the game for it. After a debate, the league changed the rule to allow a quick stop. Rule-breaking prepared the way for a change in the norm.
Every season has some fouls. No league in the illustrative region has a season without them. Deviance is normal, not a sign that the league is broken.

In words: in Durkheim's account, deviance shows a group where its lines are, and sometimes it shows the group where its lines should move.

Misconception check — "Durkheim said crime is good." Students often read Durkheim as praising crime or endorsing deviance. That is tempting, because "functions" sounds like "benefits." But Durkheim described what deviance does for a society; he did not say anyone should break the rules. The cure: read "function" as "consequence for the group," not as "approval."

Memory hook: a rule-breaker shows where the rule is; that is not praise.

4. Read the gap between goals and means: Merton's strain theory

Picture an illustrative sales office. Every employee is told the same thing: hit your monthly target. Bonuses, praise, and promotions all follow the target. But the office sits in a slow market, and honest selling will not get everyone there.

What would you do if the goal were the same for everyone and the honest path were not open to everyone? Robert K. Merton answered that question in "Social Structure and Anomie" (1938), and he developed it in Social Theory and Social Structure (1949).

Merton built on a word you met in Week 1: anomie, the unsettled, rule-less feeling that spreads when the norms people lived by stop applying. In Merton's account, anomie grows where a culture's goals and its approved means pull apart.

Strain theory is Merton's explanation, first set out in 1938, of deviance as a response to the gap between the goals a culture holds up for everyone and the approved means some people have to reach them.
Cultural goals are the aims a culture holds up as worth pursuing for everyone, such as success at work or at school.
Approved means are the ways of reaching cultural goals that a society accepts as legitimate, such as study, steady work, and honest dealing.

Merton described five responses to that gap. They are a classroom model, a tool for sorting cases, not a description of every real person. The first is conformity, which you met in Week 5: here it means accepting both the goal and the approved means. The other four are the deviant responses.

Innovation is, in Merton's strain theory, the response of a person who accepts the cultural goal but pursues it by disapproved means.
Ritualism is, in Merton's strain theory, the response of a person who keeps following the approved means after giving up on the cultural goal.
Retreatism is, in Merton's strain theory, the response of a person who rejects both the cultural goal and the approved means and withdraws.
Rebellion is, in Merton's strain theory, the response of a person who rejects both the cultural goal and the approved means and works to replace them with new ones.

The table below shows the pattern in one place.

Merton's five responses to strain, by whether each accepts the cultural goal and the approved means
Response	Cultural goal	Approved means
Conformity	Accepts	Accepts
Innovation	Accepts	Rejects
Ritualism	Rejects	Accepts
Retreatism	Rejects	Rejects
Rebellion	Rejects and replaces	Rejects and replaces

Worked example — five employees in the illustrative sales office. You sort each one by the goal and the means.

One employee keeps calling customers, follows every rule, and still chases the target. Accepts the goal and the means. Conformity.
Another enters fake orders that will be canceled next month, so the numbers look good now. Accepts the goal, uses disapproved means. Innovation.
A third fills in every form and logs every call on time but no longer expects to hit the target or cares about the bonus. Keeps the means, has given up the goal. Ritualism.
A fourth stops making calls, stops filling in forms, and spends the day scrolling at the desk. Drops both. Retreatism.
A fifth argues at a staff meeting that targets should be scrapped and replaced with shared team goals, and organizes coworkers to push for it. Rejects both and works to replace them. Rebellion.

In words: the target is the cultural goal, honest selling is the approved means, and each employee's response depends on which of the two they keep.

Misconception check — "innovation sounds like a compliment." Students often read Merton's "innovation" as praise, as if it meant creativity. That is tempting, because the everyday word is positive. But in Merton's model, innovation means pursuing an approved goal by disapproved means. Faking orders is innovation. The cure: whenever you see Merton's five words, swap in "goal" and "means" and ask which one the person keeps.

Misconception check — ritualism versus retreatism. Students also mix up these two, since both have given up on the goal. The cure is the means. The ritualist still follows every rule. The retreatist has stopped following them too.

Pause and choose one of these two prompts.

(a) Think of a goal your school, workplace, or team holds up for everyone. Describe one response to it that would fit Merton's ritualism, and explain why it fits.
(b) Think of the same kind of goal. Describe one response that would fit Merton's rebellion, and explain why it is rebellion rather than innovation.

Memory hook: keep the goal or drop it; keep the means or drop them.

5. Ask who makes the rules: the conflict account

Picture an illustrative housing development. A homeowners' board writes a new rule: no work trucks parked overnight. The rule sounds neutral. It applies to everyone. But the residents who own sedans never notice it, and the residents who drive trucks for a living, plumbers and landscapers and electricians, now get warnings and fines.

Who broke a rule? The truck owners. Who made the rule? The board. Conflict theory asks you to look at both, and to notice which question you asked first.

Recall from Week 1 that conflict theory works at the macro level and reads society as competition over scarce resources and power. Applied to deviance, it asks two questions.

Who has the power to define deviance? The people who write the rules decide which behavior counts as rule-breaking.
Who gets defined by it? The same act can draw a different response depending on who does it and who is watching.

Worked example — the illustrative development, read through conflict theory. You walk the two questions in order.

Who defined the deviance? The board, a small group of residents with the power to write rules for everyone.
Whose behavior became deviant? The residents whose jobs require a truck. The rule turned an ordinary part of their working lives into a violation.
A second scene. Two illustrative employees at the same office each take a box of pens home. The manager calls one "borrowing supplies" and the other "theft," and writes up only the second. The act was the same. The response depended on who did it.

In words: the conflict account does not ask only "who broke the rule?" It also asks "who wrote the rule, and whose life does it fall on?"

Misconception check — "the conflict view says rules are always unfair." Students sometimes read the conflict account as a claim that every rule is a trick by the powerful. That is tempting, because the examples point at unequal power. But the account is a question to ask, not a verdict. Some rules protect everyone. The cure: ask who wrote the rule and who bears its cost, then weigh what you find.

Memory hook: ask who wrote the rule, not only who broke it.

6. Follow the label: labeling, learning, and bonds

Picture an illustrative ninth grader who talks back to a teacher once, on a bad day. The teacher sends the student to the office. The next week, another teacher says, "Oh, you're the one." Classmates start calling the student "the troublemaker." Some friends' parents stop inviting the student over. By spring, the student is skipping class and hanging out with others who skip too. Asked why, the student says, "That's who I am now."

One act did not create that path. The reactions did, and you can trace each one. Symbolic interactionism, which works at the micro level of everyday interaction and shared meanings, explains how.

Labeling theory

Labeling theory is the interactionist idea, associated with Howard Becker's Outsiders (1963), that whether an act counts as deviant depends less on the act than on how others react to it.

Edwin Lemert, in Social Pathology (1951), split deviance into two stages.

Primary deviance is, in Lemert's terms, a rule-breaking act that leaves the person's self-image intact because no lasting label has stuck.
Secondary deviance is, in Lemert's terms, the behavior and self-concept that follow being labeled deviant, when the person begins to see themselves through the label and act it out.

Here Week 4 returns. Cooley's looking-glass self said you form a sense of self by imagining how others see you and judge you. A label is what others see. When everyone sees "troublemaker," the looking glass shows the same picture back.

Differential association

Edwin Sutherland asked a different question: where do people learn to break rules in the first place?

Differential association is Sutherland's idea that deviance is learned, like any other behavior, from the close personal groups a person spends time with.

Picture an illustrative new hire at a warehouse. On the first day, two coworkers show the new hire how to round break times in their favor on the timesheet, and they joke that "everybody does it." Within a month, the new hire does it too. The rule-breaking was taught and learned inside a close work group.

Control theory

Travis Hirschi, in Causes of Delinquency (1969), flipped the question around. Instead of asking why people break rules, he asked why most people keep them.

Control theory is Hirschi's explanation, from Causes of Delinquency (1969), that people conform when their social bonds of attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief are strong.
A social bond is, in Hirschi's control theory, a tie that holds a person to conventional society: attachment to other people, commitment to conventional goals, involvement in conventional activities, or belief in the rules.

Worked example — sorting four illustrative cases by theory. You name the interactionist idea that fits best.

The ninth grader's first act of talking back, before anyone called the student anything. Primary deviance.
The ninth grader, months later, skipping class and saying "that's who I am now." Secondary deviance, explained by labeling theory.
The warehouse new hire who learned timesheet tricks from coworkers. Differential association.
A first-year student who is close to family, wants to keep a scholarship, spends every evening at team practice, and thinks the campus rules are fair. Control theory. The four social bonds are attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief, and all four are strong here, so this student has a lot to lose by breaking rules.

In words: labeling theory explains how a reaction can deepen deviance, differential association explains how deviance is learned, and control theory explains why strong bonds hold people to the rules.

Misconception check — "labels cause all deviance." Students often read labeling theory as saying labels cause every deviant act. That is tempting, because the ninth grader's story is so vivid. But the first act came before any label. Labeling theory explains secondary deviance, what follows a label, not primary deviance. The cure: find the first act, then ask what changed after the label.

Three lenses on one case

Now hold all three perspectives side by side on one illustrative case: fare evasion on a city bus, where some riders board through the back door without paying.

Structural functionalism (macro): the bus system's response, from posted fines to inspectors, reminds every rider where the line is. Merton would ask whether some riders share the goal of getting to work but lack the approved means of paying.
Conflict theory (macro): the transit board decides which routes get inspectors, so riders on some routes are far more likely to be caught for the same act, and the board's choices shape who is defined as a fare evader.
Symbolic interactionism (micro): a rider stopped by an inspector in front of a full bus is labeled a "fare dodger." How the rider and the onlookers read that moment can shape whether the rider comes to see the label as their own.

In words: the first two lenses read fare evasion at the macro level of the whole transit system, and the third reads it at the micro level of one stop on one bus. None is declared the right one; each answers a different question.

Memory hook: the first act is primary; the label makes the second.

7. Read crime data carefully: rates, surveys, and the reporting effect

Two towns publish their yearly crime reports. Town B reports more crimes than Town A. A local post says Town B must be the more dangerous place. You met these two towns in Week 1. Now they carry crime figures, and the same lesson holds: you cannot judge until you know how many people live in each.

Start with the two towns. They are an illustrative example, constructed for this course, not real data.

Recorded crimes and residents in two illustrative towns in one year (constructed example, not real data)
Town	Crimes in one year	Residents
Town A	12	40,000
Town B	15	30,000

Worked example — the two towns, count against rate. You compare the towns one step at a time.

The counts. Town A records 12 crimes among 40,000 residents; Town B records 15 crimes among 30,000 residents. By count, Town B has more, because 15 is more than 12.
Town A rate. Divide the count by the residents, then multiply by 100,000: 12 ÷ 40,000 × 100,000 = 30 per 100,000.
Town B rate. Do the same: 15 ÷ 30,000 × 100,000 = 50 per 100,000.
The comparison. By rate, Town B is higher by 50 − 30 = 20 per 100,000. And 50 ÷ 30 ≈ 1.7, so Town B's rate is about 1.7 times Town A's.

In words: the smaller town has the higher rate, and the rate is the fair comparison because the towns differ in size. Here the count and the rate point the same way, but they do not have to.

To see them split, take a separate illustrative pair with its own numbers. An illustrative city records 300 car thefts among 200,000 residents: 300 ÷ 200,000 × 100,000 = 150 per 100,000. An illustrative small town records 60 car thefts among 20,000 residents: 60 ÷ 20,000 × 100,000 = 300 per 100,000. The city has five times the count, 300 versus 60, but the small town has twice the rate. A headline built on counts would point at the wrong place.

In practice (your tools). You can check a rate in any free spreadsheet. Type the count in cell B2 and the population in cell B3. In B4, type =B2/B3*100000 to get the rate per 100,000. For Town A, entering 12 and 40000 gives 30; for Town B, entering 15 and 30000 gives 50.

Two ways to count crime

Now the real data. You can count crime in two very different ways, and they answer different questions.

Police-reported crime data are counts of crimes that came to the attention of the police and were recorded by them, which miss any crime no one reported.
A victimization survey is a survey that asks people directly whether they have been victims of crime over a period, counting those crimes whether or not anyone reported them to the police.

In the United States, the Bureau of Justice Statistics runs the National Crime Victimization Survey. Its rates are written per 1,000 persons age 12 or older, a different base from the towns' per 100,000.

Worked example — the 2024 National Crime Victimization Survey, read four ways. The source is the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Criminal Victimization, 2024.

What is measured? Violent victimizations that people told the survey about, whether or not anyone reported them to police, per 1,000 persons age 12 or older.
Over whom and when? Persons age 12 or older in the United States, in 2024.
What does it show? Work it one step at a time.
- The two rates: 23.3 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older, of which 11.2 per 1,000 were reported to police.
- The base: 23.3 per 1,000 is the same rate as 23.3 × 100 = 2,330 per 100,000, which is why the base is written out every time.
- The share reported: 11.2 ÷ 23.3 × 100 ≈ 48%, so fewer than half of the violent victimizations the survey counts reached police records.
- The share not reported: 23.3 − 11.2 = 12.1 per 1,000 were not reported, and 12.1 ÷ 23.3 × 100 ≈ 52%, about half.
What does it not show? The "true" number of crimes, why victims did or did not report, anything about people under 12, or whether crime rose or fell, since it is one year.
Correlation or cause? Neither. It is a description of one year's victimizations and reports.

In words: police-reported counts and a victimization survey measure different things, and neither is the "true" number.

Honesty note: a survey depends on people remembering and telling. It misses crimes against people under 12, and it cannot count a crime a person chooses not to mention to an interviewer. Police data miss every crime no one reported. Each source has a blind spot, which is why careful readers name the source every time.

The reporting effect

Here is where the two sources meet.

The reporting effect is the gap between the crime that happens and the crime that reaches police records, which lets police counts rise or fall when the share of victims who report changes, even if crime itself does not.

Picture it in words. Suppose more victims began to report while victimization stayed the same. What would you see? Police-reported counts would rise, and the survey's rate would not. So "reported crime went up" and "crime went up" are different claims.

Misconception check — "a rise in reported crime means a rise in crime." Students often read a jump in police-reported crime as proof that crime rose. That is tempting, because the headline uses the word "crime." But reporting rates move too. A new online reporting form, more trust in police, or less trust in police can move the count with no change in crime. The cure: ask whether the figure is police-reported or survey-based, and whether reporting changed.

Misconception check — comparing counts across places. Students also compare counts across cities of different sizes. A bigger city will almost always have a bigger count. The cure: divide by the population and name the base before you compare.

Caveat: a rate is a fact about a place or a population, not about you or any one person in it. Town B's higher rate does not tell you whether any one resident of Town B is in danger.

Memory hook: name the base and the source; then compare.

For more on this week's ideas, the module's Readings & Resources page links to short articles and videos.

Key terms

Deviance — Behavior that violates the norms of a group, whether or not it also breaks a law. (first used: 1. Define deviance: the rules, the setting, and the law)
Relativity of deviance — The principle that whether an act counts as deviant depends on the time, the place, the culture, and the group, so the same act can be expected in one setting and condemned in another. (first used: 1. Define deviance: the rules, the setting, and the law)
Crime — Behavior that violates a formal law, a narrower category than deviance because it covers only the norms a state has written into law. (first used: 1. Define deviance: the rules, the setting, and the law)
Social control — The set of ways a group encourages conformity to its norms and discourages deviance, from a disapproving look to an arrest. (first used: 2. Name how groups keep order: social control)
Informal social control — Social control carried out by ordinary people in everyday life, such as a stare, a joke at someone's expense, or a cold shoulder. (first used: 2. Name how groups keep order: social control)
Formal social control — Social control carried out by official bodies acting under written rules, such as a school's discipline office, an employer, the police, or a court. (first used: 2. Name how groups keep order: social control)
Criminal-justice system — The set of formal agencies a society uses to respond to crime: the police, the courts, and corrections. (first used: 2. Name how groups keep order: social control)
Functions of deviance — Durkheim's account of the useful work deviance does for a society: crime is normal in every society, it can prepare the way for moral change, and punishing it reaffirms the shared norms it offends. (first used: 3. Read deviance as functional: Durkheim)
Social solidarity — The bonds of shared norms and belonging that hold the members of a group or a society together. (first used: 3. Read deviance as functional: Durkheim)
Strain theory — Merton's explanation, first set out in 1938, of deviance as a response to the gap between the goals a culture holds up for everyone and the approved means some people have to reach them. (first used: 4. Read the gap between goals and means: Merton's strain theory)
Cultural goals — The aims a culture holds up as worth pursuing for everyone, such as success at work or at school. (first used: 4. Read the gap between goals and means: Merton's strain theory)
Approved means — The ways of reaching cultural goals that a society accepts as legitimate, such as study, steady work, and honest dealing. (first used: 4. Read the gap between goals and means: Merton's strain theory)
Innovation — In Merton's strain theory, the response of a person who accepts the cultural goal but pursues it by disapproved means. (first used: 4. Read the gap between goals and means: Merton's strain theory)
Ritualism — In Merton's strain theory, the response of a person who keeps following the approved means after giving up on the cultural goal. (first used: 4. Read the gap between goals and means: Merton's strain theory)
Retreatism — In Merton's strain theory, the response of a person who rejects both the cultural goal and the approved means and withdraws. (first used: 4. Read the gap between goals and means: Merton's strain theory)
Rebellion — In Merton's strain theory, the response of a person who rejects both the cultural goal and the approved means and works to replace them with new ones. (first used: 4. Read the gap between goals and means: Merton's strain theory)
Labeling theory — The interactionist idea, associated with Howard Becker's Outsiders (1963), that whether an act counts as deviant depends less on the act than on how others react to it. (first used: 6. Follow the label: labeling, learning, and bonds)
Primary deviance — In Lemert's terms, a rule-breaking act that leaves the person's self-image intact because no lasting label has stuck. (first used: 6. Follow the label: labeling, learning, and bonds)
Secondary deviance — In Lemert's terms, the behavior and self-concept that follow being labeled deviant, when the person begins to see themselves through the label and act it out. (first used: 6. Follow the label: labeling, learning, and bonds)
Differential association — Sutherland's idea that deviance is learned, like any other behavior, from the close personal groups a person spends time with. (first used: 6. Follow the label: labeling, learning, and bonds)
Control theory — Hirschi's explanation, from Causes of Delinquency (1969), that people conform when their social bonds of attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief are strong. (first used: 6. Follow the label: labeling, learning, and bonds)
Social bond — In Hirschi's control theory, a tie that holds a person to conventional society: attachment to other people, commitment to conventional goals, involvement in conventional activities, or belief in the rules. (first used: 6. Follow the label: labeling, learning, and bonds)
Police-reported crime data — Counts of crimes that came to the attention of the police and were recorded by them, which miss any crime no one reported. (first used: 7. Read crime data carefully: rates, surveys, and the reporting effect)
Victimization survey — A survey that asks people directly whether they have been victims of crime over a period, counting those crimes whether or not anyone reported them to the police. (first used: 7. Read crime data carefully: rates, surveys, and the reporting effect)
Reporting effect — The gap between the crime that happens and the crime that reaches police records, which lets police counts rise or fall when the share of victims who report changes, even if crime itself does not. (first used: 7. Read crime data carefully: rates, surveys, and the reporting effect)

Summary

Deviance breaks a group's norm; crime breaks a law; they overlap without matching.
The same act can be expected in one setting and deviant in another.
Informal social control comes from people; formal social control comes from offices with written rules.
Durkheim: crime is normal, can prepare the way for change, and its punishment reaffirms shared norms.
Merton: five responses to the gap between cultural goals and approved means; innovation is not a compliment.
The conflict account asks who has the power to define deviance and whose lives the rules fall on.
Labeling explains secondary deviance; differential association explains learning; control theory explains bonds.
Compare crime by rate, not count, and name the base.
In 2024, 23.3 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older; 11.2 per 1,000 reached police, about 48%.

Check your understanding

Work these before looking at the answers — they are ungraded, and the answers (with reasoning) are at the bottom of the page.

An illustrative suburb records 90 bike thefts among 60,000 residents in one year. An illustrative village records 40 bike thefts among 20,000 residents in the same year. Which place has the higher count? Compute each rate per 100,000. Which has the higher rate, and about how many times as high?
An illustrative school sets one goal for every student: graduate on time. Sort each student into one of Merton's five responses. (a) A student buys a finished paper to pass a required course. (b) A student attends every class and turns in every worksheet but has stopped believing graduation is possible. (c) A student organizes classmates to replace on-time graduation with a self-paced, mastery-based system.
Police in an illustrative city recorded 400 thefts one year and 460 the next, after the city added an online reporting form. A survey of the city's residents found the same share of people victimized by theft in both years. By how much, and by what percent, did recorded thefts rise? Did theft rise? Explain using one of this week's terms.
An illustrative high school junior shoplifts a snack once on a dare and is never caught. A second illustrative junior does the same and is caught. At a new job, that junior is introduced as "the one who steals." Months later, the second junior starts stealing from the job and says, "Everyone already thinks I'm a thief." Which junior shows primary deviance only, which shows secondary deviance, and which theory explains the difference?

Answers (worked reasoning — read after attempting)

The suburb has the higher count, because 90 is more than 40. Suburb rate: 90 ÷ 60,000 × 100,000 = 150 per 100,000. Village rate: 40 ÷ 20,000 × 100,000 = 200 per 100,000. The village has the higher rate, and 200 ÷ 150 ≈ 1.3, so about 1.3 times as high. The count and the rate point to different places, which is why you compare by rate.
(a) Innovation: the student accepts the goal of passing but uses a disapproved means. (b) Ritualism: the student keeps following the approved means after giving up on the goal. (c) Rebellion: the student rejects both the goal and the means and works to replace them. Remember that Merton's five responses are a classroom model for sorting cases, not a full description of any real student.
Recorded thefts rose by 460 − 400 = 60, and 60 ÷ 400 × 100 = 15 percent. The survey found no change in victimization, so the evidence points to the reporting effect: the new form made it easier to report, so more thefts reached police records while theft itself held steady. "Reported theft went up" is true; "theft went up" is not supported.
The first junior shows primary deviance only: one act, no label, no change in self-image. The second junior moved from primary to secondary deviance after being labeled: the later stealing follows the label, and the junior's own words show a self-concept built around it. Labeling theory, with Lemert's primary and secondary deviance, explains the difference. It explains the second stage, not the first act.

Next up in this module: the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, the quiz, the discussion, and the assignment; next week the stratification model ranks people into layers.

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