Lecture: Deviance, Crime & Social Control
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 6
Opening
Picture three people. A shift manager is deciding whether a broken store rule is worth a written warning. A neighbor is reading a headline that says crime is up. A teammate is wondering why one rule-breaker on the team got a second chance while another got a reputation. Each of them is running into the same questions: who decides what counts as breaking the rules, how groups respond, and what a crime figure does and does not measure.
In Week 3, you met norms, the shared rules for how people are expected to behave, and sanctions, the rewards and penalties that enforce them. In Week 5, you saw how strongly a group can pull you toward its judgment. In this lecture I want to look at the other side: what happens when someone breaks the rules. We'll define deviance and crime, see how groups keep order, and run rule-breaking through all three perspectives. Then we'll read real crime data the careful way, with the rates and the four questions from Weeks 1 and 2. Next week, in Week 7, the course turns to stratification and class.
Let's start in two very loud rooms.
1. Define deviance
Picture a crowd cheering at the top of its lungs in a stadium during a playoff game. Now picture the same cheering in a hospital waiting room in the middle of the night. The noise is identical. The reaction is not. In the stadium, the silent fan stands out. In the waiting room, the cheering fan gets glares and a warning.
The act didn't change. The setting did. Deviance is behavior that violates the norms of a group, whether or not it also breaks a law. And because norms belong to groups, the verdict moves with the group. Sociologists call that the relativity of deviance: 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.
Crime is a narrower idea. It's behavior that violates a formal law. The two overlap, but neither contains the other. Cutting into a long line at a food truck breaks a norm, and people will tell you so, but it breaks no law. Driving a little over the speed limit on a highway where nearly every car does the same breaks a law, yet the other drivers don't react at all. And stealing a phone from a classmate's bag is both.
One more twist. Deviant doesn't mean bad. If a group mocks a newcomer and one person refuses to join in, that person is breaking the group's norm. In that group, kindness is the deviant act.
Pause and try this. Wearing a costume to a job interview: deviant, a crime, both, or neither?
Ask about the norm, then ask about the law.
Here's the answer. It's deviant but not a crime. It breaks the norm of the setting, and no law forbids it.
2. Name how groups keep order
Think about the last time someone gave you a look that said "stop that." Maybe you were talking during a movie. Nobody wrote you a ticket. The look did the work.
That look is a piece of social control, the set of ways a group encourages conformity to its norms and discourages deviance, from a disapproving look to an arrest. It comes in two forms that match the sanctions from Week 3. Informal social control is carried out by ordinary people in everyday life: a stare, a joke at someone's expense, a cold shoulder. Formal social control is carried out by official bodies acting under written rules: a school's discipline office, an employer, the police, or a court.
Here's a story. Someone in a hobby group chat posts the same ad five times. Other members reply with eye-roll emoji. That's informal. Then the moderator removes the posts under the group's posted rules. That's formal, because an official role is acting under written rules.
For crime, a society uses its most formal control of all. The criminal-justice system is the set of formal agencies a society uses to respond to crime: the police, the courts, and corrections.
Most social control in your life is informal. A frown or a friend's raised eyebrow does most of the work. Formal control steps in when that fails or the stakes are high.
Pause and try this. A residence office issues a student a written warning under the housing contract. Informal or formal?
Think about who is acting and what stands behind them.
Here's the answer. Formal. An office is acting under written rules, the housing contract, rather than ordinary people reacting on their own.
3. Read deviance as functional
Picture a recreational soccer league. Late in a close game, a player fakes an injury to stop the clock. The league reviews the video and suspends the player. At the next league meeting, every coach talks about the rule, and players on every team say they'd never do that. One person broke a rule, and the whole league ended up more united about it.
Émile Durkheim saw that pattern. He was a structural functionalist, working at the macro level, asking what job each part of society does. His surprise was that deviance has jobs too. In The Rules of Sociological Method, in 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, in 1893, he argued that punishing crime reaffirms the shared norms it offends and so strengthens social solidarity, the bonds of shared norms and belonging that hold a group or a society together. Together these are the functions of deviance.
What about moral change? Picture an office where the first employees who worked from home drew a manager's warning. A few years later, working from home was written into the office's policy. The rule-breaking came first, and the new norm followed.
Here's the trap I want you to avoid. "Functions" sounds like "benefits," so it's tempting to hear Durkheim saying crime is good. He didn't. He described what deviance does for a society. He never said anyone should break the rules.
Pause and try this. In the soccer league, which function of deviance does the league meeting show?
Think about what happened to the rule itself.
Here's the answer. It shows punishment reaffirming shared norms. The suspension led everyone to restate the rule and agree on it, which strengthened social solidarity.
4. Read the gap between goals and means
Picture a sales office where everyone hears the same message: hit your monthly target. Bonuses and praise all follow the target. But the market is slow, and honest selling won't get everyone there.
Robert K. Merton asked what people do in that spot, in "Social Structure and Anomie," in 1938, and he developed the answer in 1949. You met anomie in Week 1: the unsettled, rule-less feeling that spreads when the norms people lived by stop applying. Merton said anomie grows where goals and means pull apart. His strain theory explains 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. Approved means are the ways of reaching them that a society accepts as legitimate, like study, steady work, and honest dealing.
Merton named five responses. They're a classroom model, a tool for sorting cases. Keep the goal and the means, and that's conformity. Keep the goal but use disapproved means, like entering fake orders, and that's innovation. Keep following every procedure after giving up on the target, and that's ritualism. Drop both and withdraw, scrolling at the desk all day, and that's retreatism. Reject both and push to replace them, say with shared team goals, and that's rebellion.
Watch out for one word. In everyday talk, "innovation" is praise. In Merton's model, it means chasing an approved goal by disapproved means. Faking orders is innovation.
Pause and try this. An employee logs every call on time but no longer cares about the target. Which of Merton's responses is that?
Ask which one the employee kept: the goal or the means.
Here's the answer. It's ritualism. The employee still follows the approved means but has given up on the cultural goal.
5. Ask who makes the rules
Picture a housing development where a homeowners' board writes a new rule: no work trucks parked overnight. It sounds neutral, and it applies to everyone. But residents who own sedans never notice it. The residents who drive trucks for a living, plumbers and landscapers and electricians, start getting warnings and fines.
Who broke a rule? The truck owners. Who made the rule? The board. Conflict theory, which works at the macro level and reads society as competition over resources and power, asks you to look at both. Applied to deviance, it asks two questions. Who has the power to define deviance? And who gets defined by it?
Here's a second scene. Two 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.
Now, the conflict account isn't a claim that every rule is a trick. Some rules protect everyone. It's a question you ask: who wrote this rule, and whose life does it fall on?
Pause and try this. In the housing development, who held the power to define deviance?
Look at who wrote the rule, not who broke it.
Here's the answer. The homeowners' board. A small group with the power to write rules decided which behavior would count as a violation, and the cost fell on the truck owners.
6. Follow the label
Picture a ninth grader who talks back to a teacher once, on a bad day. Soon another teacher says, "Oh, you're the one." Classmates start saying "troublemaker." By spring, the student is skipping class and says, "That's who I am now." One act didn't build that path. The reactions did.
Symbolic interactionism, at the micro level, explains how. Labeling theory, associated with Howard Becker's Outsiders in 1963, holds that whether an act counts as deviant depends less on the act than on how others react to it. Edwin Lemert, in 1951, split deviance in two. Primary deviance is a rule-breaking act that leaves the person's self-image intact. Secondary deviance is the behavior and self-concept that follow being labeled, when the person begins to see themselves through the label and act it out. You'll recognize Cooley's looking-glass self from Week 4 here: a label is what the mirror shows.
Two more interactionist ideas. Edwin Sutherland's differential association says deviance is learned, like any other behavior, from the close personal groups a person spends time with. Picture a new warehouse hire whose coworkers show them how to round break times in their favor. And Travis Hirschi, in Causes of Delinquency in 1969, flipped the question: why do most people keep the rules? His control theory says people conform when their social bonds of attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief are strong.
Let's put the three perspectives side by side on fare evasion on a city bus. Structural functionalism, macro, sees fines and inspectors reminding every rider where the line is. Conflict theory, also macro, notices that the transit board decides which routes get inspectors. Symbolic interactionism, micro, watches a rider labeled a "fare dodger" in front of a full bus.
Pause and try this. The ninth grader's very first act of talking back: primary or secondary deviance?
Ask whether any label existed yet.
Here's the answer. Primary deviance. No label had stuck yet. Labeling theory explains what came after the label, not the first act.
7. Read crime data carefully
Two towns publish their yearly crime reports. They're an illustrative example, built for this course, not real data. Town A records 12 crimes among 40,000 residents. Town B records 15 crimes among 30,000. A headline built on counts says Town B has more, and it does. But you can't compare towns of different sizes by count.
So we turn each count into a rate. For Town A, divide 12 by 40,000 and multiply by 100,000. That's 30 per 100,000. For Town B, do the same with 15 and 30,000, and you get 50 per 100,000. Town B's rate is about 1.7 times Town A's. The smaller town has the higher rate.
Now the real data. You can count crime two ways. Police-reported crime data are counts of crimes that reached the police and were recorded, so they miss any crime no one reported. A victimization survey asks people directly whether they've been victims, whether or not anyone told the police. The Bureau of Justice Statistics runs one, the National Crime Victimization Survey. For 2024, it found 23.3 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older. Only 11.2 per 1,000 were reported to police. Divide 11.2 by 23.3 and you get about 48%. So fewer than half reached police records.
Walk the four questions. What's measured? Violent victimizations people told the survey about. Over whom? Persons 12 or older in the United States, in 2024. What doesn't it show? The "true" number of crimes, or why people didn't report. Correlation or cause? Neither. It's a description.
That gap has a name. The reporting effect lets police counts rise or fall when the share of victims who report changes, even if crime itself doesn't.
Pause and try this. Suppose more victims began reporting while victimization stayed the same. Would police counts or the survey's rate go up?
Think about which source depends on a call to the police.
Here's the answer. Police counts would go up and the survey's rate would not. That's why "reported crime went up" and "crime went up" are different claims.
Closing
Let me pull it together. Deviance breaks a group's norm, crime breaks a law, and the verdict moves with the setting. Groups keep order through informal and formal social control, and the criminal-justice system is the formal arm for crime. Durkheim described deviance's functions without praising it. Merton sorted responses to the gap between goals and means. The conflict account asks who writes the rules. Labeling theory, differential association, and control theory explain labels, learning, and bonds. And crime data are read by rate and by source: in 2024, about 48% of the violent victimizations the survey counted reached police.
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz, then the discussion, the assignment, and the Sociology in Action Workshop. Next week, in Week 7, the course turns to social stratification and class: how a society ranks people into layers.
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