Chapter Nine: Deviance

The recognized violation of cultural norms.

The violation of a society's formally enacted criminal law.

attempts by society to regulate people's thoughts and behavior.

The organizations-police, courts, and prison officials- that respond to alleged violations of the law.

The idea that deviance and conformity result not so much from what people do as from how others respond to those actions.

a powerfully negative label that greatly changes a person's self-concept and social identity.

the transformation of moral and legal deviance into a medical condition.

crime committed by people of high social position in the course of the occupations.

the illegal actions of a corporation or people acting on its behalf.

a business supplying illegal goods or services.

crimes that direct violence or the threat of violence against others; also known as violent crimes.

crimes that involve theft of property belonging to others; also known as property crimes.

violations of law in which there are on obvious victims.

a legal negotiation in which a prosecutor reduces a charge in exchange for a defendant's guilty plea.

an act of moral vengeance by which society makes the offender suffer as much as the suffering caused by the crime.

the attempt to discourage criminality through the use of punishment.

a program for reforming the offender to prevent later offenses.

rendering an offender incapable of further offenses temporarily through imprisonment of permanently by execution.

later offenses by people previously convicted of crimes.

correctional programs operating within society at large rathe than behind prison walls.

a criminal act against a person or a person's property by an offender motivated by racial or other bias.

using unconventional means rather than conventional means to achieve culturally approved goals.

people who don't care much about cultural goals but stick to the rules anyway in order to at least feel respectable.

rejecting both cultural goals and conventional means so that a person in effect "drops out."

rebels such as radical "survivalist" reject both the cultural definition of success and the conventional means of achieving it, but they go one step further by forming a counterculture supporting alternatives to existing social order.