7.8 Conclusion
Alexandra Olsen
What do a gay rights activist of the 1960s, a student who screams out curse words in class, a man who gets into a fight at a bar, and a businessman who engages in financial fraud have in common? After reading this chapter, you know that they all are engaging in deviance. When people think of deviance, they often think of crime, but deviance is a broader concept. This chapter has shown that deviance includes any violation of social norms, not just the breaking of formal laws. Because social norms change over time, whether an action is seen as deviant or not can also change.
In this chapter, we explored the concept of deviance and crime in greater detail, highlighting the ways that deviance is socially constructed and how society responds to different kinds of deviance and crime. Both of these concepts are socially constructed, varying across time periods and societies.
Let’s return to the original discussion of cannabis now that we have a new lens through which to understand it. It is not only a question of whether it is legal and where it is legal, but also a question that must be informed by race and class. Given the vast racial disparities in the criminal justice system, policies related to cannabis legalization must address the harm that the war on drugs has done to Black and Latino communities. At the same time, there are clear class issues at play too; when wealthy individuals open recreational dispensaries, they are entrepreneurial, but when impoverished individuals sell cannabis on the underground market, they are criminals.
There are a few ways that communities and governments have tried to address the equity issues related to cannabis. In some cities, such as San Francisco, the district attorney has automatically expunged all cannabis charges from individuals’ records now that cannabis is recreationally legal in California (Serna 2019). In other places, such as Los Angeles, community groups have offered free expungement clinics (My Prop 47 2011). At these clinics, free legal services are provided so that people who were previously charged with cannabis crimes can also expunge them from their records.
Other ways that governments have tried to address this is through cannabis equity programs. The goal of these programs is to provide opportunities for marginalized groups to participate in the legal cannabis market. An example of this can be seen in the City of Los Angeles’ Social Equity program. Their mission is “to promote equitable ownership and employment opportunities in the cannabis industry in order to decrease disparities in life outcomes for marginalized communities, and to address the disproportionate impacts of the war on drugs in those communities” (City of Los Angeles Department of Cannabis Regulation 2022). This mission clearly takes into account the systemic inequalities in the criminal justice system that we discussed in this chapter.
All considered, questions of equity around cannabis (and the criminal justice system more broadly) are ones that don’t have easy solutions. But, if we use our sociological imagination, we can critically think about how policies impact communities in different ways. It was through communities, governments, and individuals identifying issues with cannabis legalization that these innovative approaches to equity were developed. There are likely many more challenges that will come to the criminal justice system in our lifetimes. With each new reform, we should continue to ask how we can make our society more equitable and address injustices of the past.
By looking at the criminal justice system in the United States and abroad, you should begin to see the ways that groups have vastly different experiences within social institutions. Now that you have a better sense of the basics of sociology, we’ll dive deeper into learning about social inequality, highlighting how individuals have different life opportunities based on their class, gender, race, and sexuality. In the next chapter, we’ll begin by learning about social stratification and social class.
Review of Learning Objectives
Key Terms
- Crime: a behavior that violates official law and is punishable through formal sanctions.
- Criminal justice system: an organization that exists to enforce a legal code, which in the United States includes the police, courts, and corrections system.
- Deviance: a violation of established contextual, cultural, or social norms.
- Differential association theory: a theory that states individuals learn deviant behavior from those close to them who provide models of and opportunities for deviance.
- Labeling theory: the ascribing of a deviant behavior to another person by members of society.
- Mass incarceration: the overwhelming size and scale of the U.S. prison population.
- The New Jim Crow: the network of laws and practices that disproportionately funnel Black Americans into the criminal justice system, stripping them of their constitutional rights as a punishment for their offenses in the same way that Jim Crow laws did in previous eras.
- Primary deviance: a violation of norms that does not result in any long-term effects on the individual’s self-image or interactions with others.
- Private prisons: for-profit incarceration facilities run by private companies who contract with local, state, and federal governments.
- Restorative justice: a set of practices that bring together the person who committed the act, those who were harmed by the action, and other relevant community stakeholders to identify ways to heal the harm caused by an offense and prevent it from occurring again, rather than engaging in punitive punishment.
- Secondary deviance: deviance that occurs when a person’s self-concept and behavior begin to change after their actions are labeled as deviant by members of society.
- Social control: the regulation and enforcement of norms.
- Social disorganization theory: a theory that asserts crime occurs in communities with weak social ties and the absence of social control.
- Southern strategy: a Republican Party political strategy to get White voter support through explicitly or implicitly coded racism against Black Americans.
- Strain theory: a theory that addresses the relationship between having socially acceptable goals and having socially acceptable means to reach those goals.
- White-collar crime: a nonviolent crime of opportunity, often involving money.
Discussion Questions
- Which theory of crime and deviance do you find to be most believable? What about it do you find particularly compelling?
- What are some of the barriers to addressing racism in the criminal justice system?
- How does institutional racism in the criminal justice system impact the lives of Americans and their families?
- Pretend that you have a meeting with your local representative to encourage them to make a positive change to the criminal justice system. What issues in the criminal justice system would you want them to address? What evidence would you use to persuade them that there are issues with our current system?
- If you could make one reform to the criminal justice system, what would it be? Do you think that there is anything useful that the United States could learn from other countries’ criminal justice systems?
Licenses and Attributions for Conclusion
Open Content, Original
“Conclusion” by Alexandra Olsen is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
“Deviance, Crime, and Social Control Question Set” was created by ChatGPT and is not subject to copyright. Edits for relevance, alignment, and meaningful answer feedback by Colleen Sanders are licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Open Content, Shared Previously
Definitions for crime, criminal justice system, deviance, differential association theory, labeling theory, primary deviance, secondary deviance, social control, social disorganization theory, and strain theory from “Ch.7 Key Terms” by Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, and Asha Lal Tamang in Introduction to Sociology 3e, OpenStax, which is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
a set of people who share similar status based on factors like wealth, income, education, family background, and occupation.
a violation of contextual, cultural, or social norms.
a behavior that violates official law and is punishable through formal sanctions.
the social expectations of how to behave in a situation.
a group of people who live in a defined geographic area, interact with one another, and share a common culture.
a category of identity that ascribes social, cultural, and political meaning and consequence to physical characteristics.
an organization that exists to enforce a legal code, which in the United States includes the police, courts, and corrections system.
an awareness of the relationship between a person’s behavior and experience and the wider culture that shaped the person’s choices and perceptions.
mechanisms or patterns of social order focused on meeting social needs, such as government, the economy, education, family, healthcare, and religion.
the scientific and systematic study of groups and group interactions, societies and social interactions, from small and personal groups to very large groups and mass culture; also, the systematic study of human society and interactions.
a term that refers to the behaviors, personal traits, and social positions that society attributes to being female or male
the sexual feelings, thoughts, attractions and behaviors individuals have toward other people.
a society’s categorization of its people into rankings based on factors like wealth, income, education, family background, and power.