Sociology 2306, Week Three, Outline

I. Video: "What Can We Do About Violence?" part I

Livingston: "To oversimplify, we might say that if biological and psychological approaches try to show how criminals are different from you and me, sociological theories try to show how they are similar to us. Psychological theories see crime as the result of abnormal peopledoing abnormal things. Sociological theories tend to see crime as the product of normal people engaging in normal social processes in normal (though perhaps not ideal) social environments." Crime and Criminology

II. Group project

III. Rational choice theory: you act in such a way as to maximize your rewards and minimize your costs, but from the perspective of sociology, rewards and costs are more than just economic.

A. Control theory: Hirschi

Stake in conformity = what you have to lose = social bond

1. Attachments

2. Commitments

3. Involvements

4. Beliefs

B. Example: Sherman and Berk, Arrests and domestic violence

C. Routine activies theory

1. We can assume a good supply of motivated offenders.

2. Variation in crime rates is therefore a function of:

a. Availability of targets: key strategy is target hardening.

b. Suitable guardians (remember importance of informal social control)

IV. Functionalist theory

A. Durkheim and the collective conscience

1. The costs of too much group pressure--rigidity, fatalism... the deviants of today are sometimes the moral leaders of tomorrow...
Margaret Sanger, Rosa Parks, Jack Kevorkian

2. The costs of too much individualism: crime and suicide...

3. Society's reaction to deviant behavior provides an occasion for building social cohesion...

B. Kai Erikson: Wayward Puritans--

1. Crime waves: not so much the multiplication of criminal acts as a crisis of the collective conscience

a. Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s: Who is saved?

b. The Quaker invasion

c. the Salem witchcraft trials

2. This sort of crisis is not only an occasion for the reaffirmation of "traditional" values; it may also signify a fundamental break with the past

3. The 1960s

a. Gans: "the equality revolution"

b. Nixon/Reagan: a crisis of law and order