Crime And Deviance Analysis

Crime and deviance are always been a matter of fact, the ‘collateral effect’ of living among other people. Norms and rules are set in each society, from rural ones to the largest urban environments, but this cannot prevent the attitudes by some individuals, that in the most of case gang up, to not follow these norms. They are the deviant ones and they are condemned to be considered not normal, sometimes just without choosing that. Paradoxically, most of actions and situations that are considered as normal, under a more peculiar analysis may be not so ‘normal’. For example, the norms that consider smoking as a ‘crime’ are the ones that ban this action in public places, since smoking is injurious both to yours and to the others’ health but, in
However, as Downes and Rock point out, 'ambiguity' is clearly the whole issue in the analysis of crime and deviance: the authors state that it is socially recognised the difficulty of identifying situations or people as deviant and it all starts conforming to the group reaction (2004:5). That is not only about the criminal subject: assumed that sociological behaviour is performance, most of people tend to behave conforming to the situation and, then, to that series of attitudes that are considered moral. So is deviance just a conforming to the wrong side? Most of criminals and deviants are, indeed, influenced by peers despite mass media depict criminals as solitary weirdos (Krohm, 2009:401-402). Erickson, cited in Gibbs (1966:11) formulate an interesting (and prettily sociological) consideration stating that the study of crime and deviance becomes critical focusing on 'the social audience' that refers some individuals as being deviant in order to gain control since it is necessary to react against these people. That is the basis of the criminal law but, since some behaviours do not conform with civil norms, what about informal norms? Stipulating these rules and then conforming to them is the making-of the social culture, which according to Downes and Rock substantially consists in 'traditional ways of solving problems' (2003:145-146) and these problems refer to all those issues and situations that are not considered ordinary, usual and normal. Subsequently, the people who consider that side as the 'outside' are the same that behave affected by moral panic, nowadays generally spread by the mass media; meanwhile, in the Middle Age deviants for example were the left-hand writer or the witches and, in the last century, they were the homosexuals or the mods and the rockers. What makes the former ones ‘more normal’ than the latter