In this collection of 48 reprinted and completely original readings, Tammy L. Anderson gives
her fellow instructors of the undergraduate deviance course a refreshing way to energize and
revitalize their courses.
First, in 12 separate sections, she presents a wide range of deviant behaviors, traits, and con-
ditions including underage drinking and drunk driving, doping in elite sports, gang behavior,
community crime, juvenile delinquency, hate crime, prison violence and transgendered pris-
oners, mental illness, drug-using women and domestic violence, obesity, tattooing, sexual
fetishes, prostitution, drug epidemics, viral pandemics, crime control strategies and racial
inequality, gay neighborhoods, HIV and bugchasers, and (lastly) youth, multicultural iden-
tity, and music scenes.
Second, her pairing of classic and contemporary viewpoints about deviance and social con-
trol not only connects important literatures of the past to today’s (student) readers, but her
connections framework also helps all of us see social life and social processes more clearly
when alternative meanings are accorded to similar forms of deviant behavior. We also learn
how to appreciate and interact with those who see things differently from ourselves. This may
better equip us to reach common goals in an increasingly diverse and ever-changing world.
Third, a major teaching goal of Anderson’s anthology is to sharpen students’ critical thinking
skills by forcing them to look at how a deviant behavior, trait, or condition can be viewed
from opposing or alternative perspectives. By learning to see deviance from multiple perspec-
tives, students will better understand their own and others’ behavior and experiences and be
able to anticipate future trends. Balancing multiple perspectives may also assist students in
their practical work in social service, criminal justice, and other agencies and institutions that
deal with populations considered deviant in one way or another.
Tammy L. Anderson is a Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Dela-
ware. Her recent books Rave Culture: The Alteration and Decline of a Philadelphia Music Scene
(Temple University Press, 2009), Sex, Drugs, and Death (Routledge, 2010), and Neither Villain
nor Victim: Empowerment and Agency among Women Substance Abusers (Rutgers University
Press, 2008), along with her many peer review papers on substance abuse, crime, and music
scenes, showcase her range of scholarship in the area of deviance, culture, and social control.
Understanding Deviance

CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
Edited by Doug Hartmann, University of Minnesota; Valerie Jenness,
University of California, Irvine; and Jodi O’Brien, Seattle University
This innovative series is for all readers interested in books that provide frameworks for mak-
ing sense of the complexities of contemporary social life. Each of the books in this series
uses a sociological lens to provide current critical and analytical perspectives on signifi cant
social issues, patterns, and trends. The series consists of books that integrate the best ideas in
sociological thought with an aim toward public education and engagement. These books are
designed for use in the classroom as well as for scholars and socially curious general readers.
Published
Political Justice and Religious Values
by Charles F. Andrain
GIS and Spatial Analysis for the Social Sciences
by Robert Nash Parker and Emily K. Asencio
Hoop Dreams on Wheels: Disability and the
Competitive Wheelchair Athlete
by Ronald J. Berger
The Internet and Social Inequalities
by James C. Witte and Susan E. Mannon
Media and Middle Class Mom: Images and
Realities of Work and Family
by Lara Descartes and Conrad Kottak
Watching T.V. Is Not Required: Thinking about
Media and Thinking about Thinking
by Bernard McGrane and John Gunderson
Violence Against Women: Vulnerable
Populations
by Douglas Brownridge
State of Sex: Tourism, Sex and Sin in the New
American Heartland
by Barbara G. Brents, Crystal A. Jackson, and
Kate Hausbeck
Social Statistics: The Basics and Beyond
by Thomas J. Linneman
Sociologists Backstage: Answers to 10
Questions About What They Do
by Sarah Fenstermaker and Nikki Jones
Gender Circuits
by Eve Shapiro
Surviving the Holocaust: A Life Course Perspective
by Ronald Berger
Transforming Scholarship: Why Women’s
and Gender Studies Students Are Changing
Themselves and the World
by Michelle Berger and Cheryl Radeloff
Stargazing: Celebrity, Fame, and Social
Interaction
by Kerry Ferris and Scott Harris
The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture
by Phillip Vannini, Dennis Waskul, and Simon
Gottschalk
Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Decides?
by Sheldon Ekland-Olson
Surviving Dictatorship
by Jacqueline Adams
The Womanist Idea
by Layli Maparyan
Social Theory Re-Wired: New Connections to
Classical and Contemporary Perspectives
by Wesley Longhofer and Daniel Winchester
Religion in Today’s World: Global Issues,
Sociological Perspective
by Melissa Wilcox
Life and Death Decisions: The Quest for
Morality and Justice in Human Societies
by Sheldon Ekland-Olson
Understanding Deviance: Connecting Classical
and Contemporary Perspectives
by Tammy L. Anderson

Understanding
Deviance
Connecting Classical and
Contemporary Perspectives
Edited by Tammy L. Anderson

First published 2014
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
The right of the editor to be identifi ed as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their indi-
vidual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any elec-
tronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or
in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identifi cation and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Understanding deviance : connecting classical and contemporary pieces / edited by Tammy L. Anderson.
pages cm. — (Contemporary sociological perspectives)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Deviant behavior. I. Anderson, Tammy L., 1963–
HM811.U53 2014
302.5’42—dc23 2013024883
ISBN: 978-0-415-64260-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-64261-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-87963-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Visit the companion website for this title at:
www.routledge.com/cw/anderson

Available as an eBook in a range of digital formats

http://www.routledge.com/cw/anderson

CONTENTS
Series Foreword xv
Preface —Tammy L. Anderson xvii
Acknowledgments xxi
PART 1: CLASSICAL AND CONTEMPORARY
APPROACHES TO DEVIANCE
SECTION 1
Defi ning Deviance 1
Introduction —Tammy L. Anderson 3
Rules for the Distinction of the Normal from the Pathological —Emile Durkheim 6
Durkheim defi nes deviance from a statistical standpoint or by the prevalence of deviance in society. He seeks
an objective criterion by which social phenomena can be rendered normal or pathological and deviant. From
this perspective, Durkheim claims to measure the condition of society . His approach to deviance is different
from the moral and social reaction defi nitions of deviance included in this section.
Notes on the Sociology of Deviance —Kai T. Erikson 14
Erikson relies on morals, customs, and traditions that are often tied to religious doctrine to defi ne deviance.
His view is that deviance sets boundaries for acceptable behavior and strengthens solidarity among citizens.
His approach breaks from Durkheim’s statistical view and is more in tune with Becker’s social reaction
approach.
Outsiders: Defi nitions of Deviance —Howard S. Becker 18
Becker’s work is considered a classic social reaction defi nition where deviance is anything people so label. He
argues that deviance is not an objective fact, contrary to Durkheim’s position. Instead, Becker reasons, it is
something people defi ne and redefi ne through social interaction.
Defi ning Deviancy Down —Daniel Patrick Moynihan 26
Moynihan’s reading is a newer classic in the fi eld of deviance that cautions against reclassifying unaccept-
able behaviors as acceptable or trivializing their signifi cance and impact. By moving away from objective
standards for behavior and endorsing a core set of values, as Becker and Erikson propose, Moynihan believes
society enters dangerous territory and compromises itself.

| CONTENTSvi
Connections: Defi nitions of Deviance and the Case of Underage Drinking and
Drunk Driving —Tammy L. Anderson 35
In this original connections reading, Anderson compares the positions on deviance of Durkheim, Erikson,
Becker, and Moynihan by using the case of teenage drunk driving and binge drinking in the United States. The
reading illustrates the divergent viewpoints of these key deviance scholars at work in our lives today.
Critical Thinking Questions
SECTION 2
Functionalism, Anomie, General Strain Theory 43
Introduction —Tammy L. Anderson 45
Social Structure and Anomie —Robert K. Merton 49
Sociologist Robert Merton explains deviance as a result of anomie, a state of normlessness in society. His
macrolevel or environmental theory focuses on unreasonable cultural goals and institutional obstacles to
attaining those goals. This tension between goals and obstacles produces anomie and leads to deviance. Thus,
his approach focuses on the structural arrangements in society rather than on individual behavior or group
interaction.
Homeboys, New Jacks, and Anomie —John M. Hagedorn 55
In this reading, Hagedorn reports on his ethnographic study of African American gang members in Milwau-
kee. He fi nds that race-related inequality and anomie leads to criminal behavior for some inner-city black
males. His work endorses Merton’s macrolevel theory but adds racial discrimination as another structural
obstacle that can lead to deviance.
A General Strain Theory of Community Differences in Crime Rates —Robert Agnew 69
Agnew extends Merton’s classic theory of anomie by linking microlevel factors such as personal experiences
and values and how individuals feel about them to the more macrolevel causes Merton uses to explain ano-
mie and deviance. Agnew’s efforts result in a newer theory of crime — General Strain theory — that describes
community deviance as a result of both environmental and individual infl uences.
Connections: Understanding Doping in Elite Sports through Anomie and
General Strain Perspectives —Tammy L. Anderson 91
In this original connections reading, Anderson uses the case of doping in elite sports to show the differ-
ences and similarities between Merton and Hagedorn’s anomie approach and Agnew’s General Strain theory.
Anderson highlights both the weaknesses and strengths of macrolevel or environmental and microlevel or
individual level explanations of deviance in our society.
Critical Thinking Questions
SECTION 3
Social Disorganization and Collective Effi cacy 101
Introduction —Tammy L. Anderson 103
Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas —Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay 106
In this reading, Shaw and McKay describe crime and delinquency as a result of socially disorganized
neighborhoods. By focusing on things such as poverty, crowding, ethnic diversity, and population

CONTENTS | vii
turnover in Chicago, Shaw and McKay offer social disorganization theory to the field of deviance.
This theory explains crime as a function of neighborhoods, not individual behavior.
Collective Effi cacy Theory: Lessons Learned and Directions for
Future Inquiry —Robert J. Sampson 128
In the late 1990s, Sampson and a team of sociologists at the University of Chicago expanded Shaw and
McKay’s landmark study to attribute community crime rates to collective effi cacy, meaning the degree to
which neighborhood residents share a mutual trust, sense of solidarity, and willingness to intervene when
problems arise. In this reading, Sampson argues that a neighborhood’s ability to control the wrongdoing of
its residents, its collective effi cacy, will protect it from high rates of crime and deviance.
The Urban Ecology of Bias Crime: A Study of Disorganized and Defended
Neighborhoods —Ryken Grattet 140
Grattet contributes to the social disorganization and collective effi cacy frameworks by studying bias or hate
crimes in Sacramento, California. He fi nds that intergroup confl ict, stemming from intolerance to ethnic and
racial diversity, leads to an ownership mentality that causes people to defend their neighborhoods by com-
mitting crimes against those different from them.
Connections: The Prison Community from a Social Disorganization and
Collective Effi cacy Perspective —Lori Sexton 157
This connections reading by Lori Sexton advances the social disorganization–collective effi cacy continuum
by showing its relevance beyond city neighborhoods to places such as prisons. Sexton describes the cultural
aspects touched on by Sampson and Grattet to explain the predicament of transgender prisoners. In doing
so, she validates the power of both the social disorganization and collective effi cacy frameworks to explain
a broad range of deviant behaviors.
Critical Thinking Questions
SECTION 4
Social Pathology, Degeneracy, and Medicalization 167
Introduction —Tammy L. Anderson 169
Social Pathology —Edwin Lemert 173
In this famous excerpt, Lemert criticizes psychiatrists ’ efforts to develop a theory of sociopathic behavior
throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. He rejects efforts to differentiate between normal and patho-
logical behavior and contests psychiatrists ’ claims that pathological behavior has a medical basis. He ulti-
mately concludes that normal and pathological are subjectively defi ned and contingent on people’s reactions.
Whatever Happened to Social Pathology? Conceptual Fashions and
the Sociology of Deviance —Joel Best 180
Joel Best traces the rise and fall of social pathology in this reading. He notes that the term meant many things
over the course of time, including disease and illness in society, but that sociologists abandoned it because
they could not agree on a clear, working defi nition.
The Shifting Engines of Medicalization —Peter Conrad 185
Conrad explains the social changes and forces that led to a wide variety of behaviors, traits, and conditions
being defi ned as bona fi de medical problems rather than deviant. He describes the transition to medically
based defi nitions of deviance and validates the new term medicalization in sociology.

| CONTENTSviii
Connections: Mental Illness as Degeneracy, Disease , and Genetics—Victor Perez 197
This original connections reading by Victor Perez uses mental illness to trace the circular thinking among
degeneracy, social pathology, and medicalization in the sociology of deviance. His reading shows how sociol-
ogy has been involved in a love/hate relationship with the fi elds of medicine and psychiatry and why sociolo-
gists ultimately abandoned the concepts of degeneracy and social pathology for the idea of medicalization.
Critical Thinking Questions
SECTION 5
Labeling, Resistance, and Edgework 207
Introduction —Tammy L. Anderson 209
Beyond Mead: The Societal Reaction to Deviance —Edwin Lemert 212
In this reading, Lemert shows how social control strengthens when, to satisfy our needs for safety, protection,
and order, we give up our values and rights to authorities. This process features the identifi cation of harmful
acts requiring social control and the targeting and labeling of those considered harmful.
Edgework: A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk-Taking —Stephen Lyng 219
In this modern classic, sociologist Stephen Lyng defi nes a new term called edgework , which features risking
harm for a thrill. Edgework is a manipulation of the boundaries between safety and harm, order and chaos,
and norms and deviance. People engage in edgework to resist being oppressed, constrained, or socially con-
trolled in the ways Lemert describes.
Resistance as Edgework in Violent Intimate Relationships of Drug-Involved
Women —Valli Rajah 229
This reading provides another provocative example of edgework. The drug-addicted women Valli studied use
certain kinds of intimidation and violence to push back against their abusive male partners. This edgework
is thrilling and returns some semblance of control to the women Valli studied, but it also invites retaliation
from abusive spouses.
Connections: Parkour through Labeling, Resistance, and Edgework —John J. Brent 243
In this connections reading, Brent uses the youthful activity of parkour, otherwise known as urban free-
running, to contrast Lemert’s ideas on social control and labeling with Lyng’s and Valli’s perspectives on
edgework and resistance. He shows that urban free-runners risk signifi cant injury when violating norms on
urban space. They do this to protest social control, earn the respect of their peers, and increase their skills.
The reading shows how the labeling perspective is about the loss of freedom, while resistance and edgework
are about reclaiming it.
Critical Thinking Questions
SECTION 6
Stigma, Carnival, and the Grotesque Body 251
Introduction —Tammy L. Anderson 253
Stigma and Social Identity —Erving Goffman 256
Goffman’s book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Prentice-Hall, 1963) made stigma a
pivotal term in the sociology of deviance. Stigma is a special relationship between deeply discrediting traits or

CONTENTS | ix
conditions that, in turn, tarnish reputations and reduce life chances. Goffman specifi ed three types of stigma,
including abominations of the body, which are highly relevant to the new fi eld of body deviance discussed in
this section. Goffman’s term contrasts with Bhaktin’s carnival of the grotesque in other readings in this section.
Why Do People Get Tattoos? —Miliann Kang and Katherine Jones 266
Kang and Jones write about tattooing in America. They argue that tattoos are a way for young people to
resist social pressures to conform. This represents a break from Goffman’s approach, which viewed body
marks and deformities as a type of stigma that shames people.
Big Handsome Men, Bears, and Others: Virtual Constructions of
“Fat Male Embodiment” —Lee F. Monaghan 272
This reading by Monaghan uses Bhaktin’s term carnival of the grotesque , an alternative to Goffman’s stigma ,
to describe the celebration of outrageous, hairy, obese male bodies, which are typically shamed in society. By
establishing alternative settings (carnivals) with dramatically different codes and norms about comportment,
these big, handsome men exaggerate and take pride in their grotesque bodies and their sexual endeavors with
people like them.
Connections: Explaining Body Deviance with Stigma and Carnival of the
Grotesque —David Lane 290
David Lane’s original reading focuses on our bodies, our aesthetic traits, and the extent to which we defi ne
our bodies as physical or social entities, or both. Lane uses Goffman’s stigma and Bhaktin’s carnival of the
grotesque to understand two types of body deviance: tattooing and obesity. He carefully charts the value
and limitations of both concepts not only for these two cases but also for the future of body deviance and
aesthetic sociology.
Critical Thinking Questions
SECTION 7
Deviant Careers, Identity, and Lifecourse Criminology 301
Introduction —Tammy L. Anderson 303
Outsiders: Kinds of Deviance: A Sequential Model —Howard S. Becker 306
Becker uses a deviant career approach and qualitative methods to explain how people become enmeshed in
deviant lifestyles and develop deviant identities. A deciding factor in Becker’s view is the offi cial labeling of
deviance by authorities. The deviant career perspective, however, does not explain how and why people start
smoking marijuana or engaging in deviant activities in the fi rst place.
Crime and Deviance in the Life-Course —Robert J. Sampson and John H. Laub 314
Sampson and Laub present another viewpoint on deviance, this based on lifecourse trajectories. Their life-
course approach is concerned with long-term patterns of crime (trajectories) and the events that can alter
their pathways (transitions). Unlike Becker’s deviant career approach, Sampson and Laub’s lifecourse per-
spective uses quantitative techniques to explain the causes of childhood crime and delinquency and how these
behaviors change over time.
Weighing the Consequences of a Deviant Career: Factors Leading to an Exit
From Prostitution —Sharon S. Oselin 323
Sharon S. Oselin adopts both a deviant career and a lifecourse criminology framework to explain the process
of becoming a prostitute, living life as a sex worker, and trying to leave the profession behind for something

| CONTENTSx
better. Her work calls attention to the external causes that lead to prostitution (lifecourse criminology) as
well as the self-identity issues that work to keep individuals from exiting prostitution (deviant career).
Connections: Deviant Career and Life-Course Criminology Using Street
Prostitution —Emily Bonistall and Kevin Ralston 340
This original connections reading by Bonistall and Ralston uses the case of street-level prostitution to illustrate
the similarities and differences between the classical deviant career perspective and the more contemporary
lifecourse criminology framework. The reading helps us understand how various types of unconventional
behavior develop, persist, and terminate.
Critical Thinking Questions
SECTION 8
Moral Panics and Risk Society 351
Introduction —Tammy L. Anderson 353
Deviance and Moral Panics —Stanley Cohen 356
This excerpt from Folk Devils and Moral Panics (MacGibbon and Kee, 1972) by sociologist Stanley Cohen
defi nes and illustrates the classical deviance idea of moral panic. Cohen identifi es two opposing parties
involved in the creation and maintenance of these panics. The fi rst group are moral entrepreneurs, or those
create the panics, using media outlets, when they fear society or its values and traditions are being compro-
mised. Moral entrepreneurs target a second important group: folk devils, or those believed to be responsible
for the problem at hand.
Moral Panics: Culture, Politics, and Social Construction — Erich Goode
and Nachman Ben-Yehuda 363
The reading by Goode and Ben-Yehuda expands Cohen’s classic statement into a broader theory of moral
panics by asking, “How do we know when a threat is real rather than an overblown moral panic?” They
answer this question by giving us fi ve determining criteria: concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality,
and volatility.
Moral Panic Versus the Risk Society: The Implications of the Changing Sites of
Social Anxiety —Sheldon Ungar 371
Ungar suggests there may be a better way to understand social threats to society. The idea of risk society
focuses on events, conditions, and phenomena that are unpredictable, unlimited in scope, and not detect-
able by our physical senses. They originate in complex causes attributable to human decision-making,
technological innovation, and medical advancements. Risk society is also about social threats, as are
moral panics, but the reading suggests their origins and nature are more legitimate.
Connections: [A]moral Panics and Risk in Contemporary Drug and Viral
Pandemic Claims —Philip R. Kavanaugh and R. J. Maratea 378
So what are the differences between the moral panic and risk society ideas and how and why do they
matter? Kavanaugh and Maratea answer this question with two modern-day examples: the metham-
phetamine epidemic and viral pandemics (bird flu). This connections reading explains that the moral
distinction between methamphetamine addiction (often conceived as a moral panic) and viral pandem-
ics (an example of risk in modern society) is not as clear as we might think.
Critical Thinking Questions

CONTENTS | xi
SECTION 9
Critical Criminology, Culture of Control, Mass Incarceration 389
Introduction —Tammy L. Anderson 391
The Child Savers: Chapter 5: The Child-Saving Movement in Illinois —
Anthony M. Platt 394
Platt describes the creation of the modern juvenile court system, which was implemented to reverse the severe,
and often inhumane, treatment of children in the 19th century. The new juvenile court system acted as a legal
guardian to promote the successful development of youth, reasoning that such an approach would best combat
deviance and delinquency. But ironically, this juvenile court model was gradually abandoned in the late stages
of the 20th century, as youths increasingly began to be tried as adults and received harsher sentences, and the
juvenile court returned to the punitive approach of the 19th century.
The Hypercriminalization of Black and Latino Male Youth
in the Era of Mass Incarceration —Victor M. Rios 409
This reading by Victor M. Rios is based on an ethnographic study of black and Latino boys in 2006 in San
Francisco. In neighborhoods and at school, offi cials have adopted a culture of control in dealing with minority
youth. The boys have been stigmatized as violent criminals and referred to criminal justice agencies at rates
much higher than their white counterparts. This criminalization of minority male youth has contributed to
the punitive trend of mass incarceration seen recently in the United States and contradicts the original intent
of the juvenile court system Platt describes.
Governing through Crime: Safe Schools: Reforming Education through Crime —
Jonathan Simon 422
This reading is about the daily effects we encounter from a society obsessed with surveillance, security, and puni-
tive penal practices. Simon shows how government and other social institutions use punitive policies at schools
to manage perceived threats to students’ safety and security, what the author calls “governance through crime.”
Connections: The Social Control of Youth Across Institutional Spheres —Aaron Kupchik 429
Aaron Kupchik’s original connections reading for this section explains the policy approaches to controlling juvenile
deviance and crime over time and highlights the recent punitive expansion to school grounds through what the
author calls “the school-to-prison pipeline.” This causes students to miss school, drop out, and earn criminal records,
not diplomas. The policy achieves the opposite of the original intent of the juvenile justice system, outlined by Platt.
Critical Thinking Questions
PART 2: EMERGENT POSSIBILITIES
AND THE FUTURE OF DEVIANCE
SECTION 10
Queer Theory, Communities, and Citizenship 439
Introduction —Tammy L. Anderson 441
Coming Out All Over: Deviants and the Politics of Social Problems —John I. Kitsuse 444
Kitsuse argues that homosexuals—and other marginal groups in society—form separate communities to
retain their unique cultural customs and lifestyles but also seek the recognition, respect, rights, and privileges

| CONTENTSxii
heterosexuals and other “normal” citizens traditionally enjoy. He calls for sociology to move away from
viewing deviant groups through a lens of stigma, discrimination, and shame to one of citizenship and
empowerment.
There Goes the Gayborhood ?—Amin Ghaziani 456
Ghaziani’s reading reports on a new trend within the gay community that breaks with the tradition that
Kitsuse and Taylor describe. Ghaziani explains that the decline in separate gay neighborhoods and communi-
ties is due to several factors (monogamy, marriage, and parenting, to name a few) that have made gays and
lesbians more likely to assimilate and integrate with their heterosexual friends and neighbors.
Queer Presences and Absences: Citizenship, Community,
Diversity—or Death —Yvette Taylor 460
This reading by Taylor adopts a viewpoint on deviance and citizenship that is similar to that of Kitsuse but
also notes potential unintended consequences for marginal groups of securing equal rights and increased citi-
zenship. One potential consequence is the loss of a unique gay or queer culture because equal treatment and
recognition in society requires assimilating to society’s dominant standards, ways, and ideals.
Connections: HIV and Bugchasers across Queer Collectives — Holly Swan
and Laura Monico 466
This connections reading notes that marginal or deviant communities exist within a spectrum of widely dif-
ferent social contexts. For example, sexual norms and behavior among gay men differ widely between the
larger group of gay men who practice safe sex and bugchasers, who voluntarily contract HIV so they can be
“sexually free.” So, when we are tempted to classify homosexuals as a singular group that is either assimilat-
ing to heterosexual culture (as Ghaziani contends) or claiming their queer-centric ways (as Taylor argues),
what Swan and Monico fi nd instead is wide diversity within the pools of outcasts with multiple defi nitions
of deviant and normal behavior.
Critical Thinking Questions
SECTION 11
Critical Race Theory, Multiculturalism, and Identity 473
Introduction —Tammy L. Anderson 475
Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the
Study of Black Politics —Cathy J. Cohen 478
This reading outlines a critical race theory of intentional deviance, where racial and ethnic minorities or out-
siders attempt to preserve their cultural heritages while conforming to the white, middle-class mainstream.
The author argues that this type of deviance is a daily burden for the majority of black citizens but is ulti-
mately rewarding. By attending to this intentional deviance by the majority of black citizens, the sociology
of deviance can, Cohen argues, move away from its near exclusive focus on the black underclass engaged in
crime.
The Battle of Los Angeles: The Cultural Politics of Chicana/o Music in the
Greater Eastside —Victor Hugo Viesca 496
This reading describes how Hispanics in Los Angeles resist oppression and social control by participating in
Latin fusion music scenes. Through music, young Hispanics counter the harsh labels, stigma, and discrimi-
nation they often face while being their authentic selves. Unlike Cohen’s focus on cultural balance, Viesca
highlights the value of securing an outlet and space for multicultural expression.

CONTENTS | xiii
“ I Was Aggressive for the Streets, Pretty for the Pictures”: Gender, Difference,
and the Inner-City Girl —Nikki Jones 504
Nikki Jones profi les a young black female, Kiara, who shows us that race, gender, and class are ongoing per-
formances that feature norm violation and consequences. As Cohen notes in his reading, Kiara balances her
behavior and identity in “legit” white society with her inner-city home by “looking pretty for the pictures, but
tough enough for the streets.” The reading demonstrates that norms and standards for behavior are deter-
mined by our demographic and cultural background, thus requiring the fi eld of deviance to attend to diversity.
Connections: Marginality, Identity, and Music Scenes —Tammy L. Anderson 507
In this connections reading, Anderson explains how music scenes such as hip hop, homo hop, rave, and EDM,
Bhangra, Latin fusion, and narcocorridos not only teach us about the link between multiculturalism, identity,
and marginality but also how these social insights can be extended to the study of deviance. When young
people participate in music scenes, they provide powerful lessons from which sociologists have much to learn.
Critical Thinking Questions
SECTION 12
Biomedicalization, Biopower, and Biocitizens 517
Introduction —Tammy L. Anderson 519
The Medicalization of Unhappiness —Ronald W. Dworkin 522
The Dworkin reading shows us that trends in medicalizing conditions—such as depression—and controlling
them with medicines (like antidepressants) will continue to expand into the future and will ultimately target
our most simple human emotions and goals: everyday unhappiness or anxieties. The author worries that
such broad criteria for mental illness will lead to overdiagnosis of “pathologies” and expand the unnecessary
treatment of perfectly healthy people.
“ Civilizing Technologies” and the Control of Deviance —Scott Vrecko 531
Vrecko’s provocative reading asks us to consider who is responsible for addressing deviance as society shifts
to biological and neuroscientifi c explanations for nonconformity and away from moral or social causes. The
author envisions increased self-control, where we become good biocitizens who agree with medical classifi ca-
tions, conform to medical advice, and take initiatives to fi x our own problems without inconveniencing others.
Connections: Biomedicalization of Drug Addiction and the Reproduction
of Inequality —Tammy L. Anderson and Philip R. Kavanaugh 542
The readings in this section provide an overview of the shift in many societies to biomedical efforts to
fi x traits, behaviors, and conditions now considered “illness” as opposed to previous approaches, which
explained these same behaviors as moral failings or deviant behavior. This connections reading Anderson
wrote with Philip R. Kavanaugh uses the case of opiate addiction to raise troubling questions about the
persistence of inequality in society.
Critical Thinking Questions
Contributor Biographies 553
Credits 559
Index 561

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SERIES FOREWORD
By creatively connecting classical and contemporary perspectives on the study of deviance,
Understanding Deviance provides what has been missing in the fi eld for too long: a fresh
approach to covering a range of theoretical frameworks and topics in a way that renders the
study of deviance a coherent and lively fi eld of inquiry. This volume not only covers well-
known territory in the study of deviance, including functionalism, anomie, strain theory,
social disorganization, labeling, stigma, deviant careers, and moral panics, but it also covers
comparatively new and unincorporated territory in the study of deviance, including col-
lective effi cacy, degeneracy and medicalization, resistance and edgework, carnival and the
grotesque body, culture of control and mass incarceration, and queer theory and multicul-
tural identity. By skillfully connecting old and new theoretical frameworks and empirical
fi ndings in provocative ways, this book offers a unique perspective on how to interrogate
and understand the social organization, construction, and experience of deviance. It does so
by bringing the study of deviance into the modern era, providing compelling examples and
critical critiques, and effectively engaging the reader in interesting and productive ways of
thinking about deviance and the array of related sociological concerns, most notably social
rules, norms, boundaries, violations, stigma, sanctions, and stratifi cation systems. Students
will enjoy reading the many accounts of deviance in the contemporary era, and instructors
will appreciate the book’s theoretical and conceptual currency. Both will enjoy a journey
that covers new terrain, is attentive to patterns and trends as well as nuances and particulari-
ties, and arrives at a holistic and contextual understanding of deviance and deviants in the
modern world.
Douglas Hartmann
Valerie Jenness
Jodi O’Brien

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Hello. My name is Gabi. I’m a supercool feedee 1 who loves life and loves pleasing you on and off
the camera! I love being naughty with food, in public, and just going all out with snacking and eat-
ing. I am a growing girl and I would love if you would join my journey of showing how beautiful
fat, soft rolls are and how beautiful fat really is. (Gaining Gabi, n.d.)
Are feedees like Gabi deviant? If yes, how so? Understanding Deviance: Connecting Classi-
cal and Contemporary Perspectives dares readers to think in new and innovative ways about
deviance in society. Many of us, including sociologists who study deviance, would answer yes
to the fi rst question and assume we could get Gabi to conform to our norms about body
size. Our expectations for this are conveyed weekly on TV shows such as The Biggest Loser .
Contestants like Megan 2 try to conform to our standards, while feedees like Gabi violate
them. On the Biggest Loser Web site, we learn that Megan sees herself as
“fun-loving, comedic, artistic and high-spirited young adult who is missing out on enjoying life”
because of her inability to do things that most 21-year-olds can do . . . Now 21 years old, 259 pounds
and tired of her weight holding her back , she wants to get healthy so she can participate in rodeos
again and win, train horses, and shop at regular clothing stores . 3
Gabi, on the other hand, is a fi ve feet nine, 26-year-old, heterosexual blonde who wears a
women’s pant size of between 38 and 44—more than four times the average size of women
her height (i.e., average is between sizes 6 and 10). Sociologists have observed that feedees like
Gabi are likely deviant in several respects. First, they purposefully defy norms about body
size and society’s aesthetic standards. Second, they also reject expectations for how individuals
should take care of themselves and safeguard their own health and well-being. Third, Gabi
and other feedees make no apologies for being sexually charged and assertive. Instead, they
celebrate it. Gabi tells us her favorite sexual position is doggy style and the purpose of her
Web site is to attract chubby chasers who have sexual fetishes for large women. In fact, she is
proud to host a pornographic Web site that invites the public to indulge.
How do we make sense of people like Gabi? Perhaps most of us would focus on the
health risks associated with being obese. But putting aside health issues, how does her story
provoke us to hold a mirror to the norms, values, and beliefs we endorse on a daily basis?
At a very basic level, deviance is the violation of norms, a breach of the standards society
sets for behaviors, traits, conditions, identities, and lifestyles. Gabi proudly violates them
while Megan feels shamed and tries to correct her condition and conform to our norms.
Since deviance is usually viewed negatively—for example, as a threat that can harm people,
institutions, and society—it is often met with social control. Gabi probably ignores shows
PREFACE

| PREFACExviii
like The Biggest Loser and talks back to people who criticize her, while Megan buys into the
show’s worldview and gets distraught when people humiliate her for being obese. Gabi is,
in effect, a contemporary woman, while Megan is much more traditional. The classic socio-
logical work on deviance has helped us understand Megan and her viewpoints and behav-
iors, but it doesn’t equip us to understand Gabi.
This example illustrates the need to modernize the study of deviance. It also calls attention
to one of the central tenets of this book: pairing classic and contemporary viewpoints about
deviance and social control is essential because it can sharpen our critical thinking skills and
help us better understand our lives and others’ today. Not convinced? Let me ask you another
question.
Is being called a bitch a put-down or a compliment? What do you think? What would
your grandmother say? Your mother? The term bitch has historically been a pejorative label
to control and reprimand outspoken women (Hughes 2006). However, former Saturday
Night Live star Tina Fey sees things differently. In her “Weekend Update” skit on the 2008
presidential campaign, 4 she turns the sexist term bitch on its head and argues that it is a
badge of honor to celebrate and a compliment to those who are called it, including Hillary
Clinton and other strong women.
Tina Fey’s resistance stance challenges gender norms (about women and political power)
and the bitch stigma that attempts to brand unruly women. Her use of the term seeks to
reverse its damaging meaning by invoking an emboldened and opposing viewpoint, which
is more consistent with the newer tradition of resistance (Hollander and Einwohner 2004).
Resistance is about the pushback against or rejection of deviant labeling or classifi cation.
With resistance, deviant labels act as a badge of honor to celebrate, not as a kiss of death
or source of shame. Therefore, while our grandmothers may think being called a bitch is a
terrible thing, younger women today might agree with Fey’s more modern stance and view
it as a compliment.
OBJECTIVES AND CONTENT
How do these contemporary stories of deviance, labeling, shame, and resistance help explain
the rationale and structure of this book for teaching? One way is by showing us how useful it
is to draw connections between the old and the new. Not only do we see social life and social
processes more clearly when alternative meanings are accorded to similar forms of deviant
behavior, but we also learn how to appreciate and interact with those who see things dif-
ferently from ourselves. This may better equip us to reach common goals in an increasingly
diverse and ever-changing world. Connecting the classic with the contemporary allows us to
retain traditions while evolving with the times.
Part 1 of Understanding Deviance highlights parallels between classic deviance terms and
contemporary concepts from a wider range of sociological theories and traditions. Some of
these include the following:
The nine sections in Part 1 each include older and modern reprinted readings consid-
ered pivotal in the fi eld of deviance. Connections between them are offered in an original
“connections” reading—written exclusively for this book—that features a type of deviance
to elucidate the differing viewpoints of the reprinted materials. In these connections read-
ings, and the short section introductions, the learning goals of this book are introduced and
developed.

PREFACE | xix
Part 2 includes three sections with readings that raise interesting possibilities for the future
study of deviance. They suggest we cease focusing narrowly on individuals and broaden our
view to institutions and communities. Moreover, when we do talk about deviant or marginal
people, Section 10 asks us to look at them not simply as Others to be ostracized or controlled
but instead, as Kitsuse (1980) claims, as individuals demanding citizenship for unique cul-
tural and social expressions as well as novel lifestyles and identities. This will require us to
employ a multidisciplinary framework that reveals deviance as a political, social, anthropo-
logical, psychological, and medical phenomenon.
Taken together, the 12 sections in Parts 1 and 2 cover a wider range of deviant behaviors,
traits, and conditions. The readings address underage drinking and drunk driving, doping
in elite sports, gang behavior, community crime, juvenile delinquency, hate crime, prison
violence and transgender prisoners, mental illness, drug-using women and domestic violence,
obesity, tattooing, sexual fetishes, prostitution, drug epidemics, viral pandemics, crime con-
trol strategies and racial inequality, gay neighborhoods, HIV and bugchasers, and youth,
multiculturalism, and music scenes.
ENHANCING CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS
A main objective of this book is to sharpen students’ critical thinking skills by having them
consider that deviant behaviors, traits, or conditions can be viewed from opposing or alter-
native perspectives. By learning to see deviance from multiple perspectives, students will
better understand their own and other’s behavior and experiences and be able to anticipate
future trends. Balancing multiple perspectives may also assist students in their practical work
in social service, criminal justice, and other agencies and institutions that deal with popula-
tions considered deviant in one way or another.
The concepts introduced in each of the 12 sections are a useful way to develop and
strengthen critical thinking. Embedded in the stories of deviant acts and individuals that run
throughout the book, the conceptual parallels and connections often showcase at least two
sides of the very stories that characterize our lives. As the building blocks of theory, these
concepts also teach us about the present and future, alert us to potential dangers, and help
us fi nd solutions to move society forward. In short, they enable us to see patterns and make
predictions to improve life. These concepts are also the easiest way for students to see how
theory works in everyday life. This novel conceptual approach to the study of deviance,
TABLE P.1
Classic Term New Term
Functionalism, Anomie General Strain Th eory
Social Disorganization Collective Effi cacy
Social Pathology, Degeneracy Medicalization
Labeling Resistance and Edgework
Stigma Carnival of the Grotesque
Deviant Careers Lifecourse Criminology
Moral Panic Risk Society
Critical Criminology Culture of Control/Mass Incarceration

| PREFACExx
which links classical ideas to contemporary behaviors and identities, should not only serve
to help revitalize the fi eld in academic circles but also increases the value to people’s lives of
studying deviance in societies near and afar.
Another goal of Understanding Deviance is to help students see how social processes
work in everyday life, including how various forms of inequality (race, class, and gender) are
maintained by defi ning deviance and administering social control. For example, norms have
distinct meaning by race, ethnicity, gender, and class identities and status. Because norms
are always based on power disparities, certain race, class, or gender identities, expressions,
or behaviors are favored and often shape what is defi ned as acceptable or normal in society.
The Other individuals are deemed marginal and subordinated. Therefore, deviance teaches a
great deal about social inequality.
One way I provoke my students to think about deviance and inequality is through my
term “switch it out.” This phrase refers to how people’s viewpoints are not primarily about
a certain behavior or trait but more about the demographic characteristics of the person in
question. Consider any deviant behavior—for example, promiscuous sex, selling drugs, or
cage fi ghting/mixed martial arts. Does your opinion about these activities differ depending
on who commits them? Is it the same thing for males and females to engage in promiscuous
sex, sell drugs, and perform mixed martial arts? Are these behaviors less deviant for middle-
class white males than they are for poor black ones? What if the main characters in the hit
TV series The Sopranos , Dexter , or Breaking Bad were not all white males but were instead
black or Hispanic males or females? Would the public root for them the same way? Put sim-
ply, some “deviant behaviors” are not considered bad if the “right” person (i.e., those hav-
ing more socially valuable race, class, and gender identities) commits them. Understanding
Deviance helps to teach students to look at deviance in this way. The development of critical
thinking skills also helps students to probe and understand the complexities of deviance,
which includes developing a more fi nely tuned sensitivity to political, cultural, economic,
and social matters. The structure and approach of Understanding Deviance helps students to
acquire these sensitivities, stimulating their intellectual curiosity and promoting their contin-
ued learning over time.
NOTES
1. According to Urbandictionary.com, a feedee is a “male/female (typically female) that wishes to gain weight (to
become more attractive to chubby chasers) through means of stuffi ng one’s face with unhealthy food goods”;
Retrieved September 23, 2012, http://www.urbandictionary.com/defi ne.php?term=feedee.
2. “The Biggest Loser” October 10, 2012, http://www.nbc.com/the-biggest-loser/contestants/megan/bio/.
3. Italics added.
4. “SNL—Tina Fey on Hillary Clinton—Bitch Is the New Black,” February 29, 2008. Accessed September 25,
2012, http://videosift.com/video/SNL-Tina-Fey-on-Hillary-Clinton-Bitch-Is-The-New-Black .
REFERENCES
Gaining Gabi. n.d. Retrieved on September 21, 2012, www.GainingGabi.com.
Hollander, J. and Einwohner, R. L. 2004. “Conceptualizing Resistance.” Sociological Forum 19: 533–554.
Hughes, Geoffrey. 2006. Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and
Ethnic Slurs in the English-Speaking World . Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
Kitsuse, John I. 1980. “Coming Out all Over: Deviants and the Politics of Social Problems.” Social Problems 28(1): 1–12.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=feedee

http://www.nbc.com/the-biggest-loser/contestants/megan/bio/

http://videosift.com/video/SNL-Tina-Fey-on-Hillary-Clinton-Bitch-Is-The-New-Black

http://www.GainingGabi.com

http://Urbandictionary.com

This book is a labor of love which could not have been conceived, written, or published
without the help and support of many people, both inside and outside academia and pub-
lishing. It took shape during my years of teaching about deviance at the University of Dela-
ware. However, my parents like to remind me that I was always interested in people who
didn’t do what they were supposed to, especially those called “weirdos,” “troublemakers,”
or “outsiders” (including me). So, let me begin by thanking my parents—Odel and Chrys-
tine Anderson—for their love, patience, and support over the years and for listening to and
laughing at my stories about deviant behavior. Next, I’d like to express my sincere gratitude
to the folks at the University of Delaware (UD)—faculty, staff, and students alike. Nancy
Quillen, Linda Keen, Chris Grott, and Judy Watson provided constant administrative help
during the production process. My UD colleagues Joel Best, Anne Bowler, Aaron Kupchik,
Victor Perez, Susan Miller, and Ben Fluery-Steiner helped me conceive this book, and they
provided critical feedback throughout the writing process. I’m indebted to them for their
help. I can say the same for the folks at Routledge. I’d like to thank Steve Rutter and Val Jen-
ness for believing in me, assisting me, and pushing me to make this book better. Thanks also
to Margaret Moore for all of her editorial assistance. Mostly, however, I want to thank my
students. Over the years, many graduate and undergraduate students have opened my eyes to
alternative viewpoints and have tuned me in to deviance in everyday life. They have indulged
my ideas and have offered many of their own to help improve my work. Thus, this book is a
collaborative effort. Several of my former and current graduate students—Philip R.Kavanaugh,
R. J. Maratea, David Lane, Holly Swan, Laura Monico, John J. Brent, Kevin Ralston, and
Emily Bonistall (along with my faculty colleagues Aaron Kupchik, Victor Perez, and Lori
Sexton from the University of Missouri–Kansas City)—have contributed excellent connec-
tions readings to this book and have provided constant and invaluable input over time. They
wrote and rewrote their readings, always met their deadlines, and tolerated my relentless
pestering. They have simply been the best team of collaborators any author/editor could ask
for. There are still other students to thank as well, but they are too many to list here. I am
grateful for the time we spent together in class. Finally, there are other people who supported
me in fi nishing this book. Barret Michalec and Jenn Walters-Michalec, Autumn Bayles, my
siblings—Terri Hellman, David Anderson, and Tracey Whitney—and the DiFrancesco family
were always there to listen to the joy of this book’s journey as well as its bumps in the road.
Thanks for being my sounding board, guys. And last, but certainly not least, I’d like to thank
my partner, Francki DiFrancesco, for her unwavering love and support, as well as her ideas,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

| ACKNOWLEDGMENTSxxii
insights, and commentary throughout this project. Thank you, Francki, for the cover idea;
reading and commenting about Gaining Gabi, bugchasers, prostitutes, free-runners, and so
on; consoling me in the tough times, and celebrating the good. In short, I thank you all for
helping me with Understanding Deviance .
In addition, a thank you to the reviewers for their very helpful feedback:
Angela Henderson, University of Northern Colorado
Richelle Swan, California State University, San Marcos
Randy Myers, Old Dominion University
Rebecca Trammel, Metropolitan State University of Denver
Sharon S. Oselin, California State University, Los Angeles
Sarah Smith, Elmhurst College
Christopher Faircloth, Xavier University
Jennifer Lois, West Washington University

SECTION 1
Defi ning Deviance

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Introduction
Tammy L. Anderson
No one has gone where two states in the American West, Washington and Colorado, are now
going with the pioneering blueprints for how to sell pot legally. Depending on your view, it’s
either Lewis and Clark crossing the Continental Divide for the fi rst time, or a step into slow-
motion quicksand.
(Egan 2013: 1)
Marijuana was outlawed in the United States by the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act after years of
complaints about it being immoral, lacking medical value, and being downright dangerous.
Now, more than 75 years later, laws against weed are wilting. Two new patterns of control
have emerged. One seeks to medicalize marijuana for the private treatment of disease and
illness and a second seeks to decriminalize it altogether, making it available to the general
public. Both paths will likely redefi ne laws, norms, social customs, ideology, values, and mor-
als about marijuana now and into our future, changing our understanding of marijuana use
and sales as deviant behavior.
What is deviance? How is it determined? Who plays a role in defi ning deviance and who
doesn’t? How do defi nitions of deviance matter in our lives? Who benefi ts? Who loses? Sec-
tion 1 includes four readings by Durkheim, Erikson, Becker, and Moynihan that begin to
answer these questions. They have been pivotal in originating the study of deviance in soci-
ology. In this Introduction, I discuss these scholars’ positions on deviance through today’s
debate about marijuana. In my connections reading on youth alcohol use, drunk driving, and
binge drinking, I provide a deeper understanding of defi nitions of deviance and answers to
the questions above.
As you read in the Preface, a central purpose of this book is to compare classic and con-
temporary concepts that have relevance for the study of deviance today. These pairings and
connections will help you think more critically about our society and the interactions and
experiences we have with each other daily. The concepts covered here often begin by taking
a certain stance on what deviance is, who gets to say so, and how that impacts our lives. For
example, the term deviant career (Section 7) uses a social reaction or labeling theory type of
defi nition, while functionalism and anomie (Section 2) employ a more morally based one.
Critical criminology and culture of control (Section 9) use a confl ict orientation to answer
the questions above. Section 1 begins, therefore, with a review of the basic ways sociologists
have defi ned deviance in our society and have attempted to answer the questions above.
We begin with a basic idea: deviance is simply a breach of a socially acceptable standard.
While it’s important to understand the types and causes of such breaks, it is also helpful to

| TAMMY L. ANDERSON4
understand the types of things they regulate. For example, in today’s society, standards are
created for behavior—such as smoking or selling marijuana. However, there are also values
and norms for states of being or conditions (i.e., being intoxicated or sober), lifestyles (hedo-
nistic or conventional), speech or language (drug argot, slang, or proper English), and even
our identities, physical traits, and personal styles. Thus, the study of deviance cannot simply
focus on behavior. It must, instead, focus on all of these things and how they are controlled
in our society.
Once we get a better idea of the range of phenomena that are used to set standards for
people in a society, we can also study how those standards originate. In the early days,
sociologists articulated a few major ways deviance and social norms could be defi ned. The
Durkheim (1982) reading in this section provides a scientifi cally based statistical view-
point, arguing that deviant behavior is the rare phenomena or the very infrequent event.
When we hear about how “the majority of people” drink alcohol or that “most” people
are heterosexual, we are learning about statistically defi ned standards and norms. Deviance
then becomes the minority or rare case. From Durkheim’s viewpoint then, marijuana use
is normal, since most (65%) Americans have tried it and about 17% smoke it almost daily
(NSDUH 2012).
Erikson (1962)—author of another reading in this section—articulated a more morally
based way to defi ne norms and deviance. He relied on morals, customs, and traditions that
were often tied to religious doctrine. For example, the classifi cation of inebriated states
(drunkenness and being high) as deviant behavior is based in Christian morality and the
Bible. Today, religious fi gures are divided on the morality of marijuana use but were vehe-
mently opposed to it around the time of the Marijuana Tax Act (Jones 2013). If morally
defi ned deviance works to set boundaries for behavior, build solidarity among citizens, and
assist the smooth functioning of society, as Erikson contends, then will marijuana decrimi-
nalization destabilize and weaken our society?
Howard Becker (1963) spelled out a labeling theory or social reaction approach to devi-
ance. You will read his viewpoints in an excerpt from his classic book in this section. He
called deviance anything people in society so label and argued that norm violations had to
be witnessed by others in order for deviance to command our attention. Becker’s point was
that deviance doesn’t objectively exist. It is in the eyes of the beholder. Becker wrote about
marijuana and the passage and impact of the Marijuana Tax Act because he was heavily
involved in the 1940s and 1950s jazz scene, which featured casual marijuana use by musi-
cians and fans.
It is important to note that sociologists have also defi ned deviance in other ways. Sec-
tions 4 and 12 describe medical viewpoints and show that more and more deviant traits,
behaviors, and conditions are being reclassifi ed as forms of disease and illness in our society
every day. In fact, you could argue this is one reason criminal controls against marijuana use
and sales are changing. Marijuana advocates have convinced Americans that the drug is an
effective and safe treatment for a variety of ailments and drug experts tell us often that drug
addiction, in general, is a disease rather than a moral failing.
Finally, classifying and controlling deviance should also be considered acts of power. This
is a basic position of more critical or confl ict-oriented theories, which are covered in Section
9 of this book. Consider that when something or someone is defi ned as normal or accept-
able, it is almost certain that something or someone else is rendered deviant. Moreover, there
are consequences for deviant behavior and discrimination against those who engage in it or
who possess deviant traits or conditions. And when we look at who and what is classifi ed as

INTRODUCTION | 5
deviant in our society and who has done the cataloguing, we see considerable inequality. For
example, even though offi cial data sources such as the NSDUH (2012) show almost equal
rates of marijuana use by race and ethnicity, minority group members—especially African
Americans—have been arrested for it and fi nd themselves behind bars much more often
than whites (Mauer and King 2007). Thus, there is inequality between racial groups when
it comes to thinking about and responding to marijuana-related behavior and drug-related
deviance overall.
The reading by Moynihan (1992) in this section cautions us that when we defi ne deviance
down—reclassify unacceptable behaviors as acceptable or trivialize their signifi cance and
impact—we wander into dangerous territory and threaten the very stability of our society. In
his reading, Moynihan points out a few ways this is done, and we can easily see these meth-
ods at work with marijuana reform today as drug addicts are treated by healthcare profes-
sionals instead of being punished by the criminal justice system and as marijuana industries
evolve into profi t-making businesses in our economy (Jones 2013).
What do you think? Will marijuana reform defi ne deviance down in ways that endanger
society and our way of life? Will it improve things? For whom? As you read the papers in this
section, consider what deviance means and how the viewpoints expressed here complement
and contradict each other and are relevant to your life. Pay attention to who benefi ts and suf-
fers from their implementation. Can we see conceptual similarities across types of deviance—
for example, marijuana, drunk driving, and the many other types of nonconforming behaviors,
traits, and conditions—discussed in this book? Attending to questions like these, and those
asked by the contributors and I throughout this book, may just show you how relevant the
study of deviance is to all of our lives today.
REFERENCES
Becker, Howard S. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance . New York: Free Press.
Durkheim, Emile. 1982. “Rules for the Distinction of the Normal and the Pathological.” In Rules of the Sociological
Method, 85–101. New York: Free Press.
Egan, Timothy. 2013 (June 6). “Big Pot.” New York Times . Retrieved June 10, 2013, http://opinionator.blogs.
nytimes.com/2013/06/06/big-pot/.
Erikson, Kai T. 1962. “Notes on the Sociology of Deviance.” Social Problems , 9(4): 307–314.
Jones, Robert P. 2013. “Christians Divided on Morality, Legalization of Marijuana Use.” Public Religion
Research Institute. Retrieved June 10, 2013, http://publicreligion.org/2013/05/our-corner-christians-divided-on-
morality-legalization-of-marijuana-use/.
Mauer, M. and King, R. S. 2007. Uneven Justice: State Rates of Incarceration by Race and Ethnicity . Washington,
DC: Sentencing Project.
Moynihan, Daniel. 1992. “Defi ning Deviance Down.” The American Scholar 62(1): 17–30.
NSDUH. 2012. “Results from the 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Summary of National Findings.”
Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration .

http://publicreligion.org/2013/05/our-corner-christians-divided-on-morality-legalization-of-marijuana-use/

http://publicreligion.org/2013/05/our-corner-christians-divided-on-morality-legalization-of-marijuana-use/

Rules for the Distinction of the Normal
from the Pathological
Emile Durkheim
Observation conducted according to the pre-
ceding rules mixes up two orders of facts,
which are very dissimilar in certain respects:
those that are entirely appropriate and those
that should be different from what they
are—normal phenomena and pathological
phenomena. We have even seen that it is
necessary to include both in the defi nition
with which all research should begin. Yet
if, in certain aspects, they are of the same
nature, they nevertheless constitute two dif-
ferent varieties between which it is important
to distinguish. Does science have the means
available to make this distinction?
The question is of the utmost importance,
for on its solution depends one’s conception
of the role that science, and above all the
science of man, has to play. According to a
theory whose exponents are recruited from
the most varied schools of thought, science
cannot instruct us in any way about what we
ought to desire. It takes cognisance, they say,
only of facts which all have the same value
and the same utility; it observes and explains
but does not judge them; for it, there are
none that are reprehensible. For science,
good and evil do not exist. Whereas it can
certainly tell us how causes produce their
effects, it cannot tell us what ends should be
pursued. To know not what is but what is
desirable, we must resort to the suggestions
of the unconscious—sentiment, instinct, vital
urge, and so on—by whatever name we call
it. Science, says a writer already quoted, can
well light up the world but leaves a darkness
in the human heart. The heart must create its
own illumination. Thus science is stripped,
or nearly, of all practical effectiveness and
consequently of any real justifi cation for its
existence. For what good is it to strive after
a knowledge of reality if the knowledge we
acquire cannot serve us in our lives? Can we
reply that by revealing to us the causes of
phenomena, knowledge offers us the means
of producing the causes at will and thereby
to achieve the ends our will pursues for rea-
sons that go beyond science? But, from one
point of view, every means is an end, for to
set the means in motion it requires an act of
the will, just as it does to achieve the end for
which it prepares the way. There are always
several paths leading to a given goal, and
a choice must therefore be made between
them. Now, if science cannot assist us in
choosing the best goal, how can it indicate
the best path to follow to arrive at the goal?
Why should it commend to us the swiftest
path in preference to the most economical
one, the most certain rather than the most
simple one, or vice versa? If it cannot guide
us in the determination of our highest ends,
it is no less powerless to determine those sec-
ondary and subordinate ends we call means.
It is true that the ideological method
affords an avenue of escape from this mysti-
cism, and indeed the desire to escape from
it has in part been responsible for the per-
sistence of this method. Its devotees were

RULES FOR THE DISTINCTION OF THE NORMAL FROM THE PATHOLOGICAL | 7
certainly too rationalist to agree that human
conduct did not require the guidance of refl ec-
tive thought. Yet they saw in the phenomena,
considered by themselves independently of
any subjective data, nothing to justify their
classifying them according to their practical
value. It therefore seemed that the sole means
of judging them was to relate them to some
overriding concept. Hence the use of notions
to govern the collation of facts, rather than
deriving notions from them [facts], became
indispensable for any rational sociology. But
we know that, in these conditions, although
practice has been refl ected upon, such refl ec-
tion is not scientifi c.
The solution to the problem just posed
will nevertheless allow us to lay claim to the
rights of reason without falling back into ide-
ology. For societies, as for individuals, health
is good and desirable; sickness, on the other
hand, is bad and must be avoided. If there-
fore we fi nd an objective criterion, inherent
in the facts themselves, to allow us to dis-
tinguish scientifi cally health from sickness
in the various orders of social phenomena,
science will be in a position to throw light
on practical matters while remaining true to
its own method. Since at present science is
incapable of directly affecting the individual,
it can doubtless only furnish us with gen-
eral guidelines which cannot be diversifi ed
appropriately for the particular individual
unless he is approached through the senses.
The state known as health, insofar as it is
capable of defi nition, cannot apply exactly
to any individual, since it can only be estab-
lished for the most common circumstances,
from which everyone deviates to some
extent. Nonetheless, it is a valuable reference
point to guide our actions. Because it must
be adjusted later to fi t each individual case, it
does not follow that knowledge of it lacks all
utility. Indeed, precisely the opposite is true
because it establishes the norm which must
serve as a basis for all our practical reason-
ing. Under these conditions we are no longer
justifi ed in stating that thought is useless for
action. Between science and art there is no
longer a gulf, and one may pass from one
to the other without any break in continu-
ity. It is true that science can only concern
itself with the facts through the mediation of
art, but art is only the extension of science.
We may even speculate whether the practical
shortcomings of science must not continue to
decrease as the laws it is establishing express
evermore fully individual reality.
I
Every sociological phenomenon, just as every
biological phenomenon, although staying
essentially unchanged, can assume a differ-
ent form for each particular case. Among
these forms exist two kinds. The fi rst are
common to the whole species. They are to be
found, if not in all, at least in most individu-
als. If they are not replicated exactly in all
the cases where they are observed but vary
from one person to another, their variations
are confi ned within very narrow limits. On
the other hand, other forms exist which are
exceptional. These are encountered only in a
minority of cases, but even when they occur,
most frequently they do not last the whole
lifetime of an individual. They are exceptions
in time as they are in space. We are therefore
faced with two distinct types of phenomena
which must be designated by different terms.
Those facts which appear in the most com-
mon forms we shall call normal and the rest,
morbid or pathological. Let us agree to des-
ignate as the average type the hypothetical
being which might be constituted by assem-
bling in one entity, as a kind of individual
abstraction, the most frequently occurring
characteristics of the species in their most
frequent forms. We may then say that the
normal type merges into the average type
and that any deviation from that standard of
healthiness is a morbid phenomenon. It is true
that the average type cannot be delineated
with the same distinctness as an individual

| EMILE DURKHEIM8
type, since the attributes from which it is
constituted are not absolutely fi xed but are
capable of variation. Yet it can unquestion-
ably be constituted in this way, since it is
the immediate subject matter of science and
blends with the generic type. The physi-
ologist studies the functions of the average
organism; the same is true of the sociologist.
Once we know how to distinguish between
the various social species—this question will
be dealt with later—it is always possible to
discover the most general form presented by
a phenomenon in any given species.
It can be seen that a fact can be termed
pathological only in relation to a given spe-
cies. The conditions of health and sickness
cannot be defi ned in abstracto or absolutely.
This rule is not questioned in biology: it has
never occurred to anybody to think that what
is normal in a mollusc should be also for a
vertebrate. Each species has its own state of
health because it has an average type pecu-
liar to it, and the health of the lowest species
is no less than that of the highest. The same
principle is applicable to sociology, although
it is often misunderstood. The habit, far too
widespread, must be abandoned of judging
an institution, a practice, or a moral maxim
as if it were good or bad in or by itself for all
social types without distinction.
Since the reference point for judging the
state of health or sickness varies according
to the species, it can vary also within the
same species, if that happens to change. Thus
from the purely biological viewpoint, what
is normal for the savage is not always so for
the civilised person and vice versa. There is
one order of variations above all which it is
important to take into account because these
occur regularly in all species: they are those
which relate to age. Health for the old per-
son is not the same as it is for the adult, just
as the adult’s is different from the child’s.
The same is likewise true of societies. Thus
a social fact can only be termed normal in a
given species in relation to a particular phase,
likewise, determinate, of its development.
Consequently, to know whether the term is
merited for a social fact, it is not enough to
observe the form in which it occurs in the
majority of societies which belong to a spe-
cies: we must also be careful to observe the
societies at the corresponding phase of their
evolution.
We may seem to have arrived merely at
a defi nition of terms, for we have done no
more than group phenomena according to
their similarities and differences and label
the groups formed in this way. Yet in reality
the concepts so formed, while they possess the
great merit of being identifi able because of
characteristics which are objective and eas-
ily perceptible, are not far removed from
the notions commonly held of sickness and
health. In fact, does not everybody con-
sider sickness to be an accident, doubtless
bound up with the state of being alive, but
one which is not produced normally? This is
what the ancient philosophers meant when
they declared that sickness does not derive
from the nature of things but is the product
of a kind of contingent state immanent in
the organism. Such a conception is assuredly
the negation of all science, for sickness is no
more miraculous than health, which also
inheres in the nature of creatures. Yet sick-
ness is not grounded in their normal nature,
bound up with their ordinary temperament,
or linked to the conditions of existence upon
which they usually depend. Conversely, the
type of health is closely joined for every-
body to the type of species. We cannot con-
ceive incontrovertibly of a species which in
itself and through its own basic constitution
would be incurably sick. Health is the para-
mount norm and consequently cannot be in
any way abnormal.
It is true that health is commonly under-
stood as a state generally preferable to sick-
ness. But this defi nition is contained in the
one just stated. It is not without good reason
that those characteristics which have come
together to form the normal type have been
able to generalise themselves throughout the

RULES FOR THE DISTINCTION OF THE NORMAL FROM THE PATHOLOGICAL | 9
species. This generalisation is itself a fact
requiring explanation and therefore necessi-
tating a cause. It would be inexplicable if the
most widespread forms of organisation were
not also—at least in the aggregate—the most
advantageous. How could they have sus-
tained themselves in such a wide variety of
circumstances if they did not enable the indi-
vidual better to resist the causes of destruc-
tion? On the other hand, if the other forms
are rarer, it is plainly because—in the average
number of cases—those individuals display-
ing such forms have greater diffi culty in sur-
viving. The greater frequency of the former
class is thus the proof of its superiority.
II
This last observation even provides a means of
verifying the results of the preceding method.
Since the generality which outwardly char-
acterises normal phenomena, once directly
established by observation, is itself an expli-
cable phenomenon, it demands explanation.
Doubtless we can have the prior conviction
that it is not without a cause, but it is bet-
ter to know exactly what that cause is. The
normality of the phenomenon will be less
open to question if it is demonstrated that
the external sign whereby it was revealed
to us is not merely apparent but grounded
in the nature of things—if, in short, we can
convert this factual normality into one which
exists by right. Moreover, the demonstration
of this will not always consist in showing
that the phenomenon is useful to the organ-
ism, although for reasons just stated this is
most frequently the case. But, as previously
remarked, an arrangement may happen to be
normal without serving any useful purpose
simply because it inheres in the nature of a
creature. Thus it would perhaps be useful for
childbirth not to occasion such violent dis-
turbances in the female organism, but this is
impossible. Consequently, the normality of a
phenomenon can be explained only through
it being bound up with the conditions of
existence in the species under consideration,
either as the mechanically essential effect of
these conditions or as a means allowing the
organism to adapt to these conditions.
This proof is not merely useful as a check.
We must not forget that the advantage of
distinguishing the normal from the abnor-
mal is principally to throw light upon prac-
tice. Now, in order to act in full knowledge
of the facts, it is not suffi cient to know what
we should want but why we should want it.
Scientifi c propositions relating to the normal
state will be more immediately applicable to
individual cases when they are accompanied
by the reasons for them, for then it will be
more feasible to pick out those cases where
it is appropriate to modify their application
and in what way.
Circumstances even exist where this veri-
fi cation is indispensable because the fi rst
method, if it were applied in isolation, might
lead to error. This is what occurs in transi-
tion periods when the whole species is in the
process of evolving without yet being stabi-
lised in a new and defi nitive form. In that
situation, the only normal type extant at the
time and grounded in the facts is one that
relates to the past but no longer corresponds
to the new conditions of existence. A fact
can therefore persist through a whole spe-
cies but no longer correspond to the require-
ments of the situation. It therefore has only
the appearance of normality, and the gener-
ality it displays is deceptive; persisting only
through the force of blind habit, it is no lon-
ger the sign that the phenomenon observed
is closely linked to the general conditions of
collective existence. Moreover, this diffi culty
is peculiar to sociology. It does not exist,
in a manner of speaking, for the biologist.
Only very rarely do animal species require
to assume unexpected forms. The only nor-
mal modifi cations through which they pass
are those which occur regularly in each indi-
vidual, principally under the infl uence of age.
Thus they are already known or knowable,

| EMILE DURKHEIM10
since they have already taken place in a large
number of cases. Consequently, at every stage
in the development of the animal, and even
in periods of crisis, the normal state may be
ascertained. This is also still true in sociology
for those societies belonging to inferior spe-
cies. This is because, since a number of them
have already run their complete course, the
law of their normal evolution has been, or
at least can be, established. But in the case
of the highest and most recent societies, by
defi nition this law is unknown, since they
have not been through their whole history.
The sociologist may therefore be at a loss
to know whether a phenomenon is normal,
since he lacks any reference point.
He can get out of this diffi culty by proceed-
ing along the lines we have just laid down.
Having established by observation that the
fact is general, he will trace back the condi-
tions which determined this general charac-
ter in the past and then investigate whether
these conditions still pertain in the present
or, on the contrary, have changed. In the
fi rst case, he will be justifi ed in treating the
phenomenon as normal; in the other eventu-
ality, he will deny it that characteristic. For
instance, to know whether the present eco-
nomic state of the peoples of Europe, with
the lack of organisation that characterises it,
is normal or not, we must investigate what in
the past gave rise to it. If the conditions are
still those appertaining to our societies, it is
because the situation is normal, despite the
protest that it stirs up. If, on the other hand,
it is linked to that old social structure which
elsewhere we have termed segmentary and
which, after providing the essential skeletal
framework of societies, is now increasingly
dying out, we shall be forced to conclude that
this now constitutes a morbid state, however
universal it may be. It is by the same method
that all such controversial questions of this
nature will have to be resolved, such as those
relating to ascertaining whether the weaken-
ing of religious belief and the development of
state power are normal phenomena or not.
Nevertheless, this method should in no
case be substituted for the previous one,
nor even be the fi rst one employed. First, it
raises questions which require later discus-
sion and which cannot be tackled save at
an already fairly advanced stage of science.
This is because, in short, it entails an almost
comprehensive explanation of phenomena,
since it presupposes that either their causes
or their functions are determined. At the very
beginning of our research, it is important to
be able to classify facts as normal or abnor-
mal, except for a few exceptional cases, in
order to assign physiology and pathology
each to its proper domain. Next, it is in rela-
tion to the normal type that a fact must be
found useful or necessary in order to be itself
termed normal. Otherwise it could be dem-
onstrated that sickness and health are indis-
tinguishable, since the former necessarily
derives from the organism suffering from it.
It is only with the average organism that sick-
ness does not sustain the same relationship.
In the same way, the application of a remedy,
since it is useful to the sick organism, might
pass for a normal phenomenon, although it
is plainly abnormal, since only in abnormal
circumstances does it possess this utility. This
method can therefore only be used if the nor-
mal type has previously been constituted,
which could only have occurred using a dif-
ferent procedure. Finally, and above all, if it
is true that everything which is normal is use-
ful without being necessary, it is untrue that
everything which is useful is normal. We can
indeed be certain that those states which have
become generalised in the species are more
useful than those which have continued to be
exceptional. We cannot, however, be certain
that they are the most useful that exist or can
exist. We have no grounds for believing that
all the possible combinations have been tried
out in the course of the process; among those
which have never been realised but are con-
ceivable, there are perhaps some which are
much more advantageous than those known
to us. The notion of utility goes beyond that

RULES FOR THE DISTINCTION OF THE NORMAL FROM THE PATHOLOGICAL | 11
of the normal and is to the normal what
the genus is to the species. But it is impos-
sible to deduce the greater from the lesser,
the species from the genus, although we may
discover the genus from the species, since it
is contained within it. This is why, once the
general nature of the phenomena has been
ascertained, we may confi rm the results of
the fi rst method by demonstrating how it is
useful. We can then formulate the three fol-
lowing rules:
1. A social fact is normal for a given social
type, viewed at a given phase of its devel-
opment, when it occurs in the average
society of that species, considered at the
corresponding phase of its evolution.
2. The results of the preceding method can
be verifi ed by demonstrating that the
general character of the phenomenon
is related to the general conditions of
collective life in the social type under
consideration.
3. This verifi cation is necessary when this fact
relates to a social species which has not
yet gone through its complete evolution.
III
We are so accustomed to resolving glibly
these diffi cult questions and to deciding rap-
idly, after cursory observation and by dint
of syllogisms, whether a social fact is nor-
mal or not that this procedure will perhaps
be adjudged uselessly complicated. It seems
unnecessary to have to go to such lengths
to distinguish sickness from health. Do we
not make these distinctions every day? This
is true, but it remains to be seen whether
we make them appositely. The diffi culty of
these problems is concealed because we see
the biologist resolve them with compara-
tive ease. Yet we forget that it is much easier
for him than for the sociologist to see how
each phenomenon affects the strength of
the organism and thereby to determine its
normal or abnormal character with an accu-
racy which is adequate for all practical pur-
poses. In sociology, the complexity and the
much more changing nature of the facts con-
strain us to take many more precautions, as
is proved by the confl icting judgements on
the same phenomenon emitted by the differ-
ent parties concerned. To show clearly how
great this circumspection must be, we shall
illustrate by a few examples to what errors
we are exposed when we do not constrain
ourselves in this way and in how different a
light the most vital phenomena appear when
they are dealt with methodically.
If there is a fact whose pathological
nature appears indisputable, it is crime. All
criminologists agree on this score. Although
they explain this pathology differently, they
nonetheless unanimously acknowledge it.
However, the problem needs to be treated
less summarily.
Let us in fact apply the rules previously
laid down. Crime is not only observed in
most societies of a particular species but in
all societies of all types. There is not one
in which criminality does not exist, although
it changes in form and the actions which
are termed criminal are not everywhere the
same. Yet everywhere and always there have
been men who have conducted themselves
in such a way as to bring down punishment
upon their heads. If at least, as societies pass
from lower to higher types, the crime rate
(the relationship between the annual crime
fi gures and population fi gures) tended to fall,
we might believe that, although still remain-
ing a normal phenomenon, crime tended to
lose that character of normality. Yet there is
no single ground for believing such a regres-
sion to be real. Many facts would rather
seem to point to the existence of a move-
ment in the opposite direction. From the
beginning of the century, statistics provide
us with a means of following the progression
of criminality. It has everywhere increased,
and in France the increase is of the order of
300 percent. Thus there is no phenomenon

| EMILE DURKHEIM12
which represents more incontrovertibly all
the symptoms of normality, since it appears
to be closely bound up with the conditions
of all collective life. To make crime a social
illness would be to concede that sickness is
not something accidental but on the contrary
derives in certain cases from the fundamen-
tal constitution of the living creature. This
would be to erase any distinction between
the physiological and the pathological. It can
certainly happen that crime itself has normal
forms; this is what happens, for instance,
when it reaches an excessively high level.
There is no doubt that this excessiveness is
pathological in nature. What is normal is
simply that criminality exists, provided that
for each social type it does not reach or go
beyond a certain level which it is perhaps not
impossible to fi x in conformity with the pre-
vious rules.
We are faced with a conclusion which is
apparently somewhat paradoxical. Let us
make no mistake: to classify crime among
the phenomena of normal sociology is not
merely to declare that it is an inevitable
though regrettable phenomenon arising from
the incorrigible wickedness of men, it is to
assert that it is a factor in public health, an
integrative element in any healthy society. At
fi rst sight, this result is so surprising that it
disconcerted even ourselves for a long time.
However, once that fi rst impression of sur-
prise has been overcome, it is not diffi cult to
discover reasons to explain this normality
and at the same time to confi rm it.
In the fi rst place, crime is normal because
it is completely impossible for any society
entirely free of it to exist.
Crime, as we have shown elsewhere, con-
sists of an action which offends certain collec-
tive feelings which are especially strong and
clear-cut. In any society, for actions regarded
as criminal to cease, the feelings that they
offend would need to be found in each indi-
vidual consciousness without exception and
in the degree of strength requisite to coun-
teract the opposing feelings. Even supposing
that this condition could effectively be ful-
fi lled, crime would not thereby disappear; it
would merely change in form, for the very
cause which made the wellsprings of crimi-
nality dry up would immediately open up
new ones.
Indeed, for the collective feelings, which
the penal law of a people at a particular
moment in its history protects, to penetrate
individual consciousnesses that had hith-
erto remained closed to them, or to assume
greater authority—whereas previously they
had not possessed enough—they would have
to acquire an intensity greater than they had
had up to then. The community as a whole
must feel them more keenly, for they cannot
draw from any other source the additional
force which enables them to bear down upon
individuals who formerly were the most
refractory. For murderers to disappear, the
horror of bloodshed must increase in those
strata of society from which murderers are
recruited, but for this to happen the abhor-
rence must increase throughout society.
Moreover, the very absence of crime would
contribute directly to bringing about that
result, for a sentiment appears much more
respectable when it is always and uniformly
respected. But we overlook the fact that these
strong states of the common consciousness
cannot be reinforced in this way without the
weaker states, the violation of which previ-
ously gave rise to mere breaches of conven-
tion, being reinforced at the same time, for
the weaker states are no more than the exten-
sion and attenuated form of the stronger
ones. Thus, for example, theft and mere mis-
appropriation of property offend the same
altruistic sentiment, the respect for other
people’s possessions. However, this sentiment
is offended less strongly by the latter action
than the former. Moreover, since the average
consciousness does not have suffi cient inten-
sity of feeling to feel strongly about the lesser
of these two offences, the latter is the object
of greater tolerance. This is why the mis-
appropriator is merely censured, while the

RULES FOR THE DISTINCTION OF THE NORMAL FROM THE PATHOLOGICAL | 13
thief is punished. But if this sentiment grows
stronger, to such a degree that it extinguishes
in the consciousness the tendency to theft
that men possess, they will become more
sensitive to these minor offences, which up
to then had had only a marginal effect upon
them. They will react with greater intensity
against these lesser faults, which will become
the object of severer condemnation, so that,
from the mere moral errors that they were,
some will pass into the category of crimes.
For example, dishonest contracts or those
fulfi lled dishonestly, which only incur public
censure or civil redress, will become crimes.
Imagine a community of saints in an exem-
plary and perfect monastery. In it, crime as
such will be unknown, but faults that appear
venial to the ordinary person will arouse the
same scandal as does normal crime in ordi-
nary consciences. If, therefore, that commu-
nity has the power to judge and punish, it will
term such acts criminal and deal with them as
such. It is for the same reason that the com-
pletely honourable man judges his slightest
moral failings with a severity that the mass of
people reserves for acts that are truly crimi-
nal. In former times, acts of violence against
the person were more frequent than they are
today because respect for individual dignity
was weaker. As it has increased, such crimes
have become less frequent, but many acts
which offended against that sentiment have
been incorporated into the penal code, which
did not previously include them.
In order to exhaust all the logically pos-
sible hypotheses, it will perhaps be asked why
this unanimity should not cover all collective
sentiments without exception and why even
the weakest sentiments should not evoke
suffi cient power to forestall any dissentient
voice. The moral conscience of society would
be found in its entirety in every individual,
endowed with suffi cient force to prevent
the commission of any act offending against
it, whether a purely conventional failing or
crime. But such universal and absolute uni-
formity is utterly impossible, for the immedi-
ate physical environment in which each one
of us is placed, our hereditary antecedents,
the social infl uences upon which we depend,
vary from one individual to another and con-
sequently cause a diversity of consciences. It
is impossible for everyone to be alike in this
matter by virtue of the fact that we each have
our own organic constitution and occupy dif-
ferent areas in space. This is why, even among
lower peoples where individual originality is
very little developed, such originality does,
however, exist. Thus, since there cannot be
a society in which individuals do not diverge
to some extent from the collective type, it is
also inevitable that among these deviations
some assume a criminal character. What con-
fers upon this character is not the intrinsic
importance of the acts but the importance
which the common consciousness ascribes
to them. Thus if the latter is stronger and
possesses suffi cient authority to make these
divergences very weak in absolute terms, it
will also be more sensitive and exacting. By
reacting against the slightest deviations with
an energy which it elsewhere employs against
those that are more weighty, it endues them
with the same gravity and will brand them as
criminal.
Thus crime is necessary. It is linked to the
basic conditions of social life but on this very
account is useful, for the conditions to which
it is bound are themselves indispensable to
the normal evolution of morality and law.

Notes on the Sociology of Deviance
Kai T. Erikson
II
From a sociological standpoint, deviance
can be defi ned as conduct which is gener-
ally thought to require the attention of social
control agencies—that is, conduct about
which “something should be done.” Devi-
ance is not a property inherent in certain
forms of behavior; it is a property conferred
upon these forms by the audiences which
directly or indirectly witness them. Sociolog-
ically, then, the critical variable in the study
of deviance is the social audience rather than
the individual person, since it is the audience
which eventually decides whether or not any
given action or actions will become a visible
case of deviation.
This defi nition may seem a little indi-
rect, but it has the advantage of bringing
a neglected sociological issue into proper
focus. When a community acts to control the
behavior of one of its members, it is engaged
in a very intricate process of selection. Even
a determined miscreant conforms in most
of his daily behavior—using the correct
spoon at mealtime, taking good care of his
mother, or otherwise observing the mores of
his society—and if the community elects to
bring sanctions against him for the occasions
when he does act offensively, it is respond-
ing to a few deviant details set within a vast
context of proper conduct. Thus a person
may be jailed or hospitalized for a few scat-
tered moments of misbehavior, defi ned as a
full-time deviant despite the fact that he had
supplied the community with countless other
indications that he was a decent, moral citi-
zen. The screening device which sifts these
telling details out of the individual’s overall
performance, then, is a sensitive instrument
of social control. It is important to note
that this screen takes a number of factors
into account which are not directly related
to the deviant act itself: it is concerned with
the actor’s social class, his past record as an
offender, the amount of remorse he manages
to convey, and many similar concerns which
take hold in the shifting moods of the com-
munity. This is why the community often
overlooks behavior which seems technically
deviant (such as certain kinds of white-collar
graft) or takes sharp exception to behavior
which seems essentially harmless (such as
certain kinds of sexual impropriety). It is
an easily demonstrated fact, for example,
that working-class boys who steal cars are
far more likely to go to prison than upper-
class boys who commit the same or even
more serious crimes, suggesting that from
the point of view of the community, lower-
class offenders are somehow more deviant.
To this extent, the community screen is per-
haps a more relevant subject for sociological
research than the actual behavior which is
fi ltered through it.
Once the problem is phrased in this way,
we can ask, how does a community decide
what forms of conduct should be singled out

NOTES ON THE SOCIOLOGY OF DEVIANCE | 15
for this kind of attention? And why, having
made this choice, does it create special insti-
tutions to deal with the persons who enact
them? The standard answer to this ques-
tion is that society sets up the machinery
of control in order to protect itself against
the “harmful” effects of deviance, in much
the same way that an organism mobilizes its
resources to combat an invasion of germs.
At times, however, this classroom conven-
tion only seems to make the problem more
complicated. In the fi rst place, as Durkheim
pointed out some years ago, it is by no means
clear that all acts considered deviant in a cul-
ture are in fact (or even in principle) harm-
ful to group life. 1 And in the second place,
specialists in crime and mental health have
long suggested that deviance can play an
important role in keeping the social order
intact—again a point we owe originally to
Durkheim. 2 This has serious implications for
sociological theory in general.
III
In recent years, sociological theory has
become more and more concerned with the
concept “social system”—an organization
of society’s component parts into a form
which sustains internal equilibrium, resists
change, and is boundary maintaining. Now,
this concept has many abstract dimensions,
but it is generally used to describe those
forces in the social order which promote
a high level of uniformity among human
actors and a high degree of symmetry within
human institutions. In this sense, the concept
is normatively oriented since it directs the
observer’s attention toward those centers in
social space where the core values of society
are fi guratively located. The main organiza-
tional principle of a system, then, is essen-
tially a centripetal one: it draws the behavior
of actors toward the nucleus of the system,
bringing it within range of basic norms. Any
conduct which is neither attracted toward
this nerve center by the rewards of confor-
mity nor compelled toward it by other social
pressures is considered “out of control,”
which is to say, deviant.
This basic model has provided the theme
for most contemporary thinking about devi-
ance, and as a result little attention has been
given to the notion that systems operate
to maintain boundaries. Generally speak-
ing, boundaries are controls which limit the
fl uctuation of a system’s component parts
so that the whole retains a defi ned range of
activity—a unique pattern of constancy and
stability—within the larger environment. 3
The range of human behavior is potentially
so great that any social system must make
clear statements about the nature and loca-
tion of its boundaries, placing limits on the
fl ow of behavior so that it circulates within
a given cultural area. Thus boundaries are
a crucial point of reference for persons liv-
ing within any system, prominent concepts
in the group’s special language and tradition.
A juvenile gang may defi ne its boundaries
by the amount of territory it defends; a pro-
fessional society, by the range of subjects it
discusses; a fraternal order, by the variety of
members it accepts. But in each case, mem-
bers share the same idea as to where the
group begins and ends in social space and
know what kinds of experience “belong”
within this domain.
For all its apparent abstractness, a social
system is organized around the movements
of persons joined together in regular social
relations. The only material found in a sys-
tem for marking boundaries, then, is the
behavior of its participants, and the form of
behavior which best performs this function
would seem to be deviant almost by defi ni-
tion, since it is the most extreme variety of
conduct to be found within the experience of
the group. In this respect, transactions tak-
ing place between deviant persons on the one
side and agencies of control on the other are
boundary maintaining mechanisms. They
mark the outside limits of the area in which

| KAI T. ERIKSON16
the norm has jurisdiction and in this way
assert how much diversity and variability
can be contained within the system before it
begins to lose its distinct structure, its unique
shape.
A social norm is rarely expressed as a fi rm
rule or offi cial code. It is an abstract synthe-
sis of the many separate times a community
has stated its sentiments on a given issue.
Thus the norm has a history much like that
of an article of common law: it is an accumu-
lation of decisions made by the community
over a long period of time which gradually
gathers enough moral infl uence to serve as a
precedent for future decisions. Like an article
of common law, the norm retains its validity
only if it is regularly used as a basis for judg-
ment. Each time the community censures
some act of deviance, then, it sharpens the
authority of the violated norm and reestab-
lishes the boundaries of the group.
One of the most interesting features of con-
trol institutions in this regard is the amount
of publicity they have always attracted. In
an earlier day, correction of deviant offend-
ers took place in the public market and gave
the crowd a chance to display its interest in a
direct, active way. In our own day, the guilty
are no longer paraded in public places, but
instead we are confronted by a heavy fl ow
of newspaper and radio reports which offer
much the same kind of entertainment. Why
are these reports considered “newsworthy,”
and why do they rate the extraordinary
attention they receive? Perhaps they satisfy a
number of psychological perversities among
the mass audience, as many commentators
have suggested, but at the same time they
constitute our main source of information
about the normative outlines of society.
They are lessons through which we teach
one another what the norms mean and how
far they extend. In a fi gurative sense, at least,
morality and immorality meet at the public
scaffold, and it is during this meeting that the
community declares where the line between
them should be drawn.
Human groups need to regulate the rou-
tine affairs of everyday life, and to this end
the norms provide an important focus for
behavior. But human groups also need to
describe and anticipate those areas of being
which lie beyond the immediate borders of
the group—the unseen dangers which in any
culture and in any age seem to threaten the
security of group life. The universal folklore
depicting demons, devils, witches, and evil
spirits may be one way to give form to these
otherwise formless dangers, but the visible
deviant is another kind of reminder. As a tres-
passer against the norm, he represents those
forces excluded by the group’s boundaries:
he informs us of, as it were, what evil looks
like, what shapes the devil can assume. In
doing so, he shows us the difference between
kinds of experience which belong within the
group and kinds of experience which belong
outside it.
Thus deviance cannot be dismissed as
behavior which disrupts stability in soci-
ety but is itself, in controlled quantities, an
important condition for preserving stability.
V
In summary, two new lines of inquiry seem
to be indicated by the argument presented
above.
First, this reading attempts to focus our
attention on an old but still vital sociological
question: how does a social structure com-
municate its “needs” or impose its “patterns”
on human actors? In the present case, how
does a social structure enlist actors to engage
in deviant activity? Ordinarily, the fact that
deviant behavior is more common in some
sectors of society than in others is explained
by declaring that something called “anomie”
or “disorganization” prevails at these sen-
sitive spots. Deviance leaks out where the
social machinery is defective; it occurs where
the social structure fails to communicate its
needs to human actors. But if we consider the

NOTES ON THE SOCIOLOGY OF DEVIANCE | 17
possibility that deviant persons are respond-
ing to the same social forces that elicit con-
formity from others, then we are engaged in
another order of inquiry altogether. Perhaps
the stability of some social units is main-
tained only if juvenile offenders are recruited
to balance an adult majority; perhaps some
families can remain intact only if one of their
members becomes a visible deviant or is com-
mitted to a hospital or prison. If this supposi-
tion proves to be a useful one, sociologists
should be interested in discovering how a
social unit manages to differentiate the roles
of its members and how certain persons are
“chosen” to play the more deviant parts.
Second, it is evident that cultures vary in
the way they regulate traffi c moving back
and forth from their deviant boundaries. Per-
haps we could begin with the hypothesis that
the traffi c pattern known in our own culture
has a marked Puritan cast: a defi ned por-
tion of the population, largely drawn from
young adult groups and from the lower eco-
nomic classes, is stabilized in deviant roles
and generally expected to remain there for
indefi nite periods of time. To this extent,
Puritan attitudes about predestination and
reprobation would seem to have retained
a signifi cant place in modern criminal law
and public opinion. In other areas of the
world, however, different traffi c patterns are
known. There are societies in which deviance
is considered a natural pursuit for the young,
an activity which they can easily abandon
when they move through defi ned ceremonies
into adulthood. There are societies which
give license to large groups of persons to
engage in deviant behavior for certain sea-
sons or on certain days of the year. And
there are societies in which special groups
are formed to act in ways “contrary” to the
normal expectations of the culture. Each of
these patterns regulates deviant traffi c differ-
ently, yet all of them provide some institu-
tionalized means for an actor to give up a
deviant “career” without permanent stigma.
The problem for sociological theory in gen-
eral might be to learn whether or not these
varying patterns are functionally equivalent
in some meaningful sense; the problem for
applied sociology might be to see if we have
anything to learn from those cultures which
permit re-entry into normal social life to per-
sons who have spent a period of “service” on
society’s boundaries.
NOTES
1. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society
(translated by George Simpson), Glencoe: The Free
Press, 1952. See particularly Chapter 2, Book 1.
2. Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method ,
op. cit.
3. Cf. Talcott Parsons, The Social System , London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951.

Outsiders
Defi nitions of Deviance
Howard S. Becker
The outsider—the deviant from group rules—
has been the subject of much speculation,
theorizing, and scientifi c study. What lay-
men want to know about deviants is, why
do they do it? How can we account for their
rule-breaking? What is there about them
that leads them to do forbidden things? Sci-
entifi c research has tried to fi nd answers to
these questions. In doing so, it has accepted
the common-sense premise that there is
something inherently deviant (qualitatively
distinct) about acts that break (or seem to
break) social rules. It has also accepted the
common-sense assumption that the deviant
act occurs because some characteristic of the
person who commits it makes it necessary
or inevitable that he should. Scientists do
not ordinarily question the label “deviant”
when it is applied to particular acts or people
but rather take it as given. In so doing, they
accept the values of the group making the
judgment.
It is easily observable that different groups
judge different things to be deviant. This
should alert us to the possibility that the per-
son making the judgment of deviance, the
process by which that judgment is arrived at,
and the situation in which it is made may all
be intimately involved in the phenomenon of
deviance. To the degree that the common-
sense view of deviance and the scientifi c the-
ories that begin with its premises assume that
acts that break rules are inherently deviant
and thus take for granted the situations and
processes of judgment, they may leave out
an important variable. If scientists ignore the
variable character of the process of judgment,
they may by that omission limit the kinds of
theories that can be developed and the kind
of understanding that can be achieved. 1
Our fi rst problem, then, is to construct a
defi nition of deviance. Before doing this, let
us consider some of the defi nitions scientists
now use, seeing what is left out if we take
them as a point of departure for the study of
outsiders.
The simplest view of deviance is essentially
statistical, defi ning as deviant anything that
varies too widely from the average. When a
statistician analyzes the results of an agricul-
tural experiment, he describes the stalk of corn
that is exceptionally tall and the stalk that is
exceptionally short as deviations from the
mean or average. Similarly, one can describe
anything that differs from what is most com-
mon as a deviation. In this view, to be left-
handed or redheaded is deviant because most
people are right-handed and brunette.
So stated, the statistical view seems simple-
minded, even trivial. Yet it simplifi es the
problem by doing away with many questions
of value that ordinarily arise in discussions
of the nature of deviance. In assessing any
particular case, all one need do is calculate
the distance of the behavior involved from
the average. But it is too simple a solu-
tion. Hunting with such a defi nition, we
return with a mixed bag—people who are

OUTSIDERS | 19
excessively fat or thin, murderers, redheads,
homosexuals, and traffi c violators. The mix-
ture contains some ordinarily thought of as
deviants and others who have broken no rule
at all. The statistical defi nition of deviance,
in short, is too far removed from the concern
with rule-breaking which prompts scientifi c
study of outsiders.
A less simple but much more common
view of deviance identifi es it as something
essentially pathological, revealing the pres-
ence of a “disease.” This view rests, obvi-
ously, on a medical analogy. The human
organism, when it is working effi ciently
and experiencing no discomfort, is said to
be “healthy.” When it does not work effi –
ciently, a disease is present. The organ or
function that has become deranged is said
to be pathological. Of course, there is lit-
tle disagreement about what constitutes
a healthy state of the organism. But there
is much less agreement when one uses the
notion of pathology analogically to describe
kinds of behavior that are regarded as devi-
ant. For people do not agree on what con-
stitutes healthy behavior. It is diffi cult to
fi nd a defi nition that will satisfy even such a
select and limited group as psychiatrists; it is
impossible to fi nd one that people generally
accept as they accept criteria of health for
the organism. 2
Sometimes people mean the analogy more
strictly because they think of deviance as the
product of mental disease. The behavior of
a homosexual or drug addict is regarded as
the symptom of a mental disease just as the
diabetic’s diffi culty in getting bruises to heal
is regarded as a symptom of his disease. But
mental disease resembles physical disease
only in metaphor:
Starting with such things as syphilis, tubercu-
losis, typhoid fever, and carcinomas and frac-
tures, we have created the class “illness.” At
fi rst, this class was composed of only a few
items, all of which shared the common feature
of reference to a state of disordered structure
or function of the human body as a physio-
chemical machine. As time went on, additional
items were added to this class. They were not
added, however, because they were newly
discovered bodily disorders. The physician’s
attention had been defl ected from this criterion
and had become focused instead on disability
and suffering as new criteria for selection.
Thus, at fi rst slowly, such things as hysteria,
hypochondriasis, obsessive-compulsive neuro-
sis, and depression were added to the category
of illness. Then, with increasing zeal, physi-
cians and especially psychiatrists began to call
“illness” (that is, of course, “mental illness”)
anything and everything in which they could
detect any sign of malfunctioning, based on
no matter what norm. Hence, agoraphobia
is illness because one should not be afraid of
open spaces. Homosexuality is illness because
heterosexuality is the social norm. Divorce is
illness because it signals failure of marriage.
Crime, art, undesired political leadership, par-
ticipation in social affairs, or withdrawal from
such participation—all these and many more
have been said to be signs of mental illness. 3
The medical metaphor limits what we can
see much as the statistical view does. It
accepts the lay judgment of something as
deviant and, by use of analogy, locates its
source within the individual, thus preventing
us from seeing the judgment itself as a crucial
part of the phenomenon.
Some sociologists also use a model of devi-
ance based essentially on the medical notions
of health and disease. They look at a society,
or some part of a society, and ask whether
there are any processes going on in it that
tend to reduce its stability, thus lessening its
chance of survival. They label such processes
as deviant or identify them as symptoms of
social disorganization. They discriminate
between those features of society which pro-
mote stability (and thus are “functional”)
and those which disrupt stability (and thus
are “dysfunctional”). Such a view has the
great virtue of pointing to areas of possible
trouble in a society of which people may not
be aware. 4

| HOWARD S. BECKER20
But it is harder in practice than it appears
to be in theory to specify what is functional
and what dysfunctional for a society or social
group. The question of what the purpose
or goal (function) of a group is and, conse-
quently, what things will help or hinder the
achievement of that purpose is very often a
political question. Factions within the group
disagree and maneuver to have their own def-
inition of the groups function accepted. The
function of the group or organization then
is decided in political confl ict, not given in
the nature of the organization. If this is true,
then it is likewise true that the questions of
what rules are to be enforced, what behav-
iors regarded as deviant, and which people
labeled as outsiders must also be regarded as
political. 5 The functional view of deviance,
by ignoring the political aspect of the phe-
nomenon, limits our understanding.
Another sociological view is more relativ-
istic. It identifi es deviance as the failure to
obey group rules. Once we have described
the rules a group enforces on its members,
we can say with some precision whether or
not a person has violated them and is thus,
on this view, deviant.
This view is closest to my own, but it fails
to give suffi cient weight to the ambiguities
that arise in deciding which rules are to be
taken as the yardstick against which behav-
ior is measured and judged deviant. A soci-
ety has many groups, each with its own set
of rules, and people belong to many groups
simultaneously. A person may break the
rules of one group by the very act of abiding
by the rules of another group. Is he or she,
then, deviant? Proponents of this defi nition
may object that while ambiguity may arise
with respect to the rules peculiar to one or
another group in society, there are some rules
that are very generally agreed to by every-
one, in which case the diffi culty does not
arise. This, of course, is a question of fact,
to be settled by empirical research. I doubt
there are many such areas of consensus and
think it wiser to use a defi nition that allows
us to deal with both ambiguous and unam-
biguous situations.
DEVIANCE AND THE RESPONSES
OF OTHERS
The sociological view I have just discussed
defi nes deviance as the infraction of some
agreed-upon rule. It then goes on to ask
who breaks rules and to search for the fac-
tors in their personalities and life situations
that might account for the infractions. This
assumes that those who have broken a rule
constitute a homogeneous category because
they have committed the same deviant act.
Such an assumption seems to me to ignore
the central fact about deviance: it is created
by society. I do not mean this in the way it
is ordinarily understood, in which the causes
of deviance are located in the social situation
of the deviant or in “social factors” which
prompt his action. I mean, rather, that social
groups create deviance by making the rules
whose infraction constitutes deviance and
by applying those rules to particular people
and labeling them as outsiders. From this
point of view, deviance is not a quality of the
act the person commits but rather a conse-
quence of the application by others of rules
and sanctions to an “offender.” The deviant
is one to whom that label has successfully
been applied; deviant behavior is behavior
that people so label. 6
Since deviance is, among other things, a
consequence of the responses of others to
a person’s act, students of deviance cannot
assume that they are dealing with a homo-
geneous category when they study people
who have been labeled deviant. That is,
they cannot assume that these people have
actually committed a deviant act or broken
some rule because the process of labeling
may not be infallible; some people may be
labeled deviant who in fact have not broken
a rule. Furthermore, they cannot assume that
the category of those labeled deviant will

OUTSIDERS | 21
contain all those who actually have broken
a rule, for many offenders may escape appre-
hension and thus fail to be included in the
population of “deviants” they study. Insofar
as the category lacks homogeneity and fails
to include all the cases that belong in it, one
cannot reasonably expect to fi nd common
factors of personality or life situation that
will account for the supposed deviance.
What, then, do people who have been
labeled deviant have in common? At the
least, they share the label and the experience
of being labeled as outsiders. I will begin my
analysis with this basic similarity and view
deviance as the product of a transaction that
takes place between some social group and
one who is viewed by that group as a rule-
breaker. I will be less concerned with the per-
sonal and social characteristics of deviants
than with the process by which they come to
be thought of as outsiders and their reactions
to that judgment.
Mahnowski discovered the usefulness of
this view for understanding the nature of
deviance many years ago in his study of the
Trobriand Islands:
One day an outbreak of wailing and a great
commotion told me that a death had occurred
somewhere in the neighborhood. I was
informed that Kima’i, a young lad of my
acquaintance, of sixteen or so, had fallen from
a coco-nut palm and killed himself. . . . I found
that another youth had been severely wounded
by some mysterious coincidence. And at the
funeral there was obviously a general feeling
of hostility between the village where the boy
died and that into which his body was carried
for burial.
Only much later was I able to discover the
real meaning of these events. That boy had
committed suicide. The truth was that he had
broken the rules of exogamy, the partner in his
crime being his maternal cousin, the daughter
of his mother’s sister. This had been known and
generally disapproved of but nothing was done
until the girl’s discarded lover, who had wanted
to marry her and who felt personally injured,
took the initiative. This rival threatened fi rst to
use black magic against the guilty youth, but
this had not much effect. Then one evening he
insulted the culprit in public—accusing him in
the hearing of the whole community of incest
and hurling at him certain expressions intoler-
able to a native.
For this there was only one remedy; only
one means of escape remained to the unfor-
tunate youth. Next morning he put on festive
attire and ornamentation, climbed a coco-nut
palm and addressed the community, speaking
from among the palm leaves and bidding them
farewell. He explained the reasons for his des-
perate deed and also launched forth a veiled
accusation against the man who had driven
him to his death, upon which it became the
duty of his clansmen to avenge him. Then he
wailed aloud. as is the custom, jumped from
a palm some sixty feet high and was killed on
the spot. There followed a fi ght within the vil-
lage in which the rival was wounded; and the
quarrel was repeated during the funeral. . . .
If you were to inquire into the matter among
the Trobrianders, you would fi nd . . . that the
natives show horror at the idea of violating the
rules of exogamy and that they believe that
sores, disease and even death might follow
clan incest. This is the ideal of native law, and
in moral matters it is easy and pleasant strictly
to adhere to the ideal—when judging the con-
duct of others or expressing an opinion about
conduct in general.
When it comes to the application of morality
and ideals to real life, however, things take on
a different complexion. In the case described it
was obvious that the facts would not tally with
the ideal of conduct. Public opinion was nei-
ther outraged by the knowledge of the crime to
any extent, nor did it react directly—it had to
be mobilized by a public statement of the crime
and by insults being hurled at the culprit by an
interested party. Even then he had to carry out
the punishment himself. . . . Probing further
into the matter and collecting concrete infor-
mation, I found that the breach of exogamy—
as regards intercourse and not marriage—is
by no means a rare occurrence, and public
opinion is lenient, though decidedly hypocriti-
cal. If the affair is carried on sub rosa with a
certain amount of decorum, and if no one in
particular stirs up trouble—“public opinion”

| HOWARD S. BECKER22
will gossip, but not demand any harsh punish-
ment. If, on the contrary, scandal breaks out—
everyone turns against the guilty pair and by
ostracism and insults one or the other may be
driven to suicide. 7
Whether an act is deviant, then, depends on
how other people react to it. You can com-
mit clan incest and suffer from no more than
gossip as long as no one makes a public accu-
sation, but you will be driven to your death if
the accusation is made. The point is that the
response of other people has to be regarded
as problematic. Just because one has com-
mitted an infraction of a rule does not mean
that others will respond as though this had
happened. (Conversely, just because one has
not violated a rule does not mean that he
may not be treated, in some circumstances,
as though he had.)
The degree to which other people will
respond to a given act as deviant varies
greatly. Several kinds of variation seem
worth noting. First of all, there is variation
over time. A person believed to have com-
mitted a given deviant act may at one time
be responded to much more leniently than he
would be at some other time. The occurrence
of “drives” against various kinds of devi-
ance illustrates this clearly. At various times,
enforcement offi cials may decide to make
an all-out attack on some particular kind of
deviance, such as gambling, drug addiction,
or homosexuality. It is obviously much more
dangerous to engage in one of these activities
when a drive is on than at any other time.
(In a very interesting study of crime news
in Colorado newspapers, Davis found that
the amount of crime reported in Colorado
newspapers showed very little association
with actual changes in the amount of crime
taking place in Colorado. And, further, that
peoples’ estimate of how much increase there
had been in crime in Colorado was associ-
ated with the increase in the amount of crime
news but not with any increase in the amount
of crime.) 8
The degree to which an act will be treated
as deviant depends also on who commits the
act and who feels he has been harmed by it.
Rules tend to be applied more to some per-
sons than others. Studies of juvenile delin-
quency make the point clearly. Boys from
middle-class areas do not get as far in the
legal process when they are apprehended as
do boys from slum areas. The middle-class
boy is less likely, when picked up by the
police, to be taken to the station; less likely
when taken to the station to be booked; and
it is extremely unlikely that he will be con-
victed and sentenced. 9 This variation occurs
even though the original infraction of the
rule is the same in the two cases. Similarly,
the law is differentially applied to Negroes
and whites. It is well known that a Negro
believed to have attacked a white woman
is much more likely to be punished than a
white man who commits the same offense; it
is only slightly less well known that a Negro
who murders another Negro is much less
likely to be punished than a white man who
commits murder. 10 This, of course, is one of
the main points of Sutherland’s analysis of
white-collar crime: crimes committed by cor-
porations are almost always prosecuted as
civil cases, but the same crime committed by
an individual is ordinarily treated as a crimi-
nal offense. 11
Some rules are enforced only when they
result in certain consequences. The unmarried
mother furnishes a clear example. Vincent 12
points out that illicit sexual relations seldom
result in severe punishment or social censure
for the offenders. If, however, a girl becomes
pregnant as a result of such activities, the
reaction of others is likely to be severe. (The
illicit pregnancy is also an interesting exam-
ple of the differential enforcement of rules on
different categories of people. Vincent notes
that unmarried fathers escape the severe cen-
sure visited on the mother.)
Why repeat these commonplace observa-
tions? Because taken together, they support
the proposition that deviance is not a simple

OUTSIDERS | 23
quality, present in some kinds of behavior
and absent in others. Rather, it is the prod-
uct of a process which involves responses
of other people to the behavior. The same
behavior may be an infraction of the rules
at one time and not at another; may be an
infraction when committed by one person
but not when committed by another. Some
rules are broken with impunity; others are
not. In short, whether a given act is deviant
or not depends in part on the nature of the
act (that is, whether or not it violates some
rule) and in part on what other people do
about it.
Some people may object that this is merely
a terminological quibble, that one can, after
all, defi ne terms any way he wants to and
that if some people want to speak of rule-
breaking behavior as deviant without refer-
ence to the reactions of others, they are free
to do so. This, of course, is true. Yet it might
be worthwhile to refer to such behavior as
rule-breaking behavior and reserve the term
deviant for those labeled as deviant by some
segment of society. I do not insist that this
usage be followed. But it should be clear that
insofar as a scientist uses deviant to refer to
any rule-breaking behavior and takes as his
subject of study only those who have been
labeled deviant, he will be hampered by the
disparities between the two categories.
If we take as the object of our atten-
tion behavior which comes to be labeled as
deviant, we must recognize that we cannot
know whether a given act will be categorized
as deviant until the response of others has
occurred. Deviance is not a quality that lies
in the behavior itself but in the interaction
between the person who commits an act and
those who respond to it.
WHOSE RULES?
I have been using the term outsiders to refer
to those people who are judged by others to
be deviant and thus to stand outside the circle
of “normal” members of the group. But the
term contains a second meaning whose anal-
ysis leads to another important set of socio-
logical problems: outsiders, from the point
of view of the person who is labeled deviant,
may be the people who make the rules he
had been found guilty of breaking.
Social rules are the creation of specifi c
social groups. Modern societies are not sim-
ple organizations in which everyone agrees
on what the rules are and how they are to
be applied in specifi c situations. They are,
instead, highly differentiated along social
class lines, ethnic fi nes, occupational lines,
and cultural lines. These groups need not
and, in fact, often do not share the same
rules. The problems they face in dealing with
their environment and the history and tradi-
tions they carry with them all lead to the evo-
lution of different sets of rules. Insofar as the
rules of various groups confl ict and contra-
dict one another, there will be disagreement
about the kind of behavior that is proper in
any given situation.
Italian immigrants who went on making
wine for themselves and their friends during
Prohibition were acting properly by Italian
immigrant standards but were breaking the
law of their new country (as, of course, were
many of their Old American neighbors).
Medical patients who shop around for a doc-
tor may, from the perspective of their own
group, be doing what is necessary to protect
their health by making sure they get what
seems to them the best possible doctor, but,
from the perspective of the physician, what
they do is wrong because it breaks down the
trust the patient ought to put in his physi-
cian. The lower-class delinquent who fi ghts
for his “turf” is only doing what he consid-
ers necessary and right, but teachers, social
workers, and police see it differently.
While it may be argued that many or most
rules are generally agreed to by all members
of a society, empirical research on a given
rule generally reveals variation in people’s
attitudes. Formal rules, enforced by some

| HOWARD S. BECKER24
specially constituted group, may differ from
those actually thought appropriate by most
people. 13 Factions in a group may disagree
on what I have called actual operating rules.
Most important for the study of behavior
ordinarily labeled deviant, the perspectives
of the people who engage in the behavior
are likely to be quite different from those
of the people who condemn it. In this latter
situation, a person may feel that he is being
judged according to rules he has had no hand
in making and does not accept, rules forced
on him by outsiders.
To what extent and under what circum-
stances do people attempt to force their rules
on others who do not subscribe to them? Let
us distinguish two cases. In the fi rst, only
those who are actually members of the group
have any interest in making and enforcing
certain rules. If an orthodox Jew disobeys the
laws of kashruth only other orthodox Jews
will regard this as a transgression; Chris-
tians or nonorthodox Jews will not consider
this deviance and would have no interest in
interfering. In the second case, members of
a group consider it important to their wel-
fare that members of certain other groups
obey certain rules. Thus, people consider it
extremely important that those who practice
the healing arts abide by certain rules; this
is the reason the state licenses physicians,
nurses, and others and forbids anyone who
is not licensed to engage in healing activities.
To the extent that a group tries to impose
its rules on other groups in the society, we
are presented with a second question: Who
can, in fact, force others to accept their rules,
and what are the causes of their success?
This is, of course, a question of political
and economic power. Later we will consider
the political and economic process through
which rules are created and enforced. Here
it is enough to note that people are in fact
always forcing their rules on others, apply-
ing them more or less against the will and
without the consent of those others. By and
large, for example, rules are made for young
people by their elders. Though the youth
of this country exert a powerful infl uence
culturally—the mass media of communi-
cation are tailored to their interests, for
instance—many important kinds of rules are
made for our youth by adults. Rules regard-
ing school attendance and sex behavior are
not drawn up with regard to the problems of
adolescence. Rather, adolescents fi nd them-
selves surrounded by rules about these mat-
ters which have been made by older and more
settled people. It is considered legitimate to
do this, for youngsters are considered neither
wise enough nor responsible enough to make
proper rules for themselves.
In the same way, it is true in many respects
that men make the rules for women in our
society (though in America this is changing
rapidly). Negroes fi nd themselves subject to
rules made for them by whites. The foreign-
born and those otherwise ethnically pecu-
liar often have their rules made for them by
the Protestant Anglo-Saxon minority. The
middle class makes rules the lower class
must obey—in the schools, the courts, and
elsewhere.
Differences in the ability to make rules
and apply them to other people are essen-
tially power differentials (either legal or
extralegal). Those groups whose social posi-
tion gives them weapons and power are best
able to enforce their rules. Distinctions of
age, sex, ethnicity, and class are all related
to differences in power, which accounts for
differences in the degree to which groups so
distinguished can make rules for others.
In addition to recognizing that deviance is
created by the responses of people to particu-
lar kinds of behavior, by the labeling of that
behavior as deviant, we must also keep in
mind that the rules created and maintained
by such labeling are not universally agreed
to. Instead, they are the object of confl ict and
disagreement, part of the political process of
society.

OUTSIDERS | 25
NOTES
1. Cf. Donald R. Cressey, “Criminological Research
and the Defi nition of Crimes,” American Journal
of Sociology , LVI (May, 1951), 546–551.
2. See the discussion in C. Wright Mills, “The Profes-
sional Ideology of Social Pathologists,” American
Journal of Sociology , XLIX (September, 1942),
165–180.
3. Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness (New
York: Paul B. Hoeber, Inc., 1961), pp. 44–45; see also
Erving Goffman, “The Medical Model and Mental
Hospitalization,” in Asylums: Essays on the Social
Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates
(Garden City: Anchor Books, 1961), pp. 321–386.
4. See Robert K. Merton, “Social Problems and
Sociological Theory,” in Robert K. Merton and
Robert A. Nisbet, editors, Contemporary Social
Problems (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
Inc., 1961), pp. 697–737; and Talcott Parsons,
The Social System (New York: The Free Press of
Glencoe, 1951), pp. 249–325.
5. Howard Brotz similarly identifi es the question
of what phenomena are “functional” or “dys-
functional” as a political one in “Functional and
Dynamic Analysis,” European Journal of Sociol-
ogy , II (1961), 170–179.
6. The most important earlier statements of this
view can be found in Frank Tannenbaum, Crime
and the Community (New York: McGraw-Hill
Book Co., Inc., 1951), and E. M. Lemert, Social
Pathology (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co.,
Inc., 1951). A recent article stating a position very
similar to mine is John Kitsuse, “Societal Reaction
to Deviance: Problems of Theory and Method,”
Social Problems , 9 (Winter, 1962), 247–256.
7. Bronislaw Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Sav-
age Society (New York: Humanities Press, 1926),
pp. 77–80. Reprinted by permission of Humani-
ties Press and Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd.
8. F. James Davis, “Crime News in Colorado News-
papers,” American Journal of Sociology , LVII
(January, 1952), 325–330.
9. See Albert K. Cohen and James F. Short, Jr., “Juve-
nile Delinquency,” in Merton and Nisbet, op.
cit. , p. 87.
10. See Harold Garfi nkel, “Research Notes on Inter-
and Intra-Racial Homicides,” Social Forces , 27
(May, 1949), 369–381.
11. Edwin H. Sutherland, “White Collar Criminal-
ity,” American Sociological Review , V (February,
1940), 1–12.
12. Clark Vincent, Unmarried Mothers (New York:
The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), pp. 3–5.
13. Arnold M. Rose and Arthur E. Prell, “Does the
Punishment Fit the Crime? A Study in Social
Valuation,” American Journal of Sociology , LXI
(November, 1955), 247–259.

Defi ning Deviancy Down
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
In one of the founding texts of sociology, The
Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Emile
Durkheim set it down that “crime is nor-
mal.” “It is,” he wrote, “completely impossi-
ble for any society entirely free of it to exist.”
By defi ning what is deviant, we are enabled
to know what is not, and hence to live by
shared standards. This aperçu appears in the
chapter entitled “Rules for the Distinction of
the Normal from the Pathological.” Durk-
heim writes:
From this viewpoint the fundamental facts of
criminology appear to us in an entirely new
light. . . . [T]he criminal no longer appears
as an utterly unsociable creature, a sort of
parasitic element, a foreign, inassimilable
body introduced into the bosom of society.
He plays a normal role in social life. For its
part, crime must no longer be conceived of as
an evil which cannot be circumscribed closely
enough. Far from there being cause for con-
gratulation when it drops too noticeably
below the normal level, this apparent progress
assuredly coincides with and is linked to some
social disturbance.
Durkheim suggests, for example, that “in
times of scarcity” crimes of assault drop off.
He does not imply that we ought to approve
of crime—“[p]ain has likewise nothing desir-
able about it”—but we need to understand its
function. He saw religion, in the sociologist
Randall Collins’s terms, as “fundamentally
a set of ceremonial actions, assembling the
group, heightening its emotions, and focus-
ing its members on symbols of their common
belongingness.” In this context “a punish-
ment ceremony creates social solidarity.”
The matter was pretty much left at that
until seventy years later when, in 1965, Kai
T. Erikson published Wayward Puritans , a
study of “crime rates” in the Massachusetts
Bay Colony. The plan behind the book, as
Erikson put it, was “to test [Durkheim’s]
notion that the number of deviant offend-
ers a community can afford to recognize
is likely to remain stable over time.” The
notion proved out very well indeed. Despite
occasional crime waves, as when itinerant
Quakers refused to take off their hats in the
presence of magistrates, the amount of devi-
ance in this corner of seventeenth-century
New England fi tted nicely with the supply of
stocks and whipping posts. Erikson remarks:
It is one of the arguments of the . . . study that
the amount of deviation a community encoun-
ters is apt to remain fairly constant over time.
To start at the beginning, it is a simple logistic
fact that the number of deviancies which come
to a community’s attention are limited by the
kinds of equipment it uses to detect and handle
them, and to that extent the rate of deviation
found in a community is at least in part a func-
tion of the size and complexity of its social
control apparatus. A community’s capacity for
handling deviance, let us say, can be roughly
estimated by counting its prison cells and hos-
pital beds, its policemen and psychiatrists,

DEFINING DEVIANCY DOWN | 27
its courts and clinics. Most communities, it
would seem, operate with the expectation that
a relatively constant number of control agents
is necessary to cope with a relatively constant
number of offenders. The amount of men,
money, and material assigned by society to “do
something” about deviant behavior does not
vary appreciably over time, and the implicit
logic which governs the community’s efforts to
man a police force or maintain suitable facili-
ties for the mentally ill seems to be that there
is a fairly stable quota of trouble which should
be anticipated.
In this sense, the agencies of control often
seem to defi ne their job as that of keeping devi-
ance within bounds rather than that of obliter-
ating it altogether. Many judges, for example,
assume that severe punishments are a greater
deterrent to crime than moderate ones, and
so it is important to note that many of them
are apt to impose harder penalties when crime
seems to be on the increase and more lenient
ones when it does not, almost as if the power
of the bench were being used to keep the crime
rate from getting out of hand.
Erikson was taking issue with what he
described as “a dominant strain in sociologi-
cal thinking” that took for granted that a
well-structured society “is somehow designed
to prevent deviant behavior from occurring.”
In both authors, Durkheim and Erikson,
there is an undertone that suggests that, with
deviancy, as with most social goods, there is
the continuing problem of demand exceeding
supply. Durkheim invites us to
imagine a society of saints, a perfect cloister
of exemplary individuals. Crimes, properly so
called, will there be unknown; but faults which
appear venial to the layman will create there
the same scandal that the ordinary offense
does in ordinary consciousness. If, then, this
society has the power to judge and punish, it
will defi ne these acts as criminal and will treat
them as such.
Recall Durkheim’s comment that there need
be no cause for congratulations should the
amount of crime drop “too noticeably below
the normal level.” It would not appear that
Durkheim anywhere contemplates the possi-
bility of too much crime. Clearly his theory
would have required him to deplore such a
development, but the possibility seems never
to have occurred to him.
Erikson, writing much later in the twen-
tieth century, contemplates both possibili-
ties. “Deviant persons can be said to supply
needed services to society.” There is no doubt
a tendency for the supply of any needed thing
to run short. But he is consistent. There can,
he believes, be too much of a good thing.
Hence “the number of deviant offenders a
community can afford to recognize is likely
to remain stable over time” (my emphasis).
Social scientists are said to be on the
lookout for poor fellows getting a bum rap.
But here is a theory that clearly implies that
there are circumstances in which society will
choose not to notice behavior that would
be otherwise controlled, or disapproved, or
even punished.
It appears to me that this is in fact what
we in the United States have been doing of
late. I proffer the thesis that, over the past
generation, since the time Erikson wrote,
the amount of deviant behavior in Ameri-
can society has increased beyond the levels
the community can “afford to recognize”
and that, accordingly, we have been redefi n-
ing deviancy so as to exempt much conduct
previously stigmatized and also quietly rais-
ing the “normal” level in categories where
behavior is now abnormal by any earlier
standard. This redefi ning has evoked fi erce
resistance from defenders of “old” standards
and accounts for much of the present “cul-
tural war” such as proclaimed by many at
the 1992 Republican National Convention.
Let me, then, offer three categories of
redefi nition in these regards: the altruistic ,
the opportunistic, and the normalizing .
The fi rst category, the altruistic, may
be illustrated by the deinstitutionalization
movement within the mental health profes-
sion that appeared in the 1950s. The second

| DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN28
category, the opportunistic, is seen in the
interest group rewards derived from the
acceptance of “alternative” family struc-
tures. The third category, the normalizing, is
to be observed in the growing acceptance of
unprecedented levels of violent crime.
II
It happens that I was present at the begin-
ning of the deinstitutionalization movement.
Early in 1955, Averell Harriman, then the
new governor of New York, met with his new
commissioner of mental hygiene, Dr. Paul
Hoch, who described the development, at
one of the state mental hospitals, of a tran-
quilizer derived from rauwolfi a . The medica-
tion had been clinically tested and appeared
to be an effective treatment for many severely
psychotic patients, thus increasing the per-
centage of patients discharged. Dr. Hoch
recommended that it be used system-wide;
Harriman found the money. That same year
congress created a Joint Commission on
Mental Health and Illness whose mission
was to formulate “comprehensive and real-
istic recommendations” in this area, which
was then a matter of considerable public
concern. Year after year, the population of
mental institutions grew. Year after year, new
facilities had to be built. Never mind the com-
plexities: population growth and such like
matters. There was a general unease. Dur-
kheim’s constant continued to be exceeded.
(In Spanning the Century: The Life of W.
Averell Harriman , Rudy Abramson writes:
“New York’s mental hospitals in 1955 were
overfl owing warehouses, and new patients
were being admitted faster than space could
be found for them. When he was inaugu-
rated, 94,000 New Yorkers were confi ned
to state hospitals. Admissions were running
at more than 2,500 a year and rising, mak –
ing the Department of Mental Hygiene the
fastest- growing, most-expensive, most-hopeless
depart ment of state government.”)
The discovery of tranquilizers was adven-
titious. Physicians were seeking cures for
disorders that were just beginning to be
understood. Even a limited success made
it possible to believe that the incidence of
this particular range of disorders, which
had seemingly required persons to be con-
fi ned against their will or even awareness,
could be greatly reduced. The Congres-
sional Commission submitted its report in
1961; it proposed a nationwide program of
deinstitutionalization.
Late in 1961, President Kennedy ap pointed
an interagency committee to prepare legisla-
tive recommendations based upon the report.
I represented Secretary of Labor Arthur J.
Goldberg on this committee and drafted its
fi nal submission. This included the recom-
mendation of the National Institute of Men-
tal Health that 2,000 community mental
health centers (1 per 100,000 of population)
be built by 1980. A buoyant Presiden-
tial Message to Congress followed early in
1963. “If we apply our medical knowledge
and social insights fully,” President Kennedy
pronounced, “all but a small portion of the
mentally ill can eventually achieve a whole-
some and a constructive social adjustment.”
A “concerted national attack on mental dis-
orders [was] now possible and practical.”
The president signed the Community Mental
Health Centers Construction Act on Octo-
ber 31, 1963, his last public bill-signing cer-
emony. He gave me a pen.
The mental hospitals emptied out. At the
time Governor Harriman met with Dr. Hoch
in 1955, there were 93,314 adult residents of
mental institutions maintained by New York
state. As of August 1992, there were 11,363.
This occurred across the nation. However,
the number of community mental health cen-
ters never came near the goal of the 2,000
proposed community centers. Only some 482
received federal construction funds between
1963 and 1980. The next year, 1981, the pro-
gram was folded into the Alcohol and Other
Drug Abuse block grant and disappeared

DEFINING DEVIANCY DOWN | 29
from view. Even when centers were built,
the results were hardly as hoped for. David
F. Musto of Yale writes that the planners had
bet on improving national mental health “by
improving the quality of general community
life through expert knowledge, not merely by
more effective treatment of the already ill.”
There was no such knowledge.
However, worse luck, the belief that there
was such knowledge took hold within sec-
tors of the profession that saw institution-
alization as an unacceptable mode of social
control. These activists subscribed to a rede-
fi ning mode of their own. Mental patients
were said to have been “labeled” and were
not to be drugged. Musto says of the battles
that followed that they were “so intense and
dramatic precisely because both sides shared
the fantasy of an omnipotent and omniscient
mental health technology which could thor-
oughly reform society; the prize seemed emi-
nently worth fi ghting for.”
But even as the federal government turned
to other matters, the mental institutions
continued to release inmates. Professor
Fred Siegel of Cooper Union observes: “In
the great wave of moral deregulation that
began in the mid-1960s, the poor and the
insane were freed from the fetters of middle-
class mores.” They might henceforth sleep
in doorways as often as they chose. The
problem of the homeless appeared, charac-
teristically defi ned as persons who lacked
“affordable housing.”
The altruistic mode of redefi nition is just
that. There is no reason to believe that there
was any real increase in mental illness at the
time deinstitutionalization began. Yet there
was such a perception, and this enabled good
people to try to do good, however unavailing
in the end.
III
Our second, or opportunistic mode of redefi –
nition, reveals at most a nominal intent to
do good. The true object is to do well, a
long-established motivation among mortals.
In this pattern, a growth in deviancy makes
possible a transfer of resources, including
prestige, to those who control the deviant
population. This control would be jeop-
ardized if any serious effort were made to
reduce the deviancy in question. This leads to
assorted strategies for redefi ning the behav-
ior in question as not all that deviant, really.
In the years from 1963 to 1965, the Pol-
icy Planning Staff of the U.S. Department of
Labor picked up the fi rst tremors of what
Samuel H. Preston, in the 1984 Presidential
Address to the Population Association of
America, would call “the earthquake that
shuddered through the American family in
the past twenty years.” The New York Times
recently provided a succinct accounting of
Preston’s point:
Thirty years ago, 1 in every 40 white children
was born to an unmarried mother; today it
is 1 in 5, according to Federal data. Among
blacks, 2 of 3 children are born to an unmar-
ried mother; 30 years ago the fi gure was 1 in 5.
In 1991, Paul Offner and I published longi-
tudinal data showing that, of children born
in the years 1967–69, some 22.1 percent
were dependent on welfare—that is to say,
Aid to Families with Dependent Children—
before reaching age 18. This broke down as
15.7 percent for white children, 72.3 percent
for black children. Projections for children
born in 1980 gave rates of 22.2 percent and
82.9 percent respectively. A year later, a New
York Times series on welfare and poverty
called this a “startling fi nding . . . a symptom
of vast social calamity.”
And yet there is little evidence that these
facts are regarded as a calamity in municipal
government. To the contrary, there is general
acceptance of the situation as normal. Politi-
cal candidates raise the subject, often to the
point of dwelling on it. But while there is a
good deal of demand for symbolic change,
there is none of the marshaling of resources

| DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN30
that is associated with signifi cant social
action. Nor is there any lack of evidence that
there is a serious social problem here.
Richard T. Gill writes of “an accumula-
tion of data showing that intact biologi-
cal parent families offer children very large
advantages compared to any other family or
non-family structure one can imagine.” Cor-
respondingly, the disadvantages associated
with single-parent families spill over into
other areas of social policy that now attract
great public concern. Leroy L. Schwartz,
M.D., and Mark W. Stanton argue that the
real quest regarding a government-run health
system such as that of Canada or Germany
is whether it would work “in a country that
has social problems that countries like Can-
ada and Germany don’t share to the same
extent.” Health problems refl ect ways of liv-
ing. The way of life associated with “such
social pathologies as the breakdown of the
family structure” lead to medical patholo-
gies. Schwartz and Stanton conclude: “The
United States is paying dearly for its social
and behavioral problems,” for they have
now become medical problems as well.
To cite another example, there is at pres-
ent no more vexing problem of social policy
in the United States than that posed by edu-
cation. A generation of ever-more ambitious
statutes and reforms have produced weak
responses at best and a fair amount of what
could more simply be called dishonesty.
(“Everyone knows that Head Start works.”
By the year 2000, American students will
“be fi rst in the world in science and math-
ematics.”) None of this should surprise us.
The 1966 report Equality of Educational
Opportunity by James S. Coleman and his
associates established that the family back-
ground of students played a much stronger
role in student achievement relative to varia-
tions in the ten (and still standard) measures
of school quality.
In a 1992 study entitled America’s Small-
est School: The Family, Paul Barton came up
with the elegant and persuasive concept of
the parent–pupil ratio as a measure of school
quality. Barton, who was on the policy plan-
ning staff in the Department of Labor in
1965, noted the great increase in the pro-
portion of children living in single-parent
families since then. He further noted that the
proportion “varies widely among the states”
and is related to “variation in achievement”
among them. The correlation between the
percentage of eighth graders living in two-
parent families and average mathematics
profi ciency is a solid .74. North Dakota,
highest on the math test, is second highest
on the family compositions scale—that is,
it is second in the percentage of kids com-
ing from two-parent homes. The District of
Columbia, lowest on the family scale, is sec-
ond lowest in the test score.
A few months before Barton’s study
appeared, I published an article showing that
the correlation between eighth-grade math
scores and distance of state capitals from
the Canadian border was .522, a respectable
showing. By contrast, the correlation with
per-pupil expenditure was a derisory .203.
I offered the policy proposal that states wish-
ing to improve their schools should move
closer to Canada. This would be diffi cult,
of course, but so would it be to change the
parent–pupil ratio. Indeed, the 1990 Census
found that for the District of Columbia, apart
from Ward 3 west of Rock Creek Park, the
percentage of children living in single-parent
families in the seven remaining wards ranged
from a low of 63.6 percent to a high of 75.7.
This being a one-time measurement, over time
the proportions become asymptotic. And this
in the nation’s capital. No demand for change
comes from that community—or as near to
no demand as makes no matter. For there is
good money to be made out of bad schools .
This is a statement that will no doubt please
many a hard heart and displease many genu-
inely concerned to bring about change. To
the latter, a group in which I would like to

DEFINING DEVIANCY DOWN | 31
include myself, I would only say that we are
obliged to ask why things do not change.
For a period there was some speculation
that, if family structure got bad enough, this
mode of deviancy would have less punish-
ing effects on children. In 1991, Deborah A.
Dawson, of the National Institutes of Health,
examined the thesis that “the psychological
effects of divorce and single parenthood on
children were strongly infl uenced by a sense
of shame in being ‘different’ from the norm.”
If this were so, the effect should have fallen off
in the 1980s, when being from a single-parent
home became much more common. It did
not. “The problems associated with task over-
load among single parents are more constant
in nature,” Dawson wrote, adding that since
the adverse effects had not diminished, they
were “not based on stigmatization but rather
on inherent problems in alternative family
structures”— alternative here meaning other
than two-parent families. We should take
note of such candor. Writing in the Journal of
Marriage and the Family in 1989, Sara Mc –
Lanahan and Karen Booth noted: “Whereas a
decade ago the prevailing view was that single
motherhood had no harmful effects on chil-
dren, recent research is less optimistic.”
The year 1990 saw more of this lesson. In
a paper prepared for the Progressive Policy
Institute, Elaine Ciulla Kamarck and Wil-
liam A. Galston wrote that “if the economic
effects of family breakdown are clear, the
psychological effects are just now coming
into focus.” They cite Karl Zinsmeister:
There is a mountain of scientifi c evidence
showing that when families disintegrate chil-
dren often end up with intellectual, physical,
and emotional scars that persist for life. . . . We
talk about the drug crisis, the education cri-
sis, and the problems of teen pregnancy and
juvenile crime. But all these ills trace back pre-
dominantly to one source: broken families.
As for juvenile crime, they cite Douglas Smith
and C. Roger Jarjoura: “Neighborhoods
with larger percentages of youth (those aged
12 to 20) and areas with higher percentages
of single-parent households also have higher
rates of violent crime.” They add: “The
relationship is so strong that controlling for
family confi guration erases the relationship
between race and crime and between low
income and crime. This conclusion shows up
time and time again in the literature; poverty
is far from the sole determinant of crime.”
But the large point is avoided. In the 1992
essay “The Expert’s Story of Marriage,”
Barbara Dafoe Whitehead examined “the
story of marriage as it is conveyed in today’s
high school and college textbooks.” Nothing
amiss in this tale.
It goes like this:
The life course is full of exciting options. The
lifestyle options available to individuals seek-
ing a fulfi lling personal relationship include
living a heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual
single lifestyle; living in a commune; having a
group marriage; being a single parent; or liv-
ing together. Marriage is yet another lifestyle
choice. However, before choosing marriage,
individuals should weigh its costs and benefi ts
against other lifestyle options and should con-
sider what they want to get out of their intimate
relationships. Even within marriage, different
people want different things. For example, some
people marry for companionship, some marry
in order to have children, some marry for emo-
tional and fi nancial security. Though marriage
can offer a rewarding path to personal growth,
it is important to remember that it cannot pro-
vide a secure or permanent status. Many people
will make the decision between marriage and
singlehood many times throughout their life.
Divorce represents part of the normal fam-
ily life cycle. It should not be viewed as either
deviant or tragic, as it has been in the past.
Rather, it establishes a process for “uncou-
pling” and thereby serves as the foundation
for individual renewal and “new beginnings.”
History commences to be rewritten. In 1992,
the Select Committee on Children, Youth,

| DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN32
and Families of the U.S. House of Represen-
tatives held a hearing on “Investing in Fami-
lies: A Historical Perspective.” A fact sheet
prepared by committee staff began as follows:
“INVESTING IN FAMILIES: A
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE”
FACT SHEET
HISTORICAL SHIFTS IN FAMILY
COMPOSITION CHALLENGING
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM
While in modern times the percentage of
children living with one parent has increased,
more children lived with just one parent in
Colonial America.
The fact sheet proceeded to list program
on program for which federal funds were
allegedly reduced in the 1980s. We then
come to a summary:
Between 1970 and 1991, the value of AFDC
[Aid to Families with Dependent Children]
benefi ts decreased by 41%. In spite of proven
success of Head Start, only 28% of eligible
children are being served. As of 1990, more
than $18 billion in child support went uncol-
lected. At the same time, the poverty rate
among single-parent families with children
under 18 was 44%. Between 1980 and 1990,
the rate of growth in the total Federal budget
was four times greater than the rate of growth
in children’s programs.
In other words, benefi ts paid to mothers and
children have gone down steadily, as indeed
they have done. But no proposal is made to
restore benefi ts to an earlier level, or even to
maintain their value, as is the case with other
“indexed” Social Security programs. Instead
we go directly to the subject of education
spending.
Nothing new. In 1969, President Nixon pro-
posed a guaranteed income, the Family Assis-
tance Plan. This was described as an “income
strategy” as against a “services strategy.”
It may or may not have been a good idea,
but it was a clear one, and the resistance of
service providers to it was equally clear. In
the end it was defeated, to the huzzahs of the
advocates of “welfare rights.” What is going
on here is simply that a large increase in
what once was seen as deviancy has provided
opportunity to a wide spectrum of interest
groups that benefi t from redefi ning the prob-
lem as essentially normal and doing little to
reduce it.
IV
Our normalizing category most directly cor-
responds to Erikson’s proposition that “the
number of deviant offenders a community
can afford to recognize is likely to remain sta-
ble over time.” Here we are dealing with the
popular psychological notion of “denial.”
In 1965, having reached the conclusion
that there would be a dramatic increase in
single-parent families, I reached the further
conclusion that this would in turn lead to a
dramatic increase in crime. In an article in
America , I wrote:
From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century
Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of
Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable les-
son in American history: a community that
allows a large number of young men to grow
up in broken families, dominated by women,
never acquiring any stable relationship to male
authority, never acquiring any set of rational
expectations about the future—that com-
munity asks for and gets chaos. Crime, vio-
lence, unrest, unrestrained lashing out at the
whole social structure—that is not only to be
expected; it is very near to inevitable.
The inevitable, as we now know, has come
to pass, but here again our response is curi-
ously passive. Crime is a more or less con-
tinuous subject of political pronouncement,
and from time to time it will be at or near

DEFINING DEVIANCY DOWN | 33
the top of opinion polls as a matter of public
concern. But it never gets much further than
that. In the words spoken from the bench,
Judge Edwin Torres of the New York State
Supreme Court, Twelfth Judicial District,
described how “the slaughter of the innocent
marches unabated: subway riders, bodega
owners, cab drivers, babies; in Laundromats,
at cash machines, on elevators, in hallways.”
In personal communication, he writes: “This
numbness, this near narcoleptic state can
diminish the human condition to the level
of combat infantrymen, who, in protracted
campaigns, can eat their battlefi eld rations
seated on the bodies of the fallen, friend
and foe alike. A society that loses its sense
of outrage is doomed to extinction.” There
is no expectation that this will change, nor
any effi cacious public insistence that it do so.
The crime level has been normalized .
Consider the St. Valentine’s Day Mas-
sacre. In 1929 in Chicago during Prohibi-
tion, four gangsters killed seven gangsters on
February 14. The nation was shocked. The
event became legend. It merits not one but
two entries in the World Book Encyclope-
dia . I leave it to others to judge, but it would
appear that the society in the 1920s was sim-
ply not willing to put up with this degree of
deviancy. In the end, the constitution was
amended, and Prohibition, which lay behind
so much gangster violence, ended.
In recent years, again in the context of ille-
gal traffi c in controlled substances, this form
of murder has returned. But it has done so at
a level that induces denial. James Q. Wilson
comments that Los Angeles has the equiva-
lent of a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre every
weekend. Even the most ghastly reenact-
ments of such human slaughter produce only
moderate responses. On the morning after
the close of the Democratic National Con-
vention in New York City in July, there was
such an account in the second section of the
New York Times . It was not a big story; bot-
tom of the page but with a headline that got
your attention: “3 Slain in Bronx Apartment,
but a Baby is Saved.” A subhead continued:
“A mother’s last act was to hide her little girl
under the bed.” The article described a drug
execution; the now-routine blindfolds made
from duct tape; a man and a woman and a
teenager involved. “Each had been shot once
in the head.” The police had found them a
day later. They also found, under a bed, a
three-month-old baby, dehydrated but alive.
A lieutenant remarked of the mother, “In her
last dying act she protected her baby. She
probably knew she was going to die, so she
stuffed the baby where she knew it would
be safe.” But the matter was left there. The
police would do their best. But the event
passed quickly; forgotten by the next day, it
will never make World Book .
Nor is it likely that any great heed will be
paid to an uncanny reenactment of the Pro-
hibition drama a few months later, also in the
Bronx. The Times story, page B3, reported
the following:
9 Men Posing as Police
Are Indicted in 3 Murders
Drug Dealers Were Kidnapped for Ransom
The Daily News story, same day, page 17,
made it four murders, adding nice details
about torture techniques. The gang mem-
bers posed as federal Drug Enforcement
Administration agents, real badges and all.
The victims were drug dealers whose families
were uneasy about calling the police. Ran-
som seems generally to have been set in the
$650,000 range. Some paid. Some got it in
the back of the head. So it goes.
Yet, violent killings, often random, go on
unabated. Peaks continue to attract some
notice. But these are peaks above “average”
levels that thirty years ago would have been
thought epidemic:
LOS ANGELES, AUG. 24. (Reuters) Twenty-
two people were killed in Los Angeles over the

| DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN34
weekend, the worst period of violence in the
city since it was ravaged by riots earlier this
year, the police said today.
Twenty-four others were wounded by
gunfi re or stabbings, including a 19-year old
woman in a wheelchair who was shot in the
back when she failed to respond to a motorist
who asked for directions in south Los Angeles.
[“The guy stuck a gun out of the window
and just fi red at her,” said a police spokes-
man, Lieut. David Rock. The woman was later
described as being in stable condition.
Among those who died was an off-duty
offi cer, shot while investigating reports of
a prowler in a neighbor’s yard, and a Little
League baseball coach who had argued with
the father of a boy he was coaching.]
The police said at least nine of the deaths
were gang-related, including that of a 14-year
old girl killed in a fi ght between rival gangs.
Fifty-one people were killed in three days of
rioting that started April 29 after the acquittal
of four police offi cers in the beating of Rodney
G. King.
Los Angeles usually has above-average vio-
lence during August, but the police were at a
loss to explain the sudden rise. On an average
weekend in August, 14 fatalities occur.
Not to be outdone, two days later the
poor Bronx came up with a near record, as
reported in New York Newsday .
Armed with 9-mm. pistols, shotguns and M-16
rifl es, a group of masked men and women poured
out of two vehicles in the South Bronx early yes-
terday and sprayed a stretch of Longwood Ave-
nue with a fusillade of bullets, injuring 12 people.
A Kai Erikson of the future would surely
need to know that the Department of Justice
in 1990 found that Americans reported only
about 38 percent of all crimes and 48 per-
cent of violent crimes. This, too, can be seen
as a means of normalizing crime. In much the
same way, the vocabulary of crime-reporting
can be seen to move toward the normal-
seeming. A teacher is shot on her way to
class. The Times subhead reads: “Struck
in the Shoulder in the Year’s First Shooting
Inside a School.” First of the season.
It is too early, however, to know how to
regard the arrival of the doctors on the scene
declaring crime a “public health emergency.”
The June 10, 1992, issue of the Journal
of the American Medical Association was
devoted entirely to papers on the subject of
violence, principally violence associated with
fi rearms. An editorial in the issue signed by
former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and
Dr. George D. Lundberg is entitled: “Violence
in America: A Public Health Emergency.”
Their proposition is admirably succinct.

Connections
Defi nitions of Deviance and the Case of Underage
Drinking and Drunk Driving
Tammy L. Anderson
“Lexington Mom Becomes MADD Advocate after Losing Entire Family in Drunk Driving
Accident
(Abubey 2012)
INTRODUCTION
Davana Moore—a mother from Kentucky—lost her entire family one tragic day in 2003
when a drunk teen drove onto an interstate the wrong way and plowed into the car driven
by her husband, killing him and their two children. Today, Davana Moore is an activist in
the Mothers Against Drunk Driving Program (MADD), which seeks to reduce teen drunk
driving through public education campaigns, government lobbying, and policy initiatives.
Mrs. Moore is not the only person to lose family because of teenage drunk driving. Leo
McCarthy also lost family members. In 2007, his 14-year-old daughter, Mariah, was killed
when an underage drunk driver ran into her as she walked along the sidewalk a block from
her house. McCarthy was named a CNN Hero in 2012 for starting the Mariah’s Challenge
program, which asks teens to pledge not to drink and drive (Gumbrecht 2012).
While these two stories call attention to American tragedies, they can also teach us about
how deviance is defi ned in our society—the subject matter of Section 1 in this book—the
ways it has been controlled or addressed overtime, and how that impacts our lives. One of
the things that makes teen drunk driving relevant is that our society has a different set of
expectations and standards for teens than adults. How so? First, it is illegal for teens to pur-
chase and drink alcohol of any kind. Second, parents and families have responsibility for the
caretaking of children, who are viewed as being innocent dependents requiring nurturing.
Finally, teens are valued as the future of our society, thus their behavior is heavily monitored,
scrutinized, and controlled in ways that adult behavior isn’t.
In today’s society, standards are created for behavior (such as underage drinking), states
of being, or conditions; lifestyles, speech, or language; and even our identities, physical traits,
or personal styles. These standards represent society’s norms, and violating them usually
amounts to deviance. The two stories about teenage drunk driving can illustrate these defi ni-
tions and highlight their differences. In this reading, I discuss different perspectives on these
defi nitions and note their variations. I further explain why these disparate defi nitions are
important in understanding underage binge drinking among young Americans. I begin with
Durkheim’s (1982) statistical approach, followed by Erikson’s focus on morals, and Becker’s
on society’s reactions. I then review critical theories and the so-called politics of deviance.

| TAMMY L. ANDERSON36
DURKHEIM: FUNCTIONALISM AND STATISTICAL DEFINITIONS
OF DEVIANCE
Durkheim’s groundbreaking Rules of the Sociological Method —a reading from which is
reprinted in Section 1—features a statistical look at deviance. It focuses on the prevalence
of behaviors, traits, and conditions in society and claims that deviant behavior is the rare
phenomenon or the infrequent event. Durkheim states:
Let us agree to designate as the average type the hypothetical being which might be constituted by
assembling in one entity, as a kind of individual abstraction, the most frequently occurring charac-
teristics of the species in their most frequent forms. We may then say that the normal type merges
into the average type and that any deviation from that standard of healthiness is a morbid phenom-
enon. (1982: 91–92)
Central to this defi nition is a comparison point or a referent by which deviation can be mea-
sured. Thus, pathology or deviance cannot be established as an objective fact on its own.
It can only be determined by assessing the full range of behaviors, traits, or conditions in
a population. From this, an average can be determined, which will represent the “normal
type.” Deviance will be that which departs too much from it.
As you might imagine, Durkheim’s statistical approach required the collection and mea-
suring of “real” things we could observe. Throughout time, and especially today, our society
has collected enormous amounts of information on alcohol-related behaviors, attitudes, and
conditions, especially among young people. These data collection efforts allow researchers,
policy-makers, practitioners, educators, and the general public to determine averages or normal
alcohol consumption patterns as well as atypical or deviant ones. The data provide answers to
such questions as, How many Americans drive a vehicle while intoxicated, and are the Moore
and McCarthy cases above typical, yet unfortunate, incidents in our society? If the bulk of
Americans did drive intoxicated, then Durkheim would call that normal behavior because this
majority would set the statistical average or referent point. His defi nition did not cover any
legal, moral, or health-related standard, even though driving while intoxicated is a crime.
While it is tragic, offi cial data show drunk driving—responsible for losses suffered by the
Moore and McCarthy families—is not the statistical norm for Americans, nor is it for teenag-
ers or any other demographic group. Drunk driving is statistically rare in our society. Accord-
ing to the U.S. Department of Transportation (2012), 10,228 people were killed in 2010 in
alcohol-impaired driving crashes, accounting for nearly one-third (31%) of all traffi c-related
deaths in the United States. Death by motor vehicle injury is relatively uncommon compared
to death from heart disease (596,339) or cancer (575,313). However, alcohol and drugs play
a major role in motor vehicle death (Centers for Disease Control 2012). Moreover, the U.S.
Department of Justice (2012) reported 1.4 million arrests for driving under the infl uence in
2010. The biggest offenders of drunk driving are young adults, or those between the ages
of 21 and 29. Teen drunk driving, like those responsible for the deaths above, are rarer. In
fact, teenage drunk driving decreased dramatically between 1991 and 2011, such that only a
small minority of teens (about 1 million) reported driving while drunk in 2011 (Centers for
Disease Control 2012).
From Durkheim’s viewpoint, these data show teenage drunk driving is deviant, since it is
an infrequent behavior. However, the 2011 NSDUH (SAMSHA 2012) shows that almost half
(49%) of all 18- to 20-year-olds reported being current drinkers, and the 2012 report shows
about 54% of high school seniors reported being drunk in the past month (SAMSHA 2012).

CONNECTIONS | 37
These statistics indicate that alcohol consumption is normal for people under 21 by Dur-
kheim’s defi nition, but it raises an interesting contradiction when we consider other ways of
classifying deviant behavior. If teen drunk driving is a rare occurrence but underage drinking
much more common, does that mean adolescents do or do not accept society’s norms about
the drinking age and other alcohol-related values and morals?
ERIKSON: DEVIANCE AS A BREACH OF MORALS
Erikson (1962) spelled out a more morally based defi nition of deviance in his reading
reprinted in this section. He defi ned deviance as a breach of society’s norms, which were
defi ned by its morals, customs, and traditions. A deviant, Erikson maintained, was someone
whose actions or identities had moved outside the margins of the group. When society holds
him or her accountable for it, it reinforces boundaries of acceptable behavior. Morals are
often codifi ed into law, such as those which prohibit alcohol consumption by people under
21 years of age (Gusfi eld 1984, 1986). Therefore, even though many 18- to 20-years-olds
are current drinkers, their behavior is deviant by moral standards. Teenage drunk driving is
likely considered even more depraved.
Erikson (1962) argued that such morally based boundaries for behavior were crucial for
society because they increased solidarity among people and groups. This moralistic orienta-
tion to deviance was anchored in functionalism, which views society as a complex system
whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability among its population. Agree-
ment about morality and conformity to norms is necessary for society to thrive. Therefore,
too much confl ict and deviation will hinder solidarity and stability and thus throw society
into a state of chaos (Erikson 1962).
Even though too much deviance could be problematic, Erikson also noted it served
an important purpose. By establishing clear boundaries for acceptable and unacceptable
behavior—for example, it is unlawful to operate a vehicle while intoxicated—a society bol-
sters cohesion and solidarity among its citizens, helping to stabilize social life. He stated that
if “the rhythm of group life was not punctuated by moments of deviant behavior . . . social
organization would be impossible” (Erikson 1962: 68). Both the Moore and McCarthy cases
elicited the public’s sympathy over the tragic loss, reminding it about the value of life and the
dangers of alcohol. Beyond this, the drinking laws that prohibit those under 21 from drinking
shore up society’s values to protect the young, and by extension the family, against alcohol-
related consequences. 1 For example, in 1980, MADD was established to “mobilize victims
and their allies to establish the public conviction that impaired driving is unacceptable and
criminal, in order to promote corresponding public policies, programs and personal respon-
sibility.” 2 The Moore and McCarthy cases, and others, have led to the creation and growth
of public and private initiatives designed to combat drunk driving, which could even help the
economy. Erikson also noted that deviance created jobs for many to keep it in check.
MOYNIHAN: SOCIAL ACCEPTANCE OF DRINKING AND
DEFINING DEVIANCY DOWN
In a thought-provoking paper that garnered much media attention, Daniel Patrick Moynihan
(1992) wrote that the sociological positions about deviance, especially those of Durkheim

| TAMMY L. ANDERSON38
and Erikson, and the liberal public mood of the 1970s trivialized the signifi cance of devi-
ance and rendered okay unacceptable behaviors and lifestyles. He called this defi ning devi-
ance down and described it as :
the public tolerance of intolerable behavior . . . We are becoming accustomed to high levels of
deviance, crime, disorder and immoral behavior. Political correctness and increased tolerance for
stigmatized behaviors is defi ning deviancy down. (1992, 19)
Exactly how did society defi ne deviance down? Moynihan articulated three methods.
The fi rst was an “altruistic” redefi nition where seemingly well-intentioned people worked
to better treat and even humanize problem groups. Moynihan pointed to the deinstitution-
alization of mental illness which led to experts and advocates successfully campaigning for
the release of mental patients from formal facilities. The current use of biological theories
by top federal agencies to explain alcohol abuse and alcoholism as a result of brain chem-
istry interruptions or genetic makeup may be yet another example of Moynihan’s idea. For
example, Courtwright (2010) and Anderson, Lane, and Swan (2010) have pointed out that
new ideas about substance abuse and addiction downplay the moral component behind it
and explain them as medical diseases that require treatment rather than more punitive sanc-
tions. Thus, both the victims and the offenders in drunk-driving cases require our compas-
sion and assistance.
Deviance was also being defi ned downward for opportunistic reasons. Moynihan argued
that some deviant behaviors were permitted to grow in society so that groups, institutions,
and agencies could justify increased resources. This method required a redefi nition of devi-
ance as “not all that bad.” For example, Marketdata Enterprises (2000) found that the drug
and alcohol abuse treatment industry was valued at $6.8 billion per year. Since its report is
more than a decade old, it seems reasonable to speculate that the industry is worth even more
money today, since rates of alcohol abuse have remained steady or increased since that time.
A report like this can be used to justify increased resources for public institutions as well,
including local and state agencies handling alcohol problems, as well as federal agencies such
as the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
Finally, Moynihan said that there was a sort of psychological denial—especially among
sociologists—that normalized deviance. He took issue with Erikson’s and Durkheim’s
notions that a community could accommodate a certain amount of deviance before its sta-
bility would be threatened. Moynihan advocated a return to old traditions and morals (i.e.,
those which were refl ective of a white, middle-class, heterosexual standard) and was troubled
when by society’s apparent willingness to tolerate deviance.
Moynihan’s point may be supported by a recent study on substance use in popular music.
Primack and colleagues (2008) studied references to and messages about drugs and alcohol
in the most popular songs in Billboard magazine in 2005. They found the following:
The average adolescent is exposed to approximately 84 references to explicit substance use daily
in popular songs, and this exposure varies widely by musical genre. The substance use depicted in
popular music is frequently motivated by peer acceptance and sex, and it has highly positive asso-
ciations and consequences. These motivations are highly important to youth, who are especially
susceptible to them given ongoing identity crises in the teenage years. (169)
The Roberts, Henriksen, and Christensen study (1999) found similar patterns and messages
in movies.

CONNECTIONS | 39
BECKER: DEVIANCE AS SOCIAL REACTION
Howard Becker (1963), as well as Erving Goffman (1963) and Edwin Lemert (1974), articu-
lated labeling theory, or the social reaction theory of deviance. Constructionists employ a
subjectivist view, concerning themselves with how traits, conditions, behaviors, and so on
get defi ned as deviant in society. In his classic book Outsiders (1963), Becker expressed a
social-reaction type of defi nition calling deviance anything people in society so labeled and
argued that norm violations had to be publicly exposed in order for deviance to exist and
command our attention. Becker’s point was that deviance didn’t objectively exist. Instead,
it was a subjective response to something objectionable that becomes known to the public.
Thus, unless today’s 18-year-old is caught drinking or buying alcohol by authorities, he or
she can consume it and avoid being called a deviant and penalized accordingly.
Social reactionists like Becker were concerned with how people reacted to and defi ned
deviance and how those defi nitions and reactions impacted deviant behavior over time. For
example, labeling theory viewed drug and alcohol use as not initially troublesome. Such
behaviors only became problematic when society offi cially branded people as “drug abusers,”
“drunks,” or “troublemakers” and punished them. Such labeling would lead to increased
deviant behavior because those branded would accept society’s pejorative view of them
and act accordingly (Becker 1963). Labeling theorists called this the self-fulfi lling prophecy
(Cooley 1922). They argued that once a person was labeled and stereotyped as criminal, or in
some other negative fashion, he or she would likely be shunned by law-abiding society, have
diffi culty fi nding a good job, and lose some civil rights.
CRITICAL THEORY AND THE POLITICS OF DEVIANCE
It is important to note that defi ning something as deviant can be viewed as an act of power,
which may represent yet another way to describe deviance. This is a basic position of more
critical or confl ict-oriented theories (Pfohl 2009; Quinney 1975), and it plays an impor-
tant role in newer statements about deviance. Consider that when something or someone
is defi ned as normal or acceptable, it is almost certain that something or someone else is
rendered deviant. Deviance is typically devalued and scrutinized. There are consequences for
deviant behavior and discrimination against those who engage in it or who possess deviant
traits or conditions. Therefore, the act of classifying someone or something as deviant must
be viewed as one of power because of the consequences that often accompany it. And when
we look at who and what is classifi ed as deviant in our society and who has done the cata-
loguing, we see considerable inequality. Powerful groups have been able to defi ne deviance
and label others in ways that less powerful people have not.
What sorts of things do the powerful and privileged do to make sure they benefi t from
deviance? The critical theory readings included in this book point to various strategies, rang-
ing from symbolic acts (such as using the media to manipulate public opinion and beliefs—
e.g., moral panics and crusades) to actual mechanisms of social control (e.g., laws and
penalties).
If we look back in time, we can fi nd support for the confl ict perspective in legislation
about alcohol (Gusfi eld 1984, 1986). In the United States, consumption of alcoholic bever-
ages was once outlawed for everyone via the 18th Amendment or the Volstead Act (1919).
The Prohibition Era lasted until 1933, when the 21st Amendment repealed the Volstead Act

| TAMMY L. ANDERSON40
and made it legal for people to consume distilled spirits, beer, and wine once again. How-
ever, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, federal government initiatives against drinking by
young people (those under 21 years of age) ultimately produced a national drinking-age law,
making it illegal for those less than 21 years of age to buy or consume alcoholic beverages.
Scholars have noted that these alcohol policies were the result of political maneuvering by
powerful groups, such as the Anti-Saloon League, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union,
and MADD, who sought to protect families from the negative consequences of alcohol. Yet,
these laws have also been motivated by a variety of economic interests. For example, labor
unions supported Prohibition because they believed alcoholism would disrupt the workplace
while stakeholders in the alcohol industry (e.g., U.S. Brewers Association and the German-
American Alliance) and local saloons (Musto 1999) all opposed Prohibition to protect their
profi ts.
Today, powerful groups, companies, and institutions still control alcohol laws and poli-
cies in the United States (Gusfi eld 1984). For example, in addition to running a high-profi le
Web site that informs the public about the drunk-driving cases noted above, MADD has
expanded its mission to preventing underage drinking of all kinds and supporting victims
of violent crime. MADD’s infl uence will likely grow in the future given that congress just
awarded the organization $50 million to fund its efforts (MADD 2013). Its work might
be complemented by groups such as the National Association on Alcohol and Drugs and
Dependency or undermined by pro-alcohol associations such as the Brewers’ Association
and/or the major beer manufacturers themselves. One thing we can likely bet on is that the
maneuvering of such powerful entities will likely impact our own experiences with alcohol.
CONCLUSION
This essay used underage drinking and drunk driving to describe the major ways sociologists
defi ne deviant behavior, traits, and conditions in society. While the perspectives are unique,
they share some important assumptions that may render them dated in today’s society. For
example, each focuses attention on the individual deviant subject and views him or her in a
negative light. Specifi cally, deviants are considered misfi ts or offenders who threaten society
(functionalism) or victims forced into deviance by oppressive conditions (critical theory) and
then labeled and penalized in a detrimental fashion by punitive institutions and powerful
actors (labeling theory). Society and its institutions are the entities with power to defi ne devi-
ance and control individual behavior. Individuals are fairly powerless in all of this. They don’t
take pride in themselves or their actions, and they have little control over their fate. Yet when
they do take control, it often backfi res with consequences for them and the larger society.
Do you agree with this? Are these assumptions accurate and useful? As you make your
way through the readings in this book, it is important to think about these assumptions and
to keep in mind how deviance is defi ned (subjectively versus objectively; positively or nega-
tively; as an individual or structural phenomenon) in society. Pay attention to who does the
defi ning, why that matters, and how such defi nitions might perpetuate inequality. Keep your
eye on the relationship between the defi nition of deviance and the type of social control or
remedy advocated.
Most importantly, however, try to take the role or perspective of the deviant in question
so that you might see how the deviance game both impacts him or her and you, the supposed
upstanding member of society. For example, is gang membership always a bad thing? How do

CONNECTIONS | 41
members see their activity differently than the law-abiding public does? Do gangs somehow
benefi t society? How so? Can gang members make important contributions? What might they
be? By reading these pioneering statements and thinking about them critically, the contribu-
tors to this book and I are betting you will see the continued value of classic work as well as
well as the justifi cation for refreshing the fi eld of deviance with more contemporary ideas.
CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS
1. Identify a behavior, condition, or trait that could be viewed as morally deviant but is
statistically common in our society? Discuss the contradictions between the moral defi ni-
tion of Erikson with the more statistical one that Durkheim discussed.
2. Pick any deviant behavior, and discuss how the people who engage in it might not be
labeled deviant in society while still others are. What do you think explains the differ-
ences between the application of the deviant label to some and not others?
3. In what ways is deviance a positive thing for society? How do you benefi t from it person-
ally? Give examples.
NOTES
1. See Parents: The AntiDrug at http://www.theantidrug.com/drug-information/commonly-abused-drugs/alcohol.
aspx and Mothers Against Drunk Driving at http://www.madd.org/ .
2. See http://www.madd.org/about-us/mission/.
REFERENCES
Abubey, Faith. 2012 (October 20). “Lexington Mom Becomes MADD Advocate after Losing Entire Family in
Drunk Driving Accident.” WFMY News . Retrieved April 13, 2013, http://www.digtriad.com/news/local/
article/250627/57/Mom-Loses-Entire-Family-To-Drunk-Driving-Accident.
Anderson, T. L. Lane, D., and Swan, H. 2010. “Institutional Fads and the Medicalization of Drug Addiction,”
Sociology Compass 4(7): 476–494.
Becker, Howard S. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance . New York: Free Press.
Centers for Disease Control. 2012 (October). “Teen Drinking and Driving: A Dangerous Mix.” National Center for
Injury Prevention and Control, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Cooley, Charles Horton. 1922. Human Nature and the Social Order . New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Courtwright, David. 2010. “The NIDA Brain Disease Paradigm: History, Resistance and Spinoffs,” BioSocieties
5(1): 137–147.
Durkheim, Emile. 1982. “Rules for the Distinction of the Normal and the Pathological. Excerpted.” Pp. 85–101 in
Rules of the Sociological Method . New York: Free Press.
Erikson, Kai T. 1962. “Notes on the Sociology of Deviance.” Social Problems , 9(4): 307–314.
Erikson, Kai T. 1966. Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance. Rev. ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity . New York: Penguin.
Gumbrecht, Jamie. 2012 (October 10). “What Sways Teens Not to Drink and Drive? Stories Not Stats.” CNN
Online. http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/10/us/cnnheroes-underage-drunken-driving/index.html.
Gusfi eld, Joseph. R. 1984. The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order . Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Gusfi eld. Joseph R. 1986. Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement . Springfi eld:
University of Illinois Press.
Lemert, Edwin. 1974. “Beyond Mead: The Societal Reaction to Deviance.” Social Problems 21(4): 457–468
MADD. 2013 (March 21). “Federal Spending Bill Boosts MADD’s Campaign to Eliminate Drunk Driving.” Moth-
ers Against Drunk Driving, Retrieved April 13, 2013, http://www.madd.org/blog/2013/march/federal-spending-
bill-boosts-CEDD.html.
Marketdata Enterprises. 2000. The U.S. Drugs and Alcohol Treatment Centers Industry . Rockville, MD.

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http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/10/us/cnnheroes-underage-drunken-driving/index.html

http://www.madd.org/blog/2013/march/federal-spending-bill-boosts-CEDD.html

http://www.madd.org/blog/2013/march/federal-spending-bill-boosts-CEDD.html

http://www.digtriad.com/news/local/article/250627/57/Mom-Loses-Entire-Family-To-Drunk-Driving-Accident

http://www.theantidrug.com/drug-information/commonly-abused-drugs/alcohol.aspx

| TAMMY L. ANDERSON42
Moynihan, Daniel. 1992. “Defi ning Deviance Down.” American Scholar 62(1): 17–30.
Musto, David. 1999. The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control . 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pfohl, S. 2009. Images of Deviance and Social Control . Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.
Primack, Brian A., Dalton, Madeline, A., Carroll, Mary, V., Agarwal, Aaron A., and Fine, Michael J. 2008. “Con-
tent Analysis of Tobacco, Alcohol, and Other Drugs in Popular Music.” Archives of Pediatric Adolescent Medi-
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Quinney, Richard. 1975. Criminology . Boston: Little, Brown.
Roberts D. F., Henriksen, L., and Christensen, P. G. 1999. Substance Use in Popular Movies and Music . Washing-
ton, DC: Offi ce of National Drug Control Policy.
SAMSHA. 2012. “Results from the 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Mental Health Findings.”
Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2012 (September 29). “Crime in the United States 2010:
Uniform Crime Reports.” Retrieved April 15, 2013, http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/
crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/summary.
U.S. Department of Transportation, National Highway Traffi c Safety Administration (NHTSA). 2012. “Traffi c
Safety Facts 2010: Alcohol-Impaired Driving.” Washington, DC: NHTSA. Retrieved September, 28, 2012, http://
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http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811606.PDF

http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811606.PDF

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/summary

SECTION 2
Functionalism, Anomie,
General Strain Theory

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Introduction
Tammy L. Anderson
Everyone is trying to get an edge, and if you can take a pill to study all night and get that grade
you need, a lot of people don’t see why you wouldn’t.
(un-named male college student quoted in Couric 2010).
It’s crucial, that fi rst two or three weeks out of the penitentiary, very, very crucial. If they don’t fi nd a
job, what are you gonna say? Oh, man, I can’t fi nd a job. I don’t know what to do. You know what, let
me try to go back to my old way. Maybe I could sell a couple of bags, man, and then I’ll just quit, man.
Just to make me enough money to buy me some clothes, maybe. Before you know it, he sees a couple
dollars in his pocket. Oh man, let me do it again, and again.
(Eugene Kovoda, an ex-con, quoted in
Scott 2004: 129)
What do these two quotes have in common? The fi rst is from a white male college student
who claims he needs a prescription stimulant to help him get good grades in college. The
second is from an ex-con who claims selling drugs is necessary to get money to buy clothes.
Both are trying to attain goals that are social approved in our society and both are also using
illegitimate or deviant means to attain them.
Section 2—on functionalism, anomie, and general strain theory—may provide some
answers. Let’s begin with the college student. In a 2010 report entitled “Boosting Brain
Power” on the popular news program 60 Minutes , journalist Katie Couric profi led college
students who use medications, such as Ritalin and Adderall, to enhance their performance on
exams and other course requirements because they believed they couldn’t obtain the scores
they desired, or that were expected of them, on their own. The use of prescribed medications
without a doctor’s permission is a crime punishable by law. However, the students Couric
profi les suggest that such “neural-enhancement” is both logical and commonplace in college,
as indicated in the young student’s statement above.
While offi cial estimates show that ADHD is on the rise in our society (Ellison 2010), the
Couric report suggests the nonmedical use of prescription stimulants has expanded beyond
those offi cially diagnosed to a broader group seeking help in achieving respectable cultural
goals. Sociologists have found the nonmedical use of prescribed stimulants is easily justifi ed
by college students to fi x their feelings about others’ expectations and their own perceived
inadequacies in attaining their academic goals (Loe and Cuttino 2008). How can the sociol-
ogy of deviance help us understand this and make important connections between the two
very different young men described above?
Section 2 covers functionalism, anomie, and general strain theory—three seminal ideas
that have shaped the study of deviance over time. Included in this section is a classic reading

| TAMMY L. ANDERSON46
by Merton (1938), who famously articulated a theory of strain to explain deviant behavior,
based in Durkheim’s functionalism and theory of anomie. Merton would have called both
the ex-con and the students in Couric’s video “innovators,” a sort of cheater who uses ille-
gitimate means to attain socially desired goods or approved goals—that is, money for clothes
or good grades. Merton warned about such outrageous expectations in a society plagued by
anomie. Research shows it’s unrealistic to presume ex-cons will quickly fi nd employment in
an era of punitive crime policies that mark and disqualify them (Pager 2007). The students
profi led in Couric’s report are also sensitive to society’s expectations and incentives to take
deviant shortcuts. Ali explains:
I wonder, at what level . . . if so many people have ADD . . . at what level it is just because of the
standards we hold over everyone and the expectations of the school system and the work world. (Ali
from Loe and Cuttino 2008: 311)
Sociologists and criminologists have since challenged Merton and other functionalists’
structural or macrolevel explanations. One line of criticism has come from those concerned
with cultural diversity. To what extent does anomie theory hold across groups with different
cultural backgrounds, social positions, and experiences? The Hagedorn (1997) ethnographic
study of drug gangs in Milwaukee, included in this section, lends support to Merton’s ideas
but adds racial discrimination as another structural factor that motivates deviance. A second
major challenge to Merton’s anomie theory comes from those opting for more microlevel
approaches that focus on individuals’ motivations, feelings, experiences as they accumulate
over time. In this section, the reading by Agnew (1999) makes the case for a more individu-
ally oriented general strain theory (GST) of deviance and crime.
These readings, along with my connections reading on doping in elite sports (another
type of “innovator”), will hopefully sharpen students’ critical thinking skills by teaching
them about how both environmental forces beyond the individual’s control, as well as the
more personal ones they can shape on a daily basis, impact a wide range of nonnormative
behaviors across culturally and socially diverse groups. A few brief words about anomie and
general strain theory will get us thinking about this micro–macro issue.
Anomie: Robert Merton believed that the key to understanding deviance was in the norms
society sets—they are simply unrealistic to achieve or conform to. Deviance arises when
goals are too diffi cult for people to achieve by acceptable standards. Access to the oppor-
tunities (educational and economic) to achieve society’s goals and live a productive life had
to be available to all, yet Merton (1938) found they were not. Instead, their access was
unevenly distributed by social class, neighborhood, age, sex, race, and religion. Anomie
or alienation emerged when there was a discrepancy between socially approved goals and
access to their legitimate attainment. Merton argued that people could respond to anomie
in a variety of ways. Innovation was one. Innovators accepted socially approved goals
(e.g., material comfort or academic scholarships and high GPAs) but would reject conven-
tional means for obtaining them, opting for more illegitimate avenues, such as committing
street crime or using prescribed ADHD medications for reasons other than how they were
intended.
General Strain Theory (GST): Agnew’s (1999) GST is an attempt to clarify how the more
structural factors that Merton pontifi cated about—cultural goals, access to legitimate

INTRODUCTION | 47
opportunities—led to individual law-breaking. The link Agnew offered was emotional or
social-psychological in nature. People’s goals, he argued, are set by their positive experiences
in society, and when they are unable to attain them, anger, resentment, disappointment, and
unhappiness can result and lead to crime.
Agnew specifi es three major types of strain in his paper included in this section. Perhaps the
one most relevant to the innovators described above is the failure to achieve positively valued
goals. For example, if an individual cannot achieve the material things he or she desires (as was
the case with the gang members in Hagedorn’s study), or good grades (as was the case with the
students profi led in Couric’s report), he or she may resort to deviant and criminal behavior to
achieve them. Delinquent behavior is enacted to reduce feelings of anger and frustration. Thus,
Agnew would not have predicted drug-dealing or nonmedical stimulant use to simply result
from unrealistic social expectations or deprived economic status or blocked opportunities but
rather the individual’s psychological reaction to these things and his or her negative perceptions
of his or her environment. Therefore, one of the most important distinctions in Agnew’s work
is the idea that the psychological traits of individuals “condition” or infl uence the effects of
anomie on crime.
In my connections reading, I draw out the links between these anomie and strain-based
theories of deviance with yet another type of illegal activity: doping in elite sports. Above,
I asked you to consider what the college student and ex-con had in common. Now, I’d
like you to add into that mix a professional athlete, such as former Tour de France winner
Bjarne Riis, who many of us might admire. To what extent is his deviance—taking EPO
to win the marquee cycling event—similar to the student’s and ex-con’s behavior? Riis gives
us some clues in his statement:
Once you start you don’t refl ect on it, you think it’s a part of the life, a part of the culture, everybody
else is doing it and after a while you think it’s just natural. If I want to be at the top I realized this
(doping) is what I had to do. (Riis, 2012)
Taken together, Section 2 discusses several different kinds of innovators or cheaters—if you
will—in our society and the sources of anomie or strain that motivate them. Merton wrote
about garden variety criminals and juvenile delinquents. Hagedorn reports on inner-city drug
dealers. My connections reading discusses doping among elite athletes, and this introduction
describes college students’ illicit use of prescribed stimulants to achieve their academic goals.
While it is true that all of us, despite our backgrounds, are susceptible to some level of ano-
mie and strain, it is also true that there are racial and class patterns to deviant innovations.
Merton studied the poor. Hagedorn focused on disadvantaged blacks. Doping in professional
sports is a mixed-race, privileged group, while the college students popping Adderall to pass
their exams are largely middle class and white.
One question to consider then is if patterns in deviant innovation are related to cultural dif-
ferences between race and ethnic groups or to economic status and social class position? Per-
haps styles of innovation are simply a combination of a variety of social dimensions, including
race, ethnicity, class, age, and gender. If so, then another important question to ask is, which
types of cheating, and by whom, are tolerated in our society and which are not? How would
you explain the differences? Which types of innovation and groups would you explain with
the more macrolevel anomie theory or the more microlevel general strain theory? Would you
combine them? I hope the readings in this section help you reach some conclusions.

| TAMMY L. ANDERSON48
REFERENCES
Agnew, Robert. 1999. “A General Strain Theory of Community Differences in Crime Rates.” Journal of Research
in Crime and Delinquency 36(2): 123–155.
Couric, Katie. 2010 (April 25). “Boosting Brian Power.” 60 Minutes , CBS News. Retrieved February 20, 2011,
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6430949n.
Ellison, Katherine. 2010 (November 10).”Doing Battle with the ADHD Industrial Complex.” Washington Post .
Retrieved June 4, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/19/AR2010111902894.
html.
Hagedorn, John M. 1997. “Homeboys, New Jacks, and Anomie.” Journal of African American Men 3(1): 7–28.
Loe, Meika and Cuttino, Leigh. 2008. “Grappling with the Medicated Self: The Case of DHD College Students.”
Symbolic Interaction , 31(3): 303–323.
Merton, R. 1938. “Social Structure and Anomie.” ASR 3: 672–682.
Pager, Devah. 2007. Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration . Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Riis, Bjarne. 2012 (June 2). Video: Bjarne Riis on the Decision to take EPO. Cycling News . Retrieved on March 3,
2013, http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/video-bjarne-riis-on-the-decision-to-take-epo.
Scott, Greg. 2004. “‘It’s a Sucker’s Outfi t’: How Urban Gangs Enable and Impede the Reintegration of Ex-Convicts,”
Ethnography 5: 107–139.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6430949n

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/19/AR2010111902894.html

http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/video-bjarne-riis-on-the-decision-to-take-epo

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/19/AR2010111902894.html

Social Structure and Anomie
Robert K. Merton
There persists a notable tendency in socio-
logical theory to attribute the malfunction-
ing of social structure primarily to those of
man’s imperious biological drives which are
not adequately restrained by social control.
In this view, the social order is solely a device
for “impulse management” and the “social
processing” of tensions. These impulses
which break through social control, be it
noted, are held to be biologically derived.
Nonconformity is assumed to be rooted in
original nature. 1 Conformity is by implica-
tion the result of an utilitarian calculus or
unreasoned conditioning. This point of view,
whatever its other defi ciencies, clearly begs
one question. It provides no basis for deter-
mining the nonbiological conditions which
induce deviations from prescribed patterns
of conduct. In this paper, it will be suggested
that certain phases of social structure gen-
erate the circumstances in which infringe-
ment of social codes constitutes a “normal”
response. 2
The conceptual scheme to be outlined
is designed to provide a coherent, system-
atic approach to the study of sociocultural
sources of deviate behavior. Our primary
aim lies in discovering how some social
structures exert a defi nite pressure upon cer-
tain persons in the society to engage in non-
conformist rather than conformist conduct.
The many ramifi cations of the scheme can-
not all be discussed; the problems mentioned
outnumber those explicitly treated.
Among the elements of social and cul-
tural structure, two are important for our
purposes. These are analytically separable
although they merge imperceptibly in con-
crete situations. The fi rst consists of cultur-
ally defi ned goals, purposes, and interests. It
comprises a frame of aspirational reference.
These goals are more or less integrated and
involve varying degrees of prestige and sen-
timent. They constitute a basic, but not the
exclusive, component of what Linton aptly
has called “designs for group living.” Some
of these cultural aspirations are related to
the original drives of man, but they are not
determined by them. The second phase of the
social structure defi nes, regulates, and con-
trols the acceptable modes of achieving these
goals. Every social group invariably couples
its scale of desired ends with moral or institu-
tional regulation of permissible and required
procedures for attaining these ends. These
regulatory norms and moral imperatives do
not necessarily coincide with technical or
effi ciency norms. Many procedures which
from the standpoint of particular individuals
would be most effi cient in securing desired
values—e.g., illicit oil-stock schemes, theft,
fraud—are ruled out of the institutional area
of permitted conduct. The choice of expedi-
ents is limited by the institutional norms.
To say that these two elements, culture
goals and institutional norms, operate jointly
is not to say that the ranges of alternative
behaviors and aims bear some constant

| ROBERT K. MERTON50
relation to one another. The emphasis upon
certain goals may vary independently of
the degree of emphasis upon institutional
means. There may develop a disproportion-
ate, at times, a virtually exclusive, stress
upon the value of specifi c goals, involving
relatively slight concern with the institution-
ally appropriate modes of attaining these
goals. The limiting case in this direction is
reached when the range of alternative pro-
cedures is limited only by technical rather
than institutional considerations. Any and
all devices which promise attainment of the
all important goal would be permitted in this
hypothetical polar case. 3 This constitutes one
type of cultural malintegration. A second
polar type is found in groups where activi-
ties originally conceived as instrumental are
transmuted into ends in themselves. The
original purposes are forgotten and ritual-
istic adherence to institutionally prescribed
conduct becomes virtually obsessive. 4 Stabil-
ity is largely ensured while change is fl outed.
The range of alternative behaviors is severely
limited. There develops a tradition-bound,
sacred society characterized by neophobia.
The occupational psychosis of the bureau-
crat may be cited as a case in point. Finally,
there are the intermediate types of groups
where a balance between culture goals and
institutional means is maintained. These are
the signifi cantly integrated and relatively sta-
ble, though changing, groups.
An effective equilibrium between the two
phases of the social structure is maintained
as long as satisfactions accrue to individuals
who conform to both constraints, viz., sat-
isfactions from the achievement of the goals
and satisfactions emerging directly from the
institutionally canalized modes of striving
to attain these ends. Success, in such equili-
brated cases, is twofold. Success is reckoned
in terms of the product and in terms of the
process, in terms of the outcome and in
terms of activities. Continuing satisfactions
must derive from sheer participation in a
competitive order as well as from eclipsing
one’s competitors if the order itself is to be
sustained. The occasional sacrifi ces involved
in institutionalized conduct must be compen-
sated by socialized rewards. The distribution
of statuses and roles through competition
must be so organized that positive incen-
tives for conformity to roles and adherence
to status obligations are provided for every
position within the distributive order. Aber-
rant conduct, therefore, may be viewed as a
symptom of dissociation between culturally
defi ned aspirations and socially structured
means.
Of the types of groups which result from
the independent variation of the two phases
of the social structure, we shall be primarily
concerned with the fi rst; namely, that involv-
ing a disproportionate accent on goals. This
statement must be recast in a proper perspec-
tive. In no group is there an absence of regu-
latory codes governing conduct, yet groups
do vary in the degree to which these folk-
ways, mores, and institutional controls are
effectively integrated with the more diffuse
goals which are part of the culture matrix.
Emotional convictions may cluster about the
complex of socially acclaimed ends, mean-
while shifting their support from the cultur-
ally defi ned implementation of these ends.
As we shall see, certain aspects of the social
structure may generate countermores and
antisocial behavior precisely because of dif-
ferential emphases on goals and regulations.
In the extreme case, the latter may be so viti-
ated by the goal-emphasis that the range of
behavior is limited only by considerations
of technical expediency. The sole signifi –
cant question then becomes, which available
means is most effi cient in netting the socially
approved value? 5 The technically most fea-
sible procedure, whether legitimate or not,
is preferred to the institutionally prescribed
conduct. As this process continues, the inte-
gration of the society becomes tenuous and
anomie ensues.
Thus, in competitive athletics, when the
aim of victory is shorn of its institutional

SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND ANOMIE | 51
trappings and success in contests becomes
construed as “winning the game” rather
than “winning through circumscribed modes
of activity,” a premium is implicitly set upon
the use of illegitimate but technically effi cient
means. The star of the opposing football
team is surreptitiously slugged; the wrestler
furtively incapacitates his opponent through
ingenious but illicit techniques; university
alumni covertly subsidize “students” whose
talents are largely confi ned to the athletic
fi eld. The emphasis on the goal has so atten-
uated the satisfactions deriving from sheer
participation in the competitive activity that
these satisfactions are virtually confi ned to a
successful outcome. Through the same pro-
cess, tension generated by the desire to win
in a poker game is relieved by successfully
dealing oneself four aces, or, when the cult
of success has become completely dominant,
by sagaciously shuffl ing the cards in a game
of solitaire. The faint twinge of uneasiness in
the last instance and the surreptitious nature
of public delicts indicate clearly that the
institutional rules of the game are known to
those who evade them but that the emotional
supports of these rules are largely vitiated by
cultural exaggeration of the success-goal. 6
They are microcosmic images of the social
macrocosm.
Of course, this process is not restricted
to the realm of sport. The process whereby
exaltation of the end generates a literal
demoralization —that is, a deinstitutionalization—
of the means is one which characterizes
many 7 groups in which the two phases of
the social structure are not highly integrated.
The extreme emphasis upon the accumula-
tion of wealth as a symbol of success 8 in our
own society militates against the completely
effective control of institutionally regulated
modes of acquiring a fortune. 9 Fraud, cor-
ruption, vice, crime, in short, the entire
catalogue of proscribed behavior, becomes
increasingly common when the emphasis on
the culturally induced success-goal becomes
divorced from a coordinated institutional
emphasis. This observation is of crucial theo-
retical importance in examining the doctrine
that antisocial behavior most frequently
derives from biological drives breaking
through the restraints imposed by society.
The difference is one between a strictly utili-
tarian interpretation which conceives man’s
ends as random and an analysis which fi nds
these ends deriving from the basic values of
the culture. 10
Our analysis can scarcely stop at this
juncture. We must turn to other aspects of
the social structure if we are to deal with the
social genesis of the varying rates and types
of deviate behavior characteristic of different
societies. Thus far, we have sketched three
ideal types of social orders constituted by dis-
tinctive patterns of relations between culture
ends and means. Turning from these types
of culture patterning , we fi nd fi ve logically
possible, alternative modes of adjustment or
adaptation by individuals within the culture-
bearing society or group. 11 These are sche-
matically presented in the following table,
where (+) signifi es “acceptance,” () signifi es
“elimination,” and (±) signifi es “rejection and
substitution of new goals and standards.”
TABLE 6.1
Culture Goals Institutionalized Means
I. Conformity + +
II. Innovation + 
III. Ritualism  +
IV. Retreatism  
V. Rebellion12 ± ±

| ROBERT K. MERTON52
Our discussion of the relation between
these alternative responses and other phases
of the social structure must be prefaced by
the observation that persons may shift from
one alternative to another as they engage in
different social activities. These categories
refer to role adjustments in specifi c situa-
tions, not to personality in toto . To treat
the development of this process in various
spheres of conduct would introduce a com-
plexity unmanageable within the confi nes of
this reading. For this reason, we shall be con-
cerned primarily with economic activity in
the broad sense, the production, exchange,
distribution, and consumption of goods and
services in our competitive society, wherein
wealth has taken on a highly symbolic cast.
Our task is to search out some of the fac-
tors which exert pressure upon individuals
to engage in certain of these logically pos-
sible alternative responses. This choice, as
we shall see, is far from random.
In every society, Adaptation I (conformity
to both culture goals and means) is the most
common and widely diffused. Were this not
so, the stability and continuity of the soci-
ety could not be maintained. The mesh of
expectancies which constitutes every social
order is sustained by the modal behavior of
its members falling within the fi rst category.
Conventional role behavior oriented toward
the basic values of the group is the rule rather
than the exception. It is this fact alone which
permits us to speak of a human aggregate as
comprising a group or society.
Conversely, Adaptation IV (rejection of
goals and means) is the least common. Per-
sons who “adjust” (or maladjust) in this fash-
ion are, strictly speaking, in the society but
not of it. Sociologically, these constitute the
true “aliens.” Not sharing the common frame
of orientation, they can be included within
the societal population merely in a fi ctional
sense. In this category are some of the activi-
ties of psychotics, psychoneurotics, chronic
autists, pariahs, outcasts, vagrants, vaga-
bonds, tramps, chronic drunkards, and drug
addicts. 13 These have relinquished, in certain
spheres of activity, the culturally defi ned
goals, involving complete aim-inhibition
in the polar case, and their adjustments are
not in accord with institutional norms. This
is not to say that in some cases the source
of their behavioral adjustments is not in part
the very social structure which they have in
effect repudiated nor that their very exis-
tence within a social area does not constitute
a problem for the socialized population.
This mode of “adjustment” occurs, as far
as structural sources are concerned, when
both the culture goals and institutionalized
procedures have been assimilated thoroughly
by the individual and imbued with affect and
high positive value, but where those institu-
tionalized procedures which promise a mea-
sure of successful attainment of the goals
are not available to the individual. In such
instances, there results a twofold mental
confl ict insofar as the moral obligation for
adopting institutional means confl icts with
the pressure to resort to illegitimate means
(which may attain the goal) and inasmuch as
the individual is shut off from means which
are both legitimate and effective. The compet-
itive order is maintained, but the frustrated
and handicapped individual who cannot
cope with this order drops out. Defeatism,
quietism and resignation are manifested in
escape mechanisms which ultimately lead the
individual to “escape” from the requirements
of the society. It is an expedient which arises
from continued failure to attain the goal by
legitimate measures and from an inability
to adopt the illegitimate route because of
internalized prohibitions and institutional-
ized compulsives, during which process the
supreme value of the success-goal has as yet
not been renounced . The confl ict is resolved
by eliminating both precipitating elements,
the goals and means. The escape is complete,
the confl ict is eliminated and the individual
is a socialized.
Be it noted that where frustration
derives from the inaccessibility of effective

SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND ANOMIE | 53
institutional means for attaining economic
or any other type of highly valued “success,”
that Adaptations II, III and V (innovation,
ritualism and rebellion) are also possible. The
result will be determined by the particular
personality and, thus, the particular cultural
background involved. Inadequate socializa-
tion will result in the innovation response
whereby the confl ict and frustration are
eliminated by relinquishing the institutional
means and retaining the success-aspiration;
an extreme assimilation of institutional
demands will lead to ritualism wherein the
goal is dropped as beyond one’s reach but
conformity to the mores persists and rebel-
lion occurs when emancipation from the
reigning standards, due to frustration or to
marginalist perspectives, leads to the attempt
to introduce a “new social order.”
NOTES
1. E.g., Ernest Jones, Social Aspects of Psychoanaly-
sis, 28, London, 1924. If the Freudian notion is a
variety of the “original sin” dogma, then the inter-
pretation advanced in this paper may be called the
doctrine of “socially derived sin.”
2. “Normal” in the sense of a culturally oriented, if
not approved, response. This statement does not
deny the relevance of biological and personality
differences which may be signifi cantly involved
in the incidence of deviate conduct. Our focus of
interest is the social and cultural matrix; hence we
abstract from other factors. It is in this sense, I take
it, that James S. Plant speaks of the “normal reac-
tion of normal people to abnormal conditions.”
See his Personality and the Cultural Pattern , 248,
New York, 1937.
3. Contemporary American culture has been said to
tend in this direction. See André Siegfried, Amer-
ica Comes of Age , 26–37, New York, 1927. The
alleged extreme emphasis on the goals of monetary
success and material prosperity leads to dominant
concern with technological and social instruments
designed to produce the desired result, inasmuch as
in situational controls become of secondary impor-
tance. In such a situation, innovation fl ourishes as
the range of means employed is broadened. In a
sense, then, there occurs the paradoxical emergence
of “materialists” from an “idealistic” orientation.
Cf. Durkheim’s analysis of the cultural conditions
which predispose toward crime and innovation,
both of which are aimed toward effi ciency, not
moral norms. Durkheim was one of the fi rst to see
that “contrairement aux idées courantes le criminel
n’apparait plus comme un être radicalement inso-
ciable, comme une sorte d’elément parasitaire, de
corps étranger et inassimilable, introduit au sein de
la société; c’est un agent régulier de la vie sociale.”
See Les Règles de la Méthode Sociologique , 86–89,
Paris, 1927.
4. Such ritualism may be associated with a mythology
which rationalizes these actions so that they appear
to retain their status as means, but the dominant
pressure is in the direction of strict ritualistic con-
formity, irrespective of such rationalizations. In
this sense, ritual has proceeded farthest when such
rationalizations are not even called forth.
5. In this connection, one may see the relevance of
Elton Mayo’s paraphrase of the title of Tawney’s
well-known book. “Actually the problem is not that
of the sickness of an acquisitive society; it is that of
the acquisitiveness of a sick society. ” Human Prob-
lems of an Industrial Civilization , 153, New York,
1933. Mayo deals with the process through which
wealth comes to be a symbol of social achievement.
He sees this as arising from a state of anomie. We
are considering the unintegrated monetary-success
goal as an element in producing anomie. A com-
plete analysis would involve both phases of this
system of interdependent variables.
6. It is unlikely that interiorized norms are com-
pletely eliminated. Whatever residuum persists
will induce personality tensions and confl ict. The
process involves a certain degree of ambivalence.
A manifest rejection of the institutional norms is
coupled with some latent retention of their emo-
tional correlates. “Guilt feelings,” “sense of sin,”
“pangs of conscience” are obvious manifestations
of this unrelieved tension; symbolic adherence to
the nominally repudiated values or rationaliza-
tions constitute a more subtle variety of tensional
release.
7. “Many,” and not all, unintegrated groups, for the
reason already mentioned. In groups where the
primary emphasis shifts to institutional means,
i.e., when the range of alternatives is very lim-
ited, the outcome is a type of ritualism rather than
anomie.
8. Money has several peculiarities which render it
particularly apt to become a symbol of prestige
divorced from institutional controls. As Simmel
emphasized, money is highly abstract and imper-
sonal. However acquired, through fraud or insti-
tutionally, it can be used to purchase the same
goods and services. The anonymity of metropoli-
tan culture, in conjunction with this peculiarity of
money, permits wealth, the sources of which may

| ROBERT K. MERTON54
be unknown to the community in which the pluto-
crat lives, to serve as a symbol of status.
9. The emphasis upon wealth as a success symbol is
possibly refl ected in the use of the term fortune to
refer to a stock of accumulated wealth. This mean-
ing becomes common in the late sixteenth century
(Spenser and Shakespeare). A similar usage of the
Latin fortuna comes into prominence during the fi rst
century B.C. Both these periods were marked by the
rise to prestige and power of the “bourgeoisie.”
10. See Kingsley Davis, “Mental Hygiene and the
Class Structure,” Psychiatry , 1928, I, esp. 62–63;
Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action ,
59–60, New York, 1937.
11. This is a level intermediate between the two
planes distinguished by Edward Sapir; namely,
culture patterns and personal habit systems. See
Edward Sapir, “Contribution of Psychiatry to an
Understanding of Behavior in Society,” Amer. J.
Sociol. , 1937, 42: 862–70.
12. This fi fth alternative is on a plane clearly different
from that of the others. It represents a transitional
response which seeks to institutionalize new pro-
cedures oriented toward revamped cultural goals
shared by the members of the society. It thus involves
efforts to change the existing structure rather than
to perform accommodative actions within this
structure and introduces additional problems with
which we are not at the moment concerned.
13. Obviously, this is an elliptical statement. These
individuals may maintain some orientation to the
values of their particular differentiated group-
ings within the larger society or, in part, of the
conventional society itself. Insofar as they do so,
their conduct cannot be classifi ed in the “passive
rejection” category (IV). Nels Anderson’s descrip-
tion of the behavior and attitudes of the bum, for
example, can readily be recast in terms of our ana-
lytical scheme. See The Hobo , 93–98, et passim ,
Chicago, 1923.

Homeboys, New Jacks, and Anomie
John M. Hagedorn
Q. Do you consider it wrong or immoral to
sell dope?
A. No
Q. Why not?
A. That’s the only upper hand . . . us black
folks have. The only jobs that are out
there is McDonalds, Burger King . . .
and Kentucky Fried Chicken. If you
have kids, that’s not going to cut it.
African American and Latino male gang
members are shown to have basically con-
ventional aspirations and values. Gang
drug dealing is explained as the innova-
tive response of young minority males to
blocked opportunity, rather than participa-
tion in a deviant, oppositional culture. The
data from an ongoing Milwaukee study
fi nds gang members adapting in patterned
ways to conventional American success
goals. Anomie theory is discussed as an
alternative to both cultural deviance theory
and the more prevalent social disorganiza-
tion approach.
Gangs are an increasingly important issue
in social research, refl ecting their stubborn
persistence in everyday life. One way to look
at criminological explanations of gangs is
to divide them between those who see gang
members as basically “different than us”
and those who see gang members as more
“similar to us,” to paraphrase Jerome Miller
(Pepinsky, 1991). Historically, most sociolo-
gists have been fi rmly in the “similar to us”
camp, oppose crude stereotypes, and have
supported social reform.
The Chicago School explained gang
behavior in the industrial era as resulting
from social disorganization. Gangs either
derived from a lack of controls over delin-
quent behavior (Thrasher, 1963), were the
product of a deviant subculture (Sutherland,
1934, or stemmed from both (Shaw and
McKay, 1969; Kornhauser, 1978). The Chi-
cago School ecological perspective sought
to humanize gang members by pointing out
that delinquency was the product of areas,
not ethnic groups. Shaw and McKay’s cul-
tural transmission perspective, further devel-
oped by Sutherland, claimed that conformity
to subcultural norms was not deviant but
“normal” for poor youth under certain con-
ditions. Chicagoans as a whole saw gang
members as basically poor neighborhood
kids who lacked institutional resources, were
improperly socialized, and were infl uenced
by other delinquents or adult criminals.
Later, Cloward and Ohlin (1960) merged
Sutherland’s differential association concept
with Merton’s anomie theory to provide a
third distinct perspective on gangs. This view
differed from social disorganization theory
mainly in its understanding of the etiology
of delinquency. Gang delinquency arose, not
simply from conformity to deviant norms,
faulty families, or lack of controls. Rather,
the fundamental source of law-breaking lay
in the frustrated desires of poor youth to

| JOHN M. HAGEDORN56
attain American cultural goals, especially the
goal of “success.”
Social disorganization, differential associ-
ation, and anomie theories have been similar,
however, in that they have historically sought
to humanize gang members and have pro-
vided support for progressive social policies.
Today there is a growing literature that
portrays gang members and drug dealers
as especially deviant, as having a separate
culture of poverty or violence which pushes
them to commit crime (e.g., Katz, 1988; San-
chez Jankowski, 1991; Sanders, 1994). These
perspectives are resurrecting aspects of Shaw
and McKay’s (1969) cultural deviance the-
ory along with culture of poverty concepts
propagated by Walter Miller (1958), who
asserted that lower-class gangs did not share
middle-class values. By characterizing Afri-
can American and Latino male gang mem-
bers as having separate values—i.e., being
“different than us”—these theories reinforce
popular stereotypes. While some who hold
this view are politically liberal and others
are conservative, both look at the under-
class from the perspective of those who are
shocked by its “aberrant” behavior and
desire stronger social controls.
This reading reports on research on the
conventional and deviant values of adult
drug dealing gang members in Milwaukee.
It builds on our earlier work (Hagedorn,
1994a), which typed gang members on a
continuum of conventionality: from con-
ventional “legits” and “homeboys” to more
deviant “dope fi ends” and “new jacks.” Our
interview data is examined for evidence of
deviant or conventional values on work and
violence and the relationship between fam-
ily structure and antisocial values. Where
cultural deviance theory would fi nd devi-
ant values, our research fi nds gang members
adapting in patterned ways to conventional
American success goals. 1
In Merton’s (1938) conception, inno-
vation (or crime) is one response of poor
people who are not able to conform to
conventional success goals by legitimate
means. Instead of being arenas for confl ict-
ing value systems (Shaw and McKay, 1969),
anomie theory would see poor communities
as places where residents embrace main-
stream values but react in patterned ways
to diffi culties in attaining success. Cloward
and Ohlin (1960) extended this view by
looking at different types of illegitimate
opportunity structures or varying condi-
tions under which innovators adapt to the
lack of jobs.
An updated anomie theory would logically
defi ne the current expansion of drug dealing
as the innovative response of young minority
males to blocked opportunity resulting from
economic restructuring. In underclass areas,
young women may have had access to wel-
fare, but young men have had few chances
at legitimate employment. Gang drug deal-
ers attempt to attain traditional success goals
through participation in an expanding infor-
mal economy. “Hustling,” in this view, is a
another form of “hard work” (Valentine,
1978). Mainstream values remain, but struc-
tural conditions create various innovative
behaviors, some of which are violent and
destructive (Hagedorn, 1994b).
Contrary to the cultural deviance or culture-
of-poverty perspective, anomie theory sees
gang violence as a variable, not a constant
(Cloward and Ohlin, 1960; Moore, 1993).
The sources of violence are to be found in the
conditions of the illegal economy, the frustra-
tions of minority lower-class youth, dysfunc-
tional families, as well as peer group rivalries
(Bernard, 1990; Reiss and Roth, 1993). For
Moore and Vigil (1987), gang members vary
in orientation to locura , or wild behavior, as
well as in family background and involvement
in drug sales. The gang as a whole is seen as
“trophocriminal,” or permissive of criminal-
ity and violence, not as invariably violent. But
while there is a weak gang “subculture,” most
gang members aspire to conventional success
goals and eventually settle down in “square”
lives (Moore, 1978; 1991). As Fagan (1989,

HOMEBOYS, NEW JACKS, AND ANOMIE | 57
p. 206) succinctly puts it, “Conventional val-
ues may coexist with deviant behavior for
inner city youths.”
In this vein, Anderson’s value-laden reac-
tion to the hustler who wants only to “get
over” and to seek “self-aggrandizement” can
be reconceptualized. Anomie theory would
see that behavior, in Durkheim’s sense, as
overconformity to the American goal of
success (see Messner and Rosenthal, 1994).
After all, what is more American than a
“glamorous life-style, fi ne clothes, and fancy
cars”? And are underclass African American
males, whom Anderson condemns for their
view of women as “so many conquests,” all
that different from males of other races and
classes? (see Lorber, 1994, p. 44).
Bourgois sees underclass men not as
victims but as people who resist a lack of
opportunity.
Nonetheless, street-level inner-city residents
are more than merely passive victims of his-
torical economic transformations or of the
institutionalized racism of a perverse political
and economic system. They do not passively
accept their fourth class citizen fate. The are
struggling determinedly—just as ruthlessly as
the railroad and oil robber barons of the last
century and the investment banker “yuppie”
of today—to earn money, demand dignity, and
lead meaningful lives. Tragically, it is the very
process of struggle against—yet within—the
system that exacerbates the trauma of their
community and destroys hundreds of thou-
sands of lives on the individual level. (Bourgois
1990, p. 627)
It is in this context that our earlier typology
of “homeboys, dope fi ends, legits, and new
jacks” is best viewed. Just as Merton looked
at fi ve universal adaptations to American
culture, each of these gang roles is a subtype
of innovative adaptation to racism and the
lack of good jobs. Similar to John Ogbu’s
(1991) coping mechanisms of African Amer-
ican students within schools that cannot pro-
duce equal opportunity, gang members react
in patterned ways to the lack of legitimate
employment and racism. A very few “go
legit” and escape the ghetto (“legits”); many
blame themselves for failure and abuse alco-
hol or drugs (“dope fi ends”); some “over-
conform” and live out exaggerated fantasies
of the success they believe rich white people
enjoy (“new jacks”); and most go in and
out of drug selling, aspiring to the Ameri-
can dream of success, alternating between
jobs in the legitimate and illegitimate world
(“homeboys”). New jacks despise legitimate
work and display the outlook of “gangsta”
rap groups such as NWA who taunt, “It’s
not about a salary, it’s all about reality.”
Homeboys, on the other hand, spend more
time working “legit” jobs than selling dope.
While some may consider new jacks particu-
larly deviant, they also can be conceptualized
as attempting to attain mainstream cultural
goals of success and money “by any means
necessary.” This is quite close to Durkheim’s
original meaning of the word “anomie.”
These roles adopted by adult male gang
members do not represent internalized norms,
nor an oppositional culture. They are neither
stable nor mechanistically determined by fam-
ily background. They are various lifestyles or
coping mechanisms based on changing expe-
riences of gang members as adolescents and
as young adults. Many gang members go
through “new jack” and “dope fi end” phases
during their youthful years, with predictable
behavior patterns. Violence, in an anomic
perspective, should not be evenly distributed
within the gang but is both situational (i.e., it
is “aleatory”—Short and Strodtbeck, 1965)
and should be related to the “new jack”
phase of behavior.
An updated anomie theory would look
at the relative stability of American culture,
and its pervasive infl uence on all sectors of
the population, including the underclass.
As Kornhauser (1978, p. 7) points out,
social structure changes rapidly, but culture
changes more slowly. While culture is vari-
ably strong or weak, it is also important to

| JOHN M. HAGEDORN58
distinguish cultural adaptation from other
learned behavior or “culture will always be
the sole cause of behavior” (pp. 9–10). It is
the inability of gang members to live up to
mainstream cultural mandates—basically
due to the inequities of the social structure—
that causes innovative behavior, not the
sudden adoption of a new “culture.” As
Kornhauser (1978, p. 15) concludes:
Human beings are so constituted that they do
not knowingly construct cultural values from
experiences that are obviously destructive of
self or society.
Both cultural deviance and social disorga-
nization theory stress aberrant behavior as
the consequence of the adoption of opposi-
tional and deviant values. While most social
disorganization theorists see the origin of an
antisocial value system as lying in joblessness
and social isolation, the implication is that
those new “old heads” are quite bad people,
culturally “different than us.” An anomic
perspective, on the other hand, understands
violent and antisocial underclass behavior as
patterned reactions to the frustration of con-
ventional aspirations in a world with severe
economic constraints and racial discrimina-
tion. Anomie theory is one way of empha-
sizing the common humanity of underclass
gang members by looking at the world as
they see it and fi nding familiar and under-
standable reactions.
This reading explores how gang members
vary in their orientation to conventionality
and the implications of such variation for
involvement in violence. It addresses the
question of whether most gang members
fundamentally hold on to mainstream Amer-
ican cultural values or have adopted deviant
oppositional values.
METHODS
The data this article is based on were drawn
from the fi rst part of a fi ve-year National
Institute on Drug Abuse study of male and
female gang members, their drug use, and
dealing. Taped interviews with 90 males
and 11 females took place in 1992 and 1993.
Sixty percent were African American, 37%
Latino, and 3% white. The mean age was 28.
All respondents were founding members of
their gangs and were interviewed only if their
name was confi rmed as being on a roster of
gang members, developed by staff and other
gang members. Each respondent was paid
$50 for the interview. Further interviews of
73 female gang founders took place in 1995.
The study followed the collaborative
model developed by Joan Moore (1978), a
coprincipal investigator of the study. “Com-
munity researchers,” former gang members
on the staff of the Drug Posse Study, con-
ducted most of the interviews with gang
members with whom they grew up. Staff
helped focus the research design, worked
with academics to write interview questions,
and were trained in interview techniques.
Data were coded collaboratively by gang
and academic staff, entered into a computer
statistical analysis program (SPSS TM ) and a
qualitative analysis program (Foloviews TM ),
and analyzed. This and all other articles pro-
duced by the study were discussed by staff
and their conclusions fed back to respon-
dents for a validity check. Our earlier article
reported more fully on the work and drug-
selling history of our respondents (Hage-
dorn, 1994a).
To assess the hypothesis derived from
qualitative analysis of the existence of a con-
tinuum of conventionality within the gang,
an index was created out of thirteen ques-
tions which gave clear-cut deviant—“new
jack”—attitudinal responses. For example, a
“new jack” response to the question of what
a gang member most regretted in his life was
“that he regretted being caught,” or he should
have tried harder to get away with more
criminal behavior. By contrast, “homeboy”
responses were mainly regretting “dropping
out of school” or “ever using cocaine.” The

HOMEBOYS, NEW JACKS, AND ANOMIE | 59
New Jack Attitudinal Index is an unweighted
count of “new jack” responses across all
thirteen items. In other words, we added the
number of times a respondent answered one
of the questions in a “new jack” manner and
that total number was the respondent’s “new
jack” score. The intercorrelations between
the several component variables compris-
ing the new jack index were reliably high,
the alpha statistic value calculated at .8690.
Independent designations by staff of their
respondents as “homeboys” or “new jacks”
were also signifi cantly correlated with our
index (p < .05). While most prior research has questioned the link between dysfunctional families and gang membership (e.g., Short and Strodt- beck, 1965; Moore, 1991), others argue that modern gangs come from extremely dis- tressed families (Yablonsky, 1959; Fleisher, 1995). The effects of deindustrialization might indicate gang members are now com- ing disproportionately from families with intergenerational gang links or a long history of drug abuse or street life. To test that notion, we created a street family index combining responses to thirteen questions we believed indicated a “street orientation.” These questions centered on parental history of hustling, attitudes toward gang membership, and drug abuse. For exam- ple, someone from a street-oriented family would respond that a father or mother had hustled for a living while he was growing up and the family knew about the hustling and approved of it. By contrast, gang members from a more conventional family would indi- cate no history of hustling by the father or mother, or if one parent did hustle, the family disapproved. Three family types were then deduced from the distribution. 2 The inter- correlations between the several component variables comprising the street family index were also high, with alpha at .7114. Finally, we recoded the responses to our questions about violence to create two indices, one representing gang or drug sales-related (“instrumental”) violence and the other all other violence (“expressive”), following the accepted typology used by the Blocks (1995). The index was a count of all instrumental or expressive violence over nine possible items. Respondents had described the last three incidents of fi ghting they had participated in, the last three times they were shot at, and the last three people they had personally seen killed. We open-coded each of their explana- tions and then recoded those nine possible responses as either expressive or instrumen- tal. For example, a typical “expressive” vio- lent act might be a respondent who was shot at during a brawl at a bar or on a corner in a jealous rage over a woman. The respondent likely was high from drinking and the fi ght unrelated to gangs or drug sales. These fi ghts were colorfully called by our staff “40-ounce fi ghts,” describing the crazy actions of peo- ple after they have drunk beer from 40-ounce containers (see Oliver, 1994). By contrast, a fi ght in a bar or corner because the respon- dent was accosted by a rival gang member would be coded “instrumental.” So would violence that occurs between a drug seller and a dope fi end who threatens to call police. A set of theoretically derived questions were then asked, mainly related to Goldstein’s (1985) tripartite typology of drug-related violence, eliciting further details about each incident. We also asked each respondent to report the number of times he had ever been shot at and the number of people the respondent had personally seen killed. (Note that our use of “instrumental,” including violence dependent on the respondent’s gang status, differs from Goldstein’s more nar- row drug-market related “systemic” term.) The intercorrelations between the several component variables comprising the Instru- mental Violence Index had an alpha of .6037 and for the Expressive Violence Index, an alpha of .5195 (the lower alpha represents the wide variety of noninstrumental vio- lence). We also included as indicators of vio- lence the reported total number of times the Figure 7.1 “New Jack” and “Homeboy” Response to Thirteen Questions Comprising the New Jack Attitude Index Question New Jack Response Homeboy Response A 25, 26. Looking back over the past fi ve years, what major changes took place in your life— things that happened that really made things diff erent for you? Didn’t change. Still gang banging. Got a family, I got shot or friends or relatives got shot or killed, or I went to jail and I changed. Did too many drugs. Matured, grew up, went through stages. B8. How has your involvement with gangs changed since you were a teenager? I’m into it still the same or I’m more into it. Less into it or not at all into it. B36. Why do you keep selling dope? Why not just get any kind of straight job and work your way up the ladder? I didn’t want a job. Money was too good to quit, a good job was too hard to fi nd; I considered drug sales a job, I wanted to buy lots of things. B97. What happens when someone thinks you sold them bad dope or got shorted? I won’t give anything to complainers, people who say that are bullshitting and I won’t do anything for them (respondent gets upset). Never happened to me because I don’t sell bad dope. I reason with them, fi nd out the problem and straighten it out. I don’t want them to call the cops. B122. Do you consider it wrong or immoral to sell dope? No. Yes. C48. How much respect does selling drugs give you? And Quite a bit or a lot. None or not much. C49. How much power does selling drugs give you? And C50. How much pride does selling drugs give you? (Four and fi ve on a scale of one to fi ve with one being not at all and fi ve being a lot.) (One and two on a scale of one to fi ve with one being not at all and fi ve being a lot.) D70. If you could change one thing about your life when you were growing up, what would it be? Be more deviant, not lose all the money, not get caught. Stay in school, stay away from drugs, listen to my parents, have better morals, get better jobs, have more self-esteem, stay out of jail. G15. If you were chief of police, how would you enforce the laws against drug use and selling? Are there some things you would do diff erently than the police are doing now? I wouldn’t be a cop, I can’t even see myself as a cop. Crackdown on dealers, on the Cartels, corrupt politicians and police, have more drug treatment. Talk to people not just arrest them, legalize it, have more jobs. H2. Five years from now, what would you want to be doing? And H3. What do you realistically expect you’ll be doing in fi ve years? Prison, dead, fucking off , same ol’ same ol’. Working, married, settled down, own my own business, can’t see that far, I take things day by day, win the lottery, help the community. HOMEBOYS, NEW JACKS, AND ANOMIE | 61 Figure 7.2 Street-Oriented and More Conventional Responses to Thirteen Questions Comprising the Street-oriented Family Index Question Street-oriented Family Response More Conventional Family Response D2, D10. What was your father’s (mother’s) occupation when you were growing up? hustler, informal economy any other job D5, D13. Did your father (mother) ever hustle? yes no D7, D15. Did your family know about it (father or mother’s hustling) at the time? yes no or not applicable D8, D16. Did your family approve of your father’s (mother’s) hustles? yes no or not applicable D33. What did they think about it? (respondent’s involvement in a gang) approval disapproval D51. When you were growing up, how many relatives did you know who were hustling? more than three none, one, or two D55. Was anyone in your home a heavy drug user when you were growing up? yes no D56. Who was that? (heavy drug user) D69. Did you hear about gangs fi rst from friends or from someone in your family? father or mother; or more than one relative named from family none, or named only one relative and not father or mother from friends respondent said he was shot at and the total number of people the respondent said he had personally seen killed. Cultural deviance theory would predict that “hard-core” gang members like those in our study would give a distribution of answers on our New Jack Attitudinal Index with little variation, answering most of the thirteen questions with a “new jack” response. Our hypothesis was that (1) there would be substantial variation and (2) that most questions would not get a “new jack” response. We also expected similar variation in “street” responses to our thirteen family questions, and we did not believe family type would be associated with violence or new jack attitudes. Finally, we did not expect new jack attitudes to predict expressive violence, arrests, or other criminal behavior, since all gang members experience strain as a result of frustrated ambitions to be successful, almost all sell drugs, and all experience the related ills of underclass life. However, we thought new jacks, with their “don’t give a damn” attitude, would be more involved with gang and drug-related, i.e., instrumental, violence. RESULTS The distribution on responses to the “new jack” questions was in the predicted direc- tion. Out of thirteen questions indicating deviance, no one gave more than seven “new jack” responses. The distribution was highly skewed to the conventional end, with 91% of the respondents giving fi ve or fewer “new jack” answers with an overall mean of 2.7. Most respondents, for example, indicated they had matured out of the gang, consid- ered drug dealing “immoral” but neces- sary for survival, regretted dropping out of school, and expected to have a settled-down life within the next fi ve years. Thus, our data | JOHN M. HAGEDORN62 give little support to the notion that under- class gang members share strongly deviant values or possess a consistently deviant value system. 3 . . . our data give little support to the notion that underclass gang members share strongly deviant values or possess a consistently deviant value system. The distribution on answers to questions indicating a street orientation of the respon- dent’s family of origin was somewhat sur- prising. There were twenty-three respondents who gave no answers that would indicate their families had a street orientation. This indicates about a quarter of our sample had very conventional families, i.e., working par- ents, no drug or alcohol use, and no prior gang involvement. Another quarter of our sample gave fi ve or more “street” answers, generally indicating some family history of hustling and either gang involvement or drug abuse. The mean number of “street” responses was 2.49, with 95% of the respondents giving seven or fewer “street” responses. About half of the sample, we concluded, had a mixed orientation, with one to four “street” answers. This indicated that their families had some street characteristics but more conventional ones. This is consistent with our thesis that many of these families may have escaped problems in other cit- ies to migrate to Milwaukee or had been previously relatively stable and were not especially “troubled families.” Deindustri- alization in the 1980s created severe diffi - culties for families whose children were less likely to gain access to family-supporting industrial jobs. Also consistent with our prediction, new jack attitudes had only a weak nonsignifi cant association with the extent to which a family was oriented to the streets. Neither was fam- ily type related to months worked or months a respondent supported himself by hustling. While cultural deviance theories might imply that gang members are likely to come from families with a strong street culture, less than a quarter of our respondents could be seen as having been socialized to the streets by their families. . . . less than a quarter of our respondents could be seen as having been socialized to the streets by their families. 0 N u m b er o f R es p on d en ts more conventional Number of “New Jack” Responses to 13 Questions 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 more deviant Figure 7.3 Distribution of New Jack Responses HOMEBOYS, NEW JACKS, AND ANOMIE | 63 New jack attitudes were also signifi cantly negatively correlated with number of months the respondent held a legitimate job (−.2630; p < .05) and nearly signifi cantly associated with number of months the respondent sup- ported himself on “streetfunds” (.2191), mainly selling dope. New jack attitudes have a slight negative association with arrests for drugs (–.1938), despite more consistent involvement of new jacks with drug sales. As expected, there was considerable varia- tion in violence. Violence by gang members was as likely to be instrumental (44.4%) as expressive (43.8%). But rather than violence being normally distributed within the gang, new jack attitudes were signifi cantly correlated with instrumental violence (.2575. p = .014). New jack attitudes were highly correlated with exposure to violence, i.e., the number of times the respondent was shot at and the num- ber of people the respondent had personally seen killed. 4 However, new jack attitudes had little association with overall violence (.1567), arrests, or expressive violence (.1019). One in every eight shootings were described as motivated by a respondent using a gun because “ the drugs were all gone. ” There was also considerable variation between the reasons for fi st fi ghts, shooting incidents, and homicides. While half of all violence was instrumental, less than a quar- ter of the last three fi st fi ghts described by our respondents were gang or drug-related. At least a third of the fi ghts took place while either the respondent or his antagonist were “high” on drugs or alcohol. The modal fi st fi ght was a “40-ounce fi ght” at a bar, or over a domestic matter, typically a dispute about a woman (62%). This distribution changes when we view violence with guns. The majority of the times Figure 7.4 Distribution of Street-oriented Responses on Family Index 5 10 15 20 25 0 N u m b er o f R es p on d en ts more conventional Number of Street-oriented Responses to 13 Questions 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 more deviant Declining 52% Street 22% Conventional 26% Figure 7.5 Orientations of Ninety Gang Families | JOHN M. HAGEDORN64 a respondent was shot at were gang related affairs. One in every eight shootings were described as motivated by a respondent using a gun because “the drugs were all gone.” This refers to Goldstein’s (1985, p. 495) psychopharmacological state or the agitated state of cocaine users after someone comes down from a crack high. On the other hand, only 5% of the shootings were in Goldstein’s “systemic” and “economic” categories com- bined—shooting either as a result of a “deal gone bad” or of “ripping off to get drugs.” Still, more than a quarter of shooting inci- dents were related to 40-ounce fi ghts or other domestic disputes, more than twice the number of shootings related to drug sales. 5 Family type was not signifi cantly associ- ated with either instrumental or expressive violence. There is a signifi cant correlation between number of times shot at and street families, indicating some infl uences from exposure to violence in street families and violence by their children. DISCUSSION This study cannot be generalized to gangs in other regions or cities. The fi ndings need to be taken as suggestive and compared with the fi ndings of others in cities with recent gang problems as well as cities where gangs have long been entrenched (Spergel and Curry, 1990). Unfortunately, few recent studies have probed gang members’ attitudes and allowed them to explain their actions in great detail. My linking of anomie theory with an empirical analysis as an “orient- ing theory” (Strauss, 1987) hopefully will prompt renewed theoretical debate. Our data fi nd adult gang members to have values in common with other Americans, in the classic humanizing tradition of sociology (Short and Strodtbeck, 1965). Our fi nding that gang members are “like us,” is where we part company from some other perspectives. Cultural deviance theories, like those of Jack Katz and Walter Miller, stress how different gang members are from “respectables” and that deviant values have been deeply inter- nalized. Our data cannot support such a notion. The data in this article show most hard-core adult Milwaukee gang members clearly hold conventional values, and our previous work shows how “homeboys”go in and out of legitimate work and want to settle down (Hagedorn, 1994a). Their departures from conventional behavior can be more easily explained by blocked oppor- tunity than by reference to criminal values or poorly socialized families. Thus, our fi nd- ings are more optimistic than the pessimistic assertions of cultural deviance theory, which deny that simple changes in opportunity structures—i.e., more good jobs and less racial discrimination—would go very far in solving our country’s gang or drug problems. Our data fi nd adult gang members to have val- ues in common with other Americans, in the classic humanizing tradition of sociology . . . Violence itself, we found, is not an invari- able or immutable characteristic of all gang members but is related both to situations and the new jack lifestyle. Those gang members with a new jack attitude are more likely to use violence to settle disputes over drugs or engage in gang warfare. This is consis- tent with Moore’s (1991, p. 62) fi nding that gang cliques with a high number of deaths were related to the number of gang mem- bers who considered themselves as “loco” or “muy loco” while in the gang. Violence, in our data, is not strongly related to the socialization of children to the streets. Our fi ndings imply that new jacks may be more likely to be a product of expo- sure to violence as children, teens, and adults, as well as perpetrators of violence. New jack attitudes and accompanying street violence may be less a determined outcome from poorly socialized families than the compli- cated product of random events in adolescent HOMEBOYS, NEW JACKS, AND ANOMIE | 65 and young adult years or in the hazardous dope game. This adds support for those who would stress the effi cacy of interventions in adolescence and in the adult years as well as early childhood programs (Sampson and Laub, 1993). New jack attitudes are held by only a minority of Milwaukee’s adult gang mem- bers. Our study has found that many gang members go through a “new jack” phase where they are involved with amoral con- duct and gang and drug-related violence and then mature, with underlying conven- tional values reemerging. Outrageous state- ments and behavior may often be “poses” for outsiders—like reporters or researchers— rather than deeply held attitudes (Majors and Billson, 1992; Hagedorn, 1996). “New jack” attitudes may be more a role held by some during the teenage years, and shed as they grow up, along with violence and reckless conduct. With Kornhauser (1978, p. 10), I do not label such behavior “cultural” but see it as a form of learned social behavior, more easily undone. The conventional values of Milwaukee gang members indicate their com- mitment to the dominant American culture. Shaw and McKay’s view of a coherent op positional value system, currently articu- lated by Anderson, is not supported by our data. I do not fi nd the source of new jack behavior in “oppositional values” or in a new “amoral culture.” Several of our best “community researchers,” for example, cat- egorized themselves as having been “new jacks” when on the streets, but now, over time and with the opportunity of a good job, they have changed. Anderson’s description in a magazine article about “less alienated gang members” who “slip back and forth between decent and street behavior” (1994, p. 94) describes the vast majority of our population of “hard-core” Milwaukee gang members. Things may be different in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, but we lack comparable data. Anomie theory is an obvious approach to explain the expansion of drug deal- ing in these times of economic restructur- ing. Nearly all Milwaukee gang members, including some of those we classifi ed as “legits,” engaged in some drug dealing in the absence of good jobs. If gang members have underlying conventional values, then we can conceptualize even new jack behav- ior not as representing oppositional values but either as a “stretched” conventional ori- entation (Liebow, 1967; Rodman, 1963) or TABLE 7.1 Correlation Coeffi cients Variables New Jack Index Street Family Index Times Shot At Persons Seen Killed Instrumental Violence Expressive Violence New Jack Index 1.0000 .1677 .3272** .3067** .2575* .1019 Street Family Index .1677 1.0000 .2686* .0654 .0652 .0842 Times Shot At .3272** .2686* 1.0000 .2754* .1256 .2877* Persons Seen Killed .3067** .0654 .2754* 1.0000 .3973** .3284** Instrumental Violence .2575* .0652 .1256 .3973** 1.0000 .2262 Expressive Violence .1019 .0842 .2877* .3284** .2262 1.0000 Notes: *– Signif. LE .05 **– Signif. LE .01 (2–tailed) | JOHN M. HAGEDORN66 as “overconformity” to the American goal of success. Some gang and drug violence may be related to the perceived unfairness of the system, especially by those who have, at least for a time, given up trying to conform (Levi, 1980; Reiss and Roth, 1993). 6 This study shares with Wilson and Samp- son (1995) a sociological understanding of gang behavior as a product of macroeco- nomic forces and ecological processes. We share a common response of “more good jobs” as an underlying solution. We may dif- fer, however, on the nature of the values of most of those who engage in illicit behavior. Characterizing differences within poor com- munities as the result of value confl ict runs the risk of labeling all young men and women who engage in alternative means of economic livelihood—e.g., drug dealing—as holding oppositional values, which is not what this study has found. Those who theoretically divide poor communities into “deviant” and “conventional” in the Shaw and McKay tra- dition may inadvertently open the door for more prison building, not social reconstruc- tion (Hagedorn, 1988; Tonry, 1995). The approach of our study, however, is similar in one way to Clifford Shaw’s. He was a strong opponent of those who would impose outside solutions on communities and hired gang members to work in the Chi- cago Area Project (see Short, 1969). In these times of inner-city joblessness and cutbacks in social programs, we need more criminol- ogists who see gang members as “more like us” and include them and other underclass residents as participants in research. As sociologists, we need to theoretically con- front those cultural deviance theories that demonize poor minority young men who have been frustrated in their attempts to have a decent life. Finally, like Shaw, as citi- zens we need to work with gang members and others in the underclass in fi ghting for a decent life and solving the problems in poor neighborhoods. NOTES 1. This reading mainly critiques the cultural deviance approach for African American and Latino males. I believe the nature of blocked opportunity, as well as the response of female gangs to it, differs sig- nifi cantly from the nature of blocked opportunity and the response to it by males (see Cloward and Piven, 1979; Leonard, 1983; Hagedorn and Devitt, 1996). 2. From the qualitative data, we hypothesized three types of families: (1) street families with histories of hustling, gang activity, and drug and alcohol abuse; (2) conventional families which had no his- tory of street activities; and (3) a declining family type. This latter type was hypothesized as standing between street and conventional families and rep- resenting families with a few problems who may have moved to Milwaukee to escape them and/ or to fi nd economic opportunity. The category of “declining families” is consistent with the mac- roeconomic perspective of William Julius Wilson (1985; 1987), who found disruptive effects of dein- dustrialization on previously stable families. Many African American and Puerto Rican families moved to Milwaukee to escape deteriorating conditions in Chicago, New York, Detroit, and elsewhere (Hagedorn, 1988). Once in Milwaukee, the 1980s brought economic calamity, a school desegregation plan which loosened ties to neighborhoods (Leake and Faltz, 1993), and a new gang formation. The category may also apply to previously stable fami- lies who had lived in Milwaukee for generations. 3. One other incidental note about gang norms. If one measure of the strength of gang norms is the number of times a gang member was bailed out of jail by his homeboys, there appears to be little gang solidarity. Out of 250 reported arrests where the respondent was jailed, only 3 times did gang mem- bers say their homeboys bailed them out, compared to 68 times by family or girl friends and 113 times where the respondent “just sat.” Apparently those who think the gang represents a coherent value system are referring to gang rhetoric which is not refl ected in what would seem to be the most basic action, to get one’s homeboy out of jail. 4. Gang member were shot at a mean of 7.9 times with a median of 4.0. A quarter of the sample reported being shot at once (8) or not at all (9). Gang members reported seeing a mean of 2.1 people killed, with a median of 1.0. A third of the sample reported never having seen anyone killed. 5. Exposure to homicides presented a more mixed bag. Drug-related deaths were almost a quarter of all reports of “people you have personally seen HOMEBOYS, NEW JACKS, AND ANOMIE | 67 killed.” This total is fewer than killings from 40-ounce fi ghts (38%), but more than gang- related killings (18%), which is still a higher percentage than the Blocks’ (1995) fi ndings in Chicago. Interestingly, one in six killings were described as being due to the psychopharmaco- logical state of the killer, i.e., “because the drugs were all gone.” This is consistent with some published fi ndings from Goldstein (1987) but contrary to the assumptions of his tripartite con- ceptual framework (1985). 6. In that context, it is interesting to note that among gang members arrests for violence, property crimes, and drugs are not associated with new jack attitudes. In fact, gang members with a homeboy outlook are slightly more likely than new jacks to be arrested for drug offenses. The war on drugs thus increases the diffi culties of homeboys to settle down, encourages a view of the criminal justice system as arbitrary and unfair, and in that way may encourage violent rage at a racist “system.” REFERENCES Anderson, E. (1990). Streetwise: Race, class, and Change in an Urban Community . Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press. ———. (1994), “The Code of the Streets.” The Atlantic Monthly , 81–94. Bernard, T. J. (1990). “Angry Aggression among the Truly Disadvantaged.” Criminology , 73 –95. Block, C. R., and Block, R. (1995). “Street Gang Crime in Chicago.” In M. Klein, C. Maxson, and J. Miller (Eds.), The Modern Gang Reader. Los Angeles: Roxbury. Bourgois, P. (1990). “In Search of Horatio Alger: Cul- ture and Ideology in the Crack Economy.” Contem- porary Drug Problems 16, 619–649. Cloward, R., and Ohlin, L. (1960). Delinquency and Opportunity . Glencoe, Ill: Free Press. Cloward, R. A., and Piven, F. F. 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Spergel , I. A., and Curry, G. D. (1990). “Strategies and Perceived Agency Effectiveness in Dealing with the Youth Gang Problem.” In R. Huff (Ed.), Gangs in America . Beverly Hills: Sage. Strauss, A. L. (1987). Qualitative Analysis for Social Sci- entists . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sutherland, E. H. (1934). Principles of Criminology . Chicago: J. B. Lippencott Company. Taylor, C. (1989). “Dangerous Society.” East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Thrasher, F. (1963). The Gang . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tonry, M. (1995). Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment in America . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Valentine, B. L. (1978). Hustling and Other Hard Work . Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Valentine, C. A. (1968). Culture and Poverty . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wilson, W. J. (1978). The Declining Signifi cance of Race . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. (1985). “Cycles of Deprivation and the Under- class Debate.” Social Service Review , 59(4), 541–559. ———. (1987). The Truly Disadvantaged . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. (1996). When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor . New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Wilson, W . J., and Sampson, R. J. (1995). “Toward a Theory of Race, Crime, and Urban Inequality.” In J. Hagan and R. D. Peterson (Eds.), Crime and Inequal- ity . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Yablonsky, L. (1959). “The Delinquent Gang as Near- Group.” Social Problems , 7(2), 108–117. A General Strain Theory of Community Differences in Crime Rates Robert Agnew Several major theories attempt to explain community differences in crime rates. Crime rates are an aggregation of individual crimi- nal acts, so these theories essentially describe how community-level variables affect indi- vidual criminal behavior. In the words of Coleman (1990), the focus is on the “move- ment from macro to micro.” It is no sur- prise, then, that these theories explicitly or implicitly draw on microtheories when they explain how community-level variables lead individuals to engage in crime (and thereby produce crime rates). Social disorganization theory draws on social control theory, with disorganization theorists pointing to those community characteristics that ultimately reduce the level of social control to which individuals are subject. Subcultural devi- ance theory draws on differential associa- tion/social-learning theory, with subcultural theorists arguing that community values and norms lead some individuals to defi ne crime as a desirable or justifi able response in certain situations. Relative deprivation theory draws on Merton’s (1938) version of strain theory, with deprivation theo- rists arguing that high levels of income or socioeconomic inequality lead some indi- viduals to experience strain or frustration. This reading draws on Agnew’s (1992) gen- eral strain theory (GST) to offer another explanation for community differences in crime rates. This explanation encompasses relative deprivation theory but goes beyond this theory by describing additional ways in which community characteristics may gen- erate strain and foster criminal responses to such strain. Community is broadly defi ned to include areas of settlement from the block level to standard metropolitan statistical areas (SMSAs). With certain noted exceptions, the theory is best tested with data from smaller areas, such as “face-blocks” and “nominal communities” (see Bursik and Grasmick 1993). These areas are more homogeneous in terms of most of the independent and intervening variables described in this arti- cle. At the same time, there are gross dif- ferences in the independent and intervening variables between larger aggregates. As such, the theory can also partly explain differ- ences in crime rates across units like cities, SMSAs, and beyond (see Linsky, Bachman, and Straus 1995). The reading begins with a brief overview of previous research and theories on com- munity differences in crime rates—including neighborhood, city, and SMSA differences. The GST is then presented. There is a dis- cussion of the ways in which community- level variables contribute to strain, including the failure to achieve positively valued goals and the loss of positive stimuli/presenta- tion of negative stimuli. The ways in which community- level variables condition the impact of strain on crime are then examined. I note the existence of evidence compatible | ROBERT AGNEW70 with GST and point to ways in which GST may be tested. AN OVERVIEW OF THE GST OF COMMUNITY DIFFERENCES IN CRIME RATES GST argues that strain or stress is a major source of criminal motivation. The theory explains community differences in crime by community differences in strain and in those factors that condition the effect of strain on crime. In particular, high-crime communities are more likely to select and retain strained individuals, produce strain, and foster crimi- nal responses to strain. The idea that communities may cause crime through the strain they produce is not new. It is at the heart of relative depri- vation theory, and it is a central idea in the theories advanced by Bernard (1990), Hagan (1994), Hagan and McCarthy (1997a), Har- vey (1986), Hawkins (1983), Linsky et al. (1995), and numerous confl ict theorists. It is also one of the central arguments of Thrasher (1927) and Shaw and McKay (1942; also see Gold 1987), the theorists most closely asso- ciated with the development of social disor- ganization theory. These theorists indicate that slum communities contribute to several types of strain, most notably the failure to achieve economic goals. The strain elements of Shaw and McKay, however, were cut from their theory by Kornhauser (1978) and oth- ers in an effort to construct a pure social dis- organization theory. Although a number of researchers have attempted to explain community differences in crime in terms of strain, such attempts have not considered fully the different ways in which communities may promote strain and the ways in which they may condi- tion the effect of strain on crime. This may explain why certain prominent research- ers claim that strain theory has little role to play in the explanation of community differences in crime rates (e.g., Sampson and Wilson 1995: 45). The GST explanation that follows draws heavily on the work of the above-mentioned theorists and on the communities and crime research to more fully specify the community-level sources of strain and the community-level factors that condition the impact of strain on crime. A simplifi ed model of the GST explana- tion is shown in Figure 8.1 . The left side of the model shows those community charac- teristics that are associated with higher crime rates. These characteristics contribute to strain and the reaction to strain in several ways. 1. Selection and retention of strained individuals. Communities with these characteristics, especially deprived com- munities, are more likely to select for and retain strained individuals. Strained individuals, especially those experienc- ing economic strain, are more likely to move into deprived communities because they cannot afford to live elsewhere and because community residents are less able to resist their migration (Reiss 1993). Furthermore, strained individuals are less able to move out of these com - munities than nonstrained individuals. Nonstrained individuals, in fact, may deliberately migrate to other communi- ties (e.g., Anderson 1990; Bursik 1986a; Farrington 1993; Liska and Bellair 1995; Morenoff and Sampson 1997; Reiss 1986, 1993; Stark 1987; Wilson 1987, 1996). GST, however, argues that these communities are higher in crime not only because they are more likely to attract and hold strained individuals but also because they cause strain. 2. The failure to achieve positively valued goals. Communities with these charac- teristics are more likely to cause goal blockage—the fi rst type of strain in GST. In particular, such communities lead individuals to place a strong emphasis A GENERAL STRAIN THEORY OF COMMUNITY DIFFERENCES IN CRIME RATES | 71 on certain goals and make it more diffi - cult for individuals to achieve these goals through legitimate channels. Three goals are emphasized: money, status/respect, and the desire to be treated in a just or nondiscriminatory manner. 3. Relative deprivation. These commu- nity characteristics not only increase one’s absolute level of goal blockage but also increase one’s feeling of rela- tive deprivation. In particular, these and certain other community characteristics infl uence whether individuals compare themselves to advantaged others, decide that they want and deserve what these others have, and decide that they can- not get what these others have through legitimate channels. An effort is made to extend relative deprivation theory to shed light on the mixed results of past research. 4. The loss of positive stimuli/presentation of negative stimuli. These community characteristics increase the other two types of strain in GST: the loss of positive stimuli and the presentation of negative stimuli. In particular, these community characteristics (1) increase the sensitivity of residents to certain types of aversive stimuli and (2) increase the likelihood that residents will be exposed to aversive stim- uli. Several types of aversive stimuli are considered, including economic depriva- tion, family disruption and its correlates like child abuse, signs of incivility, social cleavages, and “vicarious strain.” 5. Aggregate levels of negative affect. Goal blockage, relative deprivation, and exposure to aversive stimuli increase the likelihood that community residents will experience a range of negative emotions, including anger and frustration. Aggre- gated levels of anger/frustration should have a direct effect on crime rates and should partly mediate the effect of com- munity characteristics on crime rates (community characteristics may also affect crime rates for reasons related to social control and social learning theories). 6. Increasing the frequency of interac- tion with angry/frustrated individuals. These community characteristics not only produce angry/frustrated indi- viduals but also increase the likelihood that such individuals will interact with one another. This further increases the level of strain/anger in the community, because these individuals are more likely to mistreat and get into confl icts with one another. 7. Increasing the likelihood of a criminal response to strain. These community characteristics infl uence several factors that increase the likelihood that indi- viduals will react to strain with anger/ frustration and crime. These factors, in particular, condition the effect of strain on anger/frustration and crime. 8. Community crime rates have a direct and an indirect effect on strain. The high rate of crime that results from the above processes functions as a major source of strain in itself. Criminal victimization, in fact, is one of the most serious types of strain to which individuals are subject, and data suggest that it is a major source of subsequent crime (Dawkins 1997). Fur- thermore, certain data suggest that high crime rates lead to a further deteriora- tion in community characteristics. Crime prompts many individuals— especially those with economic resources—to fl ee the community. And crime undermines relationships among those who remain in the community (see Bursik 1986a; Liska and Bellair 1995; Morenoff and Samp- son 1997; Reiss 1986, 1993; Sampson and Lauritsen 1993). The result is an amplifying loop. Deprived communi- ties generate strain and crime, whereas crime contributes to a further dete- rioration in the community and more strain. | ROBERT AGNEW72 The key portions of the GST explanation focus on the effect of community character- istics on individual strain (arguments 2 to 4 and 6). It should be noted that community characteristics might have both a direct and an indirect effect on individual strain. Direct effects are not mediated by individual traits or characteristics of the individual’s immediate social environment (e.g., family, school, work, peer group). To illustrate, imagine two indi- viduals who are identical in all ways, except that one lives in a deprived community of the type described above and the other does not. The individual in the deprived community will experience more strain. This individual, for example, is more likely to be treated nega- tively or victimized by others. This argument implies that community characteristics will have a signifi cant direct effect on individual crime after individual-level variables are con- trolled. Communities also have an indirect effect on strain by infl uencing individual traits and the individual’s immediate social environ- ment. For example, individuals in deprived communities are less likely to develop those skills necessary for successful school and work performance. As a consequence, they are less likely to achieve their economic goals and are more likely to end up in school and work situations that are experienced as aver- sive. This argument implies that controls for individual-level variables will reduce (but not eliminate) the direct effect of community characteristics on individual crime. The issue of direct versus indirect effects is discussed at certain points in the article. The GST explanation contributes to the literature on communities and crime in three major ways. First, it integrates much previous theory and research dealing with strain and community crime rates. Second, it extends previous theory by pointing to sev- eral new community-level variables that may infl uence crime, especially intervening and conditioning variables. Third, it offers a new interpretation for the effect of community- level variables on crime. Much data indicate that variables like economic deprivation, mobility, family disruption, and signs of incivility have a large effect on commu- nity crime rates. The mechanisms by which these variables affect crime rates, however, are much less clear. GST argues that these variables not only reduce social control but also increase strain. It is important to examine the reasons why community-level variables affect crime rates because these reasons infl uence the policy recommenda- tions we make. In particular, social disorga- nization theory suggests that we should help community residents exercise more control over their communities. Strain theorists do not necessarily disagree with this approach, but they argue that we should also focus on reducing the motivation for crime (see Agnew 1995a, 1995c; Brezina forthcoming for a fuller discussion ). Selected parts of the GST explanation in Figure 8.1 are elaborated in the rest of the article. I fi rst describe how community characteristics cause strain (arguments 2 to 4 and 6) and then describe how community characteristics condition the effect of strain on crime (argument 7). These represent the central and most original parts of the GST explanation. THE FAILURE TO ACHIEVE POSITIVELY VALUED GOALS Communities may affect crime rates by infl u- encing the goals that residents pursue and the ability of residents to achieve such goals through legitimate channels. Most research has focused on the inability to achieve the goal of economic success. This source of strain also occupies a central place in GST. GST, however, argues that monetary strain is not the only type of goal blockage expe- rienced by the residents of high-crime com- munities. GST also focuses on the inability of residents to achieve their status goals and to be treated in a just/fair manner. A GENERAL STRAIN THEORY OF COMMUNITY DIFFERENCES IN CRIME RATES | 73 Economic Success Economic status is the factor that most distinguishes high-crime from low-crime communities. GST argues that one reason eco- nomically deprived communities are higher in crime is because the residents of such com- munities have more diffi culty achieving their economic goals. This goal blockage creates frustration with one’s monetary situation, which, in turn, leads to income-generating crime, aggression, and drug use (see Agnew 1992; Agnew et al. 1996; Wilson 1996). First, economically deprived communities contribute to goal blockage by encouraging residents to place great emphasis on money. Deprivation in the midst of affl uence often encourages an emphasis on monetary success (see below). The individual’s own depriva- tion is further heightened by the deprivation that pervades the community—including the lack of recreational, shopping, health, and other facilities. The individuals in deprived communities are more likely to interact with other deprived individuals who empha- size money. This reinforces the individual emphasis on money and results in the devel- opment of a “community culture” stress- ing money (e.g., Anderson 1994). Deprived communities often lack the organizational and cultural resources to support the pursuit of alternative goals. Although there are no good community-level data addressing these issues, individual-level data indicate that deprived individuals place more emphasis on their monetary goals and desire propor- tionately more money than higher socio- economic status individuals (Agnew 1983, 1995b; Cloward and Ohlin 1960; Cook and Curtin 1987; Empey 1956). Figure 8.1 A General Strain Theory of Community Differences in Crime Rates Community Characteristics Economic Deprivation Inequality Large, Dense, Overcrowded High Population Mobility High % Nonwhite Intervening Mechanisms Aggregated Negative Affect (esp. Anger, Frustration) Conditioning Variables Alternative Goals/Identities Public Nature of Adversity External A�ribution of Blame Low Coping Ability Low Social Support Low Social Control Opportunities for Crime Values Conductive to Crime Criminal Others Selection/Retention of Strained Individuals Goal-Blockage Economic Strain Status Deprivation Discrimination Relative Deprivation Loss of Positive Stimuli/ Present of Negative Stimuli Economic/job adversity Family disruption and related factors like abuse Incivilities Social cleavages Vicarious Strain Frequency of Interaction w/ Angry/Frustrated People Crime Rate | ROBERT AGNEW74 Second, deprived communities not only encourage a strong emphasis on money; they also limit the ability of residents to achieve their monetary goals through legitimate chan- nels. In particular, individuals in deprived communities have less access to jobs in gen- eral and to stable, well paying, primary-sector jobs in particular. Manufacturing and service- sector jobs are often located at a distance from deprived communities, so they are less accessible. Relatively few individuals in the community have job contacts or job informa- tion, and there are relatively few individuals in the community to teach and model those skills and attitudes necessary for successful job performance (for a fuller discussion, see Crutchfi eld 1989; Hagan 1994; Hagan and Peterson 1995; McGahey 1986; Sampson and Wilson 1995; Wilson 1987, 1996). These economic problems are most severe in inner- city, African American communities for rea- sons indicated by Wilson (1987, 1996) and others (Bursik 1989; Hagan 1994; Sampson and Wilson 1995). The employment problems faced by inner- city residents, in turn, create a host of addi- tional problems that serve to further reduce legitimate opportunities for goal achieve- ment. Such problems include poor pre- and postnatal care and family disruption—along with its negative impacts on child care, inad- equate preparation for school, and low- quality schools (see Blau and Blau 1982; Bloom, Asher, and White 1978; Hagan and Peterson 1995; Majors and Billson 1992; Sampson 1985b, 1985c, 1986, 1987, 1992; Sampson and Wilson 1995; Shihadeh and Stef- fensmeier 1994; Wilson 1987, 1996). These problems not only create economic strain for adults but for adolescents as well. Adolescents have trouble fi nding part-time work, and their parents cannot provide them with adequate spending money (McGahey 1986). GST, then, can easily explain the strong association between economic deprivation at the community level and crime: Resi- dence in a deprived community increases the likelihood of economic strain. This argu- ment is best tested by surveying the residents of different neighborhoods. Neighborhoods rather than cities or SMSAs are the most appropriate unit of analysis because cities and SMSAs contain more variation in eco- nomic level. If this argument is correct, the residents of economically deprived commu- nities should express more dissatisfaction with their monetary situation. Community economic status should have a direct effect on dissatisfaction and an indirect effect through individual economic status. Aggre- gated levels of dissatisfaction should, in turn, infl uence aggregated levels of negative affect, particularly anger/frustration. Such nega- tive affect should partly mediate the effect of community characteristics and economic strain on crime rates. No study has directly tested these hypotheses, although several ethnographic and other studies suggest that economic strain is a major motive for crime in deprived communities (see Hagan 1994 for a review; for additional data compatible with these arguments, see Agnew et al. 1996; Hagan and McCarthy 1997a; Jankowski 1995; McCarthy and Hagan 1992; Messner 1983; Williams 1984; Wilson 1996). Status/Respect Closely related to the desire for money is the desire for status: “achieving respect in the eyes of one’s fellows” (Cohen, 1955: 65). Individuals may desire status in gen- eral as well as particular types of status, with the desire for “masculine” status being especially relevant to crime (see Majors and Billson 1992; Messerschmidt 1993). In the United States, status—including masculine status—is largely a function of income, edu- cation, occupation, and race (see Majors and Billson 1992). As a consequence, indi- viduals in deprived communities—especially non-Whites—face status problems more often (see Anderson 1994; Brezina 1995; A GENERAL STRAIN THEORY OF COMMUNITY DIFFERENCES IN CRIME RATES | 75 Cohen 1955; Jankowski 1995; Majors and Billson 1992; Suttles 1968). They may adapt by attempting to achieve status through alter- native channels—certain of which involve or are conducive to crime. One common alternative, particularly among young, African American males, is described by Anderson (1994) in “The Code of the Streets.” People attempt to achieve status/respect through their presentation of self, particularly through the display of certain material possessions (e.g., cloth- ing, jewelry) and the adoption of a tough demeanor—which includes the willingness to respond to even minor shows of disrespect with violence. Individuals who lack mate- rial possessions may take them from others, and individuals may actively “campaign for respect” by verbally and physically abusing others (also see Bernard 1990; Majors and Billson 1992). The code of the streets ultimately derives from the inability to achieve status through conventional channels, which is infl uenced by residence in a deprived community. GST, then, can explain the development of an alternative behavioral/value system that includes criminal elements (also see Cohen 1955). If this argument is correct, individuals in deprived, minority communities should be most likely to adopt or live by the code of the streets. Furthermore, the prevalence of the code should partly mediate the effects of economic deprivation and race on com- munity crime rates. Class/Race/Ethnic Discrimination According to GST, individuals not only want to achieve specifi c goals like monetary suc- cess and status/respect; they also have a more general desire to be treated in a just or fair manner. Class, race, and ethnic discrimina- tion represent a fundamental violation of this desire, and for that reason they are discussed as a distinct source of strain. (Such discrimi- nation, of course, also has a major effect on the achievement of the economic and status goals discussed above and on the removal of positive stimuli/presentation of nega- tive stimuli discussed below [e.g., Anderson 1990; Bernard 1990; Hawkins 1983; Mann 1995; Russell 1994; Wilson 1987, 1996].) Individuals in deprived, inner-city com- munities—especially communities with high concentrations of African Americans and other minority groups—may be more likely to experience and perceive class and race/ethnic discrimination. The existence of such commu- nities may increase the likelihood that others will form negative stereotypes of the residents who live there and treat them in a discrimina- tory manner (Cook and Curtin 1987). Some evidence, for example, suggests that this may be the case with the police (Miller 1996). Negative experiences with the police, in turn, may generate feelings of injustice and increase the likelihood of further crime (see Paternos- ter et al. 1997). Also, the existence of such communities may lead residents to the obvi- ous conclusion that race/ethnicity is strongly correlated with a host of social ills—thereby fostering impressions of discrimination. Russell (1994) provides some suggestions as to how racial discrimination may be mea- sured at the individual level, and such indi- vidual measures may be aggregated to form community-level measures. We would expect these community measures to be positively associated with aggregate levels of anger/ frustration and community crime rates, even after controls for economic and other types of strain. The experience of discrimination should have a negative impact on individuals over and above whatever other negative con- sequences result from discrimination. RELATIVE DEPRIVATION As argued above, the residents of deprived communities are more likely to engage in crime because they are more likely to expe- rience goal blockage. But as several strain | ROBERT AGNEW76 theorists have argued, individuals do not determine whether they are experiencing goal blockage in isolation from one another. They compare themselves to others; such comparisons infl uence the goals they pursue and their perceptions about the amount of goal blockage they are experiencing (Cohen 1965, 1997; Passas 1997). In this connec- tion, strain theorists have argued that per- ceptions of goal blockage should be highest in communities with high levels of income or socioeconomic inequality. In fact, virtu- ally all of the community-level research on strain theory has focused on the relation- ship between inequality and crime rates. It is assumed that when inequality is high, people compare themselves to advantaged others, decide that they want and deserve what these others have, and decide that they cannot get what these others have through legitimate channels. As indicated above, the research on rela- tive deprivation theory has produced mixed results. Such research, however, is often rather simplistic. The larger literature on relative deprivation, social comparison, and social justice suggests that inequality only leads to feelings of relative deprivation and crime under certain conditions (for overviews, see Martin 1986; Masters and Smith 1987; Nagata and Crosby 1991; Olson, Herman, and Zanna, 1986; Suls and Wills 1991). In particular, individuals do not always compare themselves to advantaged others; they often avoid comparison, make self- comparisons, or make “downward” or “lateral” compari- sons. Comparisons to advantaged others are most likely when such others are very visible, are perceived as similar on relevant dimensions, and when there is cultural sup- port for upward comparisons (see Atkinson 1986; Major, Testa, and Bylsma, 1991; Pas- sas 1997; Ross, Eyman, and Kishchuk 1986; Stroebe and Stroebe 1996; Suls 1986; Tesser 1991; Wills 1991; Wood and Taylor 1991). Furthermore, comparisons to advantaged others do not necessarily result in feelings of relative deprivation; individuals often believe that advantaged others deserve what they have or they employ other cognitive coping strategies to reduce feelings of depri- vation (see Agnew 1992; Folger 1987; Major et al. 1991; Salovey 1991; Wood and Taylor 1991). Finally, feelings of relative depriva- tion do not always result in crime. The effect of relative deprivation on crime is condi- tioned by a number of factors (see Agnew 1992). Drawing on these arguments, we would expect inequality to be most likely to lead to crime in those communities in which advan- taged others are very visible, in which they are perceived as similar, in which individuals are encouraged to make upward compari- sons, in which the reasons for inequality are perceived as unfair, and in which individuals are constrained or disposed to respond to deprivation with crime. At a more concrete level, we might predict that such conditions are most likely to obtain in urban commu- nities in which (1) there are high levels of inequality within and between neighbor- hoods; (2) illicit markets are common and there are high levels of social mobility, both of which increase the likelihood of know- ing similar others who are advantaged (see Hagan 1994; Passas 1997); (3) people hold egalitarian beliefs that stress the similar- ity between all people and encourage the universal pursuit of monetary success (see Martin 1986; Messner and Rosenfeld 1994; Passas 1997; Suls 1986); (4) inequality is linked to race/ethnicity (see Blau and Blau 1982; Phillips 1997); (5) there are large individual and group differences in the eco- nomic returns to education; and (6) people score high on those factors that increase the likelihood of a criminal response to strain (see below). The fact that empirical research only takes account of certain of these factors may help explain the mixed results of such research. A GENERAL STRAIN THEORY OF COMMUNITY DIFFERENCES IN CRIME RATES | 77 LOSS OF POSITIVE STIMULI/ PRESENTATION OF NEGATIVE STIMULI Agnew (1992) argues that strain not only results when others prevent you from achieving your goals but also when others present you with negatively valued stimuli (e.g., verbally and physically abuse you) or remove positively valued stimuli you possess (e.g., take your possessions). Communities may contribute to these types of strain by infl uencing the types of treatment that are defi ned as aversive and by infl uencing the exposure of residents to such treatment. Types of Treatment Defi ned as Aversive Some types of treatment—such as physical attack—are defi ned as negative or aversive across virtually all groups. Other types of treatment, however, are defi ned differently in different groups. Several theorists have argued that the residents of high-crime communities— especially young, African American males— are more likely to defi ne certain types of treatment as aversive. This is, in fact, a cen- tral theme in the leading subcultural theories of violence (Bernard 1990; Luckenbill and Doyle 1989; Wolfgang and Ferracuti 1967; also see Harvey 1986). Luckenbill and Doyle (1989), for example, claim that the subculture of violence “enjoins individuals to be highly sensitive and boldly responsive to affronts”— especially to affronts in which “fundamental properties of the self are attacked.” Ethno- graphic accounts confi rm such views. Ander- son (1994), for example, states that many of the forms that dissing [disrespect- ful treatment] can take might seem petty to middle-class people (maintaining eye contact for too long, for example), but to those invested in the street code, these actions become serious indications of the other person’s intentions. Consequently, such people become very sensi- tive to advances and slights. (p. 82) Residents of high-crime communities, then, are more likely to view a range of slights and provocations as aversive. This may partly explain the fact that lower-income individu- als are more likely to experience psychologi- cal distress in response to a given stressor (e.g., Thoits 1982, 1991). There are several explanations for such sensitivity, certain of which derive from strain theory. Most notably, certain theorists have argued that the continued experience with adversity may heighten one’s sensitivity to slights. The residents of deprived commu- nities must often tolerate aversive treatment from others, including racial discrimination and the “frustrations of persistent poverty” (Anderson 1994: 83). In the words of Balk- well (1990), this leads them to develop a “short fuse” (also see Anderson 1994; Ber- nard 1990; Harvey 1986; Majors and Billson 1992). If this argument is correct, the resi- dents of deprived communities—particularly the young males—should be more likely to report that they are upset or angered by a range of slights and provocations. In par- ticular, the community characteristics listed in Figure 8.1 should have both a direct and indirect effect on sensitivity to aversive stim- uli, because they have a direct and indirect effect on the individual’s exposure to aver- sive stimuli (more below). Exposure to Aversive Stimuli Not only are individuals in deprived commu- nities more sensitive to certain types of treat- ment, but they are more exposed to aversive treatment as well—including undesirable life events and chronic strains (e.g., Thoits 1982). Many data suggest that this greater exposure largely is due to the economic deprivation of the community and its residents (with the community contributing to individual depri- vation in the ways listed above). Economic deprivation is, itself, a major source of strain, and it directly or indirectly contributes to | ROBERT AGNEW78 such additional strains as family disruption, exposure to a host of “incivilities” in the community, and social cleavages. Economic deprivation. Individuals in deprived communities suffer from a range of economic hardships, including inadequate fi nancial resources, unemployment, and employment in secondary sector jobs—which are poorly paid, sporadic, and characterized by adverse working conditions (see Crutchfi eld 1989; Crutchfi eld and Pitchford 1997). These hard- ships may cause stress/strain because they interfere with the desire for money and sta- tus, as described above. They may also cause strain because the conditions of life associ- ated with these hardships are experienced as aversive, regardless of individual goals. Data, for example, suggest that the conditions associated with work in the secondary labor market contribute to psychological distress, with these conditions including low auton- omy or control and low use of capacities (Greenberg and Grunberg 1995; Mirowsky and Ross 1989; Ross and Huber 1985). More generally, data suggest that economic hardship is a major source of psychological distress, including depression, anxiety, and anger (e.g., Aneshensel 1992; Horwitz 1984; Mirowsky and Ross 1989; Ross and Huber 1985; Thoits 1982). Given the above, we would expect eco- nomic hardship to have at least a moderate direct effect on community crime rates. As indicated, the data in this area are mixed. Although studies indicate a strong zero-order relationship between economic deprivation and community crime rates, not all studies fi nd evidence of signifi cant direct effects. As numerous authors have noted, however, problems of multicollinearity often make it diffi cult to estimate such direct effects. Measures of economic hardship are strongly correlated with one another and with many of the other key correlates of crime. Nev- ertheless, recent data suggest that at least certain measures of economic hardship may have a direct effect on community crime rates. There is some evidence, for example, that unemployment increases crime rates, although its effect may be partly offset by a decrease in criminal opportunities (Land, Cantor, and Russell 1995; Phillips 1997). And Crutchfi eld (1989) found that employ- ment rates in the secondary sector were the best predictor of neighborhood crime rates (also see Crutchfi eld and Pitchford 1997). Family disruption and related problems. Economic deprivation should also have a large indirect effect on community crime rates because it increases the exposure of community residents to other types of strain. One especially important type of strain is family disruption and the problems associ- ated with such disruption. Data suggest that economic problems are perhaps the major cause of family disruption (e.g., Jankowski 1995; Sampson 1987; Wilson 1987). Family disruption, in turn, has a large direct effect on crime rates—particularly juvenile crime rates—in most studies. Furthermore, family disruption partly or fully mediates the effect of other variables on crime—like percentage African American and economic variables (e.g., Sampson 1987; Shihadeh and Steffens- meier 1994). The effect of family disruption on crime rates, however, is usually explained in terms of social disorganization rather than strain theory. Family disruption is said to reduce informal social control (e.g., supervising neighborhood kids and watching out for strangers) and participation in commu- nity organizations. GST, however, offers an additional explanation for the effect of family disruption. As Blau and Blau (1982) state, family disruption is a major source of strain as well as low social control: “Mari- tal breakups entail disruptions of profound and intimate social relations, and they gen- erally occur after serious estrangement, if A GENERAL STRAIN THEORY OF COMMUNITY DIFFERENCES IN CRIME RATES | 79 not prolonged confl icts” (p. 124). Sampson (1986: 279–80; 1987: 354) also notes the association between family disruption and strain. Nevertheless, no one has interpreted the effect of family disruption on crime rates in terms of strain theory. Ample data support such an interpretation. Family disruption has been linked empirically to a wide range of strains. Family disruption is often preceded by high levels of interper- sonal confl ict in the family, and the divorce/ separation often precipitates additional con- fl ict, especially between the mother and chil- dren. The children make more demands on the mother at a time when she is less able to meet them, and an escalating cycle of con- fl ict often results (Martens 1993; McGahey 1986; Sampson 1986). Among other things, family disruption is highly correlated with rates of child abuse (Sampson 1992, 1995). Child abuse, in turn, is an important cause of crime and delinquency, with part of the effect of abuse being explained in terms of strain theory (Brezina 1998). Family disrup- tion also has been linked to such strains as fi nancial diffi culties, housework burdens, sexual problems, and feelings of shame and failure (Bloom et al. 1978; Thoits 1982). It is no surprise, then, that family disruption is associated with higher levels of psychologi- cal distress (Mirowsky and Ross 1989). It is, therefore, reasonable to suppose that com- munities with high rates of family disrup- tion are higher in crime for reasons related to strain as well as social disorganization theory. Signs of incivility. Economic deprivation and family disruption also contribute to one of the strongest community correlates of crime: signs of incivility, such as vandalism, street harassment, and the presence of unsupervised teenage peer groups. Miethe and McDowall (1993) found that the most important con- textual factor predicting victimization was a measure indicating whether the respondent had the following problems within four blocks of their home: teenagers hanging out on the street, litter and garbage on the street, abandoned houses and buildings, poor light- ing, and vandalism. Data from Sampson and Groves (1989) suggest that unsupervised peer groups in the community are perhaps the best predictor of community crime rates (also see Sampson et al. 1997). Such groups mediate much of the effect of family disrup- tion on crime. Although unsupervised peer groups and other signs of incivility may con- tribute to crime for a number of reasons, a strain theory explanation readily suggests itself. Signs of incivility index the aversive or negative treatment that community residents must endure. The presence of unsupervised peer groups, for example, increases the likeli- hood that neighborhood residents—including the members of these peer groups—will be subject to negative treatment. Social cleavages. At a more general level, several researchers have noted that fac- tors like deprivation, heterogeneity, density, overcrowding, and population mobility undermine social relationships in a com- munity. Among other things, they are said to lead to “social cleavages,” “exploitative and manipulative relationships,” “mutual mistrust and estrangement,” and “disruptive social demands” (e.g., Chamlin and Cochran 1997; Gove, Hughes, and Galle 1979; Korn- hauser 1978; Sampson 1993; Suttles 1968). Such negative relations are a major source of strain, with some data suggesting that they contribute to anger and community crime rates (see Gove et al. 1979 and the review in Bellair 1997). For example, Sampson et al. (1997) found that deprived communities are lower in “collective effi cacy.” This measure partly indexes how well community residents get along with one another (it contains items like “people in this neighborhood generally get along well with one another,” and “people | ROBERT AGNEW80 in this neighborhood can be trusted”). Col- lective effi cacy not only has a large impact on crime, but it also mediates a substantial por- tion of the effect of community deprivation on crime rates. Vicarious strain. The residents of deprived communities are not only more likely to directly experience the above types of strain, they are also more likely to witness family members, friends, and others—including members of their racial/ethnic group—experience such strains (see Russell 1994). So, community residents are higher in both direct and “vicari- ous” strain. It is uncertain whether vicarious strain has an effect on crime, although data from the stress literature suggest that it has an effect on one’s psychic well-being (e.g., Turner, Wheaton, and Lloyd 1995). Other strains . Deprived communities may expose individuals to still other types of nega- tive treatment, many of which have been linked to crime (see Bernard 1990). In fact, one could easily compile a long list of community- related factors that might reasonably be expected to increase individual strain (see Lin- sky et al. 1995 for a list of state-level factors). Testing the Above Arguments Testing these arguments will require that we examine certain variables that have been neglected in previous community-level research, like rates of child abuse and vicari- ous strain. More important, it will require that we devote special attention to interven- ing processes. It is reasonably well established that there is an association between crime rates and community characteristics like eco- nomic deprivation, family disruption, the presence of unsupervised peer groups, and the quality of social relationships. The issue is the extent to which these associations are best explained in terms of social disorganiza- tion, subcultural deviance, or strain theory. We cannot answer this question until we measure intervening variables like anger/frus- tration, perceptions of formal and informal sanctions, and beliefs regarding crime (see Agnew 1995c). Unfortunately, the macrolevel research has paid only limited attention to intervening processes (Bursik 1986a, 1986b; Byrne and Sampson 1986: 13; Sampson and Groves 1989; Sampson and Lauritsen 1993; Simcha-Fagan and Schwartz 1986). If GST has any merit, aggregated levels of anger/ frustration should partly mediate the effect of variables like family disruption and unsu- pervised peer groups on community crime rates. A preliminary test of this proposition can be conducted with cross-sectional data, although a full test should employ longitudi- nal data so as to better estimate the causal ordering between variables (e.g., see Brezina 1996). Although no study has attempted to test the above proposition, the Youth in Tran- sition (YIT) data set contains a measure of anger/frustration that can be aggregated to the school level. We can, therefore, estimate the percentage of angry/frustrated individu- als in each school. The YIT data also allows us to construct rough measures of school disorganization and school values con- ducive to crime/violence (see Felson et al. 1994). If GST is correct, we would expect the aggregate measure of anger/frustration to be related to school crime rates even after school disorganization and values are con- trolled. (We would also expect the aggregate measure of anger/frustration to be related to individual crime, even after individual anger/ frustration and other individual-level vari- ables were controlled.) INCREASING THE FREQUENCY OF INTERACTION WITH ANGRY/ FRUSTRATED INDIVIDUALS High-crime communities not only produce more strained and angry/frustrated individu- als, they also increase the likelihood that such A GENERAL STRAIN THEORY OF COMMUNITY DIFFERENCES IN CRIME RATES | 81 individuals will interact with one another. This contributes to a further increase in strain, negative affect, and crime because these individuals are more likely to mistreat and victimize one another. An angry/frustrated person in a high- crime community is more likely to interact with other angry/frustrated people partly because high-crime communities contain a greater percentage of angry/frustrated indi- viduals. Beyond that, the characteristics of high-crime communities foster frequent interaction between certain community resi- dents—especially the young males most sub- ject to the above types of strain. Young males spend much idle time in public settings. This partly stems from family disruption, which creates a large pool of unsupervised teenag- ers and unattached males (McGahey 1986; Reiss 1986; Sampson 1986; Stark 1987). It partly stems from high rates of unemploy- ment and sporadic work. It partly stems from overcrowded living arrangements, which make street life more attractive (Stark 1987). And it partly stems from the mixed- used nature of many deprived communities, which provides more opportunities for con- gregating outside the home (Stark 1987). In this connection, Miethe and McDowell (1993) found that victimization was higher in busy places; that is, places available for public activity, like stores, bars, and parks (also see R. Felson 1993; Sherman, Gartin, and Buerger 1989). Finally, overcrowded living conditions increase the likelihood of contact with angry individuals in the home setting. The end result is that large numbers of strained/angry people are in frequent con- tact. Furthermore, the deprived nature of the community increases the likelihood that such contact may occur in the context of competi- tion over scarce resources. In the words of Wikstrom (1990), we have an environment that is likely to “provoke friction.” This argument may be tested by asking individuals about the extent to which they encounter angry/upset individuals and get into confl icts with others in their neighborhood. We would expect such encounters and con- fl icts to be more frequent among the residents of deprived communities, even after individual characteristics are controlled. Such encoun- ters/confl icts, in turn, should partly mediate the effect of neighborhood characteristics on crime rates. FACTORS INCREASING THE LIKELIHOOD OF A CRIMINAL RESPONSE As noted in GST, there are a variety of ways to cope with strain, only some of which involve crime. Individuals may employ cognitive coping strategies in an attempt to minimize the subjective strain or adver- sity they experience. For example, they may reduce their monetary strain by focusing on alternative goals, convincing themselves that they will soon achieve monetary success or blaming themselves for their misfortune. They may employ behavioral coping strat- egies that attempt to reduce their objective strain; that is, they may attempt to achieve positively valued goals, protect or retrieve positively valued stimuli, or terminate or escape from negative stimuli (Agnew 1992). Such strategies may involve conventional or criminal behavior, and they may employ emotional coping strategies that attempt to alleviate the negative emotions they feel. Such strategies may also involve conven- tional (e.g., exercise) or criminal (e.g., illicit drug use) behavior. Whether people respond to strain with crime depends on a number of factors, many of which are infl uenced by community char- acteristics. Certain of these factors are listed below. Although these factors are corre- lated with community deprivation, the cor- relations are not perfect; ideally, researchers should obtain independent measures of these factors and treat them as conditioning vari- ables. In most cases, independent measures can be obtained by aggregating individual responses within communities. | ROBERT AGNEW82 Limited Range of Alternative Goals/Identities Evidence suggests that individuals often cope with goal blockage or attacks on their iden- tity by focusing on new goals that they can achieve or new identities they can success- fully manage (Agnew 1992). Several theo- rists have argued that this coping strategy may be more diffi cult in deprived communi- ties because such communities provide less cultural and structural support for alterna- tive goals/identities (Gans 1968; Kornhauser 1978; Wilson 1987: 183). The fact that this coping strategy is less available in deprived communities increases the likelihood of a criminal response to strain. The Public Nature of One’s Adversity As indicated above, individuals in deprived communities spend much time interacting with one another in public and private set- tings. Also, there is a greater interest in the personal affairs of community residents, partly because conventional markers of moral character like educational and occupational success are unavailable (Suttles 1968). The result is that one’s aversive experiences are more likely to be witnessed by or known to others. As Hagan and Peterson (1995) state, the “press of people in dense underclass areas imposes upon residents a unique kind of com- munity organization characterized by a high level of mutual surveillance. This restricts residents’ privacy, making their activities, both legal and illegal, more frequently ‘pub- lic’ ” (p. 27) (also see Stark 1987). The public nature of one’s adversity increases the likelihood of a criminal response to strain for several reasons. First, it increases the likelihood that individuals will have their attempts at cognitive reinterpretation chal- lenged. Because others are often aware of the adversities that individuals have experi- enced, it is more diffi cult for individuals to cognitively minimize their adversity without being challenged. Second, others may remind individuals of the adversities they have expe- rienced. This may cause individuals to “cog- nitively relive” their aversive experiences, thereby increasing their level of subjective strain (Bernard 1990). Third, it increases the likelihood that individuals will feel pres- sure to respond to mistreatment with crime to “save face” and prevent future predation by others (Anderson 1994; Felson 1993; Fel- son et al. 1994; Luckenbill and Doyle 1989; Stark 1987). The External Attribution of Blame The residents of deprived communities also may be more likely to blame their strain on others, thereby increasing their level of anger and tendency to respond to strain with crime (see Agnew 1992). According to Ber- nard (1990) and others, the chronic strains that characterize life in deprived commu- nities increase the likelihood of external attributions. Furthermore, such communi- ties are more likely to develop subcultures that encourage the external attribution of blame. Such subcultures result from a com- bination of chronic strain, social isolation, and a tendency to blame one’s aggressive acts on others (also see Luckenbill and Doyle 1989). Ability to Engage in Legitimate Behavioral Coping Not only are the residents of deprived com- munities less able to employ cognitive coping strategies, they are also less able to engage in legitimate behavioral coping. They are less able to cope as individuals, due to their lim- ited coping resources and skills—like money, power, and problem-solving skills. These individual defi cits are partly a function of community characteristics. For example, de- prived communities provide fewer models of effective coping (Anderson 1990). Also, they are less able to cope as a community. In particular, they are less able to unite with A GENERAL STRAIN THEORY OF COMMUNITY DIFFERENCES IN CRIME RATES | 83 one another to solve community-wide prob- lems. The reasons for this are described by social disorganization theorists. In fact, social disorganization essentially refers to the inability of communities to cope success- fully with the problems that confront them (see Bursik 1988; Kornhauser 1978; see also Grant and Martinez 1997 for data suggest- ing that a community’s perceived ability to cope with problems through legitimate channels has an infl uence on that commu- nity’s crime rate). Lack of Social Support/Capital Not only are the residents of deprived com- munities less able to cope on their own behalf, they are less likely to receive social support from others. This is especially true in recent decades as the concentration of poverty has increased. In particular, there has been a dramatic decline in social support in deprived inner-city communities as work- ing- and middle-class African Americans have moved to more affl uent areas (Sampson 1992; Tonry, Ohlin, and Farrington 1991; Wilson 1987, 1996). This migration has not only resulted in a loss of supportive individu- als but has weakened educational, religious, recreational, and other institutions in the community. Increased levels of family dis- ruption have also contributed to a reduction in social support (Thoits 1982). The same is true of government cutbacks, which have resulted in a decline in social services. In this area, recent data suggest that higher welfare expenditures are associated with lower crime rates (DeFronzo 1997; Grant and Martinez 1997). More generally, data from Hagan and McCarthy (1997a) suggest that com- munity differences in social support have an important effect on the ability of individuals to cope with strain and that such differences in social support are linked to differences in crime rates (also see Cullen 1994; Cullen and Wright 1997; Hagan 1994; Hagan and McCarthy 1997a, 1997b; Sampson 1992, 1993; Wilson 1996). Low Social Control As social disorganization theorists have argued, deprived communities are lower in social control. Community residents, in particular, are less likely to be taught values that condemn crime, to be sanctioned for criminal behavior, and to develop a “stake in conformity.” Although low social control may lead directly to crime, it also increases the likelihood that community residents will respond to strain with crime. Opportunities for Crime As Felson (1998) and others argue, certain communities provide more opportunities for crime than other communities; that is, they increase the likelihood that strained indi- viduals (motivated offenders) will encounter attractive targets in the absence of capable guardians. Many of the characteristics of deprived communities have been linked to an increase in criminal opportunity—although the relationship between community depri- vation and criminal opportunity is far from perfect. The effect of criminal opportunity on community crime/victimization rates has been examined in several studies. The results of such research are somewhat mixed, per- haps because of the questionable validity of certain of the measures of criminal opportu- nity. Nevertheless, we would expect measures of criminal opportunity to condition the effect of strain on crime rates (see Birkbeck and LaFree 1993; M. Felson 1998; Massey, Krohn, and Bonati 1989; Messner and Blau 1987; Miethe and McDowall 1993; Miethe and Meier 1994; Sampson and Wooldredge 1987; Sherman et al. 1989). Values Conducive to Crime As indicated above, there is reason to believe that the residents of deprived communities— particularly young, minority males—are more likely to hold or live by values conducive | ROBERT AGNEW84 to crime. The origin of such values can be at least partly explained in terms of strain theory (see above; also see Bernard 1990; Harvey 1986; Luckenbill and Doyle 1989; Wilson 1996). Although such values may have a direct effect on crime, they also increase the likelihood that one will respond to strain with crime. In fact, a central com- ponent of such values is that disrespectful treatment by others often requires an aggres- sive response. Using state-level data, Linsky et al. (1995) found that values conducive to deviance sometimes condition the effect of stressors on crime/deviance rates. Presence of Criminal Others/Groups Finally, the increased presence of criminal others and groups in deprived communi- ties increases the likelihood that residents will respond to strain with crime. Such others are more likely to both model and reinforce criminal responses, among other things (see Reiss 1986; Stark 1987; Wilson 1987, 1996). The more public nature of life in deprived communities, described above, makes such modeling especially likely. The idea that crime is an appropriate or justifi - able response to certain strains may spread or diffuse throughout the community—or at least certain segments of the community. SUMMARY The GST described in this article argues that communities differ in their level of crime partly because they differ in the extent to which they produce strain and foster crimi- nal responses to strain. Communities contribute to strain in sev- eral ways. First, they infl uence the goals that individuals pursue and the ability of individ- uals to achieve these goals. Economic goals, status goals, and the desire for just/fair treat- ment occupy a central place in GST. Second, they infl uence the individual’s sense of rela- tive deprivation as well as absolute level of goal blockage. Third, they infl uence defi ni- tions of aversive stimuli and the degree of exposure to such stimuli. A range of aversive stimuli was considered, including economic deprivation, family disruption, child abuse, signs of incivility, social cleavages, and vicar- ious strains. Fourth, they increase the like- lihood that strained and angry/frustrated individuals will interact with one another, which further increases levels of strain and negative affect. These types of strain, in turn, infl uence aggregated levels of negative affect in the community—with the emotions of anger/ frustration receiving special attention. Aggre- gated levels of anger/frustration have a direct effect on community crime rates and partly mediate the effect of community character- istics on crime rates. Communities, however, may condition the impact of strain on crime in a number of ways. In particular, commu- nities may make it more diffi cult for individ- uals to “defi ne away their strain” through the use of cognitive coping strategies, engage in legitimate behavioral coping, and obtain support from others. Communities may also reduce the costs of criminal coping and increase the disposition to engage in such coping. Relevant community-level variables in these areas were described. There was a brief overview of the evi- dence compatible with these arguments, and several strategies for testing these argu- ments were suggested. At the most general level, it was argued that empirical tests need to devote more attention to interven- ing processes. With respect to goal blockage, researchers should determine the extent to which the community characteristics in Fig- ure 8.1 are associated with the experience of monetary strain, status deprivation, and dis- criminatory treatment by others. These fac- tors infl uence aggregated levels of negative affect— especially anger and frustration. Neg- ative affect, in turn, infl uences community A GENERAL STRAIN THEORY OF COMMUNITY DIFFERENCES IN CRIME RATES | 85 crime rates. With respect to relative depri- vation, one should examine the extent to which the community characteristics listed in Figure 8.1 and certain other community characteristics mentioned in the discussion infl uence perceptions of relative deprivation. Such perceptions, in turn, should infl uence levels of negative affect. With respect to the loss of positive stimuli/presentation of nega- tive stimuli, one should examine the extent to which the community characteristics in Figure 8.1 infl uence exposure to aversive stimuli. Such exposure, in turn, should infl u- ence levels of negative affect. With respect to interactional patterns, one should examine the extent to which community character- istics infl uence the level of interaction with angry/frustrated individuals. Such interac- tion should infl uence negative affect. Finally, one should examine the extent to which community characteristics infl uence those variables said to condition the effect of strain on anger/frustration and crime. Such variables, however, may not be a complete function of those community characteris- tics in Figure 8.1 . Therefore, researchers also should obtain independent measures of these variables and examine the extent to which they condition the effect of strain on aggregated levels of negative affect and crime rates. GST represents a major alternative to those theories that now dominate the research on communities and crime. In particular, GST provides another explanation for the effect of previously examined variables on com- munity crime rates—variables like economic deprivation, mobility, family disruption, and signs of incivility. The effect of these vari- ables is usually explained in terms of social disorganization and, to a lesser extent, sub- cultural deviance theory. As argued above, one can also explain the effect of these vari- ables in terms of strain theory. It is important to emphasize, however, that GST is proposed as a supplement rather than as a replacement for social disorganization and subcultural deviance theories. As exem- plifi ed in the work of Thrasher (1927) and Shaw and McKay (1942), a full explanation of community differences in crime rates must draw on a range of theories, including those that examine the ways in which communities motivate as well as control crime. 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Tygart, CEO of the National Anti-Doping Agency of the United Stated, released a statement announcing the doping case against champion cyclist Lance Armstrong and his U.S. Postal Service (USPS) team, which included other notable cyclists and admitted dopers Floyd Landis and Jonathan Vaughters. An excerpt from Tygart’s statement reads: The USPS Team doping conspiracy was professionally designed to groom and pressure athletes to use dangerous drugs, to evade detection, to ensure its secrecy and ultimately gain an unfair competi- tive advantage through superior doping practices. A program organized by individuals who thought they were above the rules and who still play a major and active role in sport today. (Tygart 2012) Doping scandals, like that of the USPS team, have increasingly dampened the world’s affection for sports and elite athletes, rendering the Tour de France more of a Tour of Shame (Petroczi 2007). In this reading, I discuss doping among elite athletes to illustrate what the classic anomie approach and the more modern general strain theory (GST) can teach us about deviance in society today. In the fi rst quote above, Merton (1938) articulates a fundamental premise of anomie the- ory: the ethic of achieving cultural goals, such as the Tour de France, at any cost breeds illicit behavior. In other words, the goals society sets for its people or athletes must be realistic and attainable through legitimate channels. If there are discrepancies between them, people will detach from norms (anomie) and engage in deviance—for example, doping. Noted cyclist and U.S. Postal Service team member Jonathan Vaughters seems to agree with Merton nearly 70 years later when describing the diffi culty in achieving his childhood dream of winning races through his own hard work and training. He states: Imagine you’ve paid the dues, you’ve done the work, you’ve got the talent, and your resolve is solid as concrete. At that point, the dream is 98 percent complete but there is that last little bit you need | TAMMY L. ANDERSON92 to become great. THEN, just short of fi nally living your childhood dream, you are told . . . by some coaches, mentors, even the boss, that you aren’t going to make it, unless you cheat. Unless you choose to dope. (Vaughters 2012) Still, Vaughters suggests unrealistic cultural goals—for example, constantly breaking world records—aren’t suffi cient in explaining doping in elite sports. It also has to do with the day-to-day pressures and feedback important others give you on the prizes you value. Such strain undercuts social norms and leads to deviance. This more personal experience of “strain” can alter our feelings and perceptions in negative ways, leading to doping among athletes like Vaughters. Herein lies an important distinction not only between Merton’s more structural theory of anomie and Agnew’s more individual-level GST but also in how we view deviance in society today : to what extent is deviance the product of environmental factors (macrolevel) that constrain us or the more immediate dynamics (microlevel) we can see, feel, and manipulate on a daily basis? Historically, the fi elds of sociology and criminology have debated the value of both macro- and microlevel explanations in understanding crime, deviance, and social problems. In this section, Merton’s classic statement on anomie and two more recent papers by Hagedorn and Agnew are featured. The Hagedorn ethnographic study of drug gangs in Milwaukee lends support to Merton’s more macrolevel theory of anomie but adds racial discrimination as an additional structural factor that motivates deviance. The reading by Agnew, on the other hand, makes the case for the more individual-oriented GST in explaining crime. The goal of this reading, then, is to help students see how each approach can inform doping in elite sports today. Secondarily, students will learn how both environmental forces beyond the individual’s control, as well as the more personal ones they can shape, impact an even wider range of nonnormative behavior. MERTON, ANOMIE, AND CRIME Like Durkheim, Erikson, and other functionalists (see Section 1), Robert Merton (1938) viewed society as a complex system whose parts worked together to promote solidarity and stability among its citizens. He believed that effi cient societies required agreement about morality and conformity to norms (Durkheim 1982). Merton maintained that the key to understanding deviance was in the institutions and structural arrangements of society, includ- ing the norms it set for its people. He believed social structures exerted pressure on people to violate norms. Deviance appeared when goals were too diffi cult for people to achieve by acceptable standards, much like the quotes above indicate. Two types of structural conditions set the stage for anomie and deviance. The fi rst were goals, interests, or social aspirations, and the second were the socially approved means or opportunities for attaining them. Merton noted that cultural goals were often unrealistic or too celebrated in society, and the avenues to obtain them were lacking or not available to enough people. Goal attainment and access to legitimate means (e.g., economic or educa- tional) were unequally distributed in society. Furthermore, a person’s status set or his or her occupation, neighborhood, age, sex, race, and/or education religion seemed to matter more in achieving goals than his or her initiative and hard work. These discrepancies produced anomie in society and could result in crime and deviance. CONNECTIONS | 93 Numerous responses to anomie were possible, Merton contended. Some people would conform to social conventions even if they experienced anomie. He called these folks “con- formists.” On the other hand, “innovators” accepted cultural goals (e.g., material comfort, winning, trophies, etc.) but would reject conventional means for obtaining them, opting for more illegitimate avenues. Ritualists were those who embraced cultural goals and legitimate means even while not believing in them. Retreatists and rebels, on yet another hand, rejected both goals and legitimate means. Rebels actively tried to change things in society, while retreatists simply faded into the background and disconnected from social institutions and ideals. The Merton reading discusses professional sports and athletes’ behavior as a case of innovation and deviance. He anticipated athletes might be “pressured” to use illegitimate means to win their contests because of the “cultural exaggeration of success goals” (Merton 1938: 675). While he did not foresee doping techniques as a means to those ends, he did dis- cuss another “innovative” method athletes might use to achieve their goals, such as: The star of the opposing football team is surreptitiously slugged; the wrestler furtively incapaci- tates his opponent through ingenious but illicit techniques; university alumni covertly subsidize “students” whose talents are largely confi ned to the athletic fi eld. (675) HAGEDORN, ANOMIE, DRUGS, AND GANGBANGING John Hagedorn studied gang members in Milwaukee extensively in the 1980s. Even though his research is about minority gang members and drugs, not elite athletes and doping, it raises some useful insights about how different groups experience and respond to anomie. For example, Hagedorn’s endorsement of Merton’s anomie theory is clear when he quotes a young gang member on the discrepancy between cultural goals (providing for your family) and socially approved means (working) to obtain them. Question: Do you consider it wrong or immoral to sell dope? Answer: No Question: Why not? Answer: That’s the only upper hand . . . us black folks have. The only jobs that are out there is McDonalds, Burger King, . . . and Kentucky Fried Chicken. If you have kids, that’s not going to cut it. (1997: 7) Like Durkheim, Hagedorn sees deviance—drug dealing in this case—as a normal response to anomie in society, and, like Merton, he attributes it to blocked opportunities to achieve the American Dream. Hagedorn states: An anomic perspective, on the other hand, understands violent and antisocial underclass behavior as patterned reactions to the frustration of conventional aspirations in a world with severe economic constraints and racial discrimination. (1997: 15) Hagedorn’s take on Durkheim’s and Merton’s ideas, however, adds racial discrimination as another structural obstacle for poor minority group members, one that further limits their opportunities to attain culturally approved goals, or the American dream. He anchors his typology of gang members in several innovative responses to racism. Hagedorn states: | TAMMY L. ANDERSON94 It is in this context that our earlier typology of “homeboys, dope fi ends, legits, and new jacks” is best viewed. Just as Merton looked at fi ve universal adaptations to American culture, each of these gang roles is a subtype of innovative adaptation to racism and the lack of good jobs. (1997: 13) Research shows that racial minorities in the United States might view sports as a vital and legitimate avenue to attain the cultural goals from which they are otherwise blocked, as Hagedorn contends. For example, Melnick and Sabo (1994) reviewed several studies show- ing that African Americans and other minority groups sought upward mobility in America through sports. This raises an important question: if racial minorities believe sports is one way to achieve culturally approved goals from which they are otherwise blocked, wouldn’t we expect higher rates of doping among them? Contrary to this expectation, few studies to date have found racial differences among ath- letes in doping practices. However, researchers have found less use of mood-altering drugs, such as alcohol and marijuana, for recreational purposes among minority athletes than their white counterparts (Durant et al. 1993; Green et al. 2001). This reminds us about Merton’s point: not all adaptations to anomie will be deviant. Conformity remains a possibility in the face of anomie. Alternatively, the failure to fi nd more doping among minority athletes— despite their higher levels of anomie in society—could indicate that Merton’s structural approach is not sensitive enough to capture the more individual-level reasons for it. Agnew’s GST just might complete the picture. AGNEW, GST, AND COMMUNITY CRIME The reading by Agnew moves the functionalist discussion of anomie closer to the individual by focusing on his or her attitudes, feelings, and perceptions related to the sorts of structural constraints discussed above. Thus, an important difference between the anomie work of Merton and Hagedorn and the GST of Agnew has to do with their different levels of analysis. Merton and Hagedorn used a more structural approach to explain deviance—highlighting things like institutions, policies and culture—whereas Agnew’s GST is more concerned with individual-level traits—for example, emotions and perceptions. The reading by Agnew in this section attempts to link both structural characteristics of communities with those of individuals. Consider the fi rst three propositions Agnew (1999) puts forth on page 127. He acknowl- edges that community-level characteristics such as poverty, unemployment, and high crime (structural factors) trap individuals in problematic neighborhoods, block them from achiev- ing positively valued goals, and, consequently, expose them to strain. However, it is the rela- tive deprivation that individuals feel from these conditions that leads to deviant behavior. Agnew states: Goal blockage, relative deprivation, and exposure to aversive stimuli increase the likelihood that community residents will experience a range of negative emotions, including anger and frustration. Aggregate levels of anger/frustration should have a direct effect on crime rates. (1999: 127) Agnew’s (1999) GST, for example, claims that important “affect” or psychological variables infl uence the strain–deviance relationship. Strain was likely to result if people placed a high value on money, did not view adherence to legit norms as a source of status or prestige, and felt unable to achieve fi nancial success through legal channels. CONNECTIONS | 95 This predicament would breed anger for some and could lead to problematic behavior. For example, the innovative response of selling drugs to attain goods or the retreatist response of using drugs to escape negative feelings would depend on the individual’s emotional response to strain. Unlike Merton and Hagedorn, Agnew would not have predicted drug-dealing to simply result from a deprived economic status or blocked opportunity but rather the individual’s psychological reaction to it or his or her negative perceptions of his or her environment. Therefore, one of the most important distinctions in Agnew’s work is the idea that the psychological traits of an individual's “condition” or infl uence effects of anomie on crime. There is another important distinction between Agnew’s GST and Merton and Hagedorn’s more structural notion of anomie. It has to do with the types of goals and opportunities/ means to attain them. For example, Merton and Hagedorn focused on societal-level goals, while Agnew identifi ed more personal ones (e.g., winning a scholarship, becoming captain of a football team, etc.) and everyday obstacles (e.g., the loss of a loved one or a treasured object). When people experience something negative, or are threatened with it (a type of blocked opportunity), they might engage in deviance to retrieve what was lost or retaliate against those who offended them. Figure 9.1 below, then, summarizes the main differences between functionalism, anomie, and GST and the positions on deviance offered by Dur- kheim, Erikson, Merton, Hagedorn, and Agnew. ANOMIE, STRAIN, AND DOPING IN ELITE SPORTS In 1928, the International Association of Athletics Federation offi cially banned the use of stimulants by competitors in world sporting events. This would mark the fi rst doping regu- lation in sporting history. Since then, tests for doping have expanded signifi cantly across all types of sports (e.g., football or soccer, cycling, baseball, and track and fi eld, to name a few). However, prohibitions have escalated most recently following the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) banning of steroids and blood doping technologies, in 1976 and 1986 respectively, and the creation of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in 2000. Since that time, famous athletes, such as Olympic sprinters Ben Johnson (1988) and Marion Jones (2000), have had their medals taken away from them due to doping scandals. Home- run kings Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Roger Clemens have also found themselves in doping trouble. However, the most notable and stunning case of doping to date may be Anomie (Merton/Hagedorn) General Strain Theory (Agnew) Society is stratifi ed with high levels of inequality, anomie is brought about by the discrepancy between cultural goals and the lack of legitimate means to achieve them; deviance is a response to anomie and is especially likely among those at the lower classes of society. Strain is located at the individual and emotional level and is tied to an individual’s immediate social environment. An individual’s actual or anticipated (1) failure to achieve positively valued goals or (2) exposure to negative events results in anger and frustration. Th is motivates individuals to engage in deviant acts. Figure 9.1 Comparing Functionalism, Anomie, and GST | TAMMY L. ANDERSON96 cyclist Lance Armstrong. After many years of lying, Armstrong admitted to Oprah Winfrey in a televised interview in January of 2013 that he doped throughout his career. He has since been stripped of his Olympic medals and seven Tour de France titles. We have also learned from the Armstrong case that doping in elite sports is executed by a complex and coordinated network of institutional and business actors who support the illegal behavior (Tygart 2012). But just how prevalent is this form of deviant behavior in sports today? Estimates show doping in elite sports today is fairly low despite our sense that it is widespread. According to Streigel, Ulrich, and Simon (2010), WADA tests show an average of 1% of Olympic Athletes testing positive for some form of doping over the past fi ve years. Pitsch and Emrich (2012) claim the WADA reports between 2004 and 2008 show about 2% of athletes testing positive for PEDs (performance enhancing drugs and techniques). However, both research teams estimate the WADA rates are conservative and far below the true prevalence of dop- ing among athletes. Using an anonymous survey method, where athletes “reported” on doping practices, Streigel and colleagues (2010) found about 7% of elite athletes reported doping for competition. Thus, the “real” rate of doping among elite athletes, Streigel and colleagues (2010) concluded, was likely to be eight times the rate found by WADA. Using a similar self-report methodology, Pitsch and Emrich (2012) estimated doping rates between 10 and 35% among elite athletes. Doping is not equal across sport (UKAD, n.d.). The UK Anti-Doping Agency (UKAD) found that an average of about 3.5% of all tests yielded doping among cyclists such as Vaughters and Armstrong. This rate was one of the highest for Olympic athletes; however, doping was at similar levels for triathletes, weightlifters, boxers, and basketball players. According to the UKAD report, sports such as gymnastics, fencing, football (or soccer), bad- minton, canoeing, and kayaking have the lowest rates. An understanding of the anomie or GST approach would explain that doping in elite sports must begin with a discussion of the cultural goals in society. Many have observed that the goals of elite sports today are not simply about winning the race, game, fi ght, or contest; they are also about setting world records (Hughes and Coakley 1991; Streigel, Ulrich, and Simon 2010). While many concede that winning is more realistic, the public’s and stake- holders’ demand for persistent record-breaking, as well as the growing corporatized world of sports (Wenner 1998), may be pushing those goals beyond athletes’ honest capacities to attain them. Thus, the pressure to cheat and dope will likely increase in the future. Merton, anomie, and doping: given the above text and Figure 9.1 , Merton would likely explain doping among elite athletes as a result of societal pressure to constantly win and set records. When the public attends a baseball game, for example, attendees want to see home runs. America’s affection for the home run derby is classic and, even today, sports fans are so eager to catch a home run ball that some may jeopardize their health or that of other spectators to get one (Marshall 2011). This cultural obsession signifi es the sort of outrageous goals—and potentially deviant adaptations—Merton described. Think back to 1998. Then, Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals and Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs thrilled fans by racing to beat Roger Maris’s long-standing (38 years) and highly coveted record of 61 home runs in one season. McGwire won the race, breaking Maris’s record on September 8 with 70 home runs. Three short years later, in 2001, Barry Bonds would break McGwire’s record by hitting 73 home runs in one season. In fact, McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds have reset the single-season home run record six times between 1998 and 2001. Bonds is currently the home run king of all time. CONNECTIONS | 97 Goals like these are extremely diffi cult to achieve through the legitimate channels of diet, training, and coaching, much like Vaughters described above. This creates anomie and leads to cheating or innovation via doping. Sure enough, the home run races of the late 1990s and early 21st century have been mired in disgrace. In 2010, McGwire publicly admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs throughout his career. In 2007, Bonds found himself ensnared in the Balco steroids scandal. He testifi ed under oath that he never used steroids or other doping techniques and was later charged with obstruction of justice and perjury. Today, too many home runs in baseball are met with suspicion by fans, thus indicating that the doping techniques used to secure them have tainted the cultural obsession with them. Hagedorn, racial inequality and doping: doping knowledge and opportunities, themselves, may be beyond the reach of some athletes and less so for others. Recall that Hagedorn endorsed Merton’s structural explanation of anomie and deviance but added an additional layer of blocked opportunity for minority group members due to racial discrimination in society. Prejudice and discrimination against blacks blocks legitimate opportunities to attain culturally approved goals, leading to higher rates of deviance among minorities. Yet, as the text above indicates, there is little evidence of higher levels of doping among minority ath- letes in the United States. Still, media reports around the world show that doping is especially prevalent in some countries—for example, Australia and Germany—suggesting there may be important differences in goal–means discrepancies by nationality or culture. Agnew, strain, and doping: Agnew’s GST approach takes a more personal viewpoint on goals, opportunities, strain, and deviance. For him, athletes experience discrepancies between their goals and methods to attain them but much more so on an individual and immediate level with direct impact in their lives. Peers, coaches, and sponsors pressure athletes to attain impossible goals and may threaten to take away the things they value about the sport or penalize them for not performing a certain way. This pressure creates negative emotions, such as anger and frustration, and is relieved only when the athlete succumbs to illegiti- mate means of doping. Due to these pressures and feelings, athletes justify doping in many ways—to keep up with their peers, alleviate their own stress and anxiety, satisfy coaches and sponsors on which they are dependent. Vaughters (2012: 2) describes some of these threats, penalties, and consequences for not doping in elite cycling: And think about the talented athletes who did make the right choice and walked away [from dop- ing]. They were punished for following their moral compass and being left behind. How do they reconcile the loss of their dream? It was stolen from them. Vaughters also links the cultural goals of winning to his own emotional state, in a way fi tting to Agnew’s GST: If the message [cultural goal] I was given had been different, but more important, if the reality of sport then had been different, perhaps I could have lived my dream without killing my soul. (2012: 2) Hughes and Coakley (1991) have spent many years studying doping in elite sports. They conclude that athletic deviance is less about outlandish cultural goals of winning and record- setting and much more about the microlevel factors Agnew and others have raised as part of GST. For example, Hughes and Coakley (1991) note that the athletes at greatest risk for | TAMMY L. ANDERSON98 doping are those with low self-esteem, those most vulnerable to demands and pressures from others, those who see no other route to success, and those prepared to make great personal sacrifi ces for their achievements. Therefore, these more interpersonal infl uences—often emo- tional in nature—play an important part in the relationship between strain and doping in elite sports. CONCLUSIONS By comparing the structural anomie position of Merton and Hagedorn with the more microlevel viewpoint by Agnew, we can see an evolution of ideas about what causes deviant behavior in society. Both approaches remind us that deviance—too much of it anyway—has the possibility of harming society, its functioning, ideology, and culture, all of which are extremely important. While the structural approaches of Merton and Hagedorn have been debated, the extension of their work to the more individual level by scholars such as Agnew represents an important evolution in thinking about deviance. Taken together, we can only surmise that deviant behavior is the result of both the environmental factors that shape cul- tural goals and opportunities as well as our own interactions, perceptions, and feelings about them. Moreover, the exact combination of macro- and microlevel infl uences on deviance will vary across our race, gender, and social class in ways Merton and others have long specifi ed. CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS 1. If racial minorities believe sports is one way to achieve culturally approved goals from which they are otherwise blocked, why aren’t their rates of doping higher than whites? What differences we would expect to see between male and female athletes? Why? 2. Given that doping in elite sports or joining a gang results from both environmental fac- tors and more interpersonal ones, what sorts of solutions do you think would be success- ful in curbing such behavior? 3. Imagine you are a researcher studying gang involvement. How would you gather infor- mation on the environmental factors behind it? What would be the obstacles to your research? REFERENCES Agnew, Robert. 1999. “A General Strain Theory of Community Differences in Crime Rates.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 36(2): 123–155. Durkheim, Emile. 1982. “Rules for the Distinction of The Normal and the Pathological.” Pp. 85–101. Rules of the Sociological Method . New York: Free Press. Durant, Robert H., Rickert, Vaughn I., Ashworth, Carolyn Seymore, Newman, Cheryl, and Slavens, Gregory. 1993. “Use of Multiple Drugs among Adolescents Who Use Anabolic Steroids.” New England Journal of Medicine 328: 922–926. Green, Gary A., Uryasz, Frank D., Petr, Todd A., and Bray, Corey D. 2001. “NCAA Study of Substance Use and Abuse Habits of College Student-Athletes.” Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine 11: 51–56. Hagedorn, John M. 1997. “Homeboys, New Jacks, and Anomie.” Journal of African American Men 3(1): 7–28. Hughes, Robert and Coakley, Jay. 1991. “Positive Deviance Among Athletes: The Implications of Overconformity to the Sport Ethic.” Sociology of Sport Journal 8: 307–325. Marshall, John. 2011 (July 12). “Keith Carmickle, Home Run Derby Fan, Nearly Falls From Stadium Stands.” Huffi ngton Post . Retrieved March 6, 2013, http://www.huffi ngtonpost.com/2011/07/12/keith-carmickle-home- run-derby_n_895355.html. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/12/keith-carmickle-home-run-derby_n_895355.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/12/keith-carmickle-home-run-derby_n_895355.html CONNECTIONS | 99 Melnick, Merrill J. and Sabo, Donald. 1994. Ethnicity and Sport in North American History and Culture . Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. Merton, R. 1938. “Social Structure and Anomie.” American Sociological Review 3: 672–682. Petroczi, A. 2007. “Attitudes and Doping: A Structural Equation Analysis of the Relationship between Athletes’ Atti- tudes, Sport Orientation and Doping Behaviour.” Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy 2(24): 1–15. Pitsch, W. and Emrich, E. 2012. “The Frequency of Doping in Elite Sport: Results of a Replication Study.” Interna- tional Review for the Sociology of Sport 47(5): 559–580. Striegel, Heiko, Ulrich, Rolf, and Simon, Perikles. 2010. “Randomized Response Estimates for Doping and Illicit Drug Use in Elite Athletes,” Drug and Alcohol Dependence 106: 230–232. Tygart, Travis T. 2012. “Statement From USADA CEO Travis T. Tygart Regarding the U.S. Postal Service Pro Cycling Team Doping Conspiracy.” http://cyclinginvestigation.usada.org/ UKAD. n.d. The Story of Anti-Doping. Retrieved March 7, 2013, www.ukad.org.uk/new-to-anti-doping/ story-of-anti-doping. Vaughters, Jonathan. 2012 (August 11). “How to get Doping out of Sports.” New York Times . Wenner, L. (1998). MediaSport . New York: Routledge. http://cyclinginvestigation.usada.org/ http://www.ukad.org.uk/new-to-anti-doping/story-of-anti-doping http://www.ukad.org.uk/new-to-anti-doping/story-of-anti-doping This page intentionally left blank SECTION 3 Social Disorganization and Collective Effi cacy This page intentionally left blank Introduction Tammy L. Anderson Neighborhood Watch programs have been successful in preventing crime and deviance in neighborhoods across our nation over time. They bring citizens together with law enforce- ment offi cials to deter crime and make communities safer. State Trooper Stefani Plume under- stands their value well. She recently told her fellow citizens of Bullskin Township in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, that their Neighborhood Watch program is doing a great job keeping their township safe. Compared to places close by, Bullskin has lower rates of crime. Plume attributes the success to the joint partnership between the police and residents. She states, “I think that you folks here in Bullskin Township have gone above and beyond and you are doing really well.” Crime Watch organizer Edwin Zylka agrees, explaining that “the major purpose of our organization is to bring people together to talk about their problems and to keep looking out for one another.” Section 3 covers social disorganization theory and the newer concept of collective effi cacy in readings by Shaw and McKay (1969), Sampson (2006), and Grattet (2009). They outline some of the fundamental ideas about crime control and safety that Neighborhood Watch programs—like that in Bullskin Township—fi nd so useful in helping communities reduce vio- lence, property crime, and vandalism. Such critical points include that deviance can be an feature of the environment—a neighborhood effect—rather than simply a matter of individual traits, decisions, and actions. Thus, collective action and inaction can both cause and eliminate it. Social Disorganization Theory. In their study of crime and delinquency in Chicago, Shaw and McKay (1969) found patterning in the distribution of crime and delinquency across different neighborhoods or zones—like the townships references above—based mostly on land-use patterns (i.e., business, commercial, residential). By poring over offi cial crime sta- tistics and conducting local observations, they found crime rates were higher in communities experiencing social changes that disrupted key dimensions of social control. High rates of transience, neighborhood decay, poverty, crowding, and population diversity (e.g., mixing of various ethnic and racial groups), they argued, threatened moral consensus and weakened local social institutions, such as churches, voluntary organizations, and parent–teacher asso- ciations. Such “social disorganization” was found to increase neighborhood crime. Social disorganization theory has helped sociologists understand the causes of violent and property crime, as well as juvenile delinquency, since the early 20th century. It was innovative because it focused on the characteristics of places—or more precisely neighborhoods—rather than the traits of individual offenders to explain things like homicide, robbery, arson, illegal drug sales, truancy, and vandalism. | TAMMY L. ANDERSON104 Collective Effi cacy. The idea of collective effi cacy came along much later in the 20th cen- tury, when sociologists employing social disorganization–like studies discovered that a more symbolic feature of environments—the ties between community members—also played an important role in the amount of crime and deviance a neighborhood contained. Both Trooper Plume and Crime Watch organizer Zylka believe such bonds between community members and offi cials are the key to Bullskin Township’s recent success in decreasing crime and disorder. According to the Sampson reading in this section, collective effi cacy refers to the degree to which neighborhood residents share a mutual trust, a sense of solidarity, and are willing to intervene when problems arise in the community. Sampson notes that a neighborhood’s abil- ity to control the wrongdoing of its residents (especially younger ones) will protect it from high rates of crime and deviance. Socially disorganized neighborhoods disallow this sort of strong bonding needed among residents—like those in Bullskin Township—to block crime. So, while attending to things like crowding, residential turnover, urban decay, and ethnic heterogeneity are important in fi ghting crime, Sampson and others propose that goal is likely better achieved through promoting collective effi cacy among community residents. Until recently, the neighborhood approach used by proponents of the social disorganiza- tion and collective effi cacy frameworks typically studied street crime—for example, property and violent crime—and relied heavily on offi cial data from police departments to track or map offending across-city neighborhoods. While many offi cials and policy-makers fi nd this approach quite valuable in fi ghting crime, it has limited the utility of the social disorganiza- tion and collective effi cacy theories in explaining other types of nonnormative behavior in other settings or contexts. Could they be useful, for example, in helping us understand devi- ance beyond the city’s streets? The reading by Grattet and the connections essay by Sexton in this section show us they can. To begin, Grattet (2007) offers an important contribution to the social disorganization and collective effi cacy framework because his study targets bias or hate crimes—that is, a category of offending based on how people’s prejudices motivate them to commit crimes against oth- ers. The FBI (2011) defi nes hate crimes as “those motivated by biases based on race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity/national origin, and disability.” In Sacramento, Grattet fi nds that intergroup confl ict, stemming from intolerance to ethnic and racial diversity in neighborhoods, best explains bias crimes. Residents attempt to “soil” their neighborhoods or defi ne them as territories exclusive to certain ethnic and racial groups and their heritages. Whites are espe- cially likely to do this—that is, use “defended neighborhood” arguments to manage intergroup confl ict that arises from the in-migration of unwanted minorities. Grattet’s study, therefore, shows that culturally based prejudices among racial and ethnic groups are the driving force to the crimes community residents commit against each other. Such biases amplify social disor- ganization and weaken collective effi cacy such that some locations and groups simply cannot adapt to diversity and come together to fi ght crime. The connections essay by Lori Sexton in this section advances the social disorganization- collective effi cacy continuum in yet another way by showing that it can also help us under- stand crime and deviance in locations beyond the city, such as prisons. Sexton’s essay invites us to: reenvision the concepts of social disorganization and collective effi cacy by plucking them from the comfortable trappings of neighborhood analysis and transplanting them into a decidedly different context: the prison. Through a focus on multiple, overlapping communities, we have problematized INTRODUCTION | 105 the demarcation of communities based purely on physical boundaries, instead allowing for communi- ties to be rooted in common experiences and identity. Sexton picks up on the cultural aspects touched on by the other readings in this section to explain the predicament of transgender prisoners. While estimates of transgender inmates in our nation’s prisons are diffi cult to come by, the media is fi lled with reports about numerous problems they encounter while incarcerated. One of the most comprehensive studies of this topic was conducted in California by Jenness, Sexton, and Sumner (2011). Jenness and her research team found abuse, intimidation, and violent victimization were daily experiences of transgender inmates. In theorizing about the causes of violent victimization of transgender inmates, Sexton links Grattet’s idea of defended neighborhoods and Sampson’s point about collective effi cacy, stating: Perhaps a lesson can be taken from Grattet’s (2009) work that combines social disorganization with a “defended neighborhoods” argument. According to this perspective, transgender prisoners—who are often visibly different from the larger inmate population—might be viewed as unwelcome others by non-transgender prisoners. Thus, despite higher levels of collective effi cacy among the transgender prisoner community, cultural confl ict between transgender prisoners and non-transgender prisoners within a prison “neighborhood” might yield higher levels of victimization for transgender prisoners. While the prison transgender community does not have a neighborhood watch group— like Bullskin Township—to bring its members or residents together to help prevent victim- ization, numerous human rights groups have emerged to stop hate crimes within prison walls. For example, Stop Prisoner Rape 1 and the Black and Pink organization 2 provide online support for transgender inmates and advocate for their protection. Such action and support from “outside” the prison community is critical for transgender inmates and others suffer- ing sexual assault and intimidation behind prison walls. However, would a more effective solution be to foster collective effi cacy within the prison community itself by physically and culturally integrating prison groups that are in confl ict with each other? To what extent do you think such a physical and cultural integration approach like this would work to reduce hate crimes across our country? What obstacles can you think of that might disallow them from happening? Hopefully, the readings in this section will help you fi nd some answers. NOTES 1. See the Stop Prisoner Rape Web site. Retrieved September 17, 2013, http://spr.igc.org. 2. See the Black & Pink Web site. Retrieved September 17, 2013, www.blackandpink.org. REFERENCES Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). 2011. “Hate Crime Statistics, 2010.” Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. Retrieved June 4, 2013, http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2010. Grattet, Ryken. 2009. “The Urban Ecology of Bias Crime: A Study of Disorganized and Defended Neighborhoods.” Social Problems 56(1): 132–150. Jenness, Valerie, Sexton, Lori, and Sumner, Jennifer. 2011. “Transgender Inmates in California Prisons: An Empiri- cal Examination of a Vulnerable Population.” Report to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabili- tation. Irvine, CA: University of California, Irvine. Sampson, Robert J. 2006. “Collective Effi cacy Theory: Lessons Learned and Directions for Future Inquiry,” Pp. 149–167 in Taking Stock , by Sampson, Robert J. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Shaw, Clifford R. and McKay, Henry D. 1969. Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. http://spr.igc.org/ http://www.blackandpink.org http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2010 Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION During the past century many studies have been made which indicate that the incidence of offi cially recorded delinquency and crime varies from one locality to another. One such study, Delinquency Areas , was pub- lished in 1929 by the authors and their col- leagues. 1 This monograph reported a study of the distribution of the home addresses of approximately 60,000 male individuals in Chicago who had been dealt with by the school authorities, the police, and the courts as actual or alleged truants, delinquents, or criminals. It was clearly demonstrated in this report that the rates of all three groups varied widely among the local communi- ties in the city. The low-income commu- nities near the centers of commerce and heavy industry had the highest rates, while those in outlying residential communities of higher economic status were more or less uniformly low. The present volume brings the delin- quency data for Chicago up to date, provides comparative data for several other large American cities, and includes much new material on the differential characteristics of local communities with varying rates of delinquents. Specifi cally, in this volume an attempt is made further to explore the fol- lowing questions in regard to the ecology of delinquency and crime in American cities: 1. To what extent do the rates of delin- quents and criminals show similar varia- tions among the local communities in different types of American cities? 2. Does recidivism among delinquents vary from community to community in accor- dance with rates of delinquents? 3. To what extent do variations in rates of delinquents correspond to demonstrable differences in the economic, social, and cultural characteristics of local commu- nities in different types of cities? 4. How are the rates of delinquents in par- ticular areas affected over a period of time by successive changes in the nativ- ity and nationality composition of the population? 5. To what extent are the observed differ- ences in the rates of delinquents between children of foreign and native parentage due to a differential geographic distribu- tion of these two groups in the city? 6. Under what economic and social condi- tions does crime develop as a social tra- dition and become embodied in a system of criminal values? Structure  Culture 7. What do the rates of delinquents, when computed by local areas for successive periods of time, reveal with respect to the effectiveness of traditional methods of treatment and prevention? 8. What are the implications, for treatment and prevention, of wide variations in JUVENILE DELINQUENCY AND URBAN AREAS | 107 rates of delinquents in different types of communities? It is not assumed that this study will pro- vide an answer to all of these questions. Certain facts are presented, however, which are useful in analyzing the nature of the problem of delinquency in urban commu- nities and which have defi nite implications for the development of control techniques. Although it long has been recognized that the social conditions in low-income areas are such as to give rise to delinquency among a disproportionately large number of boys and young men, this fact has not been given the attention which its impor- tance warrants in the development of thera- peutic and preventive programs. It is hoped that the data in this volume will help to serve this purpose by focusing attention upon the need for broad programs of social reconstruction and community organiza- tion. It would appear from the fi ndings of this study that successful treatment of the problem of delinquency in large cities will entail the development of programs which seek to effect changes in the conditions of life in specifi c local communities and in whole sections of the city. Diagnosis and supervision of individual offenders proba- bly will not be suffi cient to achieve this end. As Plant suggests: The effects of social institutions upon the personality—those ways in which the cul- tural pattern in one or another way affects the working out of the individual’s problem—are of only academic importance unless we can in one way or another alter the environment to meet the needs that appear. 2 After the turn of the century many stu- dents became interested in the ecological study of delinquency in American cities. In 1912 Breckinridge and Abbott published a study showing the geographic distribution of cases of juvenile delinquency in the city of Chicago. They utilized for this purpose the cases of boys and girls brought before the Juvenile Court of Cook County on petitions alleging delinquency during the years 1899– 1909. Among other things they prepared a map showing the location of the homes of these children. This map indicated that a disproportionately large number of the cases were concentrated in certain districts of the city. In this connection they state: A study of this map makes possible several conclusions with regard to “delinquent neigh- borhoods.” It becomes clear, in the fi rst place, that the region from which the children of the court chiefl y come is the densely populated West Side, and that the most conspicuous cen- ters of delinquency in this section have been the congested wards which lie along the river and the canals. . . . The West Side furnished the largest quota of delinquency across the river. These are chiefl y the Italian quarter of the Twenty- Second Ward on the North Side; the First and Second Wards, which together include the dis- trict of segregated vice and a portion of the so- called “black belt” of the South Side; and such distinct industrial communities as the districts near the steel mills of South Chicago and near the stockyards. 3 It should be noted that this study did not relate the number of delinquents to the popu- lation in the various districts of the city. While the distribution map served to localize the problem of delinquency and to show the abso- lute number of cases in the various districts, rates by geographic units were not computed. Hence, it was not possible to conclude from this study that the observed concentration of cases was due to anything other than a greater density of population in these areas. Since the publication of the fi ndings of Breckinridge and Abbott, studies have been carried on in which the (rate of delinquents [ratio between the number of delinquents and the appropriate population group]) has been used as a basis for comparisons among unit areas within the city. | CLIFFORD R. SHAW AND HENRY D. MCKAY108 In 1915 Ernest W. Burgess, under the direc- tion of Professor F. W. Blackmar, conducted a survey of social conditions in Lawrence, Kansas. This survey included a study of the geographic distribution of alleged delinquent children for the city as a whole, the absolute number of delinquents in the various dis- tricts, and the rates of delinquents for the several areas. Both the number of cases and the rates of delinquents show wide variations among the several areas. The ratio between the number of alleged delinquent children and the total population aged 5–16 years varied from 8.36 to 0.82 for the 6 wards of the city. In this connection Burgess states: The signifi cant fact to be gathered from the records of the children of Lawrence is the large proportion of juvenile delinquents in the entire child population in the fourth ward. One child out of every twelve children fi ve and over, but under seventeen years old, appeared in the juvenile court in the two-year period stud- ied. If this proportion were maintained for a twelve-year period, comprising the age groups between fi ve and seventeen, the presumption is that at least one-half of the children in the fourth ward would have appeared before the juvenile judge before reaching seventeen years. Since the proportion of juvenile delinquency in the fourth ward is three times as large as that in any other ward, the conclusion naturally follows that certain factors are at work here which are absent elsewhere in Lawrence . . . and classes of areas, zero-order correlations, and, in a few instances, higher-order correla- tions. While these maps and statistical data are useful in locating different types of areas, in differentiating the areas where the rates of delinquency are high from areas where the rates are low, and in predicting or fore- casting expected rates, they do not furnish an explanation of delinquent conduct. This explanation, it is assumed, must be sought, in the fi rst place, in the fi eld of the more subtle human relationships and social values which comprise the social world of the child in the family and community. These more distinctively human situations, which seem to be directly related to delinquent conduct, are, in turn, products of larger economic and social processes characterizing the history and growth of the city and of the local com- munities which comprise it. In this study the Chicago delinquency data are dealt with in a much more detailed man- ner than in the other cities for which data are presented. These give a description of the growth and confi guration of the city; the geographic distribution of delinquents and criminals, rates of infant mortality, tubercu- losis, and insanity; and indexes of the varia- tions in the economic, social, and cultural characteristics of local areas for which rates of delinquency have been computed. CHAPTER II: GROWTH OF CHICAGO AND DIFFERENTIATION OF LOCAL AREAS Chicago is a large industrial and commercial city located on the western shore of Lake Michigan near its southern extremity. It is the second largest city in the United States and the largest included in this study. Within a period of a little over a century it has grown from a small town, with a population of about 200 and an area of 2 1/2 square miles, to a great industrial metropolis, with a population of over 3,300,000 people and a corporate area of 211 square miles, extend- ing some 25 miles along the lake front and from 8 to 10 miles inland. During its growth a differentiation of areas has taken place within Chicago. Even a casual observation reveals that certain dis- tricts are occupied largely by industry and others used exclusively for residential pur- poses; that certain areas are occupied by persons of low economic status and others by the very rich; and that certain neighbor- hoods are characterized by a native white population, and others by the foreign-born, whose dominant languages are still those of JUVENILE DELINQUENCY AND URBAN AREAS | 109 the Old World. It is generally known, also, that among areas in the city there are wide differences in the rates of truants, of delin- quents, and of adult criminals, as well as in disease and mortality rates and other indexes of well-being. More subtle are the differ- ences in standards and cultural values, in community organization, and in the nature of social life—but that they exist there can be no question. Why do these variations exist? Why has the city assumed this confi guration, with this particular distribution of poverty and wealth and of racial and national groups? Why are there such wide differences in standards and cultural values among areas within the city? This volume is based on the assumption that the best basis for an understanding of the development of differences among urban areas may be gained through study of the processes of city growth. Areas acquire high delinquency rates neither by chance nor by design but rather, it is assumed, as an end- product of processes in American city life over which, as yet, man has been able to exercise little control. This elaboration of the differentiation of areas in city growth is pre- sented, then, as a frame of reference, a basis for analysis of the problem of delinquency not only in relation to the processes of urban expansion but also in relation to the whole complex of urban life. In the present reading an effort will be made (1) to outline and describe the pro- cesses of growth involved in the differentia- tion of areas in large cities; (2) to analyze the growth and expansion of Chicago with ref- erence to these processes; and (3) to present some evidence of this differentiation, with the characteristics of the different types of areas resulting. Processes of City Growth The general processes of growth underly- ing segregation and differentiation of areas within cities have long been the subject of investigation by students of urban life. Professor Robert E. Park and others have pointed out the general character of these processes, noting that every American city of the same class tends to reproduce in the course of its expansion all the different types of areas and that these tend to exhibit, from city to city, very similar physical, social, and cultural characteristics, leading to their des- ignation as “natural areas.” 4 In his description of the processes of radial expansion Professor E. W. Burgess has advanced the thesis that, in the absence of opposing factors, the American city tends to take the form of concentric zones. 5 Zone I in this conceptual scheme is the central busi- ness and industrial district; zone II, the “zone in transition,” or slum area, in the throes of change from residence to business and industry; zone III, the zone of workingmen’s homes; zone IV, the residential zone; and zone V, the outer commuters’ zone, beyond the city limits. The same general pattern of areas tends to appear in any major industrial center, even though such a “center” may be on the outskirts of a large city. This ideal or schematic construction furnishes a frame of reference from which the location and char- acteristics of given city areas may be studied at any moment, as well as the changes that take place as time goes on. (In a growing city, zones are continuously expanding, which means that each inner zone must invade 6 the next beyond.) The result of this process is observable in our large cities, where the central business and industrial areas, now largely uninhabited except by a transient population, at one time included within their limits all gradations of areas in the city. The starting point for a discussion of the processes of expansion and differentiation within the city, as indicated above, is the concentration of industry and commerce, especially the confi guration including the central business district. Even if the city were not growing, and its internal organization were assumed to be static, the residential | CLIFFORD R. SHAW AND HENRY D. MCKAY110 neighborhoods adjacent to industrial and commercial areas would be considered, no doubt, physically less desirable than those farther removed. This would be true espe- cially of residential areas near the central business district, for in most cities these are the sections built up fi rst in the development of the city and for that reason are character- ized by the oldest homes. Generally speak- ing, the largest proportion of new dwellings are to be found in the outlying sections of any city, while the areas with the most old dwellings are close to the points of early settlement. More directly, the presence of either indus- trial or commercial districts affects the desir- ability of adjacent residential areas, making life in them less pleasant, according to pre- vailing standards. The smoke and soot from heavy industrial plants soon render near- by residential structures dirty and ugly in appearance. Noise from factory machinery may be distracting, and the odors of certain industries, notably slaughtering and render- ing, are often very disagreeable. These condi- tions, together with the fact that they soon become associated with undesirable social status, would tend to create wide differences in the distribution of areas even if the basic structure of the city were permanently fi xed. In an expanding city these differences among areas are exaggerated because inva- sion or the threat of invasion from inner-city areas results in more active deterioration, with subsequent demolition of the struc- tures in those sections adjacent to industry and commerce. As the city grows, the areas of commerce and light industry near the cen- ter encroach upon areas used for residen- tial purposes. The dwellings in such areas, often already undesirable because of age, are allowed to deteriorate when such inva- sion threatens or actually occurs, as further investment in them is unprofi table. These residences are permitted to yield whatever return can be secured in their dilapidated condition, often in total disregard of the housing laws, until they are demolished to make way for new industrial and com- mercial structures. Even if invasion has not taken place, these processes are evident when the area is zoned for purposes other than residence. The same general trends are seen in resi- dential districts adjacent to outlying indus- trial centers. The distinctions may not be so noticeable, the dwellings so old, or the threat of invasion so active; yet the sections closest to industry are, in general, considered least desirable. When residential areas are being invaded or threatened by invasion, there is appar- ently little possibility of reconstruction without public subsidy. The physical unde- sirability of these areas and the ever pres- ent prospect of change in land use make it improbable that any fi rst-class residences will be constructed from private funds with- out the enactment of some special protective legislation. 7 The result is that persons liv- ing in these areas move out as soon as pos- sible. The general effect of this process has been the gradual evacuation of the central areas in all large American cities, leading to the expression frequently heard: The city is dying at its heart. The differentiation of areas within the city on the basis of physical characteristics is co- ordinate with a segregation of the population on an economic basis. The relentless pressure of economic competition forces the group of lowest economic status into the areas which are least attractive, because there the rents are low, while the economically most secure groups choose higher-rental residential com- munities, most of which are near the periph- ery of the city. Between these two extremes lie communities representing a wide variety of economic levels. This segregation according to the distribu- tion of economic goods implies also a distribu- tion of the population on an occupational and vocational basis. The persons in those occupa- tions which command the lowest wages—the JUVENILE DELINQUENCY AND URBAN AREAS | 111 unskilled and service occupations—are forced to live in the areas of lowest rents, while those in the professions and the more remunera- tive occupations are concentrated in the more attractive sections of the city. The segregation of population on an economic and occupational basis results, in turn, in the segregation of racial and nativ- ity groups if, within these groups, different economic levels are represented. In north- ern industrial cities the group of lowest eco- nomic status has, until recently, comprised the most recent immigrants. This fact has resulted in the concentration of the foreign- born in areas of lowest economic status and, conversely, in the concentration of native whites in the areas of higher economic sta- tus, but this separation does not mean that a given group of their descendants are per- manently segregated, when the distinction is based on cultural differences only. The national groups which comprise the foreign- born in one era may prosper and move, or they may follow their grown children, most of whom are native-born, into outly- ing areas. Their places are taken by newer immigrant groups, who in turn are replaced by still more recent arrivals, and so on, as long as immigration continues. The result tends to be that, while the segregation of the foreign-born in the areas of lowest economic status persists, the nationality groups pre- dominating change from decade to decade. Similarly, the native white population living in areas of high economic status are, at any given time, the descendants of those who constituted the bulk of the foreign-born in previous generations. This segregation of population groups on an economic basis does not always proceed in the manner described because it may be complicated by conditions which serve as barriers to the free movement of population within the city. In northern cities, barriers of racial prejudice and established custom have prevented the Negroes, the group now in the least advantageous position economically, from occupying certain low-rent areas, into which they otherwise would have been seg- regated by the economic process, and from moving outward into communities of their choice when economically able to do so. As a result, many have been restricted to neigh- borhoods which have most of the character- istics of inner-city areas but where often the rentals are disproportionately high, partly because of increased congestion and the resulting demand for homes. In southern cit- ies the segregation of the Negro and white population corresponds in general to differ- ences in economic status but is sustained by more elaborate caste mores and taboos. The Growth and Expansion of Chicago An effort will next be made to trace the pro- cesses of city growth as they have operated in the city of Chicago and to describe briefl y the characteristics of the areas differentiated. The original plot of Chicago, surveyed about 1830, contained roughly 1/2 square mile of territory, centered about the forks of the Chicago River. This area was extended to approximately 1 square mile in 1833 and to 2 1/2 square miles in 1835, when the town of Chicago was incorporated. Geographically, the site of Chicago was low and swampy but so level that elevation has been a negligible factor in determining the direction of metro- politan expansion. Two geographic barriers have been important, however—Lake Michi- gan and the Chicago River. An effect of Lake Michigan is seen in the fact that the central business district is located on the lake shore—geographically not in the center of the city. The study of the growth of Chicago, diagramed schematically in terms of concentric circles, is at once mod- ifi ed, therefore, to a study in terms of semi- circles. The Chicago River, likewise, has been signifi cant both because it has interfered with transportation along the diagonals from the point of original settlement and the pres- ent business center and because early in the | CLIFFORD R. SHAW AND HENRY D. MCKAY112 history of Chicago heavy industry was con- centrated along the two branches of the river. This development was accompanied by the location of groups of industries in the areas surrounding this industrial section along the river, while high-class residential districts developed north, south, and west of the cen- tral business district. The internal pattern of Chicago was determined largely by the section lines of the government survey. Dividing the city into square-mile areas, these lines have become the important streets which extend through- out the city from north to south and from east to west, tending to facilitate transporta- tion and, consequently, to accelerate radial expansion along those arterial routes running at right angles and to retard radial expansion in those areas at oblique angles to the streets of the central business district. This basic tendency has been lessened somewhat by the presence of diagonal streets to the northwest and southwest, which originally were Indian trails and later became plank roads leading to Chicago from outlying suburbs. The growth of Chicago is revealed by the changes between decennial census years. In 1840, 10 years after the original town was plotted, the population numbered 4,470. The population expanded nearly six times between 1840 and 1850, 2 1/2 times between 1850 and 1860, and nearly 3 times between 1860 and 1870. It reached 500,000 in 1880, 1,000,000 by 1900, and was well over 2,000,000 by 1910. The rate of increase between 1910 and 1920 was 23.6 per cent; between 1920 and 1930, 24.8 per cent; and between 1930 and 1940, 0.6 per cent. The drop in the rate of increase between 1930 and 1940 is due in part to the fact that during this period the areas of most rapid growth were outside the political boundaries of the city. The territorial expansion corresponded roughly to population increase. In 1889, when Chicago comprised 44 square miles, an area of 126 square miles was annexed at one time, quadrupling the area of the city and increasing the number of square miles within the political boundaries to 170. This area included Kenwood, Hyde Park, South Chi- cago, Pullman, and many other small towns, as well as much unoccupied territory. From that time to the present, annexations have been relatively small but have increased the total city area to 211 square miles. Although some of the land within the political bound- aries is as yet unpopulated, the metropolitan area extends far beyond these boundaries in every direction and includes many contigu- ous cities and towns located chiefl y along transportation lines toward the north, south, and west. In the course of this expansion, marked changes have taken place in the character of some sections of the city. This is especially true around the central business district, where early residential areas have been invaded by industrial and commercial developments and have therefore been extended farther and farther out from the center. Similarly, single- family dwellings have been replaced by the characteristic two-fl at dwellings in many neighborhoods or by large apartment houses along the important transportation routes. Exclusive residential districts of single homes are now to be found only in the outlying dis- tricts and in the suburbs. The general confi guration of Chicago resulting from growth and expansion within the limits set by Lake Michigan, the Chicago River, checkerboard streets, and the early dis- tribution of industry is outlined in Map 10.1 , which shows the areas either occupied by or zoned for industrial and residential purposes. Today the central business district cov- ers much of the area included in the city as incorporated in March, 1837. This district of approximately 10.6 square miles has primar- ily a hotel and transient population near its center, but on the outer edge the land is in transition from residential to industrial and commercial uses. This change has not pro- gressed at the same rate in all parts of the JUVENILE DELINQUENCY AND URBAN AREAS | 113 area. In some places light industrial plants, business houses, and garages have replaced dwelling-houses almost completely, while in other parts the land still is used primarily for residential purposes. The fact that it is zoned for light industry and commerce, however, makes it subject to occupancy for these uses as the central business district expands. While practically all of the exclusive residential neighborhoods of early Chicago now are included in the areas either zoned for or occupied by industry and commerce, one small area on the Near North Side has withstood successfully the threats of indus- trial and commercial invasion. This district, occupied by large residences and exclusive apartment houses and known locally as the “Gold Coast,” stands in vivid contrast to the adjoining areas of deteriorated dwellings and industrial development. In contrast with the areas zoned for light industry and commerce, located for the most part in a semicircle surrounding the cen- tral business district, the districts of heavy industry in Chicago are widely distributed. They tend to be located at points strategic for industrial development because of natu- ral advantages, such as the lake, trunk lines of railroads, or abundance of cheap land. The most extensive industrial areas in Chi- cago lie along the two forks of the Chicago River. The areas zoned for heavy industry on the North Branch extend some 4 miles northwest from the central business district, while the southern extension follows the south fork to the city limits, after broaden- ing out to include the Union Stock Yards and the so-called “central manufacturing district.” Between these forks of the Chicago River lie two large industrial areas which extend westward from the central business district along railroad trunk lines. These, in turn, are intersected by industrial areas along trunk lines running north and south, so that in a very real sense the Near West Side, the Near Southwest Side, and, to a lesser extent, the Near Northwest Side are bounded by indus- trial establishments. The Union Stock Yards and affi liated industries, clearly indicated on Map 10.1 , were opened in 1863. The site was chosen both because of its industrial advantages and because at that time it was far outside the city limits. In the general annexation of 1889, however, this area was brought within the corporate boundary of the city, so that today the Union Stock Yards occupy a posi- tion not far from the geographic center of the city. The South Chicago steel-mill center and the industrial centers indicated by the large areas zoned for industry in the southeast- ern section were also originally outside the city limits. South Chicago, located on Lake Michigan at the mouth of the Calu- met River, was founded almost as early as Chicago and for several decades remained an independent city. Although annexed to Chicago in 1889, it is still a more or less independent commercial and industrial cen- ter. The town of Pullman, located just west of Lake Calumet, likewise was annexed in 1889 and, like South Chicago, has retained its name and essential industrial character- istics. Much of the remaining area zoned for industry in the Calumet district at pres- ent is unoccupied waste land. Similarly, on the Southwest Side, the large sections marked in solid black on Map 10.1 are zoned for, but not yet occupied by, indus- trial establishments. Evidences of Differentiation Resulting from City Growth Demolition of Substandard Housing. — Evidence of physical change and deterioration in Chi- cago within the general framework of the industrial confi guration is seen fi rst in the high proportion of buildings in certain districts which have been condemned either for demo- lition or for repair. Map 10.2 , showing the location of dilapidated or dangerous buildings | CLIFFORD R. SHAW AND HENRY D. MCKAY114 demolished as of December, 1935, reveals that a large proportion of these buildings are adja- cent to the central business district. It is within this district, known sociologically as an “area in transition,” that the change in land use has been most rapid. Map 10.1 Zoning Map of Chicago JUVENILE DELINQUENCY AND URBAN AREAS | 115 Increase and Decrease of Population. —Indi- rect evidence of the processes of invasion and differentiation in Chicago is seen in the decrease of population in areas adjacent to industry and commerce and the increase in outlying areas. In a rapidly growing city it is natural that a large number of areas should be increasing in popu- lation. For purposes of differentiating among communities it is much more signifi cant that, even while the city of Chicago the low percentages of delinquency in wards 5 and 6, in North Lawrence, is to be accounted for by the semi-rural character of the commu- nity, with its opportunities for play, and by the distance from the industrial and business part of the community. . . . 8 Two years after the publication of the Lawrence survey R. D. McKenzie conducted a general study of Columbus, Ohio. In addi- tion to showing the actual geographic distri- bution of the homes of delinquent children, this study also included rates of delinquents by wards, along with certain indexes of neighborhood situations and an intensive study of a local community. The rate of delin- quency, which in this study represented the ratio between the number of delinquents and the number of registered voters, ranged from 1.66 to 0.35 for the 16 wards of the city. 9 During recent years additional studies of the ecology of delinquency and crime have been made in a number of American cities. 10 All of these revealed rather wide variations in the rates of delinquency by local areas. In some instances attention was focused almost exclusively upon variations in rates among areas while in others the rates were corre- lated with indexes of varying community backgrounds. In general, these studies sup- port the fi ndings reported in the authors’ ear- lier publication, Delinquency Areas . 11 It may be observed that some of the stud- ies presented are not of recent date. This fact does not detract from their theoretical value, since the primary interest is in the study of the relationship between the com- munity and delinquency. A study completed 10 years ago may serve this purpose as ade- quately as a current one. Whenever possible, data representing different periods of time have been utilized as a means of studying long-time trends in the relationship between volume of delinquency and local community characteristics. In this attempt to analyze the variations in rates of delinquents by geographic areas in American cities a variety of statistical data are utilized for the purpose of deter- mining the extent to which differences in the economic and social characteristics of local areas parallel variations in rates of delin- quents. The methods employed include spot maps; statistical tables showing the rates of delinquents and economic and social vari- ables computed for large zones was growing at a very rapid rate; large areas constantly were being depopulated. Between 1920 and 1930, a period of rapid growth, there were great changes in the dis- tribution of the population in Chicago. The percentage of increase or decrease of popula- tion for this period in each of the 113 areas 12 into which the city was divided is shown in Map 10.3 . It will be noted that the areas of decreasing population, delimited by heavy shading, almost completely surround the central business district, while practically all of the areas of rapid increase are near the periphery. Between these two extremes there is a continuous variation. The areas of great- est decrease in population are near the center. Beyond, in order, are the areas where there was a small decrease, then a small increase, then a substantial increase, and fi nally, at the city’s periphery, a zone where the increase was very great. It is this continuum rather than the division into areas of decreasing and increasing population that is signifi cant in showing the essential nature of the processes of city growth. | CLIFFORD R. SHAW AND HENRY D. MCKAY116 Map 10.2 Distribution of Demolished Buildings, Chicago, 1935 From Table 10.1 and Map 10.3 it will be seen that the population in 10 square- mile areas decreased more than 20 per cent between 1920 and 1930, and that in 26 additional areas the drop was between 1 and 20 per cent. The decrease reveals the fact of expansion more vividly when analyzed in conjunction with the rates of increase and decrease of population for the previous and subsequent decades. Between 1910 and 1920 the population decreased in 23 square- mile areas, while between 1930 and 1940, Map 10.3 Increase or Decrease of Population, Chicago, 1920–30 | CLIFFORD R. SHAW AND HENRY D. MCKAY118 a period of comparatively slight growth in total city population, a drop occurred in 68 out of the 140 square-mile areas. It will be noted that the outward movement from the 36 areas that decreased in population between 1920 and 1930 reduced the propor- tion of the total population in these areas from 40.0 per cent in 1920 to 27.7 per cent in 1930 and to 25.3 per cent in 1940. This change in population in the differ- ent areas of Chicago establishes the rapidity with which the population is being evacuated from the center of the city. As the areas near the central business district are taken over for industry and commerce, the depopulated dis- trict extends farther and farther outward from the Loop, and new residential areas, charac- terized by very rapid growth of population, are pushed back to the city limits or into the suburbs beyond. On a smaller scale a similar process can be noted in the areas adjacent to each of the major outlying industrial centers. Although the continuous decrease in population in the inner-city areas indicates a great drop in the number of persons per acre in these areas, this should not be interpreted to mean that there has been any increase in the number of rooms per family or decrease in the number of persons per room. It indi- cates rather that certain areas are being depopulated as they are abandoned for residential purposes and either are allowed to remain unoccupied or are taken over for industrial or commercial use. Segregation of Population on an Eco- nomic Basis. —The segregation of groups of low economic status into areas of physi- cal deterioration and decreasing population is clearly indicated when rates of increase and decrease of population are related to indexes of economic status, such as percent- age of families on relief, home ownership, median rentals, and occupation. These rela- tionships as of 1930 and 1920 are presented in Table 10.2 . Families on Relief. —Economic segregation in Chicago is likewise indicated by Map 10.4 , which shows the percentage of fami- lies on relief in 1934 in each of the 140 square-mile areas. These rates are based on the 115,132 families reported by the Illinois Emergency Relief Commission to be receiv- ing relief and on the total number of families as given in the 1930 census. The range in the percentage of families on relief is from 1.4 in square mile 121 to 55.9 in square mile 87. The median is 10.6 and the percentage for the city, 13.7. It will be noted from Map 10.4 that the areas with the highest percentage of families on relief are the areas of physical deteriora- tion and decreasing population. The lowest TABLE 10.1 Percentage of City Population, 1920, 1930, 1940, for Square-Mile Areas Grouped by Percentage of Population Increase or Decrease between 1920 and 1930 Percentage Increase or Decrease in Population 1920–30 Number of Square-Mile Areas Percentage of City Population 1920 1930 1940 Decreasing: 20–39 10 11.8 6.9 5.9 0–19 26 28.2 20.8 19.4 Increasing: 0–19 28 29.0 25.4 25.9 20–39 15 11.6 11.9 12.6 40 and over 34 19.4 35.0 36.2 JUVENILE DELINQUENCY AND URBAN AREAS | 119 percentages, on the other hand, are found in the outlying and newer districts of the city, where the population is increasing and where there is comparatively little deteriora- tion. Between these two extremes the grada- tions correspond closely with the gradations in the physical characteristics of the areas as already presented. A notable exception to this tendency is seen in certain Negro areas, where the rate of families on relief is high but where the population is increasing, probably as a result of the restrictions to free movement of Negro population into other areas. TABLE 10.2 Economic Segregation by Areas Grouped according to Increase or Decrease of Population 1930 and 1920 1930 Percentage Increase or Decrease of Population 1920–30 Percentage of Families on Relief 1934 Median Rental 1934 Median Rental 1930 Percentage of Families Owning Homes 1930 Percentage of Families Having Radios 1930 Decreasing: 20–39 (27.5)* 30.0 $16.59 $22.72 16 6 34.2 0–19 (7.9)* 23.3 18.71 35.32 27.2 42.9 Increasing: 0–19 (9.2)* . . . . . . 16.2 30.05 56.18 23.8 61.2 20–39 (28.4)* . . . . . . 8.6 35.85 62.94 27.6 71.5 40 and over (124.2)* 6.1 41.90 70.62 41.4 76.5 1920 Type of Occupation, 1920 Percentage Increase or Decrease of Population 1910–20 Rate of Dependent Families 1921 Percentage of Families Owning Homes 1920 Percentage Manufacturing Percentage Domestic and Personal Service Percentage Clerical Percentage Professional Decreasing: 20–39 (32.5)* . . . . . . 3.2 12.2 50.6 8.6 6.2 2.3 0–19 (8.4)* . . . . . . 1.9 17.9 51.8 6.3 8.1 2.3 Increasing: 0–19 (10.0)* . . . . . . 1.1 25.6 48.2 4.7 12.2 3.4 20–39 (29.9)* . . . . . . 0.5 28.9 46.8 5.0 13.9 5.0 40 and over (87.5)* 0.4 32.2 39.4 5.9 14.2 6.1 * Percentages for class as a whole. | CLIFFORD R. SHAW AND HENRY D. MCKAY120 Median Rentals. —Another index of eco- nomic status is presented in Map 10.5 , which shows for 1930 the median equivalent monthly rental for each of the 140 areas. These rentals are based on the monthly rent- als and home values as presented in the 1930 federal census, in relation to the total num- ber of homes in each square mile. 13 From Map 10.5 it will be seen that the areas of lowest rentals are concentrated around the central business district and the industrial areas along the two forks of the Chicago River. Outside these inner-city areas and in the South Chicago industrial district are the areas of slightly higher rents. In general, the rentals are successively higher as one moves outward from the central business district or away from the heavy industrial centers. With the exception of several Negro areas, where the rentals are disproportionately high, the confi guration presented by the variations in median rentals corresponds closely with the variation in the percentage of families on relief as presented in Map 10.4 . Occupation Groups. 14 —Other evidence of economic segregation is to be seen in the dif- ferential distribution of occupation groups. These data are included in Table 10.2 . They indicate that a disproportionate number of industrial workers are concentrated in the areas of physical deterioration and decreas- ing population and a disproportionate num- ber of professional and clerical workers in outlying residential communities, where the population is increasing most rapidly. Since these occupational groups refl ect variations in economic status, the facts constitute fur- ther evidence of economic segregation. Segregation of Racial and Nationality Groups as a Product of Economic Segrega- tion. —The segregation of population on an economic and occupational basis in American society brings about, in turn, a segregation of racial and nativity groups. Throughout most of the history of Chicago the groups of lowest economic status—that is, the foreign- born and, more recently, the Negroes—have been concentrated in the areas of physical deterioration and low rentals. On the other hand, the native white population has been centered in the outlying communities, for collectively this group has a higher economic status. Together, the foreign-born and Negro groups furnish a large proportion of the unskilled industrial workers and a compara- tively small proportion of the professional and clerical groups. (The foreign-born have been concentrated, therefore, in the areas adjacent to industrial establishments not only because it is economical and convenient for these workers to live closer to their work but also because they often cannot afford to live elsewhere.) (The same distribution among low-rent areas would probably char- acterize the Negroes were it not for the fact that racial barriers prevent their movement into many such areas and, in effect, operate to raise rents in the Negro area.) This segregation of population on an economic basis is again clearly indicated in Table 10.3 . Especially noticeable is the con- centration of Negro population in the areas where more than 21 per cent of the families are on relief. This concentration was not so apparent in 1920, when the highest propor- tion of Negro population was found in the areas with intermediate rates of dependent families, based on number receiving relief from private charities. Concentration of Most Recent Immi- grants and Migrants. —As indicated by the previous discussion, those nationality groups which represent the newest immi- gration constitute the largest proportion of the population in areas adjacent to the cen- tral business and industrial districts, while the so-called “older immigrant groups” are more widely dispersed. If citizenship is taken as an indication, more positive evidence of the segregation of the newest immigrants is to be seen in the differential distribution of the alien population, both in 1930 and in 1920. These variations in the proportion of aliens in the white population are presented Map 10.4 Families on Relief, Chicago, 1934 | CLIFFORD R. SHAW AND HENRY D. MCKAY122 Map 10.5 Median Rentals, Chicago, 1930 in Table 10.4 . This table indicates that the areas of lowest economic status are occu- pied not only by the highest proportion of foreign-born in the white population but also by the highest proportion of aliens in the foreign-born white population 21 years of age and over. The range in 1930 was from 15.9 per cent in the areas of lowest economic status to 3.8 per cent in the areas of highest status. JUVENILE DELINQUENCY AND URBAN AREAS | 123 In his study of the Negro family Fra- zier similarly found the most recent Negro migrants to the city concentrated in the most deteriorated sections of the Negro areas. He states: Although nearly four-fi fths of all the Negroes in Chicago were born in the South, the propor- tion of southern-born inhabitants in the popu- lation diminishes as one leaves those sections of the Negro community nearest the heart of the city. It is in those zones just outside of the Loop where decaying residences and tottering frame dwellings presage the inroads of industry and business that the southern migrant is able to pay the cheap rents that landlords are will- ing to accept until their property is demanded by the expanding business area. 15 The results of this process of segregation in Chicago as of 1930 are revealed in Map TABLE 10.3 Distribution of Racial and Nativity Groups by Areas Grouped according to Relief and Dependency Rates, 1930 And 1920 1930 Percentage of Families on Relief 1934 Percentage Foreign- born and Negro Heads of Families Percentage Negroes in Total Population Percentage Foreign Born in White Population 28.0 and over (39.2)* . . . 78.5 38.1 32.9 21.0–27.9 (23.8)* . . . 62.5 15.7 29.5 14.0–20.9 (16.9)* . . . 59.4 3.9 32.4 7.0–13.9 (9.8)* . . . 46.7 0.3 27.1 0.0–6.9 (3.8)* . . . 33.5 0.2 20.8 1920 Rates of Dependent Families 1921 Percentage Foreign- born and Negro Heads of Families Percentage Negroes in Total Population Percentage Foreign Born in White Population 2.0 and over (2.8)* . . . . . . 80.2 5.4 43.8 1.5–1.9 (1.7)* . . . . . . 71.9 3.5 37.8 1.0–1.4 (1.2)* . . . . . . 67.2 11.3 35.6 0.5–0.9 (0.7)* . . . . . . 54.5 1.6 29.2 0.0–0.4 (0.1)* . . . . . . 42.6 2.2 24.0 * Percentage for class as a whole. 10.6 , which shows nativity and race of fam- ily heads. In those census tracts where a pre- dominant number of the heads of families were foreign-born, the leading nationality group is indicated. 16 On this map the areas in solid black are those predominantly occupied by Negroes. Since only the numerically dominant group is indicated in each area, it should be remem- bered that there are Negroes in many of the other tracts in the city. This is especially true on the Near North Side, where large num- bers of Negro families are to be found. Several facts are immediately apparent from Map 10.6 . In the fi rst place, a large proportion of tracts where the foreign-born heads of families constitute the predominant group are clustered around the city’s point of original settlement or are distributed in the areas where heavy industry has been located. | CLIFFORD R. SHAW AND HENRY D. MCKAY124 TABLE 10.4 Distribution of Most Recent Immigrants in Chicago by Areas Grouped according to Relief and Dependency Rates, 1930 and 1920 1930 Percentage of Families on Relief 1934 Percentage Foreign Born in White Population Percentage Aliens in Foreign-born White Population 21 Years and Over Percentage Aliens 21 Years and Over in White Population 21 and Over 28.0 and over (39.2)* . . . 32.9 30.5 15.9 21.0–27.9 (23.8)* . . . 29.5 27.3 12.6 14.0–20.9 (16.9)* . . . 32.4 25.6 12.6 7.0–13.9 (9.8)* . . . 27.1 19.7 7.9 0.0–6.9 (3.8)* . . . 20.8 13.0 3.8 1920 Rates of Dependent Families 1921 Percentage Foreign Born in White Population Percentage Aliens in Foreign-born White Population 21 Years and Over Percentage Aliens 21 Years and Over in White Population 21 and Over 2.0 and over (2.8)* . . . . . . 43.8 41.1 28.7 1.5–1.9 (1.7 )* . . . . . . 37.8 32.8 19.6 1.0–1.4 (1.2)* . . . . . . 35.6 26.9 15.0 0.5–0.9 (0.7 )* . . . . . . 29.2 22.6 10.1 0.0–0.4 (0.1)* . . . . . . 24.0 16.5 5.4 * Percentage for class as a whole. Secondly, symbols designating the country of birth of the foreign-born heads of families show that in some instances large areas are dominated by one national group and that the most recent immigrants are concentrated in the least desirable sections of the city. This map represents the distribution of racial and national groups as of 1930, but it does not even suggest the nature of the pro- cess that brings about this segregation—the continuous succession of national groups in these immigrant areas. Similar maps for earlier decades would reveal a more decided concentration of foreign-born, but the nationalities included would be different. 17 In short, nationality groups have succeeded one another in the areas of lowest economic sta- tus, while the concentrations of older immi- grant groups are now to be found beyond the inner-city areas. Each new nationality group was segregated into the low-rent areas dur- ing the period of its adjustment to the New World. As they have moved out, their places have been taken by other newcomers from abroad until recent years, when part of this inner-city area has been occupied by the newly migrated Negro people. Thus, in the process of city growth, areas within Chicago have been differenti- ated in such a way that they can be distin- guished from one another by their physical or economic characteristics or, at any given JUVENILE DELINQUENCY AND URBAN AREAS | 125 Map 10.6 Predominant Nationality and Race of Family Heads by Nativity Area, Chicago, 1930 | CLIFFORD R. SHAW AND HENRY D. MCKAY126 moment, by the composition of the popula- tion. Associated with these differences and with the more subtle variations in the atti- tudes and values which accompany them are found marked variations in child behavior. These are refl ected in differential rates of delinquents. NOTES Chapter I 1. Clifford R. Shaw, Frederick Zorbaugh, Henry D. McKay, and Leonard S. Cottrell, Delinquency Areas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929). 2. Life and Labor in London (London, 1891), Vol. II, Appen., “Showing Map of London Pov- erty by Districts.” 3. Sophonisba P. Breckinridge and Edith Abbott, The Delinquent Child and the Home (New York: Rus- sell Sage Foundation, 1912), pp. 150–53. Chapter II 4. Robert E. Park and E. W. Burgess, The City (Chi- cago: University of Chicago Press, 1925). 5. Ernest W. Burgess (ed.), The Urban Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926). 6. The terms invade and invasion are here used in their technical ecological sense, meaning to “encroach upon.” 7. Legislation in Illinois in 1941, authorizing pri- vately fi nanced neighborhood redevelopment cor- porations with limited condemnation powers, has been termed by planning experts as the “fi rst effec- tive attack on the slum problem undertaken in any large city.” These experts are confi dent that “the tide of decentralization can be turned.” The ques- tion of rentals within reach of low-income groups, however, remains unanswered, constituting the main argument for federal low-rent housing. 8. F. W. Blackmar and E. W. Burgess, Lawrence Social Survey (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1917), pp. 71–72. 9. The Neighborhood: A Study of Local Life in the City of Columbus, Ohio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923). 10. The following is a partial list of these studies: Irwin W. Halpern, John N. Stanislaus, and Ber- nard Botein, A Statistical Study of the Distribu- tion of Adult and Juvenile Delinquents in the Boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn (New York: Polygraphic Co. of America, 1934); Nor- man S. Hayner, “Delinquency Areas in the Puget Sound Region,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. XXXIX; Calvin F. Schmid, Social Saga of Two Cities (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Council of Social Agencies, 1937); R. Clyde White, “The Relation of Felonies to Environmental Factors in Indianapolis,” Social Forces, Vol. X; J. B. Lottier, “Distribution of Criminal Offenses in Metro- politan Regions,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. XXIX; Herman Adler, Fran- ces Cahn, and Johannes Stuart, The Incidence of Delinquency in Berkeley, 1928 – 32 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1934); Donald Trauger, L. Kral, and W. Rauscher, Social Analy- sis of Des Moines (Des Moines: Iowa State Plan- ning Board, 1935); Vernon E. Keye, “Survey of Juvenile Delinquency in Evanston, Illinois” (Work Projects Administration Report, 1940); Emil Fran- kel, “New Brunswick Delinquency Areas Study” (Work Projects Administration Report, 1936); Donald R. Taft, “Testing the Selective Infl uence of Areas of Delinquency,” American Journal of Sociology, XXXVIII, 1933; M. C. Elmer, “Mal- adjustment of Youth in Relation to Density of Population,” Proceedings of the American Soci- ological Society, Vol. XXII; Howard Whipple Green, Population Characteristics by Census Tra- cis, Cleveland, Ohio (Cleveland: Plain Dealer Pub. Co., 1931); Sophia M. Robison, Can Delinquency Be Measured? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936); H. D. Shelden, “Problems in the Sta- tistical Study of Juvenile Delinquency,” Metron, XII, 1934; E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933), pp. 204–19; William J. Ellis, Delinquency Areas in Essex County Municipalities (New Jer- sey Department of Institutions and Agencies, Trenton, 1938); Clarence W. Schroeder, Delin- quency in Peoria (Peoria, Illinois: Bradley Poly- technic Institute, 1939); Edwin H. Sutherland, “Ecological Survey of Crime and Delinquency in Bloomington, Indiana,” Indiana University, 1937; J. B. Maller, Maladjusted Youth (Report of the Children’s Court Jurisdiction and Juvenile Delin- quency Committee [Legislative Document No. 75 (1939), 201 pages]); J. B. Maller, Juvenile Delin- quency in the State of New York (Report of the Children’s Court Jurisdiction and Juvenile Delin- quency Committee [Legislative Document No. 62 (1940), 115 pages]); Kimball Young, John L. Gil- lin, Calvert L. Dedrick, The Madison Commu- nity (“University of Wisconsin Studies,” No. 62 [Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1934]); and W. Wallace Weaver, West Philadelphia: A Study of Natural Social Areas (Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1930). JUVENILE DELINQUENCY AND URBAN AREAS | 127 11. Op. cit. 12. These areas represent the basic units into which the city of Chicago was divided for the presenta- tion of rates of delinquents and other data based on the 1920 census. In the more densely popu- lated sections of the city these are square-mile areas bounded on all four sides by the section lines of the government survey. In the more sparsely settled outlying areas, it was necessary, in many instances, to combine two or more contiguous square-mile areas until a minimum population base was secured. For the earliest delinquency series further combinations in the outlying areas reduced the number of areas to 106. For 1930 data many of the larger, more populous outly- ing areas were redivided, and the total number of areas increased to 140. Although some of these units contain more than 1 square mile, they will be referred to throughout this study as “square- mile areas.” 13. The computation of the median rental on the basis of the total number of homes was necessary both because in some areas only a small proportion of the homes was rented and because the rented homes often were not representative of the area. There are probably some inherent errors in these data on monthly rentals. In apartment houses, for example, rentals usually included heat, water, and janitor service, whereas none of these is included in the rental of single homes. These differences may be even greater in furnished- apartment areas where all furnishings, and some- times gas and light, are included in the rent. It was for the purpose of compensating for these varia- tions that the monthly rentals for homes owned were calculated at 1 per cent of the total value. These median rentals, calculated from the 1930 federal census, are approximately twice as high as the rentals in the same areas from the Civil Works Administration census for 1934, and it is probable that even these 1934 median rent- als are higher than the median rent actually paid. However, for our purpose these variations are not important. We are interested in rentals as indica- tions of the differences among areas rather than in the absolute amount of rent paid. 14. The federal census of 1920 includes the best data for this analysis, since it was a census of occupa- tions, whereas the census of 1930 was a census of gainful workers by industrial groups, in which “all persons whose services are employed in a given industry are classifi ed under that industry.” Even the general divisions of occupations used in 1920 are, in several instances, too general to serve as an adequate basis for a study of the differen- tial distribution of occupations. Manufacturing includes, for example, the executives, superinten- dents, and technicians as well as the unskilled per- sonnel. While it is obvious that, from the point of view of the study of economic segregation, execu- tives should be separated from unskilled workers, these classifi cations can be used to show general tendencies because the number of executives and managers is relatively small, as compared with the number of laborers. 15. E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), pp. 98–100. 16. The effects of a large European immigration on Chicago over a long period of time and of a more recent migration of Negroes are shown in an analysis of the composition of the population. In 1930, 92.3 per cent of the population were white, 6.9 per cent were Negro, and 0.8 per cent were classifi ed as “other races.” At the time, 24.9 per cent of the population were foreign born, 39.4 per cent were classifi ed “native white of foreign or mixed parentage,” and 29.9 per cent as “native white of native parentage.” Since 1900, signifi cant population changes have taken place. One trend indicating migration of Negroes to Chicago is the increase in the pro- portion of Negroes in the total population from 2.0 per cent in 1910 to 6.9 per cent in 1930. Another trend is a decrease in the foreign born in the total population from 35.7 to 24.9 per cent, while the percentage classifi ed “native white of native parentage” increased from 20.4 in 1910 to 27.9 in 1930. In spite of this transition, in 1930 the foreign born and the children of the foreign born constituted 69.8 per cent of the total white population in the city. In 1940, 91.7 per cent of the population were white and 8.3 per cent nonwhite. Of the foreign-born white, 17.8 per cent were born in Poland; 3.2 per cent in Germany; 13.0 per cent in Russia and Lithuania; 8.8 per cent in Italy; 7.8 per cent in Sweden; 6.5 per cent in the Irish Free State and North Ireland; and 5.8 per cent in Czechoslovakia. 17. Paul F, Cressey, “The Succession of Cultural Groups” (Ph.D. dissertation-Department of Soci- ology, University of Chicago, 1930). Collective Effi cacy Theory Lessons Learned and Directions for Future Inquiry Robert J. Sampson In this reading I consider the role of neigh- borhoods in the modern city. Despite our increasingly global and interconnected world, neighborhoods show remarkable continu- ities in patterns of criminal activity. Indeed, for at least a hundred years, criminological research in the ecological tradition has con- tinually confi rmed the nonrandom concen- tration of crime in certain neighborhoods, especially those characterized by poverty, the racial segregation of minority groups, and the concentration of single parent fami- lies. But why? By focusing primarily on cor- relates of crime at the level of community social composition—especially poverty and race—traditional neighborhood research has tended toward a risk-factor rather than an explanatory approach. The aim of this paper is to move away from community- level correlations, or markers, to a theory of the underlying social mechanisms theoreti- cally at work. I conceptualize a social mech- anism as a theoretically plausible (albeit typically unobservable) contextual process that accounts for or explains a given phe- nomena (Sorenson 1998), in this case crime rates. I specifi cally “take stock” of the social- mechanistic theory of collective effi cacy with which I have been associated. I begin with a brief review of its intellectual legacy and the basic ideas that animate collective effi - cacy theory. I then turn to a synthesis of rel- evant empirical literature, although I do not intend this as a comprehensive review. For- tunately, independent scholars have under- taken the task of summarizing the evidence to date through rigorous meta-analysis, leav- ing me the opportunity to make a case for the larger patterns and implications. After laying out the main ideas and the empirical regulari- ties, I then turn to the future—where do we go from here? Science advances through the reasoned criticism of received knowledge, and so my goal is to lay out the challenges to collective effi cacy theory and, potentially, fruitful avenues of future work. Along the way I introduce key methodological issues and work in progress that I hope sharpens our theoretical approach to community level theories of crime. COLLECTIVE EFFICACY To address these challenges and new urban realities, my colleagues and I have proposed a focus on mechanisms of social organization that may be facilitated by, but do not nec- essarily require, strong ties or associations. This move allows us to reject the outmoded (and normative) assumption that the ideal neighborhood is characterized by dense, intimate, emotional bonds. Instead, neigh- borhoods are defi ned in ecological terms where analytic properties of social orga- nization are allowed to vary. We have also introduced a science of studying community COLLECTIVE EFFICACY THEORY | 129 processes—ecometrics—that is rooted in the idea that we have to take seriously the mea- surement of community properties in its own right (Raudenbush and Sampson 1999). A key form of social organization that I will focus on here is collective effi cacy . The concept of collective effi cacy unites social cohesion, the “collectivity” part of the con- cept, with shared expectations for control, the social action or effi cacy part of the con- cept (Sampson et al. 1997). In other words, we combine a particular kind of social struc- ture (cohesion, with an emphasis on working trust and mutual support) with the culturally tinged dimension of shared expectations for social control. Moreover, we argue that just as self-effi cacy is situated rather than general (one has self-effi cacy relative to a particular task), a neighborhood’s effi cacy exists rela- tive to specifi c tasks. We therefore conceive of collective effi cacy as a higher-order or organizing theoretical framework that draws attention to variations in the nexus of social cohesion with shared expectations for con- trol. Viewed another way, collective effi cacy theory unites the constructs of mutual support (Cullen 1994), which largely defi nes cohesion, with a collective-action orientation—in this case the activation or generation of commu- nity social order. One reason I believe cohesion and sup- port are important is that they are funda- mentally about repeated interactions and thereby expectations about the future. There is little reason to expect that rational agents will engage in sanctioning, or other acts of social control or support, in contexts where there is no expectation for future contact or where residents mistrust one another. The insight of collective effi cacy theory is that repeated interactions may signal or generate shared norms outside the “strong tie” setting of friends and kin. Another conceptual move of collective effi cacy theory is its emphasis on agency. Moving away from a focus on pri- vate ties, use of the term collective effi cacy is meant to signify an emphasis on shared beliefs in a neighborhood’s capability for action to achieve an intended effect, coupled with an active sense of engagement on the part of residents. Some density of social networks is essential, to be sure, especially networks rooted in social trust. But the key theoretical point is that networks have to be activated to be ultimately meaningful. Col- lective effi cacy, therefore, helps to elevate the “agentic” aspect of social life over a perspec- tive centered mainly on the accumulation of stocks of social resources as found in ties and memberships (i.e., social capital). This conceptual orientation is consistent with the redefi nition by Portes and Sensenbrenner (1993) of social capital in terms of “expecta- tions for action within a collectivity.” Distinguishing between the resource potential represented by personal ties, on the one hand, and the shared expectations for action among neighbors represented by col- lective effi cacy, on the other, therefore, helps clarify the dense networks paradox: social networks foster the conditions under which collective effi cacy may fl ourish, but they are not suffi cient for the exercise of control . The theoretical framework I propose recog- nizes the transformed landscape of modern urban life, holding that while community effi cacy may depend on working trust and social interaction, it does not require that my neighbor or local police offi cer be my friend. Collective effi cacy theory also addresses the valence of social ties and, ultimately, col- lective action by applying the “nonexclusiv- ity requirement” of a social good to judge whether neighborhood structures serve col- lective needs. Does consumption of a social good by one member of a community dimin- ish the sum available to the community as a whole? I would argue that safety, clean envi- ronments, quality education for children, active maintenance of intergenerational ties, the reciprocal exchange of information and services among families, and the shared will- ingness to intervene on behalf of the neigh- borhood are capable of producing a social | ROBERT J. SAMPSON130 good that yields positive “externalities” of benefi t to all residents—especially children. As with other resources that produce positive externalities, I believe that collective effi cacy is widely desired but much harder to achieve, owing, in large part, to social constraints. Empirical Results: Taking Stock My colleagues and I tested the theory of col- lective effi cacy in a survey of 8,782 residents of 343 Chicago neighborhoods in 1995. Applying ecometric methods, a fi ve-item Likert-type scale was developed to measure shared expectations about social control. Residents were asked about the likelihood that their neighbors could be counted on to take action if: (i) children were skipping school and hanging out on a street corner; (ii) children were spray-painting graffi ti on a local building; (iii) children were showing disrespect to an adult; (iv) a fi ght broke out in front of their house; or (v) the fi re station closest to home was threatened with budget cuts. Our measurement relied on vignettes because of the fundamental unobservability of the capacity for control—the act of inter- vention is only observed under conditions of challenge. If high collective effi cacy leads to low crime, then at any given moment no intervention will be observed precisely because of the lack of need. Like Bandura’s (1997) theory of self-effi cacy, the argument is that expectations for control will increase behavioral interventions when necessary, but the scale itself taps shared expectations for social action—in our case ranging from informal intervention to the mobilization of formal controls. The emphasis is on actions that are generated “on the ground level” rather than top down. The “social cohesion/trust” part of the measure taps the nature of community relationships and was measured by cod- ing whether residents agreed that “people around here are willing to help their neigh- bors”; “people in this neighborhood can be trusted”; “this is a close-knit neighborhood”; “people in this neighborhood generally get along with each other”; and “people in this neighborhood share the same values.” As hypothesized, social cohesion and social control were strongly related across neigh- borhoods and, thus, combined into a sum- mary measure of collective effi cacy, yielding an aggregate-level reliability in the .80 to .85 range. In our research we found that collective effi cacy was associated with lower rates of violence, controlling for concentrated dis- advantage, residential stability, immigrant concentration, and a comprehensive set of individual-level characteristics (e.g., age, sex, SES, race/ethnicity, home ownership) as well as indicators of dense personal ties and the density of local organizations (Sampson et al. 1997; Morenoff et al. 2001). Whether measured by offi cial homicide events or vio- lent victimization as reported by residents, neighborhoods high in collective effi cacy consistently had signifi cantly lower rates of violence. This fi nding held up controlling for prior neighborhood violence which was negatively associated with collective effi - cacy. This pattern suggests a reciprocal loop where violence depressed later collective effi - cacy (e.g., because of fear). Nevertheless, a two-standard deviation elevation in collec- tive effi cacy was associated with a 26 per- cent reduction in the expected homicide rate (Sampson et al. 1997: 922). Another fi nding is that the association of disadvantage and stability with violence is reduced when collective effi cacy is controlled, suggesting a potential causal pathway at the community level. This pathway is presumed to operate over time, wherein collective effi - cacy is undermined by the concentration of disadvantage, racial segregation, family dis- ruption, and residential instability, which, in turn, fosters more crime (Sampson et al. 1997, 1999). Morenoff et al. (2001) also showed that the density of personal ties and organizations were associated with higher collective effi cacy and, hence, lower crime, even though the former did not translate COLLECTIVE EFFICACY THEORY | 131 directly into lower crime rates. These fi ndings are consistent with, although do not prove, the hypothesis that collective effi cacy medi- ates the effect of both structural resources (e.g., affl uence, home ownership, organiza- tions) and dense systemic ties on later crime. As noted at the outset, neighborhoods are, themselves, nodes in a larger network of spatial relations. Contrary to the common assumption in criminology of analytic inde- pendence, neighborhoods are interdependent and characterized by a functional relation- ship between what happens at one point in space and what happens elsewhere. The idea of spatial dependence challenges the urban village model which implicitly assumes that neighborhoods represent intact social sys- tems, functioning as islands unto themselves. Our fi ndings support the spatial argument by establishing the independent effects of spa- tial proximity—controlling for all measured characteristics internal to a neighborhood, collective effi cacy and violence are signifi - cantly and positively linked to the collective effi cacy and violence rates of surrounding neighborhoods, respectively (Sampson et al. 1999; Morenoff et al. 2001). This fi nding suggests a diffusion, or exposure-like pro- cess, whereby violence and collective effi cacy are conditioned by the characteristics of spa- tially proximate neighborhoods, which, in turn, are conditioned by adjoining neighbor- hoods in a spatially linked process that ulti- mately characterizes the entire metropolitan system. The mechanisms of racial segrega- tion reinforce spatial inequality, explaining why it is that despite similar income profi les, black middle-class neighborhoods are at greater risk of violence than white middle- class neighborhoods (Sampson et al. 1999). An oversimplifi ed sketch of the major argument made to this point is shown in Fig- ure 11.1 . This model makes clear that collec- tive effi cacy theory is not merely an attempt to push the burden of social control or sup- port onto residents, “blaming the victim” as some have claimed. Inequality in resources matters greatly for explaining the production of collective effi cacy. Concentrated disad- vantage and lack of home ownership, for example, predict lower levels of later collec- tive effi cacy, and, vice versa, the associations of disadvantage and housing instability with violence are signifi cantly reduced when col- lective effi cacy is controlled (Sampson et al. 1997). These patterns are consistent with the inference that neighborhood resources infl u- ence crime and violence, in part, through the mediating role of neighborhood effi cacy. The capacity to exercise control under conditions of trust is, thus, seen as the most proximate to explaining crime. Collective effi cacy the- ory has also been extended to explain com- munity well-being and population health, although I do not cover that here (Sampson 2003; Morenoff 2003). In theoretical terms, Figure 11.1 posits that organizations and institutional strength represent a mechanism that can sustain capacity for social action in a way that tran- scends traditional personal ties (see also Tripplet et al. 2003). In other words, organi- zations are, at least in principle, able to fos- ter collective effi cacy, often through strategic networking of their own. Whether garbage removal, choosing the site of a fi re station, school improvements, or police responses, a continuous stream of challenges faces mod- ern communities, challenges that no longer can be met (if they ever were) by relying solely on individuals. Action depends on connections among organizations that are not necessarily dense, or refl ective of, the structure of personal ties in a neighborhood. Our research supports this position, showing that the density of local organizations and voluntary associations predicts higher levels of collective effi cacy, controlling for prior crime, poverty, and the social composition of the population (Morenoff et al. 2001). What about evidence from beyond Chi- cago? Rather than provide a narrative review of the evidence on collective effi cacy theory that might be biased by my priors, I rely on an independent assessment. Recently, Pratt and Cullen (2005) have undertaken a | ROBERT J. SAMPSON132 painstaking review of more than 200 empiri- cal studies from 1960 to 1999 using meta- analysis. The bottom line is that collective effi cacy theory fares well with an overall correlation of −.303 with crime rates across studies (95 percent confi dence interval of −.26 to −.35). By meta-analysis standards this is a robust fi nding, and the authors’ rank collective effi cacy number 4 when weighted by sample size, ahead of traditional suspects such as poverty, family disruption, and race. Although the number of studies and, hence, empirical base, is limited and, while there is considerable variability in operationalization across studies, the class of mechanisms asso- ciated with social disorganization theory and its offspring, collective effi cacy theory, shows a robust association with lower crime rates (see also reviews in Sampson et al. 2002; Kubrin and Weitzer 2003). ADVANCES IN COMMUNITY-LEVEL THEORY Turning It Around: “Structure” as Endogenous I now turn to the frontiers of collective effi - cacy theory. I consider fi rst the rather funda- mental possibility that the standard account of mediation in community-level theories of crime may simply be wrong. The standard view, one that I have advocated, is that social processes, like collective effi cacy, “medi- ate” the effects of social structure, especially concentrated disadvantage (Sampson et al. 1997). This account is so plausible and hege- monic that no one has really challenged its logic. Yet why should collective effi cacy, or any other social process, necessarily be endogenous to structure? Weber and the endogeneity of capitalism aside, the whole point of Robert Putnam’s Making Democ- racy Work (1993) was to reverse the causal chain and posit social capital as the driver of economic development in Italy. Rather than see poverty as the cause of declining eco- nomic fortunes, Putnam argued that the lack of civil society was the key ingredient that held back the southern provinces of Italy (see also Banfi eld 1958). A similar logic can be applied to present day America and the neighborhoods of Chi- cago. Areas low in trust, cooperation, and the fundamentals of collective effi cacy may lead to the out-migration of those who can afford to live in more harmonious environ- ments. As a recent mover, I can attest to the fact that real estate brokers are attuned to the cohesion of neighborhoods, a subtle, but nonetheless salient, factor that gains special currency among families with children. (It is Figure 11.1 Main Lines of Emphasis in Collective Effi cacy Theory Concentrated Poverty/ Residential Instability Density of Social Ties Organizational Infrastructure Collective Efficacy Spatial Proximity Violence/ Disorder/ Poor Health + + +– – – COLLECTIVE EFFICACY THEORY | 133 not a coincidence that the city I chose to live in is endowed with considerable social capi- tal and collective effi cacy.) Moving beyond personal anecdotes, collective effi cacy, by the terms of the theory, is expected to be correlated with the production of a number of collective goods that matter to residents, including the allocation of city services (e.g., road repair, economic development and investment). Bryk and Schneider’s (2002) recent work also shows collective effi cacy in the schools is a major predictor of student achievement, a point surely not lost on some parents. In short, there is reason to believe that collective effi cacy is a causal factor bound up in the structural disadvantage of a community. If so, then traditional models may have gotten it backwards by controlling for disadvantage in estimating the “direct” effect of collective effi cacy—under the above scenario the effect of collective effi cacy should vanish. There is preliminary evidence to support this position. Consider the simple prediction of future poverty from the current state of collective effi cacy. Figure 11.2 demonstrates a correlation that is surprising even by social science standards—for all intents and pur- poses the relationship is about as strong as one could expect (R 2 = 75 percent). Areas with high collective effi cacy are strongly pre- dictive of where that community will end up in the stratifi cation hierarchy. But is this just due to past poverty? The answer is no, for when we control for poverty in 1990, socio- economic status in 1995, racial composition in 1995, and the violent crime rate in 1995, the direct association of collective effi cacy in 1995 is strong and signifi cant (B = −25, t-ratio = −4.36). The magnitude of predic- tion is second only to prior poverty and almost its equal. These results undermine the simplistic models that are often specifi ed in the crimi- nological literature. As the late Allen Liska warned us, reciprocal structural dynamics are at work in urban social systems, such that crime, itself, can be considered a path in the causal chain (see also Bellair 2000; Markowitz et al. 2001). We have already Figure 11.2 Turning It Around: Poverty as Predicted Outcome of Low Collective Effi cacy in Chicago Neighborhoods, 1995–2000 1 0 –1 –2 –3 –4 –2 0–1 Collective Efficacy, 1995 Lo gi t o f P ov er ty , 2 00 0 Rsq = 0.7465 1 2 3 | ROBERT J. SAMPSON134 found evidence that crime and collective effi cacy are reciprocally related in a self- reinforcing process (Sampson and Rauden- bush 1999). Taken a step further, there is reason to argue that collective effi cacy is an independent factor in the future economic trajectory of a community. If so, then struc- tural disadvantage is, in some sense, endog- enous to collective effi cacy, completely the reverse of current practice. Although this hypothesis cannot be easily established, the key point for consideration is that the status of collective effi cacy, as other social processes (culture), is ambiguous under the traditional model specifi cation in criminology. Indeed, if collective effi cacy has any role in the deter- mination of prior values of structural disad- vantage, then controlling that effect serves to partial out part of the causal pathway by which it leads to crime. Discriminant Validity and the Role of Theory A second problem, that is at once theoreti- cal and methodological, turns on the dis- criminate validity of the concept of collective effi cacy. Thomas Cook and his colleagues (1997) have argued that researchers of com- munity need to pay increased attention to the “lumping” among social processes. In its simplest form, the question is whether there is just one big factor that underlies the cor- relations among seemingly disparate social processes. A similar point was made about the lumping among structural covariates by Land et al. (1990)—disentangling and esti- mating independent effects within a set of highly collinear predictors is a recipe for methodological confusion. More recently, Taylor (2002) has correctly pointed out the strong empirical overlap among many indi- cators of social disorganization, informal social control, and collective effi cacy. Unfortunately, resolution of this legitimate issue is not easy. The critics are right that many community concepts overlap empirically, but that does not mean they tap the same con- cept or that statistical methods necessarily help to resolve the problem. It is instructive to recall the debate between Bernard Lander and his critics some fi fty years ago. In using factor analysis, Lander (1954) identifi ed a concept he called anomie, which carried high loadings for home ownership, percent black, and crime, among others. As Kornhauser (1978) argued, however, Lander included in the explanatory factor (anomie) the outcome itself—crime. From Lander’s perspective, the indicators could not be separated empirically (there was a lack of “discriminant validity”), but from a theoretical perspective, we would not want to say that crime is the same con- struct as home ownership. Rather, they are ecologically intertwined in a social process. Fast-forwarding to the present, ecological scholars are well aware that percent black typically loads on a factor defi ned by poverty. We can complicate this even more by adding in violent crime, reminiscent of Lander. As a simple exercise, I entered the percent pov- erty, unemployment, percent black, and the violent crime rate in a principal components analysis for Chicago neighborhoods in 1990 and 2000. Only one factor emerged! Surely we would not want to interpret this factor as saying crime is the same concept as race or poverty. What the factor taps is the empiri- cal entwinement of the multiple indicators— the factor tells us nothing about causality, sequential order, mediation, or anything else of ultimate interest. The same goes for social processes. If we throw in a series of indica- tors from the PHDCN Community Survey, it turns out disorder loads with collective effi - cacy (negatively). Again, does this mean they are the same construct? As earlier, I would argue no—I believe disorder is a marker for low collective effi cacy, like crime, but my argument derives from logic and theory, not simply from the data. All this goes to say that ecological mechanisms of allocation and seg- regation create groupings of variables that are diffi cult to interpret and even harder to COLLECTIVE EFFICACY THEORY | 135 study with respect to crime. No statistical method can solve what is fundamentally a theoretical issue about causal mechanisms. Although resolution of this complex issue is surely beyond this reading, I should like to emphasize one point, however, that speaks in favor of collective effi cacy theory. As I have been at pains to argue, one of the distinguish- ing features of collective effi cacy theory is its insistence that agency and control are not redundant with dense personal ties. In point of fact, this assertion is supported despite the otherwise lumpy nature of the data when it comes to factor or principal components analysis. Specifi cally, indicators of control and cohesion (and yes, disorder) consistently load together on a separate factor from den- sity of personal and friendship ties. This fi nding has recently been confi rmed with a repeated cross-sectional replication of the 1995 Chicago Community Survey in 2002. There is also evidence that collective effi cacy is highly stable over time, as is the separate construct of dense ties. Based on theory and empirical evidence, then, we have some con- fi dence to maintain the core analytical dis- tinction between effi cacy (social action) and dense ties, all the while recognizing that there the correlations among social processes, just as among structural covariates, are high. The larger point is that neither statistical methods (e.g., LISREL) nor the correlations among social processes and structural features of the city (“the data”) speak for themselves—an organizing theoretical model is needed. Comparative Studies A third concern I have about extant commu- nity research is its seeming disregard for the establishment of generality in causal mecha- nisms. The prime example is that most of our knowledge has been gained from U.S. cities and only a few of them at that. Yet nothing in the logic of collective effi cacy is necessar- ily limited to specifi c cities, the United States, or any country for that matter. Just how far can we push collective effi cacy theory? Is it applicable in societies like France, where republican values and strong norms of state intervention, rather than individual respon- sibility, might confl ict with the notion of neighbors intervening? Does it hold in wel- fare states where concentrated disadvantage is less tenacious or in former Soviet states where public spiritedness is allegedly on the wane? Our comparative knowledge base is, unfortunately, limited—very few multilevel studies have been carried out with the explicit goal of cross-national comparison of crime rates and community social mechanisms. An exception is found in a recent com- parison of leading cities in Sweden and the United States. Although Chicago and Stockholm vary dramatically in their social structure and levels of violence, this does not necessarily imply a difference in the pro- cesses or mechanisms that link communities and crime. In fact, Sampson and Wikström (2004) show that rates of violence are sig- nifi cantly predicted by low collective effi cacy in Stockholm as in Chicago. Furthermore, collective effi cacy is fostered by housing stability and undermined by concentrated disadvantage—again, similarly, in both cit- ies. These fi ndings are rather remarkable given the vast cultural and structural dif- ferences between the countries in question. Sweden is a modern welfare state with highly planned residential communities. “Race” groups are nonexistent and immigration comes primarily from Turkey and Morocco. Chicago is the quintessential American city, rank with inequality and the segregation of African Americans and with neighborhoods that are emblematic of unplanned market sorting. Immigration fl ows are also very dif- ferent, coming primarily from Mexico rather than Europe or Africa. That the data show an almost invariant pattern despite these differences is, thus, con- sistent with the general theoretical approach of this reading that emphasizes neighbor- hood inequality in social resources and | ROBERT J. SAMPSON136 contextual conditions that foster the collec- tive effi cacy of residents and organizations. But this is only one study. The empirical application of neighborhood studies to other societal contexts is badly needed if we are to make further progress in understanding the generalizability of the link between commu- nity social mechanisms and crime rates. Technology Mediated Effi cacy My fi nal point of emphasis is the most specu- lative, but it circles back to the issue raised at the outset: what produces collective effi cacy if not (or besides) dense personal ties? I have offered two general hypotheses thus far that I believe are supported by the data, one in the form of structural resources (e.g., home ownership, stability, economic status) and the other in terms of the density of nonprofi t organizations. But this seems insuffi cient in the world I described at the outset, one of fl eeting social ties. My speculative answer is that a partial solution may well lie in tech- nology, although its realization will take time. My argument is that rather than under- mining social organization, modern technol- ogy has the potential to knit together weak community ties for the purposes of building collective effi cacy. We have all heard anec- dotally about how the internet was effec- tively used to mobilize protests against the International Monetary Fund in Seattle a few years back. Internet use was also widely used in the Howard Dean campaign and on both sides of the political spectrum in the recent presidential election. What about in the more prosaic neigh- borhood? Three lines of evidence suggest an interesting scenario. One, Barry Wellman and his colleagues show that, contrary to com- mon belief, the more “wired” local residents are with respect to computer technology, the more their local contacts and involvement in community issues (Hampton and Wellman 2003; Wellman 2004). For example, com- pared to nonwired residents, wired residents of the Toronto community they studied rec- ognized three times as many of their neigh- bors, visited 50 percent more often and more often made use of email for local contacts. Second, Keith Hampton, in an intriguing project called E-Neighbors (see http://www. i-neighbors.org/), is attempting to use tech- nology as a means to increase community well-being. Although the results are prelimi- nary, some of the trial neighborhoods he is studying are showing positive results, such as a signifi cant increase in the number of local social ties, more frequent communication on and offl ine and higher levels of community involvement. The I-Neighbors website is an attempt to apply this model to neighbor- hoods across the United States and Canada. Third, in an ongoing collaborative research project directed by Bob Putnam at Harvard, we are looking at the potential social-capital inducing effects of Meetup.com, a technol- ogy that organizes not chat rooms in cyber or virtual space but real meetings between people in physical spaces (see www.meetup. com/fi nd). From book clubs to politics to lovers of Golden Retrievers, Meetup.com brings people together in physical space to share common interests. Although many of the groups seem trivial at the outset (dog lov- ers, knitting, Goths), it appears that political action, in fact, generates many of the meet- ups. Besides, if Putnam (2000) is right and social interaction has spin-off externalities for collective action, and possibly the genera- tion of collective effi cacy, then even the trivial groups should not be dismissed out of hand. Fourth, it is now possible to imagine how the rapid spread of technology can be har- nessed to improve dissemination of crime data and the mapping of “hot spots” of crime. Already some cities allow citizens to access police data and map when and where inci- dents of crime are occurring, almost in real time (e.g., http://12.17.79.6/ctznicam/ctzni cam.asp). Although knowledge about the realities of crime’s distribution and frequency might be alarming at fi rst, such knowledge http://www.i-neighbors.org/ http://www.meetup.com/find http://12.17.79.6/ctznicam/ctznicam.asp http://www.i-neighbors.org/ http://www.meetup.com/find http://12.17.79.6/ctznicam/ctznicam.asp http://Meetup.com http://Meetup.com COLLECTIVE EFFICACY THEORY | 137 ultimately could lead to a sense of increased collective effi cacy and community participa- tion on the part of residents and, perhaps, demands that ameliorative efforts be under- taken by the appropriate authorities. After all, one of the things that research has taught us is that even in high crime areas, most areas are safe most of the time (St. Jean 2007). It is too soon to know, of course, but rather than taking the stance of Luddites and assuming in a Wirthian manner that com- munity automatically declines in the era of cell phones and instant messaging, these lines of evidence suggest that we need to add net- works of technology to our theoretical tool- kit of community social organization and collective effi cacy. CONCLUSION In this reading I have “taken stock” of the theory of collective effi cacy and considered four agendas that I believe are crucial to the advancement of theoretical knowledge— collective effi cacy as a potential cause rather than simply mediator of structural disad- vantage; discriminant validity of social- processes that constitute collective effi cacy; the need for comparative studies and general theory; and role of technology in promoting collective effi cacy. There are others of course, but these seem to me to cut to the core of questions that have been raised about col- lective effi cacy. What causes it? Is collective effi cacy a theoretically distinct concept? Is it doomed to be impotent in mass, modern society? What is the association with con- centrated disadvantage, and is it cause or consequence? Is collective effi cacy merely a “Chicago” phenomenon? If this reading is any guide, progress has been made on all these fronts even though there is much work to be done. I would argue that collective effi cacy does have unique theoretical value, is general in import, may be fostered under conditions of modernity, and predicts not only crime but possibly community social structure itself through reciprocal, self- reinforcing processes. In one way or another, social networks cut across all these agendas, right down to considering technology as another form of network. We live in a network society we are told, but not all networks are created equal and many lie dormant. A key mistake has been to equate the existence of networks with mechanisms of effective social control. As Arthur Stinchcombe (1989) put it in a use- ful analogy, just as road systems have their causal impact through the fl ow of traffi c, so systems of links among people and organi- zations (and in this case, neighborhoods) have their causal impact through what fl ows through them . The problem, then, becomes obvious—through networks (whether per- sonal, spatial, organizational, or technologi- cal) fl ow the full spectrum of life’s realities, whether criminal knowledge, friendship, or social control. The basic theoretical position articu- lated in this article is that collective action for problem-solving is a crucial causal mechanism that is differentially activated under specifi c kinds of contextual condi- tions. The density of personal networks is only one, and probably not the most important, characteristic of neighborhoods that contributes to effective social action and mutual support. 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The Urban Ecology of Bias Crime A Study of Disorganized and Defended Neighborhoods Ryken Grattet The last decade has witnessed sustained growth in research and policy attention to bias crimes, or, as they are more frequently called, “hate crimes” (Bell 2002; Jacobs and Potter 1998; Jenness and Broad 1997; Jenness and Grattet 2001; Lawrence 1999; Levin and McDevitt 2002; Perry 2001). As a novel social problem, bias crime has gen- erated a research community that divides roughly into scholars who specialize in the study of bias crime, whose main research goal is to elaborate an understanding of the phenomena on its own terms, and scholars who study bias crime to illustrate broader social processes and dynamics. 1 As the litera- ture on bias crime has matured, a discernible shift from the former to the latter has taken place. To urge this maturation along, Donald Green, Lauren McFalls, and Jennifer Smith (2001) conclude their review of hate crime scholarship by discussing the relationship between bias crime and other forms of social confl ict. “The challenge before hate crime researchers is to demonstrate both concep- tually and empirically how hate crimes dif- fer from other manifestations of confl ict. In what way are the causal forces that precipi- tate hate crime different from those that lead to other forms of bigoted conduct?” (p. 499). To this we might add, how are the causes of bias crime different from or similar to those that lead to other forms of criminal con- duct? Both questions prompt investigations into how research on intergroup confl ict and discrimination might be united with research on criminality to yield greater insight into the phenomena of bias crime and contribute to broader theoretical debates and cumula- tive research fi ndings on related topics. Bias crime is itself a hybrid phenomenon, containing elements of intergroup bias , on the one hand, and crime , on the other. And while separately both bias (or prejudice) and crime have been the subjects of sociologi- cal research for some time, very little work has tried to link these traditions. With this in mind, I combine ideas about the social ecology of crime with notions of intergroup confl ict and neighborhood ethnic transition to account for the distribution of bias crime across communities. 2 I focus specifi cally on two theoretical perspectives: social disor- ganization theory (Bursik and Grasmick 1993; Kubrin and Weitzer 2003; Sampson and Wilson 1995; Shaw and McKay 1942), a general macrosociological model of crimi- nal deviance, and the “defended neighbor- hoods” perspective, developed by urban and race relations scholars to account for neigh- borhood intergroup confl icts (Blalock 1967; DeSena 1990; Green, Strolovitch, and Wong 1998; Park, Burgess, and McKenzie 1967; Pinderhughes 1993; Suttles 1972). Although these two research traditions aim to account for different phenomena, they share a com- mon ancestry in the Chicago school of social ecology and, as I describe below, contain points of both commonality and difference. THE URBAN ECOLOGY OF BIAS CRIME | 141 Empirically, I focus on the relationship between neighborhood demographic charac- teristics and biased criminal behavior. Using Sacramento, California, “America’s most diverse city,” 3 as a study site, this study uses data on bias crime and other kinds of crimi- nal offending, specifi cally robbery, assault, and vandalism, to investigate the common- alities and differences between bias crimes and other types of offending. Next I discuss the theoretical concerns in more detail. After that, I describe the case of Sacramento, the data, and the methods employed in the quantitative analyses. Then I explain the results of an investigation of the distribution of bias crimes across Sac- ramento neighborhoods. Finally, I conclude with a consideration of the implications of these fi ndings for research and theory on bias crime and intergroup confl ict. DISORGANIZED AND DEFENDED NEIGHBORHOODS Criminological research has long empha- sized the community conditions associated with criminal behavior (Bursik and Gras- mick 1993; Kubrin and Weitzer 2003; South and Messner 2000; Warner 2007). Since the 1980s, researchers have returned to and revitalized the arguments of social disorgani- zation theory (Bursik 1988; Byrne and Samp- son 1986). Social disorganization theory highlights the conditions that affect the abil- ity of a neighborhood to realize the common values of its residents or solve commonly experienced problems (Kornhauser 1978). How social disorganization arguments apply to bias crime is not entirely clear. On the one hand, because bias crime always contains conduct that is already criminal- ized we might expect that bias crime is generated from the same conditions of dis- organization as other crime. Early research on bias crime tended to make this kind of argument, although proponents relied more on strain theory than social disorganization. For example, Jack Levin and Jack McDe- vitt (2002) note that bias crimes frequently emerge in circumstances where economic pressures, such as job scarcity and manu- facturing decline, exist and generate com- munity tensions that devolve along racial or ethnic lines. This can lead to “scapegoating” violence, where specifi c individuals are tar- geted because they appear to threaten the economic position of the dominant group (see Perry 2001). Green, Dara Strolovitch, and Jannelle Wong (1998), however, refuted a simple poverty argument in their study of bias crime in New York City. They found that poverty did not affect the incidence of bias crime, but they did not go further to explore other aspects of social disorganiza- tion. Thus, the argument about the relation- ship between social disorganization and bias crime remains untested. On the other hand, we might expect that bias crime is different from other kinds of crime and perhaps requires a different the- oretical lens. Recall that Shaw and McKay (1942) saw the regulatory capacity of neigh- borhoods as exhibited through a resistance of the neighborhood residents from outsid- ers. Bias crime could be construed as a mani- festation of such resistance. As Jeannine Bell (2002) points out in her study of the policing of bias crime in “Central City,” one white neighborhood was extremely well organized in using intimidation and violence in coun- tering newcomers (see also DeSena 1990; Reider 1985). A few white residents, backed by tacit support from other whites, targeted racial and ethnic newcomers for “move-in” violence and scare tactics. This echoes How- ard Pinderhughes (1993) fi ndings about the racial views of youths in south Brooklyn. For these young people, establishing a strong cohesive individual and group identity required showing the rest of the group that they were “down with the program.” In this case, the program includes concrete proof of being tough, hating the appropriate enemies, | RYKEN GRATTET142 and a readiness to take those enemies on to defend principles and turf (p. 487). In this sense, defense of turf emerges and is reinforced through peer group interactions. More recently, Green and associates (1998) linked the defense of turf argument to the much older notion of the “defended neighborhood,” a concept most clearly artic- ulated by Gerald Suttles in his book The Social Construction of Communities (1972). How- ever, as Suttles (1972) himself acknowledges, the basic underlying idea was expressed in earlier Chicago school social ecology work, specifi cally that of Robert Park, Ernest Bur- gess, and Roderick McKenzie (1967) in the 1920s as part of their studies of the ecologi- cal processes that operate within cities. Park and colleagues (1967) saw neighborhoods as ethnically homogenous units that, when fac- ing natural processes of invasion from ethnic others, react with defensive tactics. By con- trast, Suttles (1972) maintains that defended neighborhoods are frequently not homoge- neous, and in fact, ethnicity does not form the primal basis along which neighborhood defenses occur (p. 27). He cites instances of intraethnic neighborhood defenses among blacks in adjacent neighborhoods in Chicago and emphasizes the panethnic solidarities that arise in other neighborhoods as exam- ples of how the defense of neighborhood is not exclusively or even primarily rooted in ethnic identifi cations (pp. 27–28). Suttles (1972) also understood neighbor- hood defenses as composed of a variety of actions, such as the creation of restrictive covenants, the use of private security guards and doormen, vigilantism, and, perhaps most importantly, the emergence of delin- quent street gangs (p. 21). Although he did not address them specifi cally, it is clear that Suttles would see bias crimes as one manifes- tation of a neighborhood defense. Moreover, going beyond Suttles, it seems likely that bias crime would occur when other more socially legitimate defensive strategies, such as private security and restrictive covenants, are unavailable or unaffordable by residents. Thus, the kind of defensive tactic used by residents might be predicted by other neigh- borhood characteristics, such as the level of social organization. More socially organized neighborhoods might favor tactics such as restrictive covenants and private security forces, and less socially organized communi- ties might rely more on delinquent gangs to do the same work of excluding rival others. This, then, indicates another possible com- patibility between social disorganization and defended neighborhood perspectives. When Green and associates (1998) invoke the idea of defended neighborhoods in their analyses of bias crime in New York City, they do so with some modifi cations to the earlier usage. They argue: Studies of defended neighborhoods suggest that higher rates of racially motivated crime will occur in areas where whites enjoy numeri- cal superiority . . . From the vantage point of defended neighborhoods studies, growing minority populations undermine the preexist- ing social networks that both foster whites’ sentimental attachment to a racially homo- geneous image of the community (Suttles 1972: 35) and facilitate acts of hostility against outsiders by the most belligerent community members. (Green et al. 1998: 376) This formulation elevates white neighbor- hoods as the main kind of community that experiences neighborhood defenses. 4 Neither Suttles nor the earlier Chicago school soci- ologists interpreted neighborhood defenses as solely or even primarily a phenomena occurring within white neighborhoods. Indeed, Suttles (1972) explicitly argues that ethnic-based defenses, while possible, are less common than other kinds of neighbor- hood defenses. Both Suttles and the earlier Chicago school researchers also treated defended neighborhoods as a discrete type of neighborhood. A key assumption made by Green and associates’ (1998) work on THE URBAN ECOLOGY OF BIAS CRIME | 143 defended neighborhoods is that neighbor- hoods can be more or less defensive. Nonetheless, what Green and associates’ (1998) formulation lacks in fi delity to the earlier usage it gains in terms of being a clear testable proposition in regards to bias crime. The centerpiece of their argument—that the effects of in-migration of various nonwhite groups leads to greater bias crimes against those groups in more homogeneously white neighborhoods—remains highly plausible. As Green and associates (1998) point out, the defended neighborhood idea incorpo- rates the central notion of the minority group threat hypothesis—that bias crimes occur when majority groups face large and growing minority populations (Blalock 1967; King 2007). The defended neighborhood perspec- tive is similar to various strands of realistic group confl ict theory in that it conceives of demographic processes that heighten inter- group contact and proximity as underlying bias crime (Green et al. 1998: 373–78). The defended neighborhood argument highlights the importance of change, particularly the infl ux of minority population and the rate at which white homogeneity diminishes. Green and associates (1998) reconcep- tualize defended neighborhoods by return- ing to Park and colleagues’ (1967) idea that ethnicity is a central basis for neighborhood defenses. They (Green et al. 1998) also shift attention from viewing defended neighbor- hoods as a discrete type of neighborhood to conceiving of the “defendedness” of a neighborhood as a quantitative variable. And, fi nally, Green and associates (1998) specifi cally highlight white neighborhoods as especially prone to neighborhood defenses enacted through bias crime. The existing literature thus presents vari- ous expectations about how bias crime might be related to demographic conditions and how similar bias crime is to other kinds of crime in terms of its community correlates. If bias crime is like other kinds of crime, it should be more prevalent in communities with high residential turnover, concentrated disadvantage, and ethnic heterogeneity. If bias crime is different from other crime, vari- ables associated with the defended neighbor- hoods perspective should affect bias crime but not other kinds of crime. A third option is also possible: bias crime is affected by structural social disorganization but is also more likely in defended neighborhoods regardless of their level of disorganization. If so, social disorganization and defended neighborhoods perspectives need to be com- bined to explain bias crime. DATA AND METHODS The present study 5 —bias crime reports— are subject to three levels of screening. The responding offi cer fi les an incident report and checks a box indicating that the inci- dent was bias motivated. Typically, offi cers substantiate the bias designation in their narrative comments in the report. A super- vising offi cer then makes a determination to support or disconfi rm the bias designation. Finally, the records personnel at the Califor- nia Department of Justice, Criminal Justice Statistics Center determine whether the inci- dent is confi rmed as a hate crime and offi - cially recorded in the state publications as a bias crime. The impact of screening can be seen by comparing data made available by the City of Sacramento Police Department and the Cali- fornia Criminal Justice Statistics Center. At the fi rst responder level, from 1995 to 2002, Sac- ramento police offi cers reported 622 bias crime incidents. The screening process at the second and third levels removed 374 incidents and included another 34 incidents that were not reported by fi rst responders. The former rep- resent incidents that were screened out either by the second level of review (i.e., the supervi- sor) or at the state level. The latter represent 34 incidents that were not initially identifi ed as bias crimes but were identifi ed as such by either | RYKEN GRATTET144 a supervisor or the state data collectors. Over time the agreement between fi rst responders and the third tier of review converged. For example, from 1995 to 1997, Sacramento police offi cers identifi ed 114, 90, and 51 cases as bias crimes that were rejected in higher levels of review. From 2000 through 2002, rejections dropped to 38, 21, and 26. These patterns sug- gest that offi cers were learning about which incidents would be accepted and adjusted their reporting behavior accordingly. A total of 248 cases survived the three tiers of review and therefore represent the most reliable measure of bias crime. How- ever, the Sacramento Police Department does not always disclose addresses for crimes involving sexual assault or crimes involving minors, and thus, three cases that omitted address information were dropped to make the fi nal total of incidents 245. The trends over time in bias crimes dis- play no particular upward or downward tra- jectory. The highest level occurred in 1996 when 41 incidents were reported. The next highest was 38, which occurred in 1999 and 2000. The lowest levels were 20 in 2002 and 22 in 1997. Table 12.1 presents a compari- son of the characteristics of Sacramento bias crimes during the observation period with those of the nation as a whole. Race-based bias crimes are the most common in both Sacramento and the U.S. totals. Sexual orien- tation is proportionally similar to other parts of the country. Religious-based bias crimes in Sacramento make up a smaller proportion as compared with other parts of the county. The Sacramento bias crime rate for the period is 6.9 crimes per 10,000, as compared to 4.5 for California as a whole, and 7.3 for Los Angeles. Thus, Sacramento is generally similar to other California and American communities in terms of its bias crime rate and distribution among types of bias crime. In the coming analyses, data on Sacramento bias crimes is divided into three variables: total bias crimes, antiblack bias crimes, and violent bias crimes. Antiblack crimes are given special attention because several stud- ies have focused specifi cally on blacks as tar- gets of bias crime and to address the concern that grouping bias crimes together obscures the important differences between the differ- ent manifestations of the phenomena. Vio- lent bias crimes were given special attention under the assumption that they, like other kinds of violent crime, would be more reli- ably reported. Analyses were conducted to see whether the basic patterns hold for the more reliably reported bias crime. Data were also collected on reported rob- bery, assault, and vandalism from the Sac- ramento Police Department. Robbery was selected because it is one of the most reliably reported crimes and thus serves as a good comparison crime. Assault and vandalism were tracked because they are most similar to bias crimes in terms of the conduct involved. In fact, 75 percent of the bias crimes in Sac- ramento were simple or aggravated assault or vandalism. Independent variables were drawn entirely from the 1990 and 2000 U.S. Census. Ethnic TABLE 12.1 Comparison of Reported Sacramento Bias Crime with U.S. Totals Sacramento U.S. Totals Bias type Race 184 (75%) 10,011(66%) Sexual orientation 48 (20%) 2,923 (19%) Religion 12 (5%) 2,215 (15%) Gender/disability 1 (.4%) 79 (1%) Total 245 15,228 THE URBAN ECOLOGY OF BIAS CRIME | 145 heterogeneity was computed using Blau’s (1977) method, an index that measures the expected chance that any two individu- als drawn from the population would be of different groups, taking into consideration the number of groups and their relative size (Blau 1977). Concentrated disadvantage is based on Sampson and colleagues’ (1997) conceptualization. It is a factor score com- posed of 2,000 bits of data on the number of female-headed households, unemployed persons, non-Hispanic blacks, persons below the poverty level, and males under the age of 17. Percent of new residents is a measure of residential turnover and is based on the number of residents who say they did not live in their current residence in 1995. The variables related to the “defended neighbor- hood” argument are percent white , measured in 1990, and the percent change in non- white population between 1990 and 2000, calculated by subtracting the percentage of nonwhite population in 2000 from the per- centage of nonwhite population in 1990. Following Green and associates (1998), I use an interaction term between percent white and the change in the nonwhite population to assess the effects of nonwhite in-migration on neighborhoods with different levels of white homogeneity. 6 The defended neighbor- hood hypothesis is that bias crimes will be more frequent in more homogenously white neighborhoods that are experiencing heavy in-migration from nonwhites. The means and standard deviations for these variables are given in Table 12.2 . The theoretical unit of analysis for the social disorganization and defended neigh- borhoods arguments is the neighborhood, which I approximate using U.S. Census tracts. With a few exceptions (Tita, Cohen, and Engberg 2005), census tracts have been used as proxies for neighborhoods in previ- ous research on crime (Krivo and Peterson 1996; Miles-Doan 1998). Sacramento has 114 census tracts that touch some portion of the city limits and, by extension, the jurisdic- tional boundaries of the Sacramento Police Department. Several of these tracts contain one hundred or less residents of the city of Sacramento. A few tracts had zero Sacra- mento residents. These tracts were merged with their nearest neighboring tracts to yield a total of 103 units. Only two bias crimes occurred in low-population tracts that were subsequently merged to an adjacent tract. Many tracts, particularly in the older midtown and downtown, relate quite closely to historically identifi ed neighborhoods (e.g., Southside Park, Poverty Ridge, and Boulevard Park). A gay and lesbian neigh- borhood, known as “Lavender Heights,” TABLE 12.2 Descriptive Statistics Variable Mean SD Bias crimes, 1995–2002 2.397 2.379 Anti-black bias crime, 1995–2002 .932 1.060 Violent bias crime .748 1.334 Robbery, 1995–2002 114.631 90.433 Assault, 1995–2002 299.680 241.665 Vandalism, 1995–2002 319.369 173.232 Ethnic heterogeneity, 2000 .608 .165 Concentrated disadvantage, 2000 0 1 % new residents since 1995, 2000 .533 .128 % white, 1990 .565 .200 Population, 1990 (per 100) 44.4 132.24 Percentage point change nonwhites, 1990–2000 12.042 8.911 | RYKEN GRATTET146 Figure 12.1 The Spatial Distribution of Bias Crime in Sacramento, 1995–2002 Bias crime Type Anti-black Anti-other race Sexuality-based Other Sacto Tracts 0 1 2 3 4 Miles exists in midtown. The most homogenously white neighborhoods lie in East Sacramento (aka, the MacKinley Park area) and Land Park, where whites make up between 80 to 87 percent of the residents. Between 1995 and 2002, at least one bias crime occurred in 77 percent of Sacramento's census tracts. Whereas race-based bias crime occurred throughout the city, roughly one- third of the sexual orientation–based offenses occurred in the environs of Lavender Heights in midtown (see Figure 12.1 ). The concentra- tion of antigay bias crime fi ts a pattern iden- tifi ed in previous research in which assaults, THE URBAN ECOLOGY OF BIAS CRIME | 147 vandalism, or threats occur in close proxim- ity to gay and lesbian bars and other visible symbols of gayness (e.g., the LAMBDA com- munity center) (Moran et al. 2001). Latinos make up 50 percent of one census tract in the northern part of the city called Gardenland. A historically black neighbor- hood, Oak Park, which lies southeast of downtown, has between 30 and 35 percent black residents. Similarly, a historically Chi- nese and Japanese neighborhood near down- town continues to have 44 percent Asian residents. Despite these concentrations, groups are fairly evenly distributed across the city (Dingemans and Datel 1995). The mean ethnic heterogeneity for the city is .61, which indicates that the chance that any two indi- viduals drawn from the same census track would be of different races is 61 percent. The dependent variables for the follow- ing analysis are counts , which are nonnega- tive and distributionally skewed. A nonlinear model is recommended for such data, and I selected the negative binomial model because test statistics revealed that the more rigid assumptions of the Poisson model do not hold and because previous work has used the negative binomial on similar data (Green et al. 1998). In other words, the alpha statis- tic that measures over- and underdispersion was signifi cantly different from zero, mean- ing that the Poisson assumption of the equal- ity of means and standard deviations was violated by the data. 7 To aid interpretation, I transform the coeffi cients into factor or per- centage changes in the expected counts using the methods described by Scott Long (1997: 228–29). 8 FINDINGS In terms of bivariate relationships, robbery, vandalism, and assault are all highly corre- lated (between .75 and .86), suggesting that similar causal circumstances underlie each of them. The correlations between total bias crime, antiblack bias crime, and violent bias crime are not as high as the correlations for other kinds of crime, ranging between .27 and .52. Thus, it is unclear whether the same causal precursors generate both ordinary crime and bias crime from simply looking at the correlations. Table 12.3 presents results of negative binomial regressions. Models for bias crime are presented incrementally to show the additive effects of considering the defended neighborhood variables. 9 Model 1 shows that concentrated disadvantage and residen- tial turnover—two social disorganization variables—increase bias crime, while ethnic heterogeneity has no effect. The defended neighborhoods variables in Model 2 do not alter these basic fi ndings. As expected, ethnic heterogeneity and percent white are strongly correlated ( r = .93) and produce inconsistent estimations of both coeffi cients when they are both present in the model. Ethnic het- erogeneity was dropped in favor of percent white because percent white is central to the calculation of the interaction term that is the centerpiece of the defended neighborhoods argument and because Model 1 shows that ethnic heterogeneity does not have a mar- ginal effect on bias crime. Dropping ethnic heterogeneity has no effect on the fi t of the model. Model 3 thus provides the best basis for interpreting the relationships between bias crime and the arguments about social dis- organization and defended neighborhoods described above. The effect of concen- trated disadvantage is quite large. A two- unit change in concentrated disadvantage, which is the difference between one standard deviation below the mean to one standard deviation above the mean (i.e., low disad- vantaged neighborhoods versus high dis- advantaged neighborhoods), is associated with a doubling of bias crime. This fi nding contrasts with Green and colleagues (1998), who found little support for the effects of unemployment and other indicators of eco- nomic strain on bias crime. 10 The effect of new residents is also reasonably large. | RYKEN GRATTET148 A 20-percentage-point change in the percent of new residents, which is roughly the differ- ence between one standard deviation above (60 percent) and below the mean (40 per- cent), increases expected bias crime counts by 38 percent. In addition to providing support for the idea that at least some portion of the varia- tion in bias crime across neighborhoods is attributable to ecological variables found to affect all kinds of crime, the processes associ- ated with the defended neighborhoods also operate. Despite the nonsignifi cance of the main effect for percent white, the improve- ment in fi t of the model including the defended neighborhood variables is signifi - cant (LR statistic = –11.488, p < .01). These effects are summarized graphically in Figure 12.2 . The disorganization variables are set to their means, the percent increase in nonwhite population ranges from 0 to 40 per- cent (e.g., the maximum amount of change in the sample), and high and low values for the percent white variable are defi ned as 90 per- cent white in 1990 (e.g., a mixed neighbor- hood), and 60 percent white in 1990. The interaction effect is apparent in that the nonwhite infl ux is dependent upon whether a neighborhood is homogeneously white or mixed. Homogeneously white neighbor- hoods experiencing a large nonwhite infl ux have a much greater expected number of bias crimes. Conversely, in mixed neighborhoods the effect of on nonwhite infl ux is actually negative, such that the greater the increase in nonwhite residents the lower the number of bias crimes. These fi ndings are consistent with those found in Green and colleagues’ (1998) analy- ses of various race-based bias crime in New York City neighborhoods. In their words, “In-migration leads to the sharpest upturn in hate crimes in predominately white neighbor- hoods” (p. 338). In terms of the size of the effects, among Sacramento neighborhoods characterized by high nonwhite in-migration TABLE 12.3 Negative Binomial Regressions of Bias Crime on Social Disorganization and Defended Neighborhoods Variables Bias Crime (1) (2) (3) Social disorganization Ethnic heterogeneity 1.236 (.777) 2.112 (2.272) — Concentrated disadvantage .296 (.119)*** .421 (.122)*** .414 (122)*** % new residents 2.073 (.753)*** 1.481 (.725)** 1.641 (.712)** Defended neighborhoods % white — 1.756 (2.007) .028 (.757) Percentage point change in nonwhite population — .124 (.039)*** .117 (.038)*** % white * change in nonwhite population — .132 (.067)** .153 (.063)** Constant .459 (.613) –1.727 (2.176) .222 (.579) Overdispersion (α) .443*** .319*** .330*** Log likelihood 203.082 197.338 197.769 N = 103 Note : Standard errors in parentheses. * p < .10 ** p < .05 *** p < .01 (two-tailed tests) THE URBAN ECOLOGY OF BIAS CRIME | 149 (a change from 50 percent white to 80 percent white), the number of bias crimes increases by a factor of 2.6. Neighborhoods with low nonwhite in-migration experienc- ing the same change would be expected to see an increase by a factor of 1.16 or 16 percent. Table 12.4 investigates the determinants of the three comparison crimes: robbery, assault, and vandalism. Because these models contain the percent white variable, the het- erogeneity measure is again excluded, which substantially overlaps with one another in terms of the variation they explain. As both theories would predict, Models 1 and 2 show that the social disorganization variables affect robbery and assault and that the defended neighborhoods variables do not. The vandal- ism model shows somewhat different results. Unlike the other crime variables, including bias crime, vandalism is affected by the pop- ulation size. However, it is lower population tracts that have a higher incidence of vandal- ism than more populated ones. This could be the result of the fact that, having controlled Figure 12.2 Predicted Bias Crime by Percent White and Change in Nonwhite Residents in Sacramento Neighborhoods Note: High percent white neighborhoods defi ned as 90 percent white in 1990. Low percent white (or mixed) neighborhoods defi ned as 60 percent white in 1990. 0 0 2 4 6 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 30 32 34 36 38 40 1 P re d ic te d B ia s C ri m es Percentage Increase in Nonwhite Population High percent white Low percent white 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 for other factors that affect crime, vandal- ism is more likely in sparsely populated areas where there are less witnesses around to detect the crime in progress. Of the social disorganization variables, concentrated dis- advantage does not have effects when other factors are controlled, but the effect of new residents persists. Among the defended neighborhood variables, only the increase in the nonwhite population affects vandalism. The increase in nonwhite population is also negative and signifi cant in the assault model. Both results suggest that, ceteris paribus , neighborhoods with large increases in non- white residents have less of both assault and vandalism. However, the central implication of the defended neighborhood argument is the interaction term, which does not affect assault or vandalism. 11 Antiblack and Violent Bias Crimes The fi nal set of analyses divides bias crime into different components. The fi rst model | RYKEN GRATTET150 gauges whether the infl uences on the aggre- gate counts of bias crime are also relevant to specifi cally antiblack bias crime. Previous research by Green and colleagues (1998) and Steven Messner, Suzanne McHugh, and Rich- ard Felson (2005) examined bias crime dis- aggregated by race under the very plausible assumption that different factors operate for different kinds of bias crime targets. I have taken the opposite approach by fi rst assum- ing that many of the neighborhood dynam- ics associated with bias crime would operate regardless of the characteristics of the specifi c targets. I also relied on the aggregated fi gures because of the sample size in this study is smaller than the previous studies. Model 1 in Table 12.5 tests whether the same ecological processes operate to predict specifi cally antiblack bias crime. The fi ndings suggest that there are minor differences. As was the case in the models using aggregate bias crime counts, concentrated disadvan- tage remains a strong determinant. However, the residential turnover measure (i.e., percent of new residents) does not affect antiblack bias crimes. Bias crimes against blacks are no more likely in neighborhoods experiencing high levels of residential turnover than they are in stable neighborhoods. Thus, of the structural sources of social disorganization, disadvantage emerges as the key determinant in predicting antiblack bias crime. The defended neighborhoods perspective also receives support with respect to specifi - cally antiblack bias crimes. The increase in nonwhite residents and the interaction term shows that antiblack bias crimes are more likely in white neighborhoods experienc- ing an infl ux of nonwhites. The effects are quite large here as well. For example, using the 60 percent and 90 percent white thresh- olds relied upon above, the model predicts an increase of bias crime in high nonwhite in-migration neighborhoods by a factor of 2.9 as compared with an increase of 1.34 in low nonwhite in-migration neighborhoods. It is tempting to infer that these fi ndings sug- gest that the environmental conditions that TABLE 12.4 Negative Binomial Regressions of Robbery, Assault, and Vandalism on Measures of Social Disorganization and Defended Neighborhoods Robbery Assault Vandalism (1) (2) (3) 1990 population — — –.005 (.002)** Social disorganization Concentrated disadvantage .431 (.098)*** .601 (.086)*** .094 (.117) % new residents 1.126 (.634)* 1.770 (.567)*** .0005 (.0001)*** Defended neighborhoods % white .303 (.676) .605 (.607) .026 (.446) Percentage point change in nonwhite population .051 (.035) .076 (.031)** .0427 (.021)** % white * change in nonwhite population .067 (.059) .105 (.052) .037 (.034) Constant 4.376 (.530)*** 5.121 (.476)*** 5.197 (.231)*** Overdispersion (α) .563*** .422*** .195*** Log likelihood 574.449 657.139 640.584 N = 103 Note : Standard errors in parentheses. * p < .10 ** p <.05 *** p < .01 (two-tailed tests) THE URBAN ECOLOGY OF BIAS CRIME | 151 generate bias crime do not differ depending upon who the target is. However, the data from Sacramento are simply too limited to show anything defi nitive along these lines. Thus, at best, these results should be viewed as suggestive of potential patterns. 12 A second way of examining bias crime is to focus solely on the violent incidents. To the extent that more serious bias crimes are more likely to be reported, focusing on the most serious kinds of incidents would argu- ably provide a more reliable measure of the underlying phenomena. If so, then analyses of violent bias crimes serve as a test of the reliability of the fi ndings reported in Table 3 on a subsample of the data that is assumed to represent the most certain bias incidents. Model 2 shows that, indeed, the same pattern of relationships observed in the aggregate data are present in the subsample of violent bias crimes. The effects of concentrated dis- advantage remain large. A one-unit change, which for a factor score variable like this one is the difference between the mean and one standard deviation above the mean, is associ- ated with a 61 percent increase violent bias crime. In addition, the defended neighbor- hood effects are consistent with total bias crime and antiblack crime models. CONCLUSION The urban ecology of bias crime refl ects the dynamics previously identifi ed in research on more generic crime. As with crime in general, the evidence from Sacramento sug- gests that ethnic confl icts are likely to erupt in settings where there is little capacity for informal social control to manage or mediate tensions between groups. More socially dis- organized contexts are prone toward having tensions boil over into moments of sporadic crime and violence. In this sense, the study of TABLE 12.5 Poisson and Negative Binomial Regressions of Antiblack and Violent Bias Crime on Measures of Social Disorganization and Defended Neighborhoods Anti-Black Bias Crime † Violent Bias Crime (1) (2) Social disorganization Concentrated disadvantage .481 (.141)*** .470 (.201)** % new residents .431 (.866) 3.185 (1.264)*** Defended neighborhoods % white .548 (.892) 1.430 (1.228) Percentage point change in nonwhite population .093 (.045)** .170 (.062)*** % white * change in nonwhite population .143 (.072)** .239 (.102)** Constant .575 (.693) 1.043 (.940) Overdispersion (α) — .683*** Log likelihood 127.808 113.005 N = 103 Note : Standard errors in parentheses. † Because the chi-square test of the overdispersion parameter (α) is not signifi cant, the anti-black hate crime model is a Poisson rather than a negative binomial regression. Th e coeffi cients can be interpreted similarly. * p < .10 ** p < .05 *** p < .01 (two-tailed tests) | RYKEN GRATTET152 neighborhood ethnic confl icts has something to gain from criminological research on the relationship between informal social control and crime. And yet, evidence from Sacramento sug- gests that even when poverty and residential turnover—two of the three key measures of social disorganization—are held constant, bias crimes remain affected by the demo- graphic dynamics Green and colleagues (1998) refer to as a “neighborhood defense.” Moreover, the defended neighborhood dynamic does not operate with respect to robbery, assault, and vandalism, although those crimes are affected by the social dis- organization variables. The fact that generic crime in Sacramento neighborhoods varies in ways predicted from research conducted on Midwestern and Eastern cities suggests that there is nothing particularly anoma- lous about the empirical setting that should undermine the generality of the conclusions. As opposed to the emphasis that many scholars and policymakers have placed on the unique features of bias crime, the emerg- ing picture of bias crimes is that they share many things in common with other kinds of offending behavior. This point parallels Messner and associates’ (2005) fi ndings that bias criminals are not “specialists” whose bias-motivated behavior represents the sole form of their criminal involvement. While Messner and associates’ (2005) study is con- ducted at the individual level and the present study is conducted at the neighborhood level, both show that some of the same crimino- genic circumstances that lead to other kinds of crime also engender bias crime. However, this is only half the picture. Bias crime is also refl ective of broader social pro- cesses of intergroup confl ict. In this sense, bias crime in Sacramento neighborhoods resembles patterns found in research on eth- nic group confl ict in a number of settings throughout the world (Harden 1995; Pinder- hughes 1993). While there is no single uni- fi ed set of circumstances that account for all or even most ethnic confl icts, one recurring theme in much political and anthropological writing has been the link between collective ethnic identity and territory (Horowitz 2000). Territory becomes coextensive with ethnic identity, and a group’s claim to its territory is frequently couched in moral terms. When that claim appears or is threatened, defensive actions, by at least some members of the com- munity, are likely—and, perhaps, morally required. As Donald Horowitz (2000) writes: Ethnic claims to priority or exclusion are sup- ported by appeals to moral principles. The principles are invoked to justify departures from strict equality. The moral basis for ethnic claims lies in group legitimacy within a terri- tory . . . To understand the concept of group legitimacy, it is necessary to link it to owner- ship. Legitimacy goes to one’s right place in the country. To be legitimate is therefore to be identifi ed with the territory. Georg Simmel notes that the ethnic stranger is “ ‘no owner of the soil’—soil not only in the physical but also in the fi gurative sense of life-substance which fi xed, if not in a point in space, at an ideal point in the social environment. (pp. 201–2) Neighborhood defenses grow out some ethnic groups’ claims to “soil.” But not all groups. It tends to occur in white communities fac- ing an in-migration of blacks or other ethnic minorities. Historian Stephen Grant Meyer documents numerous instances of “move- in” violence by whites directed specifi cally at blacks in his book As Long As They Don’t Move Next Door (2001). In Sacramento and New York City (i.e., Green and associ- ates’ [1998] study site), homogeneously or nearly homogenously white neighborhoods experiencing an infl ux of nonwhites have the highest rates of bias crime. Neighborhoods with a mix of ethnic groups or those that are more homogenously a single nonwhite group (which is rare in Sacramento) tend to have lower bias crime levels. This suggests that white neighborhoods possess a greater sense of entitlement to the defense of place THE URBAN ECOLOGY OF BIAS CRIME | 153 than other neighborhoods. Although there are some cases, such as in Central City in Jeannine Bell’s Policing Hatred (2002), where bias crime and biased behavior were explicitly supported within a white com- munity and by some white police offi cers, it may be that the support for neighborhood defense through means of bias crime is more often tacit or concentrated within particular peer networks (see also Bursik and Grasmick 1993; Suttles 1972). This view points toward the need to examine local cultural processes that gener- ate neighborhood defenses and, more spe- cifi cally, to comprehend the efforts or lack of efforts of neighborhood elites in white communities to manage the behavior of seg- ments of the neighborhood who engage bias- motivated intimidation. This requires a shift in focus from structural to cultural processes that parallels the shift in focus in the study of communities and crime represented by Warner’s (2003) work on attenuated culture and Kubrin and Weitzer’s (2003) work on the connections between concentrated dis- advantage and neighborhood culture. A key issue for future work is whether informal social control in white neighborhoods erodes in the face of attenuated culture or because of a heterogeneity of cultural frameworks, or both conditions. Such work has the potential to go beyond simply applying social disorga- nization theory to neighborhood ethnic con- fl icts and could contribute to the theoretical advancement of the disorganization perspec- tive as well. In addition, we need to know how bias crime fi ts within a neighborhood residents’ tool kit of defensive strategies and how the social disorganization of a neighborhood shapes the kinds of defenses mobilized by residents. Such work would situate bias crime within Suttles’s (1972) broader con- ception of neighborhood defenses and would provide a better understanding of why bias crime emerges as a strategy in some commu- nities and not others. Like many other social problems, bias crime is a public issue that can be approached from several theoretical viewpoints and tra- ditions of inquiry. As with other problems, it is important to search for points of conver- gence and divergence within these traditions and to identify common generative processes that underlie seemingly different behavior and outcomes. The key to building sociologi- cal theory of social problems like bias crime lies in integrating those traditions and resist- ing the temptation to see the phenomenon as requiring a theory of its own. NOTES 1. The tendency to emphasize the unique features of bias crime is perhaps most prominent in scholar- ship that advocates on behalf of bias crime laws. Proponents depict bias crime as a unique form of criminal activity and in doing so provide a foundation for justifying harsher criminal pen- alties for such crimes (Lawrence 1999). Craig (2002) recently listed the underlying arguments as follows: bias crime is distinctive because of (a) the unique symbolic aspects of the crime, (b) the amount of physical violence involved, (c) the special psychological harms for victims, (d) the presence of multiple perpetrators, (e) the unique contribution such crimes make to the deteriora- tion of social relations, and (f) it typically involves the victimization of already marginalized and neg- atively stereotyped groups (see also Broekman and Turpin-Petrosino 2002; Garofalo 1991; Leonard and Taylor 1981). The author is grateful to Carlos Bravo, Angela Quach, Fernando Murrain, Robert Vercoe, and Julie Siebens for their research assistance. Julie Young at the UCD College of Agriculture and Environmen- tal Sciences, Informatics Center assisted with the GIS mapping. Valerie Jenness and Carl Grindstaff provided extensive feedback on early drafts. Randy Gainey, Eric Grodsky, Bill McCarthy, and Charles Tittle provided help with the early formulation of the research project. The anonymous reviewers and the editors for Social Problems also contrib- uted greatly to the improvement of the manuscript. Direct correspondence to Ryken Grattet, Depart- ment of Sociology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616. E-mail: rtgrattet@ucdavis.edu. 2. This is only one point of potential cross-fertilization between scholarship on bias crime and research on crime more generally. Another is Messner, McHugh, | RYKEN GRATTET154 and Felson’s (2005) article on whether bias crime perpetrators are specialist versus generalists. Broader still, a small body of work has begun to expose the gendered nature of bias crime. Like other kinds of criminal behavior, bias crime expresses conformity to conventional cultural norms about masculinity (Bufkin 1999; Ferber 1998; Perry 2001). 3. In August of 2002, Time Magazine made this dec- laration, basing it on the conclusions of a Harvard Civil Rights Project study, and asked: “Why is there still racial tension?” (Stodghill and Bower 2002). 4. Krivo and Peterson (1996) found that measures of concentrated disadvantage have consistent effects on property and violent crime in Columbus. Samp- son, Raudenbush, and Earls (1997) showed that a factor score based upon the number of female headed households, unemployed persons, non- Hispanic blacks, persons below the poverty level, and males under age 17 affects the level of violent crime in Chicago. Kubrin and Weitzer (2003) show that concentrated disadvantage and cultural adap- tations to extreme poverty, such as subcultures supportive of violence and distrust of the police, combine to affect retaliatory homicides in St. Louis. 5. Defended neighborhoods is by no means the only possible argument about the relationship between bias crime and ethnic composition. Several other theories and arguments exist regarding such fac- tors as ethnic competition over resources (Olzak, Shanahan, and West 1994); racial threat (Blalock 1967; King 2007; Tolnay, Beck, and Massey 1989), strain (Levin and McDevitt 2002; Perry 2001), tipping points (Galster 1990), the conse- quences of white fl ight (Wilson 1978), social dis- tance and contact (Blau 1977), and different kinds of arguments about the relative balance of power between groups (see Horowitz 2000). 6. City data was retrieved from the City of Sacra- mento crime report database (http://www.sacpd. org/databases. asp) and the state data was provided by the California Criminal Justice Statistics Center. 7. It is important to note that both social disorga- nization and defended neighborhoods theories share the idea that neighborhood in-migration affects crime. However, the defended neighbor- hoods perspective is different in two ways. First, it focuses specifi cally on nonwhite in-migration, because the threat to neighborhood purity is specifi cally rooted in an ethnically based claim to territory. In-migration of blacks into a black neighborhood would not be expected to generate a neighborhood defense. Social disorganization theory, on the other hand, uses the concept of residential turnover, a broader phenomenon that also includes out-migration and that can involve any ethnic groups. Second, the defended neigh- borhood argument is that in-migration is more threatening to specifi cally white neighborhoods. As a result, the nonwhite in-migration effect must be interpreted along with the effects of percent white within a neighborhood. 8. All models presented below were tested for spatial autocorrelation based on least squares residuals. No such tests exist for negative binomial models. In every case, the test statistic, Moran’s I , was not signifi cant at the .05 level. The specifi c method used involved the calculation of a binary weights matrix based upon the connectivity of each tract with its surrounding tracts. 9. In the negative binomial regression model, fac- tor changes are computed by exponentiating the unstandardized coeffi cient. Percentage changes are computed using the following formula: 100[exp()-1]. 10. The 1990 population size was controlled in initial models in logged and unlogged forms. It had no effect in either bivariate or multivariate models. Likewise, Green and colleagues (1998) found no effect of population size on bias crime in New York City. 11. Green and colleagues (1998) used economic mea- sures, not as part of a test of social disorganiza- tion theory but to gauge the effects of economic strain and resource competition. The fact that these effects are present in Sacramento could be interpreted as providing some support for strain and ethnic competition models, as well as a key pillar of social disorganization theory. 12. The positive effect of percent white on vandalism may highlight a difference between predominantly white neighborhoods and other neighborhoods in the propensity to report less serious crimes like vandalism. Holding the other factors constant, neighborhoods with lower percent white may be less likely to invoke formal social control to deal with minor problems. The fact that the percent white variable is not signifi cant in the assault and robbery models suggests that when the crime is more serious white and nonwhite neighborhoods respond similarly. REFERENCES Anderson, Elijah. 1999. Code of the Street . New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Bell, Jeannine. 2002. Policing Hatred: Law Enforce- ment, Civil Rights, and Hate Crime . New York: New York University. Blalock, Hubert M. 1967. Toward a Theory of Minority- Group Relations . New York: John Wiley and Sons. http://www.sacpd.org/databases.asp http://www.sacpd.org/databases.asp THE URBAN ECOLOGY OF BIAS CRIME | 155 Blau, Peter M. 1977. 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Chicago: University of Chicago Press. http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,340694,00.html http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,340694,00.html http://wcr.sonoma.edu/v5n1/sun.html Connections The Prison Community from a Social Disorganization and Collective Effi cacy Perspective Lori Sexton INTRODUCTION When Shaw and McKay (1942) wrote Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas , Chicago was the second largest city in the United States. Today, if the population of America’s prisons were taken from inside prison walls and concentrated into an urban setting, it would create the second largest city in the United States (Gopnik 2012). This hypothetical situation may seem outlandish, but it sparks in the imagination parallels between prisons and cities that might not otherwise come to mind. If we think of prison as a city, or at least of prison settings as similar in some ways to today’s urban centers, we can begin to see the potential applica- tions of social disorganization and collective effi cacy theories inside prison. In fact, prison settings have much in common with cities: they bring a large number of people together in close proximity; the people who live within them form communities (Clemmer 1940); they are primarily populated with people—predominantly young men of color—who have lived in urban settings (Western and Pettit, 2010); and they can be characterized by varying levels of disorder (Carrabine 2005). Commonalities aside, prisons remain different from cities in a very fundamental way: they are what Goffman (1961) refers to as “total institutions”—rigidly structured, closed systems that isolate a group of similarly situated people from larger society. As total institutions, pris- ons differ from cities along numerous dimensions: prisons are not formed by the same social ecological processes that characterize the development of cities; the prisoners they hold are captive in their environment to a degree not evident in the outside world (although social and geographic mobility outside of cities is but a distant dream for many urban dwellers); and formal social control is more pervasive in prisons than in even the most heavily policed urban settings. It is these striking differences—readily evident on the face of things—that have per- haps prevented social disorganization and collective effi cacy scholars from turning their ana- lytic lens toward a prison setting. In this reading, however, I invite you to look beyond these differences—not to set them aside but rather to fi nd within them conceptual similarity in the face of stark empirical difference—in order to examine the potential for dynamics generally understood to play out at a neighborhood level to also exist inside prison walls. In order to examine social disorganization and collective effi cacy in a prison setting, we need to be creative and fl exible in our approach. There are two primary ways to do this: (1) by importing spatially defi ned understandings of neighborhoods into a prison setting and (2) by reconceptualizing the meaning of “community” along cultural lines. The fi rst, and perhaps most straightforward, way is to locate the prison equivalent of neighborhoods. | LORI SEXTON158 Research on social disorganization and collective effi cacy breaks down larger geographic units like cities into smaller, discrete units like neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are commonly measured at the level of the census tract (Hipp 2007). In a prison setting, the “neighborhood” equivalent to census tracts would be individual housing units: the buildings, cell blocks, pods, or dormitories that constitute discrete areas of the prison where inmates are housed. Viewing prison housing units as neighborhoods allows us to employ the common tactic of spatial demarcation of neighborhoods in a novel setting. Just as cities are comprised of geographically bounded neighborhoods that contain clusters of residents, prisons are com- prised of geographically bounded housing units that contain clusters of prisoners. The second way to bring the study of social disorganization and collective effi cacy into a prison setting requires a shift from an emphasis on neighborhoods to a focus on community. Whereas neighborhoods are defi ned by their geographic boundaries, communities can be defi ned more fl exibly. A cultural approach to studying communities, for instance, considers a community to be a group of people tied together by a common identity or other mutually shared characteristics, rather than geographic proximity. In a prison setting, this identity- and commonality-based reconceptualization of community prompts us to move beyond looking at prison housing units as discrete neighborhoods, and instead offers the “prisoner commu- nity” as a whole, or separate subcommunities (e.g., transgender inmates, prison gangs, lifers, or sex offenders), as the unit of analysis for social disorganization and collective effi cacy. SPATIAL DEMARCATION OF PRISON NEIGHBORHOODS Let’s begin our exploration of social disorganization and collective effi cacy in prisons with spatially defi ned prison “neighborhoods.” As noted earlier, there are key ways in which the prison, as a total institution, differs from urban neighborhoods. These differences have pro- found implications for the examination of social disorganization and collective effi cacy in a prison setting. Primary among these factors is the degree of social control evident in prison “neighborhoods.” Formal social control is much stronger and more pervasive in total institu- tions than in the outside world. Prisoners live their lives under constant supervision, whether in the form of surveillance by correctional offi cers, enforcement of rules and regulations by prison staff, or the looming threat of sanctions for disciplinary infractions. In short, prisons amplify formal social control in that they exert near total control over the prisoners in their charge (Goffman 1961). The degree of formal social control in prisons and the oppositional relationship between those wielding formal control (prison staff) and those subject to it (prisoners) also have interesting implications for the extent and nature of informal social control exercised by prisoners (Sykes and Messinger 1960). In communities in the free world, formal and informal social control are often complementary means toward the same end. In a prison setting, however, formal social control on the part of prison staff and informal social control among prisoners coexist in an uneasy tension, each striving toward its own end. For example, it is well documented in the literature that prison gangs are a major source of infor- mal social control. Prison gangs rely on hierarchical organization (with “shot callers” at the top of the chain and “associates” at the bottom) to control their members and use violence as a means of control over both gang members and prisoners outside their ranks (Trammel 2012). Prison staff, on the other hand, use the formal control that they exert over prisoners to maintain the very safety and security that are jeopardized by prisoners’ means of informal social control. CONNECTIONS | 159 Another signifi cant way in which prisons differ from cities is that they are not character- ized by the radial expansion patterns of urban centers described by Burgess (1925) and Shaw and McKay (1942). Prisons simply do not “grow” in the same way that cities do, nor do their populations shift from one area to another according to the same general patterns. As total institutions, prisons allow their residents neither voluntary exit from prison nor uncon- strained movement within the prison. This does not mean that prison populations are static, however. There are set rules (admission and release procedures) that pattern the fl ow of people into and out of prisons, but the location and function of the prison remain the same. Similarly, although the population within a prison moves around on a very regular basis, the “neighborhoods” (housing units) that house this population remain constant, absent some alteration to the physical design such as construction or demolition of housing units or the repurposing of a dining hall or gym into housing space. Thus, prisons as total institutions once again complicate the application of social disorganization to a prison setting, this time with regard to the social ecological underpinnings of the social disorganization framework. The implications of this departure from a social ecological model are most notable in what is absent from prisons: slums. The city’s social ecological process of radial expansion produces a “zone in transition” in which undesirable characteristics (e.g., nuisance from nearby indus- try, deteriorating housing conditions, and key measures of social disorganization) push out all but the least fortunate residents (Burgess 1925). Prisons, in contrast, have no such zone in transition. Broadening our lens, however, and seeing the prison not as an autonomous entity, but rather as situated within a larger ecological sphere, many scholars have likened prisons themselves to slums (Wacquant 2000, 2001). Prisoners are largely pulled from urban centers, primarily zones in transition, and transplanted into prisons. In this way, although social ecological dynamics do not affect the structure of prisons themselves, the composition of their populations is decidedly similar to that of the zones in transition described by social disorganization scholars. Viewing prisons not just as neighborhoods but as particularly depressed and challenged neighborhoods provides the opportunity to examine specifi c structural markers of social disorganization in a prison setting. Research on social disorganization in neighborhoods has consistently demonstrated the relationship between poverty—specifi cally concentrated disadvantage—and crime. In a prison setting, inmates both import disadvantage (in the form of low socioeconomic status) into prison with them and experience new disadvantage in the forms of their limited ability to earn a fair or reasonable wage while incarcerated and their decided inability to signifi cantly improve their living conditions. When construed more broadly, prisoners also embody concentrated disadvantage in other infl uential ways. Prison- ers as a group are disadvantaged within the prison system, as evidenced by their subordinate status and the extreme degree of control exercised over them by the prison (Goffman 1961). Thus, prisoners fi nd themselves disadvantaged in a hierarchy of power as much as a hierar- chy of fi nancial means. Another major indicator of social disorganization in neighborhoods is ethnic heterogene- ity. Measurement of ethnic heterogeneity in prison “neighborhoods” presents an interesting dilemma. In some states, policy-mandated or de facto racial segregation in prisons is com- mon and generally justifi ed as necessary to the maintenance of safety and security in the face of gang-related threats (Henderson, Cullen, Carroll, and Feinberg 2000). For instance, California state prisons were racially segregated as a matter of course, beginning at inmates’ initial point of entry into prison reception centers, until the state’s policy of racial segrega- tion was discontinued in 2005 after a protracted legal battle (Goodman 2008). The degree | LORI SEXTON160 to which prisoners self-segregate along racial or ethnic lines—in ways that may or may not correspond to formal or institutional racial segregation in prison—provides another layer of data on ethnic heterogeneity. A wealth of empirical literature on life in prison has dem- onstrated that grouping of inmates occurs primarily along racial lines, even in prisons with relatively low rates of gang activity (Jacobs 1979). Thus, the intersection of formal and infor- mal social control in prison once again complicates what is a fairly straightforward measure in urban settings. Residential instability is also a major component of life in prison. Despite the static nature of prison housing units as “neighborhoods,” there can be a great deal of fl uctuation in the residents of these neighborhoods. It is not uncommon for prisoners to be moved across hous- ing units within a single prison or even transferred between prisons over the length of their sentence, due to factors as diverse as administrative penalties for disciplinary infractions, changes in custody or security levels, programming needs, legal issues, or health concerns. The commonality across these varied reasons for residential instability in prison is that they are rarely, if ever, initiated by prisoners. Once again, we see the formal control of the total institution constricting what would be ordinarily be voluntary behavior in neighborhoods. These distinct forces produce residential instability in prison that follows markedly different patterns than in a neighborhood characterized by social ecological processes of relatively voluntary in- and out-migration. SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION AND PRISON VIOLENCE Given that social disorganization is associated with higher levels of crime in cities, the ques- tion naturally follows: Is social disorganization similarly associated with crime in a prison setting? If so, the indicators of social disorganization discussed above—concentrated dis- advantage, racial segregation, and residential instability—would lead us to expect prison neighborhoods to be rife with crime and victimization. To determine whether this is the case, we can turn to decades of empirical research on violence in prisons. Prisons have long been demonstrated to be environments defi ned by the threat and reality of violence (Trammel 2012). Johnson (1987: 75) summed it up succinctly when he explained that “the reality of violence [is a fact] of everyday life.” While offi cial statistics tell us that 28 out of every 1,000 inmates—just under 3%—have been physically assaulted by another inmate (Stephan and Karberg 2003), unoffi cial estimates paint a far more vivid picture of violence. One recent self-report study revealed that approximately one in fi ve prisoners has been the victim of physical violence while incarcerated—a fi gure that far exceeds the 2.8% reported by offi cial fi gures (Wolff, Blitz, Shi, Siegel, and Bachman 2007). In fact, self- report data on violent victimization in prison routinely provide estimates of inmate-on- inmate assault that are at least 10 times higher than offi cially reported fi gures (Byrne and Hummer 2007). Taken together, the image of prisons as violent settings and the markers of social disor- ganization evident in prison “neighborhoods” suggest rudimentary empirical support for a social disorganization hypothesis in prison. In fact, this hypothesis is quite compatible with a leading explanation of inmate culture: the structural functionalist or deprivation perspective. According to structural functionalism, the distinctive inmate culture that arises in prison— complete with its acceptance of and reliance on violence—is attributable to characteristics of the prison environment. Facets of the institutional environment that have commonly been CONNECTIONS | 161 implicated in the development of inmate culture include the losses and deprivations of a life of confi nement known as the “pains of imprisonment” (Sykes 1958) and the constraints imposed by the prison regime (Goffman 1961). The markers of social disorganization that we have considered here fall neatly under the rubric of institutional factors; concentrated disadvantage, ethnic heterogeneity, and residential mobility are largely components of pris- oners’ lives in prison, rather than attributes that they bring into prison with them. The structural functionalist perspective has resulted in a body of empirical research that describes prison culture in rich detail. We know, for instance, that inmate culture is orga- nized around an informal code that demands strict opposition to prison staff, loyalty to other inmates, and a somewhat paradoxical distrust of prisoners and staff alike (Sykes and Messinger 1960). This prison culture—including its uneasy relationship with trust—becomes pivotal as we move from social disorganization’s focus on the association between struc- tural conditions and crime, to a collective effi cacy framework that emphasizes the underlying social mechanisms that explain this relationship. COLLECTIVE EFFICACY, TRANSGENDER PRISONERS, AND A CULTURAL APPROACH TO COMMUNITY Sampson, Raudenbush and Earls’s (1997) work on collective effi cacy has examined the medi- ating role of social ties in the relationship between social disorganization and crime. Col- lective effi cacy operationalizes these ties as the interplay between social cohesion (based on mutual trust among neighbors) and a shared commitment to intervention for the common good. When examined in a prison setting, the fraught nature of social ties among prison- ers adds an interesting twist to the fabric of collective effi cacy. The structural conditions of social disorganization are clearly evident in a prison setting, as is the key dependent vari- able, crime, but the degree to which a relationship between the two is mediated by disrupted social ties among prisoners remains to be seen. On the one hand, our knowledge of inmate culture paints a picture of solidarity against offi cers and expectations for mutual cooperation among inmates in this regard. On the other hand, the mandate to “trust no one” indicates a complicated and contingent quality of social ties among prisoners and a corresponding norm of nonintervention within the prisoner community. To determine the infl uence of these social ties—strained or otherwise—in the social disorganization framework, we must fi rst defi ne and measure them in terms of collective effi cacy. One potential way to examine collective effi cacy among prisoners—and to determine its mediating role in the relationship between social disorganization and crime—is to move beyond the spatial demarcation of prison “neighborhoods” to an identity- or commonality- based conceptualization of community. Recall from earlier in this reading that such an approach focuses not on geographic boundaries between housing units but rather empha- sizes communities bounded by commonality of identity and experience, regardless of physi- cal location. In this way, all prisoners belong to the “prison community” no matter where they are housed, based on the overarching similarities in the inmate culture (Clemmer 1940). By this same logic, discrete groups of prisoners can be part of smaller prison subcultures, corresponding to unique prisoner communities nested within the larger prison community. This cultural approach to community may be particularly conducive to an examination of collective effi cacy because it relies on ties between community members rather than mere expectations for future interaction based on geographic proximity. | LORI SEXTON162 One particular population provides a unique opportunity to examine the existence of cul- tural communities within prison: transgender prisoners. Transgender prisoners are inmates whose gender identities or presentations do not fi t neatly with their biological sex—for instance, biologically male inmates who identify as female and present themselves in femi- nine ways. Until very recently, transgender prisoners were what Tewksbury and Potter (2005) deemed a “forgotten group.” In 2013, ABC News brought to light the story of one such “for- gotten” prisoner: Kelly McAllister, a transgender woman with “fully developed breasts, long hair, and feminine features,” who was housed in a cell with a male inmate in the Sacramento County Jail (Libaw 2013: 1). Despite her female identity and feminine appearance, Kelly is biologically male and considered a male inmate by correctional staff. Like most transgender women who have run afoul of the law, Kelly was placed in a facility for male inmates—a decision that the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department acknowledged put her at risk of victim- ization and resulted in her placement in protective custody. Over the past few years, a num- ber of highly visible transgender prisoners like Kelly have received increased attention from the media, correctional practitioners, policymakers, and researchers alike. National news outlets have run stories about transgender women in prisons for men who have lobbied— and at times sued—for hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery (e.g., Sweet, 2013); high-profi le lawsuits in both federal and state courts have been brought forth by transgender prisoners alleging rampant sexual assault behind bars ( Farmer v. Brennan , 1994; Giraldo v. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation , 2007); and recent empirical research has revealed the extent to which transgender prisoners are victimized in men’s pris- ons (Jenness, Sexton, and Sumner 2011). This increased media, policy, and academic attention reveals that transgender prisoners like Kelly McAllister face a number of challenges: offi cials’ disregard of their gender identity, denial of gender-specifi c medical care and garments (like bras), and heightened risk of vic- timization, to name a few. These experiences set transgender prisoners apart from the larger inmate population and bind them together as a discrete group. Recognizing the potential that these common experiences have for the development of community, Sexton and Jenness (2013) conducted a study to examine the presence, extent, and nature of a sense of commu- nity among transgender inmates in California prisons for men. They assessed the degree to which transgender prisoners affi liated with two separate “communities” in prison: the trans- gender inmate community and the inmate community writ large. They utilized the concepts of collective identity—a individual’s shared sense of commitment or connection to a broader community—and collective effi cacy to measure affi liation, cooperation, and a shared sense of agency among transgender prisoners. Sexton and Jenness’s fi ndings revealed that transgender inmates expressed a sense of col- lective identity and collective effi cacy with other transgender inmates as well as with the larger inmate population, regardless of their physical location within a given prison. This provides evidence for a cultural conceptualization of community, where similarly situated prisoners feel a connection that transcends the physical boundaries of individual prison “neighborhoods.” Further, it demonstrates that collective effi cacy—a concept based explic- itly on group cohesion, trust, and shared expectations of intervention on behalf of others— can exist within a prison culture organized around distrust and nonintervention. Although transgender inmates affi liated themselves with both the transgender inmate community and the larger inmate community, their sense of collective identity and perceived collective effi - cacy was stronger with other transgender inmates than with the inmate community as a whole. As one transgender inmate in their study explained, “The transgenders are all in one CONNECTIONS | 163 group. We get along. We’re like community. We have to stick together in here” (Sexton and Jenness 2013: 22). These fi ndings demonstrate the importance of commonality of identity and experience in the confi guration of communities and have implications for the examina- tion of violence and victimization among these communities. Given a relatively high degree of collective effi cacy among the transgender prisoner com- munity, and collective effi cacy’s demonstrated attenuating effect on crime in neighborhoods, it would be reasonable to hypothesize that members of the transgender community might experience lower levels of victimization in prison. Anecdotal evidence from stories like Kelly McAllister’s would suggest otherwise—a conclusion confi rmed by empirical research. Although Sexton and Jenness (2013) did not directly examine the effect of transgender inmates’ perceived collective effi cacy on violence, data collected from the same population of transgender prisoners reveals a picture of transgender inmates’ heightened vulnerability to both physical and sexual victimization in prison. Jenness, Sexton, and Sumner (2011) found that transgender prisoners’ rate of sexual victimization exceeds that of male prisoners by a factor of 13, with 59% of transgender inmates reporting having experienced sexual assault while incarcerated. The prevalence of physical victimization was even higher among trans- gender inmates: 80% reported being a victim of physical assault while incarcerated—a rate that far exceeds statistics for male prisoners (Jenness, Maxson, Matsuda, and Sumner 2007; Jenness, Sexton, and Sumner 2011). Whether and to what extent these high levels of violence are related to indicators of social disorganization or collective effi cacy is an empirical ques- tion that has not been directly tested, but high levels of collective effi cacy among transgender inmates and strikingly high levels of victimization in this community suggest that there are other factors at play. What might these other factors be? And perhaps more importantly for our discussion here, can they be considered under the rubric of social disorganization and collective effi cacy—or do they detract from the applicability of the social disorganization framework to a carceral setting? The answer to this last question may lie in our dual conceptualization of community, which renders the dynamics of social disorganization and collective effi cacy quite complex. Because communities can be understood as both spatially and culturally bounded, there exists the potential for these different forms of community to be quite at odds with one another. Transgender inmates comprise a distinctive community in terms of common identity and experience, but like Kelly McAllister, they are also frequently housed in prison “neigh- borhoods” with nontransgender inmates. Thus, the victimization experienced by transgender prisoners is not necessarily intracommunity in the cultural sense. Instead, it is quite possible that transgender prisoners experience violence within their housing unit “neighborhood,” despite the fact that this violence is most often perpetrated by inmates outside the transgen- der inmate community (Jenness, Sexton, and Sumner 2011). To better understand the driving force behind this intraneighborhood, but intercommunity, violence, perhaps a lesson can be taken from Grattet’s (2009) work that combines social disorganization with a “defended neighborhoods” argument. According to this perspective, transgender prisoners—who are often visibly different from the larger inmate population—might be viewed as unwelcome others by nontransgender prisoners. Thus, despite higher levels of collective effi cacy among the transgender prisoner community, cultural confl ict between transgender prisoners and nontransgender prisoners within a prison “neighborhood” might yield higher levels of vic- timization for transgender prisoners. This indicates that, although collective effi cacy may be higher among culturally bounded communities in prison, spatially bounded prison neighbor- hoods remain an important unit of analysis for measures of disorganization and crime. | LORI SEXTON164 CONCLUSION: IMPLICATIONS OF SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION AND COLLECTIVE EFFICACY IN PRISON This essay has invited you to reenvision the concepts of social disorganization and collec- tive effi cacy by plucking them from the comfortable trappings of neighborhood analysis and transplanting them into a decidedly different context: the prison. Through a focus on multiple, overlapping communities, we have problematized the demarcation of communities based purely on physical boundaries, instead allowing for communities to be rooted in com- mon experiences and identity. These shifts—from cities to prisons, and from neighborhoods to communities—have taken us away from the original tenets of social disorganization as envisioned by Shaw and McKay (1942) but have provided an opportunity to examine these dynamics in new and interesting, albeit complicated, ways. By interpreting social disorga- nization in the context of prison “neighborhoods,” we glimpsed the relationship between characteristics of the prison environment and violence in prison in a new light. By reconcep- tualizing community, we were able to examine more directly the dynamics of social cohe- sion and intergroup agency and hypothesize their potential effect on violence. Through a discussion of transgender inmates’ location at the intersection of culturally based prison communities and physical prison “neighborhoods,” we expanded the social disorganization and collective effi cacy frameworks to allow for the possibility of multiple, overlapping com- munities within a single, spatially defi ned neighborhood. We have also seen that these innovations are not without complication. As research in the structural functionalist tradition has long demonstrated, prisons are “special places” (Bottoms and Sparks 1997: 16) in terms of their structure, culture, and the context that they provide for concepts like social disorganization, collective effi cacy, and even crime. The char- acteristics that distinguish prisons from the free world may prove infl uential to the ways in which dynamics of social disorganization and collective effi cacy play out in a prison setting and the effect that they have on crime. For instance, the tension between informal and formal social control, and the oppositional nature of the two—both recurring themes throughout this reading—complicate the examination of social disorganization and collective effi cacy. The existence of an oppositional inmate code suggests that social networks in prison have a powerful potential to serve negative or criminogenic functions, rather than positive or pro- social functions—potential that is heightened by the frequent use of violence as an informal social control mechanism among prisoners (Johnson 1987; Bottoms 1999). This phenom- enon is not without parallel in the neighborhoods literature, however. Sampson (2006) noted the potential for social networks in neighborhood settings to have negative or criminogenic effects, rather than protective effects against crime. In this way, the prison community can perhaps be likened to the oppositional subcultures in found in some “underclass” neighbor- hoods (Wilson 1987), in which distinctive belief systems arise that endorse crime rather than proscribing it (Kubrin and Weitzer 2003). In fact, even the term oppositional subculture mir- rors the “solidary opposition” to the prison regime that Sykes and Messinger (1960) found to characterize inmate culture. Once again, the existence of similarities such as these amidst a backdrop of stark difference, leads us to conclude that prisons, “special places” as they are, still have much in common with cities. Despite the fraught nature of “community” in prison and the complex interplay of for- mal and informal social control that render the examination of social disorganization in a prison setting challenging, the pursuit is ultimately worthwhile. A rich history of empirical research in prisons has yielded a detailed body of knowledge about prison environments, the inmate culture that arises within them, and the pervasive atmosphere of violence that they CONNECTIONS | 165 create. A similarly venerable line of research on the social ecology of cities has shown us that social disorganization is a major force in understanding crime in the free world. Thus, transferring our knowledge of social disorganization to a prison setting is both logical and potentially fruitful. This reading is a fi rst step toward the application of social disorganiza- tion and collective effi cacy to a prison setting. It presents a selective review of the literature that examines components of social disorganization and collective effi cacy in a piecemeal fashion, oftentimes in ways that were not originally foreseen by the researchers. But such a post-hoc analysis of social disorganization and collective effi cacy in prisons can only take us so far. In order to fully understand the applicability and merit of examining social disorga- nization and collective effi cacy in a prison setting, researchers must design studies that spe- cifi cally examine these dynamics. Doing so would help to bridge disparate—but at the same time, quite complementary—literatures on communities, neighborhoods, prison culture, and prison management in a way that would benefi t policymakers, correctional practitioners, prisoners, and anyone with a vested interest in understanding the dynamics of prisons and increasing safety within them. CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS 1. In this reading, Sexton makes a case for the study of social disorganization and collective effi cacy in prisons. How could these frameworks be applicable to other settings that are equally far removed from cities? For instance, Goffman’s notion of the “total institu- tion” encompasses not just prisons but also orphanages, convents, nursing homes, and mental hospitals. You might also consider settings that are not total institutions, such as schools or workplaces. Could the study of social disorganization and collective effi cacy have purchase in these settings as well? How so? 2. Sexton describes two different ways of examining social disorganization and collective effi cacy in prison: spatially defi ned neighborhoods and culturally defi ned communities. How might we apply the cultural conception of community to a traditional urban set- ting? For instance, consider whether a street gang, a community of faith, or an immi- grant community might be an interesting unit of analysis. 3. Despite their high levels of collective effi cacy, transgender prisoners are at far greater risk for victimization than their nontransgender counterparts. Sexton suggests that this may be due to the overlap between the culturally defi ned transgender community and the spatially defi ned prison “neighborhoods” in which they live. What are some other pos- sible explanations for this departure from the traditional protective function of collective effi cacy? Are these explanations compatible with the examination of social disorganiza- tion and collective effi cacy in prison, or do they call it into question? REFERENCES Bottoms, A. E. 1999. “Interpersonal Violence and Social Order in Prisons.” Pp. 205–283 in Prisons , Vol. 26, edited by M. Tonry and J. Petersilia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bottoms, A. E. and Sparks, R. 1997. “How is Order in Prisons Maintained?” Pp. 14–31, in Security, Justice and Order in Prison: Developing Perspectives , edited by A. Liebling. Cambridge: University of Cambridge. Burgess, E. W. 1925. “The Growth of the City.” Pp. 47–62 in The City , edited by R. E. Park, E. W. Burgess, and R. D. McKenzie. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Byrne, J. M. and Hummer, D. 2007. “Myths and realities of prison violence: A review of the evidence.” Victims & Offenders, 2 (1), 77–90. Carrabine, E. 2005. “Prison Riots, Social Order and the Problem of Legitimacy.” British Journal of Criminology 45(6): 896–913. | LORI SEXTON166 Clemmer, D. 1940. The Prison Community . Boston: Christopher. Farmer v. Brennan , 511 U.S. 825 (1994). Giraldo v. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation , CGC-07–461473, S.Ct. of California (2007). Goffman, E. 1961. Asylums . Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Goodman, P. 2008. “ ‘It’s just Black, White, or Hispanic’: An Observational Study of Racializing Moves in Califor- nia’s Segregated Prison Reception Centers.” Law & Society Review 42(4): 735–770. Gopnik, A. 2012 (January 30). “The Caging of America.” The New Yorker , 72–77. Grattet, R. 2009. “The Urban Ecology of Bias Crime: A Study of Disorganized and Defended Neighborhoods.” Social Problems 56(1): 132–150. Henderson, M. L, Cullen, F. T., Carroll, L., and Feinberg, W. 2000. “Race, Rights, and Order in Prison: A National Survey of Wardens on the Racial Integration of Prison Cells.” The Prison Journal 80(3): 295–308. Hipp, J. R. 2007. “Block, Tract, and Levels of Aggregation: Neighborhood Structure and Crime and Disorder as a Case in Point.” American Sociological Review 72(5): 659–680. Jacobs, J. B. 1979. “Race Relations and the Prison Subculture.” Crime and Justice 1: 1–27. Jenness, V., Maxson, C. L., Matsuda, K. N., and Sumner, J. 2007. Violence in California Correctional Facilities: An Empirical Examination of Sexual Assault . Report to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilita- tion. Irvine, CA: University of California, Irvine. Jenness, V., Sexton, L., and Sumner, J. 2011. Transgender Inmates in California Prisons: An Empirical Examination of a Vulnerable Population. Report to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Irvine, CA: University of California, Irvine. Johnson, R. 1987. Hard Time: Understanding and Reforming the Prison . Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole. Kubrin, C. E. and Weitzer, R. (2003). “New Directions in Social Disorganization Theory.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 40(4): 374–402. Libaw, O. 2013 (January 22). “Prisons Face Dilemma with Transgender Inmates.” ABC News . Retrieved Septem- ber 3, 2013, http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=90919&page=1#.UWrpfaWFwhy. Sampson, R. J. 2006. “Collective Effi cacy Theory: Lessons Learned and Directions for Future Inquiry.” Pp. 149–167 in Taking Stock: The Status of Criminological Theory , edited by F. T. Cullen, J. P. Wright, and K. Blevins. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Sampson, R. J., Raudenbush, S. W., and Earls, F. 1997. “Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Effi cacy.” Science 277: 918–924. Sexton, L. and Jenness, V. 2013. “ ‘We’re Like Community’: An Empirical Examination of Collective Identity and Collective Effi cacy among Transgender Prisoners.” Manuscript submitted for publication. Shaw, C. R. and McKay, H. D. 1942. Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stephan, J. and Karberg, J. 2003. The Census of State and Federal Correctional Facilities, 2000 . Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Offi ce of Justice Programs. Sweet, L. J. 2013 (April 3). “Killer’s Sex Surgery Prep Goes Ahead Despite Appeal.” Boston Herald . Retrieved June 4, 2013, http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/04/killer_s_sex _surgery_prep_goes_ ahead_despite_appeal. Sykes, G. M. 1958. The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison . Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni- versity Press. Sykes, G. M. and Messinger, S. L. 1960. “The Inmate Social System.” Pp. 5–19 in Theoretical Studies of the Social Organization of the Prison , edited by R. A. Cloward, D. R. Cressey, G. H. Glosser, R. McCleery, L. E. Ohlin, G. M. Sykes, and S. Messinger. New York: Social Science Research Council. Tewksbury, R. and Potter, R. H. 2005. “Transgender Prisoners: A Forgotten Group.” Pp. 15-1–15-14 in Managing Special Populations in Jails and Prisons , edited by S. Stojkovic. New York: Civic Research Institute. Trammel, R. 2012. Enforcing the Convict Code: Violence and Prison Culture . Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Wacquant, L. 2000. “The New ‘Peculiar Institution’: On the Prison as a Surrogate Ghetto.” Theoretical Criminol- ogy 4(3): 377–389. Wacquant, L. 2001. “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh.” Punishment & Society 3(1): 95–134. Western, B. and Pettit, B. 2010. “Incarceration & Social Inequality.” Daedalus 139(3): 8–19. Wilson, W. J. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy . Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press. Wolff, N., Blitz, C. L., Shi, J., Siegel, J., and Bachman, R. 2007. “Physical Violence Inside Prisons: Rates of Victim- ization.” Criminal Justice and Behavior 34(5): 588–599. http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=90919&page=1#.UWrpfaWFwhy http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/04/killer_s_sex _surgery_prep_goes_ahead_despite_appeal http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/04/killer_s_sex _surgery_prep_goes_ahead_despite_appeal SECTION 4 Social Pathology, Degeneracy, and Medicalization This page intentionally left blank Introduction Tammy L. Anderson When held accountable, the so-called “compulsive” gambler may claim he has become “addicted.” This means that he has immersed himself so deeply that quitting is hard to do. Yet, just as people struggle to give up many bad habits once these habits have cost them dearly, the “addicted” gambler can do the same. (Samenow 2010: 1) Do you agree with this statement by renowned psychiatrist Stanton E. Samenow? Is there such a thing as gambling addiction and, if so, is it a biologically based form of mental illness, or is it the result of bad habits and poor choices as Samenow claims? How would our responses to compulsive gambling differ if we viewed it as a medical disease versus a lifestyle choice? What would be the impact on gamblers? Over time, our society has increasing viewed a growing number deviant behaviors and conditions as medical problems, which were formerly considered moral failings or lifestyle choices. Gambling is one of them. Today, we are constantly being told that problem or patho- logical gambling is a disease, rooted in some internal biological process and that it should be dealt with by medical practitioners. This is what Samenow is commenting on above even though his psychiatrist colleagues are some of the most active advocates of “pathological gambling” as a medical condition. How and why does some behavior or conditions shift from being viewed as a lifestyle choice made by an immoral person to a disease or illness affl icting him or her? Section 4 includes four readings that discuss how deviant behaviors have been viewed, explained, and dealt with as biologically based or medical conditions over the course of time. Readings by Lemert (1951) and Best (2006) discuss the rise and fall of degeneracy and social pathology, which were the initial concepts sociologists used to explain deviance in medical terminology. The Conrad (2005) reading describes more contemporary efforts to “medicalize” deviance or to describe gambling as an “addiction” and form of mental illness that should be treated, rather than stigmatized and punished. The connections reading in this section by Victor Perez uses mental illness, of which pathological gambling is one vari- ety according to the DSM-V (Ferentzy and Turner 2013), to trace the “circular thinking” between these divergent ideas over time. His reading shows how sociology has been involved in a so-called love/hate relationship with the fi eld of medicine and psychiatry, agreeing and disagreeing with Samenow’s position above and abandoning the once favored concepts of degeneracy and social pathology for the more politically correct and scientifi cally supported idea of medicalization and genetically informed sociology. | TAMMY L. ANDERSON170 By comparing these terms and profi ling various forms of mental illness, we hope to get you thinking about how some behaviors and traits come to be defi ned as medical matters beyond individual control while others are considered the result of bad choices, poor morals, or other social infl uences that people can regulate. Moreover, as more and more behaviors and conditions become medicalized in our society, how will you “see” and “treat” those having the conditions? How will you support them? Later, in Section 12 of this book, we will discuss biomedical treatments for deviance and their availability in society. That section not only shows how the medicalization trend will become increasingly salient for the study of deviance in the future but will challenge our principles of fairness and equality. Before proceeding, we’ll quickly review this section’s terms. Degeneracy. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, sociologists and criminologists viewed nonnormative and criminal behavior as the result of genetic inferiority that was passed on through the family. As Perez notes in his connections reading, deviant behaviors like mental illness were believed to be caused by biological defects that were inherited. As part of the eugenics movement at the time, theorists and policy-makers interpreted individual lawbreak- ers as subhuman and advocated strict social control of them, including denying them the right to propagate and confi ning them in institutions. Over time, degeneracy theory was abandoned, as Perez details in his essay, and sociologists shifted to a social pathology frame- work to understand non-normative behavior. The Lemert reading describes social pathology as a “sick society,” one plagued by various social problems like crime, alcoholism, and mental illness, which could destabilize society if left unaddressed. Social pathology is an older concept rooted in French positivism, which con- sidered conditions as absolute or objective facts. In this sense, then, social pathology is like functionalism (i.e., macrolevel and more objectivist-oriented) discussed in Section 2 and dif- ferent from symbolic interactionism and labeling theory, covered in Sections 5, 6, and 7. Social pathology was considered “scientifi c”: valued for adopting a statistical framework that would objectively describe deviance and abstain from individual moral judgments. This was critically important because, at the time, sociology sought increased recognition as a “science” to gain legitimacy and infl uence in society (Sutherland 1945). Medicalization is a term coined in recent times and was fi rst used in studies of deviance by Conrad and Schneider (1980). In its most general form, it refers to how human condi- tions and behaviors get transformed into medical disorders. Conrad (2005) calls it a process whereby problems are defi ned in medical terms, described using medical language, under- stood by adopting a medical framework, and treated with medical interventions. Conrad and Schneider (1980) fi rst discussed the process toward the medicalization of deviance with mental illness. Since then, many other types of deviant behavior or conditions—for example, drug addiction, ADHD and pathological gambling—have also become medicalized in our society. Consider the matter of gambling. Gambling was an illegal activity in the United States until right after the Great Depression of the 1930s, and during that time, it was consid- ered sinful and a moral failing by corrupt individuals (Sallaz 2009). This included casino owners and operatives as well as the garden-variety gambler who spent the family’s for- tune and fell into other forms of deviance—for example, alcoholism. Today, 48 states INTRODUCTION | 171 and the District of Columbia have at least one legal form of gambling and new forms of gambling (e.g., online poker and sports betting) are being actively legislated on by state and federal governments (American Gaming Association 2011). Yet pathological gambling— now a bona fi de form of mental illness on the DSMIV and V—proliferates in our society, leading experts and policy-makers to classify it as a neurological disease or obsessive- compulsive disorder that infl icts sick people. Gambling in the United States, therefore, illustrates the shift toward medicalizing deviance in the latter 20th and early 21st century. The medicalization trend, Conrad (2005) argues, is being used to explain and redefi ne more and more types of behaviors, traits, and conditions deemed deviant by moral standards in the past. To recap, degeneracy and social pathology considered deviance as a sort of illness that endangered society. Degeneracy blamed the problem on defective individuals who were bio- logically inferior, while social pathology only used the illness metaphor to describe chaos from a wide variety of social problems. Social pathology was, during its time, a way for sociologists to move past the fallout from degeneracy and the eugenics movement. It had potential to be a lasting sociological theory of deviance, but as Best (2006: 535) observes, sociologists abandoned the term instead: Imagine early sociologists developing metaphoric comparisons with medical pathology, theorizing about how social ailments might attack the components of a healthy society, and promoting the idea that sociology offered diagnostic tools to understand these processes and perhaps even suggest cures. Had they taken the concept seriously, perhaps they might have been able to construct a better theory of social pathology. But the discipline didn’t take that path. Today, the term social pathology has limited use in sociology and typically refers to the study of sociopaths and other psychiatric topics (Horwitz 1984). The medicalization perspective dominates not only the sociological study of deviance today but also our well-being more generally. On the surface, it may appear as though it has much in common with degeneracy from the past, but there are important differences. Returning to our example above, degeneracy theorists of the past and neurologists of the present might agree on the biological bases of “pathological gambling.” So if we have gone full circle in understanding mental illness as a medical disease, as Perez contends, how will we view those with gambling problems? Which among those “affl icted” with this type of mental illness will be considered a threat to society and which will garner our empathy? For sure, degeneracy lent a cruel lens to the mentally ill, while medicalization attempts to human- ize them and drum up resources on their behalf. So, as our society increasingly relies on medicine to explain and address more and more behaviors, to what extent will our newfound benevolence land us in a “sick society”? REFERENCES American Gaming Association. 2011. State Information . Retrieved March 17, 2012, http://www.american gaming.org/. Best, Joel. 2006. “Whatever Happened to Social Pathology? Conceptual Fashions and the Sociology of Deviance.” Sociological Spectrum 26: 533–546. Conrad, Peter. 2005. “The Shifting Engines of Medicalization.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 46(1): 3–14. Conrad, Peter and Schneider, Joseph W. 1980. Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness . Philadel- phia: Temple University Press. http://www.americangaming.org/ http://www.americangaming.org/ | TAMMY L. ANDERSON172 Ferentzy, P. and Turner, N.E. 2013. A History of Problem Gambling: Temperance, Substance Abuse, Medicine, and Metaphors . New York: Springer. Horwitz, Allan. 1984. “The Economy and Social Pathology.” Annual Review of Sociology 10: 95–119. Lemert, Edwin. 1951. Social Pathology: A Systematic Approach to the Theory of Sociopathic Behavior . New York: McGraw Hill. Sallaz, Jeffrey J. 2009. The Labor of Luck: Casino Capitalism in the United States and South Africa . Berkeley: University of California Press. Samenow, Stanton E. 2010 (December 21). “ ‘Compulsive’ Gambling: Mental Disorder or Irresponsible Choice?” Inside the Criminal Mind, Psychology Today . Retrieved May 30, 2013, http://www.psychology today.com/blog/inside-the-criminal-mind/201012/compulsive-gambling-mental-disorder-or-irresponsi ble-choice. Sutherland, Edwin. 1945. “Social Pathology.” American Journal of Sociology 50(6): 429–435. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/inside-the-criminal-mind/201012/compulsive-gambling-mental-disorder-or-irresponsible-choice http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/inside-the-criminal-mind/201012/compulsive-gambling-mental-disorder-or-irresponsible-choice Social Pathology Edwin Lemert EARLY VIEWPOINTS ON SOCIAL PROBLEMS In the earlier history of sociology the basis for judging what constituted society’s ills was candidly and uncritically moralistic. By this we mean that sociologists bothered little or not at all about the method by which they placed their ethical tags of “good” or “bad” on various social conditions or behaviors. They simply drew upon their own sense of the rightness of things or took their cue from social reformers of the time—usually the social workers (from whom they were not always distinguishable)—and con- demned poverty, crime, prostitution, alco- holism, and related behavior as evils to be stamped out. Like General Custer’s, their tactics were simple; they “rode to the sound of the guns.” Generally speaking, these late nine- teenth- and early twentieth-century sociolo- gists grouped together under the heading of “social pathology” those human actions which ran contrary to ideals of residen- tial stability, property ownership, sobriety, thrift, habituation to work, small business enterprise, sexual discretion, family soli- darity, neighborliness, and discipline of the will. In effect, social problems were consid- ered to be any forms of behavior violating the mores from which these ideals were pro- jected. The mores behind the ideals, for the most part, were those of rural, small-town, and middle-class America, translated into public policy through the rural domination of county boards of supervisors and state legislatures and through the reform activities of humanitarian social workers and Protes- tant religious federations. In this connection we note with special interest that many of the early writers on social pathology lived their more formative years in rural commu- nities and small towns; often, too, they had had theological training and experience, so that it was only natural that they should look upon many forms of behavior associ- ated with urban life and industrial society as destructive of moral values they cherished as universally good and true. 1 Although some few sociologists still adhere to this point of view in one form or another, there has grown up among many of them a scientifi c sophistication—even cynicism— about the reform movements which fl our- ished around the turn of the present century. Many sociologists would now agree that reform movements often create more prob- lems than they solve and that in such cases the “problem” turns out to be the reform action itself. It is likewise beginning to be plain to some of these sociologists that the sanctioned values of the culture have an important function in producing the behav- iors which reform groups disapprove of and seek to eliminate. From the recognition of such facts has come the newer emphasis in the fi eld of social pathology—the tendency | EDWIN LEMERT174 to look upon problem-defi ning behavior as an integral part of the data to be studied as well as the objective conditions which strike reformers as being “problems.” TOWARD A SYSTEMATIC THEORY OF SOCIOPATHIC BEHAVIOR It is our intention in this reading to set up a systematic theory of sociopathic behavior. If this seems to be an ambitious project, we may say that it is done with an awareness that it is somewhat tangential to the strong empirical interests of many American soci- ologists and also that it is being done with an awareness of the diffi culties to be met. The problem at hand is a special phase of the larger problem of conceptual integration which has occupied sociologists for many years. The latent danger of zealous pursuit of conceptual integration is that such industry will degenerate into system building alone or into an exercise in abstraction with but indif- ferent attention to the possibilities of empiri- cal demonstration of the theoretical system. It is perhaps for this reason that the word “system” has collected barnacle-like many unfavorable connotations since the days when Comte, Spencer, Ward, and Ross cre- ated their systematic sociologies. In reacting against the grandiose system building of early sociologists later critics undoubtedly were correct in claiming that architectonic integration of all sociological knowledge is likely to lose in value because of its world-girdling inclusiveness. However, we should be careful not to follow the lead of those who would throw the baby out with the bath water by discarding theory in all forms in favor of pure empiricism. It is hard to see any valid objections to the creation of abbreviated conceptual systems which are data orientations within delimited fi elds of human behavior. Indeed, this seems to be the direction of much sociological development today. 2 Thought of in this way, theory is no less important than the gathering of facts and information. It can be urged strongly that empirical research is as much dependent upon sound theoretical work as theory is obviously dependent upon sound empirical research. THE REQUIREMENTS FOR A SYSTEMATIC THEORY A systematic theory, as might be expected, is not constructed in a random or purely intui- tive fashion. There are certain rules which serve as guides in taking up the task. Thus, while sociologists, in building a system of concepts, will keep one eye on the evidence behind them, they will have a strong prelimi- nary interest in the epistemological qualities of their theory. They will ask certain ques- tions having usefulness for research pur- poses. These questions are a way of setting up requirements or criteria for the critical evaluation of the theory and other theories from a methodological standpoint. Armed with these criteria, sociologists are able to make explicit the bases upon which their theoretical criticisms rest. Communication between them becomes more precise, and their comparison of different theories in an objective manner is facilitated. 3 Among the criteria of a systematic theory some may be thought of as absolute require- ments, while others are merely desirable or recommended. We choose to list here only those criteria which are minimum require- ments and to express them in terms of the particular study area with which we are concerned— i.e. , sociopathic behavior: 4 1. The fi eld of study, sociopathic behavior, must be strictly delimited. 2. The systematic conceptualization of the fi eld should be derived from a limited number of postulates. 3. The conceptual system should be not only internally consistent but should also be consistent with and an integral part of a general theory of human behavior. SOCIAL PATHOLOGY | 175 4. The concepts should be necessary and suffi cient— i.e. , they should explain the bulk of the facts classifi ed as “sociopathic.” 5. The hypotheses must be the logical con- sequences of the postulates. 6. Concepts should be suffi ciently detailed to explain the phenomena studied with- out the use of analogies. Processual anal- ysis must be explicit. MAKING USE OF THE CRITERIA The criteria which we have enumerated can be drawn into our discussion in a number of different ways. However, we plan to use them primarily to raise a priori questions as to whether several nonsociological approaches, about which we have said nothing up to the present time, can be sanctioned as systematic theory for the study of sociopathic behav- ior. Following this, we shall state in contrast what we deem to be the indispensable fea- tures of a sociological approach to the study of this fi eld. As an immediate sequel to this it will be our job to set forth the propositions or postulates which have been evolved by us in the effort to meet the requirements for a systematic theory. Let us now turn to the fi rst application of the criteria. THE BIOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF SOCIOPATHIC BEHAVIOR While biologists have shown a lively inter- est in social pathology, we may question whether their conceptualizations can be dig- nifi ed with the classifi cation of “systematic theory.” Mostly, the generalizations in the fi eld of biology which pertain to pathological deviants, or to the “defective classes” as they tend to be called, are parenthetical observa- tions found usually in chapters appended to treatises on human genetics, with only the odd book completely devoted to social biol- ogy. Biologists interested in social pathol- ogy, and those who defer to their opinions, believe that certain forms of socially disap- proved behavior, like homosexuality, chronic alcoholism, or mental disorder, arise in one of the following ways: (1) through the inheri- tance of a gene or a gene combination (or its absence) which directly causes the behavior, (2) through the inheritance of an unspecifi ed type of tendency to behave in these ways, or (3) through the inheritance of an unspecifi ed type of constitutional weakness which pro- duces the sociopathic behavior. Apart from the general criticism that they are not presented in the form of systematic theory, biological concepts of social pathol- ogy fail to satisfy the fi rst of our criteria in that the fi eld of study is not strictly delim- ited. Thus such widely divergent anatomical and physiological facts as brachydactylism and diabetes insipidus are included along with socially and culturally defi ned phe- nomena such as crime and mental disease to be understood as expressions of genetic factors. Furthermore, the biological posi- tion on social pathology is compromised by such explicit admissions that “some forms of mental disease are inherited but others are not” or that “while some epileptics become psychotic others become geniuses.” Con- sequently, the biological attempts at expla- nations of sociopathic behavior also fail to satisfy criterion number four— i.e. , that they should explain the bulk of the phenomena classifi ed as “social pathology.” It may be that a small percentage of cases of certain forms of sociopathic behavior is caused by the fact that the structural and physiologi- cal foundations of behavior have been con- genitally destroyed, and for these select cases biological explanations become directly relevant. However, beyond these, biologi- cal factors are only indirectly important in explaining deviant behavior. To press direct explanations of sociopathic behavior within a biological frame of reference also violates criterion number six: the necessity of mak- ing clear the details of the process of effective causation. Thus, for example, where writers claim that mental disorder is hereditary, they | EDWIN LEMERT176 provide no description of how the hereditary factors become elaborated into a demonstra- ble structure or function which produces the mental symptoms. The application of biolog- ical theories to the collective aspects of social pathology, such as organized or professional crime, results in an even grosser disregard for the details of causation. PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PSYCHIATRIC APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF SOCIOPATHIC BEHAVIOR Psychological and psychiatric viewpoints on social pathology more commonly take the form of systematic theory than is true of biological conceptions. They also go much farther in explaining the facts at hand, undeniably shedding much light upon the subjective dynamics of pathological human behavior. Consequently, they often supply us with necessary, although not always suf- fi cient, concepts to account for many aspects of social pathology. In their search for the key to why people transgress social norms, psychologists have variously stressed such things as general or abstract intelligence, per- sonality traits, thought processes, motives, attitudes, and “vectors” of the mind. Psy- chiatrists have been somewhat less versatile in their explanations, mainly looking for emotional confl icts or “psychopathology” behind the misconduct of deviants. The points at which many psychological and psychiatric theories reveal their inadequa- cies are in respect to criteria numbers four and six. The concepts they advance are seldom if ever suffi cient to give us useful explanations of pathological behavior in its collective aspects, and often they fail to make sense out of many actions of the individual deviant. To follow those psychologists who have conceived of such things as crime, prostitution, and drug addiction as cumulative or summated expres- sions of discrete, individual intelligence capac- ities, personality traits, thought processes, or motives leaves us with too many signifi cant questions about the pathologies unanswered. Likewise, to follow the lead of traditional psychiatric thought in these matters shunts us into intellectual bypasses. For example, imputing psychopathic mental processes to individuals in order to account for their crimi- nal behavior is illuminating only in some few of the more unusual cases of crime. Such a procedure obviously ignores the commission of crime by persons who are in no way patho- logical mentally. Rare, indeed, is the person who at one time or another has not commit- ted a felony. To ascribe this to mental pathol- ogy is to make the term lose its meaning, for most of us would have to be called “episodic psychopaths.” The designation of crime as a psycho- pathic symptom obscures rather than clari- fi es how criminal activity becomes integrated into forms of social organization which are participated in by persons with a wide vari- ety of personal motives and psychological orientations. Criminals may operate illegal gambling establishments, but their patrons include the respectable citizens of the com- munity. Bankers operate banks for noncrimi- nal use, but many such bankers in the past have knowingly accepted deposits of money gained dishonestly by criminals. Lawyers, labor unions, insurance companies, and newspapers have been known to enter into collusion with criminals. Even presidents of the United States have appointed members of criminally corrupt political machines to high offi ces. Unless we wish to diagnose all their patrons or customers and those who cooper- ate economically or politically with criminals as psychopathic, we are driven to the conclu- sions that “reductionist” psychiatric theories of organized crime in terms of abnormal mental processes are insuffi cient. The same criticism is applicable to psychiatric theo- ries applying to other forms of sociopathic deviation. The failure of psychological and psychi- atric schema to satisfy the sixth criterion for systematic theory can be traced back to the failure to meet our fourth requirement. SOCIAL PATHOLOGY | 177 The general tendency of men in these fi elds to think of cultural phenomena as aggregate manifestations of individual psychic factors leaves them with no detailed explanation of the collective or organized aspects of social pathology. Hence, they have often fallen back upon implicit or explicit analogies. Oddly enough, if logically pursued, these analogies take us back to a variety of group-mind con- cepts, which have been the object of vigorous criticism among the psychologists themselves. Society and social organization become like individuals in that what happens socially is taken as epiphenomena of the mind. The details of the process by which psychological factors lead to social pathology are ignored, or they are assumed to be unnecessary. Even in the more dynamic psychological formula- tions where the concepts of “person fi eld” and “social fi eld” have been brought in to make room for collective factors, the rela- tionship between the two is left unclear. A SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF SOCIOPATHIC BEHAVIOR The early tendency to regard sociology as a synthetic discipline which combines items of biological, psychological, psychiatric, geo- graphic, and demographic knowledge in order to explain human behavior has pretty well disappeared. Sociologists now hold to the notion that theirs is a separate fi eld of study requiring concepts and generalizations which are unique to this fi eld. Sociologists now generalize at “their own level” rather than trying to reduce their generalizations to the level of other fi elds. The only remnants of the synthetic tradition, if it can be called that, lie in a certain amount of confusion over how to reckon theoretically with non- sociological factors which have a marginal or indirect bearing upon human behavior. Our own position on this matter is that the direct or signifi cant factors of sociopathic behavior are sociological or sociopsychologi- cal in nature, expressible by such concepts as social structure, group, role, status, and symbolic interaction. To the extent that fac- tors falling outside of those which are strictly sociological must be taken into consideration in analyzing pathological human behavior they must be related in a verifi able way to the sociological variables. Such factors as physical size and strength, biological anoma- lies, aggressiveness, hallucinations, monetary income, age, sex, and position in space can be applied in only a limited way to explain variation in social and cultural factors, which in turn are the chief interacting determiners of human behavior. Where variables such as the former must be taken into account, it must be shown how they affect social organi- zation, role, status, social participation, self- defi nitions, and the other variables which we defi ne as “sociological.” The actual details of effective causation can be given at this last, a sociological or sociopsychological level. Starting with these assumptions as to the nature of the sociological approach and guided by the criteria of a systematic theory, we can now proceed to the series of proposi- tions or postulates which are the elements of our theory of sociopathic behavior. A GENERAL STATEMENT OF OUR THEORY Stated in the most general way, our theory is one of social differentiation, deviation, and individuation. For a summary description we may turn to an excerpt from a paper by the present writer: 5 We may pertinently ask at this juncture whether the time has not come to break abruptly with the traditions of older social pathologists and abandon once and for all the archaic and medicinal idea that human beings can be divided into normal and pathological, or, at least, if such a division must be made, to divest the term “pathological” of its mor- alistic unscientifi c overtones. As a step in this direction, the writer suggests that the concepts of social differentiation and individuation be | EDWIN LEMERT178 rescued from the limbo of older textbooks on sociology, dusted off, and given scientifi c air- ing, perhaps being supplemented and given statistical meaning with the perfectly usable concept of deviation. There seems to be no cogent reason why the bulk of the data dis- cussed in textbooks and courses on social pathology cannot be treated as a special phase of social and cultural differentiation and thus conveniently integrated with general sociologi- cal theory as taught in courses in introductory sociology. . . . Because some method must be found to distinguish that portion of differentiation which can be designated as appropriately falling within the fi eld of social pathology, the second necessary postulate is that there is a space-time limited societal awareness and reaction to deviation, ranging from strong approval through indifference to strong disapproval. Thus, by further defi ni- tion, sociopathic phenomena simply become differentiated behavior which at a given time and place is socially disapproved even though the same behavior may be socially approved at other times and in other places. To recapitulate, then, we start with the idea that persons and groups are differenti- ated in various ways, some of which result in social penalties, rejection, and segregation. These penalties and segregative reactions of society or the community are dynamic fac- tors which increase, decrease, and condition the form which the initial differentiation or deviation takes. This process of devia- tion and societal reaction, together with its structural or substantive products, can be studied both from its collective and its dis- tributive aspects. In the fi rst instance, we are concerned with sociopathic differentiation, and, in the second, our concern is with socio- pathic individuation. BREAKING DOWN THE THEORY INTO ITS POSTULATES In order to give further precision to the above statement, it can be resolved into a series of postulates. These postulates are simple state- ments of fact for which the writer feels no obligation to supply proof. They differ from axioms, upon which mathematical and sym- bolic systems are constructed, in that they contain empirical elements. They are the building blocks for the theory of this treatise and ipso facto they must be accepted as points of departure for the analysis which follows. The question as to whether these postulates are the relevant ones or whether they are too few must await answer until after the theory has been tested. The postulates are as follows: 6 1. There are modalities in human behav- ior and clusters of deviations from these modalities which can be identifi ed and described for situations specifi ed in time and space. 2. Behavioral deviations are a function of culture confl ict which is expressed through social organization. 3. There are societal reactions to deviations ranging from strong approval through indifference to strong disapproval. 4. Sociopathic behavior is deviation which is effectively disapproved. 5. The deviant person is one whose role, status, function, and self-defi nition are importantly shaped by how much devia- tion he engages in, by the degree of its social visibility, by the particular expo- sure he has to the societal reaction, and by the nature and strength of the societal reaction. 6. There are patterns of restriction and freedom in the social participation of deviants which are related directly to their status, role, and self-defi nitions. The biological strictures upon social par- ticipation of deviants are directly signifi - cant in comparatively few cases. 7. Deviants are individuated with respect to their vulnerability to the societal reaction because (a) the person is a dynamic agent, or (b) there is a structuring to each per- sonality which acts as a set of limits within which the societal reaction operates. SOCIAL PATHOLOGY | 179 CONCLUSION In this reading we have briefl y described and criticized the general points of view of soci- ologists toward social pathology. We have enumerated criteria for a systematic theory of sociopathic behavior. Following these dis- cussions we delimited the fi eld of study and put down the postulates of our theory. NOTES 1. Mills, C. W., “The Professional Ideology of Social Pathologists,” American Journal of Sociology, 49, September, 1943, pp. 165–180. 2. Merton, R., “Sociological Theory,” American Jour- nal of Sociology , 50, May, 1945, pp. 462–473; also Merton’s discussion of T. Parson’s paper in the American Sociological Review, 13, April, 1948, pp. 165f. 3. Levine, S., and A. Dornblum, “The Implications of Science as a Logical System,” American Socio- logical Review, 4, June, 1939, pp. 381–387; Staf- ford, A. B., and H. Phelps, “Criteria of a Systematic Sociology,” ibid., p. 388; Bain, Read, discussion of Leonard Cottrell’s paper, “Situational Fields in Social Psychology,” ibid., 7, June, 1942, pp. 383–387. 4. The criteria are adapted from Bain, op. cit. 5. Lemert, Edwin M., “Some Aspects of a General Theory of Sociopathic Behavior,” Proceedings of the Pacifi c Sociological Society, 1948, Research Studies, State College of Washington, 16, No. 1, pp. 24ƒ. 6. While in general we found the social problems and the social disorganization viewpoints lacking in theoretical fulfi llment, it is not our intention here to insist that all recent treatments of social pathol- ogy are without value and that “ours is the only theory.” Several books on social pathology have presented fairly defensible theoretical positions. L. Guy Brown’s Social Pathology is distinguished in the main for its internal consistency and interre- lated framework of ideas, and for the integrity with which its central scheme is made the basis for each successive discussion of problem behavior. Social Pathology, by Stuart Queen and Jeannette Gruener, merits favorable comment for the simplicity and economy of its conceptual presentation, features which, as we have shown, are desirable in all the- ory. Whether their attempt to study social pathol- ogy exclusively in terms of social participation is an oversimplifi cation remains to be seen. Certainly it is a necessary concept, as we shall try to show, but alone, at least as it has been used by others, it remains an incomplete formulation. Another posi- tion which deserves comment here because of its obvious bearing upon certain phases of our theory is the value-confl ict conception of social problems. In this conception, chief emphasis is placed upon the clash of ideals, opinions, judgments, and mean- ings as the source of social problems. In our esti- mation this is a special variety of culture-confl ict theory, and we freely recognize its importance in studying deviation. However, the value-confl ict the- ory remains a highly generalized statement which fails to make a sharp delimitation of the fi eld. For example, it does not tell us how much or what kind of confl ict is necessary in order to have a social problem. No distinction is struck between effective value-confl icts and those which are purely spuri- ous and have little or no effect upon the organi- zation and interaction of groups and participating individuals. Furthermore, it makes no allowance for cultural inconsistencies or contradictory value systems within the same culture which are recip- rocals or necessary derivatives of each other. For statements of the value-confl ict view see Waller, W., “Social Problems and the Mores,” American Socio- logical Review, 1, December, 1936, pp. 922–933; Fuller, R., and R. Myers, “Some Aspects of a The- ory of Social Problems,” ibid., 6, February, 1941, pp. 24–32; Cuber, J., and R. Harper, Problems of American Society, 1948, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefi eld. SELECTED READINGS Brown, L. Guy: Social Pathology, 1942, Part 1, pp. 3–77. New York: Crofts. Frank, L. K.: “Society as the Patient,” American Journal of Sociology, 42, 1936, pp. 335–344. Fuller, R. G., and R. Myers: “Some Aspects of a Theory of Social Problems,” American Sociological Review, 6, February, 1941, pp. 24–32. Lemert, Edwin M.: “Some Aspects of a General Theory of Sociopathic Behavior,” Proceedings of the Pacifi c Sociological Society, 1948, Research Studies, State College of Washington, 16, No. 1, pp. 23–29. Mills, C. W.: “The Professional Ideology of Social Pathologists,” American Journal of Sociology, 49, September, 1943, pp. 165–180. Waller, W.: “Social Problems and the Mores,” Ameri- can Sociological Review, 1, December, 1936, pp. 922–933. Warren, R.: “Social Disorganization and the Interrela- tionship of Cultural Roles,” American Sociological Review, 14, February, 1949, pp. 83–87. Whatever Happened to Social Pathology? Conceptual Fashions and the Sociology of Deviance Joel Best WHAT HAPPENED TO SOCIAL PATHOLOGY The term “social pathology” was on its way out by the end of the Second World War. C. Wright Mills (1943) published his critique, “The Professional Ideology of Social Pathol- ogists” in 1943. Two years later, Edwin H. Sutherland wrote: The term “social pathology” refers to an area of knowledge which is designated also by the terms “social disorganization,” “social prob- lems,” “applied sociology,” “practical sociol- ogy,” and “social technology.” Although these terms have variations in shades of meaning, they are commonly used as synonyms. . . . The terms “social disorganization” and “social problems” seem to be supplanting the others. (1945, p. 429) In its heyday the term “social pathology” suggested prestigious scientifi c and medical connotations; just as pathologists studied the diseases that damaged people’s bodies, so might sociologists examine the patholo- gies infl icting the body social. Social pathol- ogy became a popular course title during the early twentieth century and several textbooks shared the title (e.g., Queen and Mann 1925; Smith 1911). However, another term soon emerged as a rival. As early as the 1920s, many courses were using the more modern label “social problems”; although, Queen and Mann’s Social Pathology remained the leading text in those courses (Reinhardt 1929), and a few textbook authors contin- ued to use the older title until Lemert pub- lished his book in 1951. Why did sociologists stop using the term? Many concepts display a standard trajectory of usage: they are introduced, are adopted by a growing number of people until usage peaks, and then they gradually fall out of favor. These are fads or fashions in the use of particular concepts (Peng 1994; Placier 1996). For example, sociologists’ usage of the concept “folkway” appears to have peaked in the 1940s (Best and Schweingruber 2003). But why does the use of concepts decline in this way? In part, they lose their fashionable aura and begin to seem antiquated, as some newer term (say, social problem or deviance) begins to gain favor and pushes the older term (social pathology) aside. The process is abetted to the degree that the older con- cept’s usefulness has fallen into doubt. And social pathology had accumulated plenty of doubters. Mills (1943, p. 166) criticized social pathology textbooks: “The level of abstraction which characterizes these texts is so low that often they seem to be empiri- cally confused for lack of abstraction to knit them together.” Similarly, Sutherland (1945, pp. 430–431) noted: “One of the persistent and perplexing problems has been the defi ni- tion of social pathology. . . . At the turn of the century the meaning of pathology was assumed to be obvious. . . .” However, he WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SOCIAL PATHOLOGY? | 181 continued, sociologists increasingly recog- nized that people tended to disagree about what was pathological and why: “Because of the absolutistic connotations of the term ‘pathology,’ it is not an appropriate designa- tion for these relativistic phenomena, and on that account it is being supplanted by other terms, such as ‘social disorganization’ ” (Sutherland 1945, p. 431). In other words, the real problem that bedeviled social pathology—and that has plagued its conceptual cousins, including social problems, social disorganization, and (as we shall see) deviance—is that its pro- ponents could not agree on a workable way to defi ne the concept. On the one hand, the term implied that it referred to an objectively defi nable set of social conditions—those phe- nomena that could be recognized as diseases of society. Yet, on the other hand, the iden- tifi cation of social pathologies proved to be highly subjective, dependent upon the inter- ests of those members of society who iden- tifi ed some conditions as pathological and upon the prejudices and presumptions of the authors who selected topics for inclusion in their texts (Mills 1943). This confusion meant that the concept of social pathology had little analytic utility. It may have been a popular title for courses and textbooks, but it was not a concept that sociologists actually used—partly because they couldn’t agree on its meaning and partly because they never saw it as a base upon which they might develop a theoreti- cal approach. We might now view this as a lost opportunity. Imagine early sociologists developing metaphoric comparisons with medical pathology, theorizing about how social ailments might attack the components of a healthy society, and promoting the idea that sociology offered diagnostic tools to understand these processes and perhaps even suggest cures. Had they taken the concept seriously, perhaps they might have been able to construct a better theory of social pathol- ogy. But the discipline didn’t take that path; social pathology remained just a term, not a serious concept within an elaborated theory. And there were rival terms, less beset by crit- ics. In the competition for sociologists’ favor, social pathology had little to recommend it, and it gradually fell out of style. WHAT’S HAPPENED TO DEVIANCE Which brings us to the recent debate regard- ing the vitality of the concept of deviance. A variety of critics have pronounced devi- ance “dead”; although, they cannot agree on whether its demise was due to (a) the fail- ure of sociologists of deviance to embrace a radical sociological agenda (Sumner 1994), or (b) those sociologists of deviance having fallen into the grip of a radical sociological agenda (Hendershott 2002). These claims have been most vigorously challenged by sociologists who happen to produce well- regarded deviance textbooks and who insist that courses in deviance continue to draw big enrollments and that society is fi lled with examples of deviance for sociologists to study (Adler and Adler 2006; Goode 2003). My own view (Best 2004a, 2004b) is that the concept of deviance—like its predeces- sors social pathology and social problems— poses awkward defi nitional problems that have never been successfully resolved. Basi- cally, sociologists have tried to defi ne devi- ance according to three distinct principles: 1. Statistics: Here, sociologists argue that deviance can be defi ned as outliers from common patterns of behavior. The once-popular term “deviation” had this statistical connotation and it is worth remembering that Lemert’s (1951, p. 22) fi rst postulate begins: “There are modali- ties in human behavior and clusters of deviations from these modalities. . . .” This approach to defi ning deviance quickly fell out of favor; although, it occasionally resurfaces in discussions of | JOEL BEST182 “positive deviance” when analysts argue that deviance may be found at both ends of some normal distribution (e.g., if we regard those of very low intelligence as deviant, then we should also defi ne as deviant those of very high intelligence). 2. Morality: Far more common are efforts to defi ne deviance as normative violations. But which norms? It seems to depend, and the variety of answers reveals the weaknesses of defi ning deviance this way. Some analysts presume that the key norms are those social control agents uphold (i.e., deviants are people whose normative violations risk serious sanc- tions); others seem to favor a broader defi nition of what counts as a normative violation. Still other analysts are willing to designate those norms that they believe ought to be upheld and to declare as devi- ant “the robbery of the corporate world” (Liazos 1972, p. 107) or assisted suicide (Hendershott 2002). 3. Societal Reaction: The labeling theorists thought they could circumvent these problems by focusing on the creation or construction of categories of devi- ance and upon the application of those categories to individuals. In fact, this approach seemed—at least for a time— to be workable: a substantial body of research sought to explore and extend the labeling approach. This defi nition inspired, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, a far more articulated view of deviance than had previously devel- oped for either social pathology or social problems. The sociology of deviance fl ourished as a fashionable, highly visible area for research. TOWARD A NATURAL HISTORY OF CONCEPTUAL FASHION Clearly, social life has a lot of features that attract attention because people view them as troublesome. There is no reason to imag- ine that humans will soon attain some uto- pian plane where no one will be bothered by any aspects of social life. These troubling conditions raise interesting, albeit obvious questions: what causes that? Why do people do those things? What should we do it about it? It is no surprise that sociologists—eager to interest other people, to demonstrate the importance of their enterprise—want to study and teach about these topics. These are subjects that promise sociologists a steady supply of topics that will strike others as interesting and important. Most obviously, we can choose to study some topic that bothers people under the particular name those people use. Some of those native terms are very old ( rape ); some are newer and may not last ( road rage ). Alternatively, we can group a set of trou- bling conditions under some heading, such as “social pathology,” “social problems,” or “deviance.” Traditionally, these headings have really been categorical conveniences: instructors devise some list of troubling conditions that are attracting contemporary attention and then devote each week’s lec- tures to reviewing sociological studies about rape or road rage or whatever (just as text- book authors use the same approach to orga- nizing their chapters). The problem arises when sociologists try to insist that the currently fashionable category name for troubling conditions is a genuine concept which offers theoretical leverage by allowing us to devise broader, more powerful theories. There are basically two ways to attempt this. The fi rst—which seems so intuitively obvious—is to argue that the troubling conditions encompassed within the current category name are the same sort of condition ; that is, these are all phenom- ena that somehow interfere with society’s operations, or they are all violations of social norms. These condition-based defi nitions tend to work well enough during the intro- ductory lecture in an undergraduate course. WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SOCIAL PATHOLOGY? | 183 If one begins by declaring that this is what we mean by social pathology/social problems/ deviance and then promptly turns to discuss- ing the various troubling conditions one at a time, it will probably never be necessary to refer back to that original defi nition. The problem, of course, is that anyone who sits back and considers that defi nition of conditions soon becomes dissatisfi ed. The numerous exceptions call the defi nition’s value into question: one can always point to phenomena that seem to fi t the defi nition yet never get mentioned as instances of the cate- gory; people may also disagree about whether particular instances that are conventionally included within the category really fi t the def- inition and belong in the category. Moreover, because the category encompasses a diverse set of phenomena, it isn’t clear how to actu- ally use the concept of social pathology/ social problems/deviance to develop any sort of general theory. There turn out to be few theories using condition-based defi nitions of social pathology/social problems/deviance and few efforts to do research guided by those concepts. The second approach to turning a category name for troubling conditions into a useful concept is to focus on the condition’s trou- bling qualities. Although recommended by critics of condition-based defi nitions through- out the twentieth century, these efforts have only gained traction twice: fi rst, with the emergence of the labeling approach to devi- ance, and then, somewhat later, with the rise of the constructionist stance toward social problems. Neither developed as a genuinely elaborated theory, but both served a sensi- tizing orientation that inspired large bod- ies of both empirical research and inductive theorizing. If we look for works that actually try to use the concepts of deviance or social problems, we will discover that most come out of the labeling and constructionist tradi- tions, respectively. We have already examined the fate of labeling. It drew a lot of attention—and a lot of critics whose attacks had the effect of once more calling the defi nition of deviance into question and, thereby, discouraging fur- ther use of the concept, so that it undoubtedly contributed to the pattern of decline. Thus far, the social constructionist approach to social problems hasn’t suffered the same fate, but we may suspect this is because so few sociologists actually try to use the concept of “social prob- lems” that constructionists have no real rivals. Thus, we can see a sort of natural history: sociologists want to teach about the trou- bling conditions of the day; they devise some rubric under which to group together the issues which they want to address; they offer some defi nition—either a condition-based defi nition that proves to be useless in guiding further research or a troubling-based defi ni- tion that inspires researchers, at least until it attracts critics. Those critics, of course, worry that a focus on the processes that lead to a condition being defi ned as troubling is too narrow, that it cannot address important issues (e.g., What are the condition’s causes? How can the condition be eradicated?). This critique is true—focusing on those processes doesn’t help address those questions. But, of course, the critics don’t really have an alter- native defi nition that can be used to guide analyses. And this leads to the fi nal stage in the natural history. People begin to doubt that that old, established category name is all that useful. The debates over its defi nition keep circling the same conceptual bushes, and the name begins to sound a little dated. Maybe the solution lies in junking the old term and devising some shiny new term to encompass the study of troubling conditions. Thus, we can understand the fi nal demise of social pathology more than fi fty years ago, as well as the recent sniping about the death of deviance. REFERENCES Adler, Patricia A. and Peter Adler. 2006. “The Deviance Society.” Deviant Behavior 27: 129–148. | JOEL BEST184 Becker, Howard S. 1995. “The Power of Inertia.” Qualitative Sociology 18: 301–309. Best, Joel. 2004a. Deviance : Career of a Concept. Bel- mont, CA: Wadsworth. ——. 2004b. “Deviance May Be Alive, But Is It Intellec- tually Likely? A Reaction of Goode.” Deviant Behav- ior 25: 483–492. ——. 2006. Flavor of the Month : Why Smart People Fall for Fads. Berkeley: University of California Press. 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The Shifting Engines of Medicalization Peter Conrad Social scientists and other analysts have writ- ten about medicalization since at least the 1970s. While early critics of medicalization focused on psychiatry (Szasz 1970) or a more general notion of medical imperialism (Illich 1975), sociologists began to examine the processes of medicalization and the expand- ing realm of medicine (Freidson 1970; Zola 1972). As sociological studies on medicaliza- tion accumulated (see Conrad 1992, 2000) it became clear that medicalization went far beyond psychiatry and was not always the product of medical imperialism but of more complex social forces. The essence of medicalization became the defi nitional issue: defi ning a problem in medical terms, usually as an illness or disorder, or using a medical intervention to treat it. While the medical- ization process could be bidirectional and partial rather than complete, there is strong evidence for expansion rather than contrac- tion of medical jurisdiction. RISE OF MEDICALIZATION Most of the early sociological studies took a social constructionist tack in investigat- ing the rise of medicalization. The focus was on the creation (or construction) of new medical categories with the subsequent expansion of medical jurisdiction. Concepts such as moral entrepreneurs, professional dominance, and claims-making were central to the analytical discourse. Studies of the medicalization of hyperactivity, child abuse, menopause, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and alcoholism, among others, broadened our understanding of the range of medicalization and the attendant social processes (see Conrad 1992). If one conducted a meta-analysis of the studies from the 1970s and 1980s several social factors would predominate. At the risk of oversimplifi cation, I suggest that three factors underlie most of those analy- ses. First, there was the power and authority of the medical profession, whether in terms of professional dominance, physician entre- preneurs, or, in its extremes, medical colo- nization. Here, the cultural or professional infl uence of medical authority is critical. One way or another, the medical profes- sion and the expansion of medical jurisdic- tion was a prime mover for medicalization. This was true for hyperactivity, menopause, child abuse, and childbirth, among others. Second, medicalization sometimes occurred through the activities of social movements and interest groups. In these cases, organized efforts were made to champion a medical defi nition for a problem or to promote the veracity of a medical diagnosis. The clas- sic example here is alcoholism, with both Alcoholics Anonymous and the “alcoholism movement” central to medicalization (with physicians reluctant, resistant, or irresolute). But social movements were also critical in | PETER CONRAD186 the medicalization of PTSD (Scott 1990) and Alzheimer’s disease (Fox 1989). Some efforts were less successful, as in the case of multi- ple chemical sensitivity disorder (Kroll-Smith and Floyd 1997). In general, these were organized grassroots efforts that promoted medicalization. Third, there were directed organizational or inter- or intraprofessional activities that promulgated medicalization, as was the case with obstetricians and the demise of midwives (Wertz and Wertz 1989) or the rise of behavioral pediatrics in the wake of medical control of childhood dis- eases (Pawluch 1983; Halpern 1990). To be sure, there were other contributing factors that were implicated in the analyses. Pharmaceutical innovations and market- ing played a role with Ritalin and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in the medical- ization of hyperactivity and menopause. Third-party payers were factors in the medi- calization in terms of whether insurance would pay for surgery for “gender dyspho- ria,” obesity, or detoxifi cation and medi- cal treatment for alcoholism. However, it is signifi cant that in virtually all studies where they were considered, the corporate aspects of medicalization were deemed secondary to professionals, movements, or other claims- makers. By and large, the pharmaceutical and insurance industries were not central to the analyses. CHANGES IN MEDICINE By the 1980s we began to see some profound changes in the organization of medicine that have had important consequences for health matters. There was an erosion of medical authority (Starr 1982), health policy shifted from concerns of access to cost control, and managed care became central. As Donald Light (1993) has pointed out, countervailing powers among buyers, providers, and pay- ers changed the balance of infl uence among professions and other social institutions. Managed care, attempts at cost controls, and corporatized medicine changed the organi- zation of medical care. The “golden age of doctoring” (McKinlay and Marceau 2002) ended, and an increasingly buyer-driven sys- tem was emerging. Physicians certainly main- tained some aspects of their dominance and sovereignty, but other players were becoming important as well. Large numbers of patients began to act more like consumers, both in choosing health insurance policies and in seeking out medical services (Inlander 1998). Managed care organizations, the pharmaceu- tical industry, and some kinds of physicians (e.g., cosmetic surgeons) increasingly saw patients as consumers or potential markets. In addition to these organizational changes, new or developed arenas of medical knowledge were becoming dominant. The long-infl uential pharmaceutical companies comprise America’s most profi table industry and became more so with revolutionary new drugs that would expand their infl uence (Public Citizen 2003). By the 1990s the Human Genome project, the $3 billion venture to map the entire human genome, was launched, with a draft completed in 2000. Genetics has become a cutting edge of medical knowledge and has moved to the center of medical and public discourse about illness and health (Conrad 1999). The bio- technology industry has had starts and stops, but it promises a genomic, pharmaceutical, and technological future that may revolution- ize health care (see Fukuyama 2002). Some of these changes have already been manifested in medicine, perhaps most clearly in psychiatry where the cutting edge of knowledge has moved in three decades from psychotherapy and family interaction to psy- chopharmacology, neuroscience, and genom- ics. This is reinforced when third-party payers will pay for drug treatments but severely limit individual and group therapies. The choice available to many doctors and patient- consumers is not whether to have talking or pharmaceutical therapy but rather which brand of drug should be prescribed. THE SHIFTING ENGINES OF MEDICALIZATION | 187 Thus, by the 1990s these enormous changes in the organization of health care, medical knowledge, and marketing had created a dif- ferent world of medicine. How have these changes affected medicalization? In a recent paper, Adele Clarke and her colleagues (2003) argue that medicalization is intensifying and being transformed. They suggest that around 1985 “dramatic changes in both the organization and practices of con- temporary biomedicine, implemented largely through the integration of technoscientifi c innovations” (p. 161) coalesced as an expanded phenomena they call biomedicalization. By biomedicalization they mean “the increasingly complex, multisited, multidirectional processes of medicalization that today are being recon- stituted through the emergent social forms and practices of a highly and increasingly technosci- entifi c biomedicine” (Clarke et al. 2003: 162). Clarke et al. paint with a very broad brush and create a concept that attempts to be so compre- hensive and inclusive—incorporating virtually all of biotechnology, medical informatics and information technology, changes in health ser- vices, the production of technoscientifi c iden- tities, to name just a few—that the focus on medicalization is lost. This new conception, in my judgment, loses focus on the defi nitional issues, which have always been a key to medi- calization studies. 1 Along with Clarke et al. (2003), I see some major changes in medicalization in the past two decades (cf. Gallagher and Sionean 2004). I see shifts, where they see transfor- mations. I see medicalization as expanding and, to a degree, changing but not morphing into a qualitatively different phenomena. My task remains narrower and more focused on the medicalization process. EMERGENT ENGINES OF MEDICALIZATION In the reminder of this reading, I want to examine how three major changes in medical knowledge and organization have engendered a shift in the engines that drive medicaliza- tion in Western societies: biotechnology, con- sumers, and managed care. Biotechnology Various forms of biotechnology have long been associated with medicalization. Whether it be technology such as forceps for childbirth (Wertz and Wertz 1989) or drugs for distract- ible children (Conrad 1975), technology has often facilitated medicalization. These drugs or technologies were not the driving force in the medicalization process; facilitating, yes, but not primary. But this is changing. The pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries are becoming major players in medicalization. Pharmaceutical industry. The pharma- ceutical industry has long been involved in promoting its products for various ills. In our 1980 book Deviance and Medicaliza- tion (Conrad and Schneider [1980] 1992) the examples of Ritalin, Methadone, and psychoactive medications were all a piece of the medicalization process. However, in each of these cases it was physicians and other professionals that were in the forefront. With Ritalin there were drug advertisements promoting the treatment of “hyperactivity” in children and no doubt “detailing” to doctors (e.g., drug com- pany representative’s sales visits to doctor’s offi ces). But it was the physicians who were at the center of the issue. This has changed. While physicians are still the gatekeepers for many drugs, the pharmaceutical companies have become a major player in medicalization. In the post- Prozac world, the pharmaceutical industry has been more aggressively promoting its wares to physicians and especially to the public. Some of this is not new. For most of the twentieth century the industry has been limited to promoting its wares to physi- cians through detailing, sponsoring medical | PETER CONRAD188 events, and advertising in professional jour- nals. However, since the passage of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Moderniza- tion Act of 1997 and subsequent directives, the situation has changed. Revisions in FDA regulations allowed for a wider usage and promotion of off-label uses of drugs and facilitated direct-to-consumer advertising, especially on television. This has changed the game for the pharmaceutical industry; it can now advertise directly to the public and create markets for their products. Overall, pharmaceutical industry spending on television advertising increased six-fold between 1996 and 2000, to $2.5 billion (Rosenthal et al. 2002), and it has been rising steadily since. Drug companies now spend nearly as much on direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising as in advertising to physicians in medical journals, especially for “block- buster drugs that are prescribed for com- mon complaints such as allergy, heart burn, arthritis, ‘erectile dysfuction,’ depression and anxiety” (Relman and Angell 2002: 36). The brief examples of Paxil and Viagra can illustrate this, but there are many others (see Conrad and Leiter 2004). Male impotence has been a medical prob- lem for many years. In March 1998, the FDA approved Viagra (sildenafi l citrate) as a treatment for erectile dysfunction (ED). When introduced, Viagra was intended pri- marily for the use of older men with erectile problems or ED associated with diabetes, prostate cancer, or other medical problems (Loe 2001). A demand for a drug for erectile problems surely existed before Pfi zer began advertising Viagra. However, it was Pfi zer who tapped into this potentially large mar- ket and shaped it by promoting sexual dif- fi culties as a medical problem and Viagra as the solution. The initial Viagra promotion was modest (Carpiano 2001), but Pfi zer soon marketed very aggressively to both physi- cians and the general public. At fi rst it was with Bob Dole as a spokesman for elders, but soon it was with baseball star Rafael Palmeiro and the sponsorship of a Viagra car on the NASCAR circuit, expanding the audience and the market for the drug. Virtu- ally any man might consider himself to have some type of erectile or sexual dysfunction. “Ask your doctor if Viagra is right for you,” the advertisements suggest. Viagra sales were sensational. In the fi rst year alone, over three million men were treated with Viagra, translating into $1.5 bil- lion in sales (Carpiano 2001). In 2000, Viagra was ranked sixth in terms of DTC spending and sales. By 2003 Viagra reached $1.7 bil- lion in sales and was taken by six million men, which may not include all those who pur- chased it from Internet sites. By 2003, Levitra and Cialis were introduced as improvements and competitors for a share of this large market. The drug industry has expanded the notion of ED and has even subtly encouraged the use of Viagra-like drugs as an enhance- ment to sexual pleasure and relationships. Recent estimates suggest a potential market of more than 30 million men in the United States alone (Tuller 2004). The medicaliza- tion of ED and sexual performance has sig- nifi cantly increased in the past six years and shows no signs of abating. When Prozac was introduced in 1987, it was the fi rst wave of new antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibi- tors (SSRIs). SSRIs had the same or better effi cacy than older antidepressants, with fewer disturbing adverse effects. These drugs caused a bit of a revolution in the phar- maceutical market (Healy 1998) and with $10.9 billion in sales in 2003 have become the third best selling class of drugs in the United States (IMS Health 2004). When Paxil (paroxetine HCl) was approved by the FDA in 1996 it joined a very crowded mar- ket for antidepressants. The manufacturer of Paxil, now called GlaxoSmithKline, sought FDA approval to promote its product for the “anxiety market,” especially Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) and Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). SAD and GAD were rather THE SHIFTING ENGINES OF MEDICALIZATION | 189 obscure diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Sta- tistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) : SAD (or “Social Phobia”) is a persistent and extreme “fear of social and performance sit- uations where embarrassment may occur,” and GAD involves chronic, excessive anxi- ety and worry (lasting at least six months), involving multiple symptoms (American Psy- chiatric Association 1994: 411, 435−36). Marketing diseases, and then selling drugs to treat those diseases, is now com- mon in the “post-Prozac” era. Since the FDA approved the use of Paxil for SAD in 1999 and GAD in 2001, GlaxoSmithKline has spent millions to raise the public visibil- ity of SAD and GAD through sophisticated marketing campaigns. The advertisements mixed expert and patient voices, providing professional viability to the diagnoses and creating a perception that it could happen to anyone (Koerner 2002). The tag line was “Imagine Being Allergic to People.” A later series of advertisements featured the ability of Paxil to help SAD sufferers brave din- ner parties and public speaking occasions (Koerner 2002). Paxil Internet sites offer consumers self-tests to assess the likelihood they have SAD and GAD (www.paxil.com). The campaign successfully defi ned these diagnostic categories as both common and abnormal, thus needing treatment. Preva- lence estimates vary widely, from 3 to 13 percent of the population, large enough to be a very profi table pharmaceutical market. The marketing campaign for Paxil has been extremely successful. Paxil is one of the three most widely recognized drugs, after Viagra and Claritin (Marino 2002), and is currently ranked the number six prescription drug, with 2001 U.S. sales approximately $2.1 bil- lion and global sales of $2.7 billion. How much Paxil was prescribed for GAD or SAD is impossible to discern, but by now both Paxil and SAD are everyday terms. While there have been some concerns raised about Paxil recently (Marshall 2004), it is clear that GlaxoSmithKline’s campaign for Paxil increased the medicalization of anxiety, inferring that shyness and worrying may be medical problems, with Paxil as the proper treatment. Children’s problems constitute a grow- ing market for psychotropic drugs. Ritalin for attention defi cit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has a long history (Conrad 1975) but perhaps now can be seen as a pioneer drug for children’s behavior problems. While the public may be ambivalent about using drugs for troubled children (McLeod et al. 2004), a wide array of psychotropic drugs are now prescribed for children, especially stimulants and antidepressants (Olfson et al. 2002). Whatever the benefi ts or risks, this has become big business for the drug indus- try. According to a recent survey, spending on behavior drugs for children and adoles- cents rose 77 percent from 2000 through 2003. These drugs are now the fastest grow- ing type of medication taken by children, eclipsing antibiotics and asthma treatments (Freudenheim 2004). At the other end of the life spectrum, it is likely that the $400 billion Medicare drug benefi t, despite its limits, may increase phar- maceutical treatments for a range of elder problems as well. This policy shift in benefi ts is likely to encourage pharmaceutical com- panies to expand their markets by promoting more drug solutions for elders. Genetics and enhancement. We are at the dawn of the age of genomic medicine. While there has been a great investment in the Human Genome Project and a celebra- tion when the draft of the human genome was completed in 2000, most of genetic medicine remains on the level of potential rather than current practice. For example, we have known about the specifi c genes for cystic fi brosis and Huntington’s disease for a decade, but these have yet to trans- late into improvements in treatment. Thus far, genetics has made its impact mostly in terms of the ability to test for gene muta- tions, carriers, or genetic anomalies. Despite http://www.paxil.com | PETER CONRAD190 the publicity given to genetic studies (Con- rad 1997), we have learned that only a few disorders and traits are linked to a single gene, and that genetic complexity (several genes operating together, gene–environment interactions) is the rule (Conrad 1999). But I have little doubt that genomics will become increasingly important in the future and impact medicalization. Although the genetic impact on medical- ization still lies in the realm of potential, one can imagine when some of the genetic contributors to problems such as obesity and baldness are identifi ed, genetic tests and eventually treatments will soon follow. Obe- sity is an increasing problem in our society and has become more medicalized recently in a number of ways, from a spate of epi- demiological studies showing the increase in obesity and body fat among Americans to the huge rise in intestinal bypass opera- tions. Today physicians prescribe the Atkins or South Beach diet and exercise; it is pos- sible in the future that there could be medi- cal interventions in the genes (assuming they can be identifi ed) that recognizes satiation. Gene therapy has not yet succeeded for many problems, but one could imagine the rush to genetic doctors if there were a way to manipulate genes to control one’s weight. We know that baldness often has a genetic basis, and with Rogaine and hair transplants it has already begun to be medicalized. However, with some kind of medical genetic interven- tion that either stops baldness or regenerates hair, one could see baldness move directly into the medical sphere, perhaps as a genetic “hair growth disorder.” A large area for growth in genetics and medicalization will be what we call biomedi- cal enhancement (Elliott 2003; Rothman and Rothman 2003; Conrad and Potter 2004). Again, this is still in the realm of potential, but the potential is real. There is a great demand for enhancements, be they for children, our bodies, or our mental and social abilities. Medical enhancements are a growing form of these. One could imagine the potential of genetic enhancements in body characteristics such as height, musculature, shape, or color; in abilities such as memory, eyesight, hear- ing, and strength; or in talents (e.g., perfect pitch for music) and performance. Enhance- ments could become a huge market in a soci- ety where individuals often seek an edge or a leg up. While many genetic improvements may remain in the realm of science fi ction, there are suffi cient monetary incentives for biotechnology companies to invest in pursu- ing genetic enhancements. The potential market for genetic enhance- ments is enormous. To get a sense of the possible impact, I recently examined human growth hormone as an existing biomedi- cal enhancement (Conrad and Potter 2004). Synthetic human growth hormone (hGH) became available in 1985, and it was approved for some very limited purposes, including growth hormone defi ciency (a rare hormonal disorder). Shortness can be deval- ued and engender social problems for indi- viduals. There is evidence that shorter people earn less money, get fewer promotions, can be stigmatized, and can have problems with such mundane tasks as fi nding proper fi tting adult clothes (Rothman and Rothman 2003; Conrad and Potter 2004). Parents often have concerns that their children will be too short and now have the option of going to physicians for growth hormone treatments. Genentech, manufacturer of Protropin, a brand of hGH, encouraged “off-label” uses of hGH for children who were extremely short but had no growth hormone defi ciency. In a real sense these children with idiopathic short stature (ISS) can be called “normal” shorts; they are just short, from short parents or genetic makeup. Although hGH therapy can be very expensive ($20,000 a year for perhaps fi ve years) and yield only moderate results (2−3 inches), in 1994 13,000 children with ISS were treated in the United States. These numbers are undoubtedly greater now, since the FDA recently approved an Eli THE SHIFTING ENGINES OF MEDICALIZATION | 191 Lilly growth hormone, Humatrope, for use for short statured children in the lowest 1.2 percent of the population. There are several lessons for biomedical enhancement here. First, a private market for enhancements for children, even involving signifi cant expense, exists and can be tapped by biotechnology companies. Second, biotechnology compa- nies, like pharmaceutical companies, will work to increase the size of their markets. Third, the promotion and use of biomedical enhancements will increase medicalization of human problems, in this case short stature. Imagine if genetic interventions to increase a child’s height were available. We do not yet have biotechnology com- panies promoting genetic enhancements, but we will. Biotech companies are already poised to use DTC advertising to promote genetic tests. They will employ many of the same marketing strategies as the pharmaceu- tical companies, which is no surprise, since many of them are the same or linked. The promotion of genetic tests may also con- tribute to medicalization. A positive fi nding on a genetic test—that one has a gene for a particular problem (cancer, alcoholism)— may create a new medicalized status, that of “potentially ill.” This can have an impact on one’s identity, social status, and insurability, and it may create new categories of precan- cer, prealcoholism, or similar labels. This could expand medical surveillance (Arm- strong 1995) and the medical gaze. Consumers In our changing medical system, consumers of health care have become major players. As health care becomes more commodifi ed and subject to market forces, medical care has become more like other products and services. We now are consumers in choosing health insurance plans, purchasing health care in the marketplace, and selecting institutions of care. Hospitals and health care institutions now compete for patients as consumers. I will briefl y cite several examples about how consumers have become a major factor in medicalization: cosmetic surgery, adult ADHD, hGH therapy, and the rise in phar- maceutical advertisements. Cosmetic surgery is the exemplar of consum- ers in medicine (Sullivan 2001). Procedures from tummy tucks to liposuction to nose jobs to breast augmentation have become big med- ical business. The body has become a project, from “extreme makeover” to minor touch- ups, and medicine has become the vehicle for improvement. In a sense, the whole body has become medicalized, piece by piece. To use just one example, from the 1960s through 1990 two million women received silicone breast implants, 80 percent for cosmetic pur- poses (Zimmerman 1998; Jacobson 2000). In the 1990s a swirling controversy concerning the safety of silicone implants became pub- lic when consumer groups maintained that manufacturers had mislead women about sili- cone implant safety, leading the FDA in 1992 to call for a voluntary moratorium on the distribution and implantation of the devices (Conrad and Jacobson 2003). The market for implants plummeted. In 1990 there were 120,000 implants performed; by 1992 there were 30,000. But with the introduction of apparently safer saline implants, breast aug- mentation increased by 92 percent from 1990 to 2000. According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (2004), in 2003 there were 280,401 breast augmentations in the United States, making this procedure the second most popular cosmetic surgery fol- lowing liposuction. While plastic surgeons do promote breast augmentation as a product (current cost around $3,000), the medical- ization of breasts and bodies is driven largely by the consumer market. Overall, 8.3 million Americans had cosmetic medical procedures in 2003, a 20 percent rise from the previous year and a whopping 277 percent rise since 1997 (American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery 2004). While the media and profes- sional promotion fuel demand, virtually all of | PETER CONRAD192 these procedures are paid for directly out of the consumer’s pocket. Since the early 1970s, Ritalin has been a common treatment for ADHD (formerly known as hyperactivity) in children. How- ever, in the 1990s a new phenomenon emerged: adult ADHD. Researchers had shown for years that whatever ADHD was, it often persisted beyond childhood, but in the 1990s we began to see adults coming to physicians asking to be evaluated for ADHD and treated with medication. This was in part a result of several books, including one with the evocative title Driven to Distraction (Hallowell and Ratey 1994), along with a spate of popular articles that publicized the disorder. Adults would come to physicians and say, “My son is ADHD and I was just like him,” “I can’t get my life organized, I must have ADHD,” or “I know I’m ADHD, I read it in a book.” Since Ritalin for adult attention problems is an off-label use of the medication, the pharmaceutical companies cannot directly advertise either the disorder or its treatment, but there are other ways to publicize the disorder: there are any number of Internet web sites describing adult ADHD and its treatment, and the advocacy group Children and Adults with Attention Defi cit and Hyperactivity Disorder (CHAAD) has become a strong advocate for identifying and treating adult ADHD. It is well-known that CHAAD gets most of its funding from the drug industry. Even so, CHAAD is a consumer-oriented group and, along with adults seeking ADHD treatment, has become a major force in what I have called elsewhere “the medicalization of underperformance” (Conrad and Potter 2000). Adult ADHD is only one example of what Barsky and Borus (1995) have identifi ed as the public’s decreased tolerance for mild symptoms and benign problems. Individuals’ self-medicalization is becoming increasingly common, with patients taking their troubles to physicians and often asking directly for a specifi c medical solution. A prominent example of this has been the increasing medi- calization of unhappiness (Shaw and Wood- ward 2004) and expansive treatment with antidepressants. Nonprofi t consumer groups like CHAAD, National Alliance for the Mentally III (NAMI), and the Human Growth Foun- dation have become strong supporters for medical treatments for the human problems for which they advocate. These consumer advocacy groups are comprised of families, patients, and others concerned with the par- ticular disorder. However, these consumer groups are often supported fi nancially by pharmaceutical companies. CHAAD received support from Novartis, manufacturer of Rit- alin; the Human Growth Foundation is at least in part funded by Genentech and Eli Lilly, makers of the hGH drugs; and NAMI receives over $6 million a year from phar- maceutical companies (Mindfreedom Online 2004). Spokespeople from such groups often take strong stances supporting pharmaceuti- cal research and treatment, raising the ques- tion of where consumer advocates begin and pharmaceutical promotion ends. This refl ects the power of corporations in shaping and sometimes co-opting advocacy groups. The Internet has become an important consumer vehicle. On the one hand, all phar- maceutical companies and most advocacy groups have web sites replete with consumer- oriented information. These often include self-administered screening tests to help indi- viduals decide whether they may have a par- ticular disorder or benefi t from some medical treatment. In addition, there are thousands of bulletin boards, chat rooms, and web pages where individuals can share information about illness, treatments, complaints, and services (Hardey 2001). This has for many individuals transformed illness from a priva- tized to a more public experience. On these web sites people suffering from similar ail- ments can connect and share information in new ways, which, despite the pitfalls of mis- information, empower them as consumers of THE SHIFTING ENGINES OF MEDICALIZATION | 193 medical care. Both corporate and grassroots web sites can generate an increased demand for services and disseminate medical perspec- tives far beyond professional or even national boundaries. In our current medical age, consumers have become increasingly vocal and active in their desire and demand for services. Indi- viduals as consumers rather than patients help shape the scope, and sometimes the demand for, medical treatments for human problems. 2 Managed Care Over the past two decades, managed care organizations have come to dominate health care delivery in the United States largely in response to rising health care costs. Managed care requires preapprovals for medical treat- ment and sets limits on some types of care. This has given third-party payers more lever- age and often constrained both the care given by doctors and the care received by patients. To a degree, managed care has commercial- ized medicine and encouraged medical care organizations and doctors to emphasize prof- its over patient care. But this is complex, for in some instances managed care constrains medical care and in other cases provides incentives for more profi table care. In terms of medicalization, managed care is both an incentive and a constraint. This is clearly seen in the psychiatric realm. Man- aged care has severely reduced the amount of insurance coverage for psychotherapy avail- able to individuals with mental and emo- tional problems (Shore and Beigal 1996), but it has been much more liberal with paying for psychiatric medications. Thus managed care has become a factor in the increasing uses of psychotropic medications among adults and children (Goode 2002). It seems likely that physicians prescribe pharma- ceutical treatment for psychiatric disorders knowing that these are the types of medical interventions covered under managed care plans, accelerating psychotropic treatments for human problems. In the 1980s I would frequently say to my students that one of the limits on the medi- calization of obesity is that Blue Cross/Blue Shield (then a dominant insurance/managed care company) would not pay for gastric bypass operations. This is no longer the case. Many managed care organizations have con- cluded that it is a better fi nancial investment to cover gastric bypass surgery for a “mor- bidly obese” person than to pay for the treat- ment of all the potential medical sequelae including diabetes, stroke, heart conditions, and muscular skeletal problems. The num- ber of gastric bypass and similar surgeries in the United States has risen from 20,000 in 1965 to 103,000 in 2003, with 144,000 projected for 2004 (Grady 2003). In the con- text of the so-called obesity epidemic (Abel- son and Kennedy 2004), bypass operations are becoming an increasingly common way to treat the problem of extreme overweight, with the threshold for treatment decreasing and becoming more inclusive. The recent Medicare policy shift declaring obesity as a disease could further expand the number of medical claims for the procedure. As the New York Times recently reported, “The surgery has become big business and medi- cal centers are scrambling to start programs” (Grady 2003: D1). But managed care organizations affect medicalization by what they don’t cover as well. When there is a demand for cer- tain procedures and insurance coverage is not forthcoming, private markets for treat- ment emerge (Conrad and Leiter 2004). As noted earlier, prior to this year, hGH was only approved for the very few children with a growth hormone defi ciency. The FDA approval of Humatrope expanded the num- ber of children eligible for growth hormone treatment by 400,000. It will be interesting to see whether managed care organizations will cover the expensive hGH treatments for these children. | PETER CONRAD194 In effect, managed care is a selective double- edged sword for medicalization. Viagra and erectile dysfunction provide an interesting example; some managed care organizations’ drug benefi ts cover (with co-pays) either four or six pills a month. While it is unclear how these insurance companies came up with these fi gures, it seems evident that managed care strictures both bolster and constrain the medicalization of male sexual dysfunction. Increasingly, though, managed care organiza- tions are an arbiter of what is deemed medi- cally appropriate or inappropriate treatment. NOTES 1. While this ambitious and analytically dense paper has many virtues, in my judgment, Clarke et al. (2003) lose sight of the process of medicalization itself. The authors are certainly correct in many of their contentions. It seems clear that the biotechno- logical and pharmaceutical industries— especially in the areas of scientifi c and commercial discoveries in genetics, neuroscience, and pharmacology—will have an increasing impact on the medicalization of human problems. The extension of “medical jurisdiction over health itself and the commodifi - cation of health” are seen as parts of medicaliza- tion, especially through risk factors and medical surveillance. They see the shift to biomedicaliza- tion as moving from medical control over exter- nal nature to controlling and transforming inner nature. These all seem to me to be astute obser- vations. However, in the Clarke et al. conception one is hard pressed to identify something related to biotechnology and medicine that is not part of biomedicalization. Further, the claim that the biomedicalization change represents a shift from modernity to postmodernity depends entirely on what one considers as postmodern. As Anspach (2003) points out, “Efforts to rationalize health care through data banks and practice guidelines may actually represent new forms of bureaucrati- zaton, a quintessentially modern, rather than post modern, phenomenon” (unpaged). Given its reli- ance on a scientifi c knowledge base and its bureau- cratic organization, it is diffi cult to see biomedicine as predominantly a postmodern enterprise. 2. It is my contention that the consumer orientation toward medical care has expanded, subsuming or reorienting some of the social movements promot- ing medicalization. Moreover, there is an increasing amount of public and media promotion of health care products, procedures, and services that further spurs medicalization (including medications, surgical procedures, and other treatments). These are aimed at individuals, not as patients but as consumers. REFERENCES Abelson, Phillip and Donald Kennedy. 2004. “The Obe- sity Epidemic.” Science 304(June 4): 1413. American Psychiatric Association. 1994. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 4th ed. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association. American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. 2004. 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Connections Mental Illness as Degeneracy, Disease, and Genetics Victor Perez A 22-year-old unmarried white man . . . spends most of his time in the house and refuses to go out at night alone. He used to live independently and worked until a few months ago. The patient states he made an error on his taxes and is convinced the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) hired detectives to gather information about his whereabouts. He states that since his mistake he uncovered an essential fl aw in the taxation algorithm, which may expose the underpinning of IRS, and is convinced they hired assassins disguised as bikers. After moving in with his mom, he did not see the bikers, but they are trying to trace his “mental activity”. Also, he hears them outside of his house talking about how they will kill him. (Epocrates Online., 2012) Is the young man in the opening vignette mentally ill? Most people would unequivocally say yes, but what allows us to come to that conclusion so easily? How would a sociologist respond to this vignette and what criteria do they use to identify and explain mental illness? Mental illness has been a societal concern for centuries and a primary subject for soci- ologists for the past 50 years. Today, we are beginning to use genetics and gene–environment interactions to help explain mental illness, arguing that individuals with a genetic predis- position and the right environmental trigger(s) or stressors may develop the condition. Sociologists are also exploring epigenetics , examining how stressful social environments are even capable of changing gene expression and the genetic makeup of individuals, mak- ing them prone to developing mental illness and passing this on to future generations (Ledger 2009). These contemporary explorations of mental illness parallel the fi eld’s earlier ways of understanding mental illness as a form of deviance. In the past, sociology embraced explana- tions that pointed to degenerate, or inferior, human bodies and minds. Though there are very important differences between early ideas of degeneracy and the contemporary understand- ing of the genetic underpinnings of mental illness, by way of the “genetic turn in sociology,” the fi eld is nonetheless returning to the makeup of the body for an explanation (Shea 2009). This reading explores the historical roots and contemporary status of mental illness within the fi eld of sociology, comparing how it has been understood as a form of medical deviance over time through fi ve major paradigms: degeneracy, social pathology, labeling, medicaliza- tion, and genetics. With assistance from Section 4 readings by Lemert, Best, and Conrad, I offer a comparison of these varied historical and contemporary perspectives. This reading suggests that the sociological understanding of mental illness has followed a circular trajec- tory that refl ects our endorsement and rejection of medical and psychiatric models for it at different time periods. | VICTOR PEREZ198 WHAT IS MENTAL ILLNESS? While contemporary explanations for mental illness are beginning to incorporate new genetic research unavailable to our predecessors, it is important to make clear that mental illness is foremost a social defi nition. A key observation in sociology is that people’s reactions to norm violations are central to labeling something as deviant, either formally (i.e., offi cially) or informally (Becker 1963). It is important to distinguish, therefore, the difference between mental illness as a form of deviance and mental illness as a cause of deviance . Since this read- ing explores how sociological frameworks identify and explain mental illness over time, it focuses on mental illness as a form of deviance; that is, behaviors recognized as deviant and used to distinguish mental illness from other types of deviance. This reading uses the term mental illness as it better represents the medical metaphor that is present in the perspectives in this analysis, moving from degeneracy, to social pathology, to disease/medicalization and modern genetics. Others have argued the need for conceptual clarity in delineating the terms mental illness , mental disease , mental health , and mental disorder from each other (Horwitz 2002), so this reading focuses on mental illness for its medical leaning and its presence as a term in mainstream American culture. So, what is it? At its core, mental illness is best understood as a social designation based on the reactions of others, be they laypersons (e.g., your friends, coworkers, family members) or formal agents of social control with the authority to professionally label people (e.g., psychi- atrists, social workers, counselors, pediatricians). Since reactions and labels can vary across different social contexts, pinning down a precise defi nition is challenging because exactly what constitutes mental illness can change from time to time and from place to place. In other words, mental illness as some sort of deviance is not absolute. In an attempt to provide a working template for defi ning mental illness, Tausig and colleagues (2004) suggested, “We may defi ne mental illness as descriptive of certain kinds of deviant behavior. Some deviant behavior is defi ned as criminal or bad manners . . . but the deviant behavior we associate with mental illness often does not fi t these categories and is distinguished by its incomprehensibil- ity” (pp. 114–115). Therefore, mental illness as a form of deviance presents itself through the reactions of others to undesirable, incomprehensible behavior within a specifi c setting. Remember the young man in the opening vignette? His behavior, which included staying inside because of delusions about assassins and a secret IRS algorithm, is bewildering to those around him and simply cannot be understood as reasonable or rational. Using this working defi nition for mental illness, we move on to the task of how sociologists have tried to understand it. THE ROOTS OF MENTAL ILLNESS IN DEGENERACY Degeneracy theory was an explanation for social problems that pointed to the innately inferior individuals who caused them. This approach dates back to the late 19th and early 20th century with American sociology’s attention to social maladies and the concern about “degenerate” individuals passing on their deviant traits through heredity. At this time, men- tal illness was grouped together with other troubling social conditions (such as crime and substance use) and degeneracy was a way to understand and explain all of these varied forms of difference or deviance (Best 2004). However, exactly what constituted mental illness was not the primary focus of sociology at the time; sociology often borrowed defi nitions and CONNECTIONS | 199 measures of mental illness from other specialty fi elds. At the time, what sociologists were paying attention to was explaining the source of the mental illness in people so defi ned. This approach did not have the luxury of today’s genetic technologies to detect biological differences between those labeled mentally ill and those who weren’t. Any perceived differ- ence was considered a result of differences in the physical body and mind, but there was no way to provide evidence of this beyond rudimentary studies of body shape, size, and similarly visible physical characteristics. Consequently, violations of social norms deemed mental ill- ness were explained with the degenerate body, where physiological evidence was crude and unlike today’s sophisticated understanding of the human genome. Derived from the fi eld of medicine and propelled by the growth of the American Medical Association (Curra 2000), degeneracy was borne of the biological determinism of the late 1800s in the work of European scholars such as criminologist Cesare Lombroso. In an early discussion of the physical traits of the insane and the criminal, Yonge (1898) argued that “common to both criminals and the insane . . . are similarities and agreements in the physi- cal peculiarities of the two classes which appear to point to a common origin in defective or disordered brains” (quoted in Horton 2000: 198). Though it was largely applied to the issues of race and crime (Gould 1981), degeneracy was used to explain the wider collection of society’s problems, and some specifi c statements on mental illness came directly from the fi eld of sociology. In one of the earliest published sociological statements about the biological foundations of social outcomes, Reid (1906) suggested, “The huge brain of man is a very complex and delicate machine. A defect (an unfavorable variation) in any of its parts is apt to throw the whole out of gear; and, like other variations, such a defect, such a predisposition to insanity, tends to be inherited” (p. 553). These ideas played heavily in explanations of mental illness: it was the result of degenerate individuals and was passed on through heredity. Degeneracy theory began to lose favor quickly in the early 20th century, as both European psychoanalytic approaches to mental illness and American quantitative sociology were mov- ing towards the study of how social infl uences were important catalysts to people developing mental illness. At the University of Chicago, for example, documenting patterns in mental illness prevalence across geographic spaces was a precursor to the school of thought known as social pathology . Based on the burgeoning approach known as “social disorganization,” social pathology evoked a medical analogy of a “sick society,” which could be documented by mapping areas dense with the era’s most troubling conditions (Best 2004). This was the beginning of a more sociologically informed ecological approach to explaining problems in society. THE SICK SOCIETY Pointing to patterns of social problems as evidence of a sick society, the broader term social pathology was used concurrently with degeneracy and psychopathology in the early 20th century, with social pathology becoming the favored sociological approach. Social pathology was a different way of discussing problems that involved a perspective focused on social envi- ronments, in addition to the individuals that resided and interacted therein. Prominent social problems such as crime, mental illness, and drug use revealed patterns, and these patterns were evidence of a “pathogenic” society (Durkheim 1982), but it was strictly a metaphor: there was nothing medical about the approach. In his reading in this section, Best (2006) | VICTOR PEREZ200 argues that it was an attempt to document objective conditions in society that could be con- sidered pathological and thus warrant intervention, and in so doing it provided a robust new sociological approach to mental illness that was a radical departure from the perspective of degeneracy. At the time, some explanations of the patterns in mental illness still involved degenerate (innately inferior) or psychopathological individuals, but social structural characteristics of certain areas were coming under scrutiny as contributing to problems of crime, drug use, and mental illness. As both Lemert (1951) and Best (2006) showed, this was important because early American sociology was heavily reformist, and patterns of mental illness, madness, and other social problems were evidence that the society was sick and needed to be made well. Lemert (1951) noted that mental illness became a primary subject for sociologists around the mid-20th century because this form of deviance represented a threat to the normative social order, usually defi ned in very moralistic terms. Furthermore, the work of Lemert (1951) for- mally stated that if social pathology, as an approach to understanding society’s problems, was to be useful it needed to take into account how groups were differentiated in ways that resulted in penalties and sanctions. It was, in hindsight, the birth of the labeling perspective to come. At the time, sociologists borrowed defi nitions of mental illness from psychoanalysis and psychiatry when studying social pathologies (Endleman 1990). A classic example of this is the work of Faris and Dunham (1939) in studying “mental disease” in urban Chicago. Map- ping the prevalence of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia in the city, they documented social pathology by noting that certain areas had higher rates of hospitalization for mental illness and that this was the result of social disorganization or more transient areas that had differing/confl icting social and cultural value systems. Though the work of Faris and Dunham (1939) and others allowed for a more sociological approach to explaining the prevalence of mental illness in a community, they still based their work on how psychiatry defi ned mental illness. Furthermore, as Best (2006: 535) shows, the marked relativity of the term social pathology and the variety of social problems it was sup- posed to represent stood in stark contrast to its absolutist character in denoting “pathology” in society. The term, therefore, lacked any real analytical utility to be useful if it could be applied to so many different types of social problems. As Best (2006) noted: On the one hand, the term implied that it referred to an objectively defi nable set of social conditions— those phenomena that could be recognized as diseases of society. Yet, on the other hand, the identi- fi cation of social pathologies proved to be highly subjective, dependent upon the interests of those members of society who identifi ed some conditions as pathological and upon the prejudices and presumptions of the authors who selected topics for inclusion in their texts. (p. 535) This issue, along with the disparaging connotation that “degeneracy” took on after WWII, set the stage for a radical departure from the medical orientations and medical analogies of the past toward a new sociological approach, suggesting that mental illness was nothing more than a label. LABELING AND THE SOCIAL REACTIONS OF OTHERS Beginning in the 1960s, sociologists offered their own notion of mental illness that was a stark divergence from anything that they had utilized in the past. In short, mental illness was not something located within an individual’s inferior or defi cient body, nor was an objective CONNECTIONS | 201 trait of a pathological society, but a label applied to persons and behaviors for norm viola- tions that were not easily categorized (Scheff 1966). This new way of thinking about mental illness as a label was the fi rst widespread original formulation of the concept in sociology, and it was based on an overall critique of psychiatry. The labeling perspective in sociology is a combination of the symbolic interactionist school of thought and the confl ict theoretical perspective, which suggests powerful groups shape the world to their advantage and impose their viewpoints on the less powerful, thus maintain- ing the status quo. However, labeling theory was not solely focused on those who lacked the power to thwart offi cial designations of deviance; it held that anyone could be defi ned as mentally ill if their behaviors violated the expectations of societal norms (Rosenberg 1984). Demonstrating labeling’s departure from previous conceptions and perspectives of mental illness, Curra (2000: 173) noted, “Finding mental illness is an ineradicable social process of deciding who is normal and who is not that has little to do with a diagnosed individual’s physical characteristics.” This illustrates how mental illness, during the height of labeling theory in sociology, was not located within the individual but rather in social processes of labeling people deviant. In 1966, Thomas Scheff provided one of the most lucid descriptions of this sociological view of mental illness as residual rule breaking . He argued that mental illness is best under- stood through the study of social roles, de-emphasizing any medical model of mental illness that focused on the body. For Scheff, mental illness was a label, and people successfully deemed mentally ill committed “residual deviance.” This approach to mental illness took hold during the 1960s, and, though it has encountered considerable resistance, it is still active today. It shifted the focus from looking to explain the sociological causes of mental illness (stress, diffi cult social arrangements, social disorganization, social class, etc.) to how some people, because of their behaviors in certain social circumstances, were defi ned as mentally ill in the fi rst place. Labeling theory was not without opposition. One of the key critiques was that it fun- damentally denied mental illness as a real, biological condition within the individual. This debate crystallized the rift between labeling theory and the biologically/organically based psychiatric understandings of mental illness. With this critique, the increasing dominance of psychiatry and medicine over mental illness in mainstream culture, and the burgeoning use of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) to legitimate the condition, labeling theory was seriously weakened. Soon, though, sociologists responded in turn with a critical perspective that both acknowledged and disparaged the notion of mental illness as a biological phenomenon: medicalization . HOW THE MENTALLY ILL BECAME SICK: “THE DSM AS A CATEGORICAL TOUCHSTONE” The success and subsequent critique of labeling theory paved the way for sociologists to develop a perspective that examined how social deviance such as mental illness comes to be defi ned as having medical origins . As Conrad (2005) shows, over time there have been several key claims-makers who posit that deviance is not merely a social construct but that it has a physiological basis and thus can be explained and controlled using medical interven- tions. From doctors, to ordinary people, to psychiatrists, and more recently pharmaceutical companies and their “informed consumers,” the engines driving the medicalization of mental illness have shifted in sociologically important ways. | VICTOR PEREZ202 A consistent theme in this essay is that, historically, sociology has either adopted the use of psychiatric/medical conceptions of mental illness in its studies or has been critical of biologi- cal and medical approaches to defi ning and understanding mental illness. Medicalization, a perspective still very active in the sociology of mental illness and articulated clearly in the Conrad reading in this section, is somewhat of a middle ground: it provides an examination of the defi nitional process by which labels from psychiatry are created and successfully applied to individuals, transforming their badness into sickness (Conrad and Schneider 1980). The medicalization of mental illness is in large part a criticism of diagnosis through tax- onomy: the process of defi ning clinical criteria that, taken together, indicate the presence of an underlying biological mental disorder. Much of the criticism had to do with the increasing dominance of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III (DSM) (APA 1980) and its implied justifi cation for psychopharmacol- ogy to “treat” mental illness, which it saw as an organic (i.e., biological) phenomenon. Con- cerning this perspective, Leo (2004) offered: The basic tenet of biological psychiatry is that mental illness is an “organic” disease, meaning that the patient has too much or too little of a neurotransmitter, too much or too little of a receptor, or an overactive or underactive neuronal circuit. Whatever the problem might be, it is “biological” and biological problems are best treated with drugs. (p. 45) The psychiatric defi nition, diagnosis, and treatment of mental illness are controversial to some sociologists because there is little evidence that the preponderance of what psychiatrists deem mental illness has a physiological cause (Rogers and Pilgrim 2005). Conrad (2005) shows the power of the pharmaceutical industry in promoting the view that mental illness is medical by bringing our attention to the recent proliferation of psychotropic drugs and the conditions that they supposedly treat. Though not necessarily pointing to deviant individuals or groups as inherently inferior or defi cient (i.e., degenerate), medicalization shifts our gaze back to individual physiology in the form of the disease metaphor (and also uses disease in a very different way than we saw with social pathology). Take major depressive disorder as an example. To diagnose this form of mental illness, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV Text-Revision (DSM-IV-TR), one needs to exhibit enough symptoms or clinical criteria to be offi cially diagnosed and labeled. Here are a few of the criteria: • depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day, as indicated by either subjective report (e.g., feels sad or empty) or observation made by others (e.g., appears tearful) • markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities most of the day, nearly every day (as indicated by either subjective account or observation made by others) • fatigue or loss of energy nearly every day • feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt (which may be delusional) nearly every day (not merely self-reproach or guilt about being sick) (APA 2000). Medicalization proponents may argue that this diagnostic paradigm and resulting psychiatric label are a product of transgressing professionally mandated (i.e., psychiatric) social stan- dards for acceptable behavior and do not necessarily indicate the underlying presence of a “biological” mental disorder; in other words, the diagnosis refl ects certain social preferences about what it means to be happy or sad but does not demonstrate a biological problem. In his reading in this section, Conrad (2005) notes that the expanding authority of medi- cine in society, and more recently the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, is shown CONNECTIONS | 203 in the growth and professionalization of these sorts of labels that defi ne acceptable ranges for behaviors and conditions. By noting that certain behaviors or conditions such as depression, autism, ADHD, or antisocial personality disorder can be identifi ed and understood as collec- tions of symptoms, and that they are deviant, psychiatry sets the parameters for acceptable social behaviors and why individuals’ bodies are at fault for their deviance. With the comple- tion of the Human Genome Project in the year 2003, the stage was set for an even closer look at our bodies to locate the source of our deviance. “THE GENETIC TURN IN SOCIOLOGY” Medicalization set the stage for a rebirth of social scientists’ focus on the body and brain, as well as the incorporation of new knowledge of the possible genetic infl uence on mental illness into traditional sociological models. With the luxury of hindsight, this newer focus on the genetic underpinnings of mental illness is a less pejorative and exclusionary form of “degen- eracy” and has become known as “geneticization” (Shostak and Freese 2010). Indeed, the incorporation of genetics research has become so important to how sociologists think about mental illness and other social outcomes that fl agship publications in the fi eld have devoted entire issues to genetics in recent years. The completion of the Human Genome Project and the interest in genetic explanations for social differences, and more acutely social deviance, has refocused our attention towards innate, inherent differences between individuals and groups by way of their genetic makeup. Recently, genetics has been touted as a successful approach to explaining some forms of mental illness such as schizophrenia and affective disorders but only because of their presumed heritability and not because of any single gene explanation. For example, the Conrad reading argues that “most of genetic medicine remains on the level of potential rather than current practice . . . Thus far, genetics has made its impact mostly in terms of the ability to test for gene mutations, carriers, or genetic anomalies” (2005, p. 7). These tests, currently, only allow for low levels of predictive ability for mental illness outcomes and must take into account the necessary social environments to activate the genetic predisposition. Mental illnesses such as autism, anorexia nervosa, bipolar affective disorder, unipolar depression, and anxiety disorders all point to gene–environment interactions in their manifestation (Uher 2009). Through this perspective, the individual is the focal point for intervention. But how is this accomplished? If we are to accept defi nitions of mental illness as provided by the DSM, then fi rst we need a diagnosis, followed by an investigation into the genetic makeup of the individual receiving the diagnosis. By pursuing genetic explanations for differences across individuals who are already defi ned as mentally ill, we quickly move back toward the notion of inherent, heritable traits that provide for deviant outcomes like mental illness, while losing sight of the initial social process of labeling and diagnosis and the social environments that contribute to their manifestation. Take attention-defi cit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as an example. Firmly rooted in the DSM, this diagnosis follows the same steps as any other that uses clinical criteria. However, recent medical scholarship points to a potential genetic underpinning of this disorder. Con- rad (2007) stated: Researchers posit a potential link between ADHD and three genes: the D4 dopamine receptor gene, the dopamine transporter gene, and the D2 dopamine receptor gene . . . The thinking is that people | VICTOR PEREZ204 who carry the gene overproduce dopamine, and this overproduction impairs self-control. Some have suggested that genetic inheritance may account for as much as 80 percent of the likelihood that one has ADHD . . . If the disorder is genetic, then it is deemed an intrinsic characteristic of people with the gene. (pp. 62–63) A long line of sociological criticism argues that modern ADHD is not mental illness but rather the expanding power of pharmaceutical companies to defi ne acceptability in social behavior and intervene with their products. However, because of its inclusion in the DSM, the stage was set for ADHD to undergo genetic investigation. Thus, the “pathway” to searching for genetic determinants of ADHD as a DSM-defi ned mental illness lay in its his- tory of already being medicalized in the lexicon of diagnosis and psychiatry (Shostak et al. 2008). COMING FULL CIRCLE: MENTAL ILLNESS AS MEDICAL DEVIANCE IN THE FUTURE Recently, respected UCSF neurobiologist and psychiatrist Samuel Barondes remarked that he is optimistic about DNA research in helping to understand the genetic underpinnings of men- tal illnesses like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. He noted, “When I trained in psychiatry in the 1960s, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder were blamed on bad mothering. Now we know that the pathogenic stuff that mothers (and fathers) transmit is genes” (Barondes 2007: 200). Statements like this offer excitement in the promise of new genetic research, but we must be cautious about how mental illness and deviance are defi ned in the fi rst place and, as the Conrad reading notes, who the major claims-makers driving the medicalization and geneticization of mental illness are today. CONCLUSION The path that mental illness has traveled over time in the fi eld of sociology as a form of medical deviance does not represent a clear linear trajectory, moving from one idea to the next, building on its predecessors. From the early notions that mental illness was a result of degenerate individuals to social pathology, labeling, medicalization, and modern geneti- cization, it has been both a subject of sociology and a target for sociological criticism in other fi elds. Over time, we can see how sociology has moved from studying the degener- ate body to the diseased social body, to powerful labels, and now back to the genetically predisposed individual. However, the trajectory of mental illness in sociology as medical deviance has, all the while, been in a love/hate relationship with the fi eld of medicine and psychiatry. The prevailing mood in the fi eld today is that genetics research can only complement the sociological understanding of mental illness. The later models that incorporate biological and genetic data are likely more powerful ways of understanding mental illness, if only because they will highlight the importance of social environments that contribute to gene expressions. If genetic determinants were found to produce a variety of human outcomes, the environ- mental (i.e., social) interaction effects needed to allow for the expression of genetic predispo- sitions is left entirely to the social environment in which persons with those predispositions CONNECTIONS | 205 fi nd themselves. From this perspective, sociology is even more important than before as an interdisciplinary scientifi c endeavor that can demonstrate under which social conditions, social networks, and social interactions genetic predispositions will express themselves and manifest into a variety of deviant outcomes, including mental illness (Ledger 2009). This reading has argued that the conceptual development of mental illness is somewhat of a circular trajectory, and knowing this expands our understanding of how deviance is defi ned and understood over time as powerful institutions and agents of social control compete for the ability to defi ne and regulate it. If sociology is to remain relevant, either by incorporat- ing genetic variables into models to explain mental illness and deviance or by critiquing the potential stigmatizing effects of genetics research and the medical consumer market interests of pharmaceutical companies, it must also continually pronounce that mental illnesses are, by defi nition, social phenomena to begin with. Once an illuminating sentiment at the height of labeling theory, this is a vital characteristic of the continued relevance of sociology in the study of mental illness that must not be forgotten. New, powerful medical claims-makers, such as pharmaceutical companies, are at the forefront of how mental illness is being defi ned today. Like our predecessors, we must now fully examine how we can continue to interject sociological wisdom and prescience into the study of mental illness in an increasingly medi- calized world. CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS 1. Explain how sociology has had “a love/hate” relationship with medical and psychiatric conceptions of mental illness. Why is this important when examining the trajectory of mental illness as medical deviance over time in the fi eld of sociology? 2. The reading argues that both social pathology and medicalization use a medical perspec- tive but in very different ways—explain how. Based on your response, how does each locate mental illness at the societal and individual levels? 3. How does the reading argue that degeneracy and the contemporary “genetic turn in sociology” are related? What are some implications of the use of genetic information by sociologists today? Does it empower or disempower the role of sociology in examining mental illness? REFERENCES American Psychiatric Association. 1980. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders . 3rd ed. Washing- ton, DC: American Psychiatric Association. American Psychiatric Association. 2000. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders . 4th ed. Washing- ton, DC: American Psychiatric Association. Barondes, Samuel. 2007. “Finding Mental Illness Genes.” Pp. 200–202 in What are You Optimistic About? Today’s Leading Thinkers on Why Things are Good and Getting Better , edited by John Brockman. New York: Harper Perennial. Becker, Howard. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance . New York: Free Press. Best, Joel. 2004. Deviance: Career of a Concept . Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning. Best, Joel. 2006. “Whatever Happened to Social Pathology? Conceptual Fashions and the Sociology of Deviance.” Sociological Spectrum 26: 533–546. Conrad, Peter. 2005. “The Shifting Engines of Medicalization.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 46(1): 3–14. Conrad, Peter. 2007. The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Conrad, Peter and Joseph W. Schneider. 1980. Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness . Philadel- phia: Temple University Press. | VICTOR PEREZ206 Curra, John. 2000. The Relativity of Deviance . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Durkheim, Emile. 1982. The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method . New York: Free Press. Endleman, Robert. 1990. Deviance and Psychopathology . Malabar, FL: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company. Epocrates Online. 2012. “Schizophrenia.” Retrieved September 28, 2012, https://online.epocrates.com/u/2922406/ Schizophrenia/Basics/Vignette. Faris, Robert E. L. and H. Warren Dunham. 1939. Mental Disorders in Urban Areas: An Ecological Study of Schizo- phrenia and Other Psychoses . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gould, Stephen Jay. 1981. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Horton, David M. 2000. Pioneering Perspectives in Criminology . Incline Village, NV: Copperhouse Publishing Company. Horwitz, Allan V. 2002. Creating Mental Illness . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ledger, Kate. 2009. “Sociology and the Gene.” Contexts 8(3): 16–20. Lemert, Edwin M. 1951. Social Pathology: A Systematic Approach to the Theory of Sociopathic Behavior . New York: McGraw Hill Book Company. Leo, Jonathan. 2004. “The Biology of Mental Illness.” Society 46: 45–53. Reid, G. Archdall. 1906. “The Biological Foundations of Sociology.” American Journal of Sociology 11(4): 532–554. Rogers, Anne and David Pilgrim. 2005. A Sociology of Mental Health and Illness . 3rd ed. New York: Open Uni- versity Press. Rosenberg, Morris. 1984. “A Symbolic Interactionist View of Psychosis.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 25(3): 289–302. Scheff, Thomas J. 1966. Being Mentally Ill: A Sociological Theory . Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company. Shea, Christopher. 2009. “The Nature-Nurture Debate, Redux.” The Chronicle Review: A Weekly Magazine of Ideas 55(18): B6–B9. Shostak, Sara, Peter Conrad, and Allan V. Horwitz. 2008. “Sequencing and Its Consequences: Path Dependence and the Relationships between Genetics and Medicalization.” American Journal of Sociology 114(Supp.): S287–S316. Shostak, Sara and Jeremy Freese. 2010. “Gene Environment Interaction and Medical Sociology.” Pp. 418–434 in The Handbook of Medical Sociology , edited by Chloe E. Bird, Peter Conrad, Allen M. Fremont, and Stefan Tim- mermans. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Tausig, Mark, Janet Michello, and Sree Subedi. 2004. A Sociology of Mental Illness . 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall. Uher, R. 2009. “The Role of Genetic Variation in the Causation of Mental Illness: An Evolution-Informed Frame- work.” Molecular Psychiatry 14: 1072–1082. Yonge, Eugene S. 1898. “The Insanity of the Criminal.” Macmillan’s Magazine 79(469): 50–55. https://online.epocrates.com/u/2922406/Schizophrenia/Basics/Vignette https://online.epocrates.com/u/2922406/Schizophrenia/Basics/Vignette SECTION 5 Labeling, Resistance, and Edgework This page intentionally left blank Introduction Tammy L. Anderson What do we have to do to get law enforcement to do something about the massive numbers of skateboarders who are using public sidewalks and streets with their boards as a means of trans- portation? As a business owner with a shop directly on Thames Street, I witness almost daily near misses with these skateboarders and pedestrians. People have to really be looking out as I have seen them skoot quickly to one side or other to avoid being hit. . . . Bikes are a problem too, but for the most part they have rules to follow. Have to give signals before turning. I am “picking on skateboarders” as you say, because that is the issue at hand. One thing at a time. Bicyclists are not allowed to ride on the sidewalks. There are rules for bikes, there are rules for cars, now we need rules for skateboarders. (Gaines 2011) The text above describes one woman’s—Shana Gaines—sentiment about skateboarders in Newport, Massachusetts. Gaines is one of many who see public sidewalks, streets, stoplights, and other urban fi xtures as essential to ensuring public order and protecting citizens from harm. She has seen skateboarders doing tricks or navigating their own pathways over benches, stairwells, and curbs throughout the city, which she believes puts innocent pedestrians in harm’s way. Gaines might be comforted if Newport implemented the same antiskateboarding laws that are on the books in Asheville, South Carolina. A “Nuisance Court” there handles tickets issued to skateboarders for doing the sorts of “dangerous” things Gaines describes (Postelle 2010). How and why does a popular youth-oriented sport like skateboarding—or its “cousin” parkour 1 —get designated a harmful activity that threatens daily life, one so serious that jurisdictions across the United States have moved to criminalize it? When is social control needed in our society, and who gets to determine its content and form? How do individuals respond to such control? Section 5 attempts to answer these questions through labeling theory and the concepts of resistance and edgework. The reading by Lemert (1974) and the Section 1 reading by Becker articulate the labeling theory position, while readings by Lyng (1990) and Rajah (2007) discuss resistance and edgework. They offer very different answers to the questions above using vari- ous types of deviance, such as juvenile delinquency, extreme sports and voluntary risk-taking, drug abuse, and domestic violence. John J. Brent’s connections reading about parkour—urban free-running—describes the differences by weaving labeling, resistance, and edgework into a framework of governance, which is a more encompassing form of social control that char- acterizes our society today. Brent shows how young free-runners practicing parkour— similar to the skateboarders in Newport, Massachusetts, or Asheville, South Carolina—“tinker” with the boundaries of safety and risk and violate ordinances and norms about the environ- ment to move through cities and towns as they see fi t. Such resistance of local ordinances and | TAMMY L. ANDERSON210 edgework-like behavior are ways people push back against social control instead of giving in to it. The paragraphs below briefl y introduce students to the evolution of social control and governance in society through the concepts of labeling theory, resistance, and edgework. Labeling. Labeling theory is concerned with how society responds to deviant acts. From the Becker reading in Section 1, you learned that labels are a form of social control that can infl u- ence people’s lives. To Lemert (1974), labels are a type of social reaction that can be both informal or much more serious in nature. For instance, when a teenager is ticketed for skate- boarding in Asheville and is processed through the juvenile justice system, he or she may be shunned by law-abiding society, have diffi culty staying in school, and lose some civil rights. This social reaction can ultimately levy a heavy burden on the labeled person’s identity. Lemert was interested in expanding labeling theory in ways that will help us see just how much social control we are exposed to in society. One of his key ideas is that people and groups give up some of their values—most likely to powerful bodies like government agencies—in order to satisfy their more salient needs for things like safety, protection, and order. For example, people resist temptations to jaywalk or sleep on a city bench in order to enhance their safety and keep urban space orderly. They use cars or public transportation to get around, instead of riding skateboards or scooters or free-running. What remains is a sort of common set of values and policies that are believed to satisfy and benefi t everyone. Agencies, like the Asheville police department, are entrusted with protecting and enforcing this more general set of values and will enjoy a great amount of power doing so. Invariably, individuals will fi nd themselves at odds with such authority if they attempt to express alter- native ideas and ways. In his connections reading, John J. Brent picks up on the observations Lemert made nearly 40 years ago by tying Lemert’s group interaction ideas to Foucault’s notion of governance. He writes: Governance refers to new processes, actions, and forms of discipline that seek to rule individuals and society more broadly. This notion of contemporary governance closely relates to the labeling framework as each focus on the role of social control when handling deviant acts . . . Harking back to the labeling framework, resultant crime control practices are designed to expand defi nitions of deviance so to as manage an ever-broadening set of perceived threats to safety and order. The Lemert reading and this observation by Brent provide answers the questions above about how certain acts get designated harmful activity that require formal social control and how it is likely to be targeted and labeled. But it is the two newer terms of resistance and edgework that answer the question about how individuals respond to things like labels, discrimination and social control. Resistance is concerned with actions— symbolic and real, social and political—that oppose labels and norms. People who are labeled as outcasts or nuisances—in the case of skate- boarders or free-runners—often try to thwart their deviant labels, even while powerful forces try to control them. Instead of feeling shame about deviant behavior and stopping it, people double down in their deviant actions and take pride in doing so. They reject society’s defi ni- tions and some even become invested in deviant lifestyles. Thus, resistance highlights how the powerless often stand in opposition to mainstream values. INTRODUCTION | 211 Edgework is a second, and perhaps an even more fi tting, term that may help us understand skateboarders and free-runners. Originating from the work of Lyng (1990), edgework is a form of resistance that features risking harm for a thrill. Edgework is a manipulation of the boundaries between safety and harm, order and chaos, and norms and deviance (Lyng 1990). A fundamental quality about it is the sensation it provides and the “competence” or “expertise” one can accrue by doing it. Individuals utilize a specialized skill sets and particu- lar individual capacities in edgework pursuits. Doing so is viewed as a way to fulfi ll a need for control, self-determination, stimulation, and arousal. Edgework is another variety of resistance against oppression and restraint or the social control levied by labeling. For example, the connections reading by John J. Brent on parkour discusses how urban free-runners move through public space in ways that not only violate norms (i.e., how to descend a building or use a courtyard bench) but risk signifi cant injury. Among free-runners, however, such edgework is performed for the protest it represents, respect it earns, and thrill it provides. The reading by Rajah (2007) is yet another provoca- tive example of edgework. The drug-addicted women she studied used their own forms of intimidation and violence against their abusive male partners. They engaged in this edgework despite the likelihood of retaliation or blowback from their male partners. To close, Lemert writes that deviants who are successfully labeled lose their individuality and become empty organisms. But is this really what happens? Both the resistance and edge- work terms reject the idea that labeling and social control—even modern-day governance by the state—can always wield such power. Instead, outcasts or troublemakers fi ght back against punitive social norms and modern-day governance and come back to life. When paired together, we can see that labeling might start the process of social control, but instead of simply expecting people to head down the path of conformity or shame toward a self- fulfi lling prophecy (as labeling theory contends), resilient “deviants” might resist their labels and accrue expertise (i.e., engage in edgework) in being deviant instead. By learning to see deviance through the multiple and opposing lenses of labeling, resistance, and edgework, students may better understand their own and other’s behavior and experiences. They might also be able to spot and dissect social control in our society and anticipate how increased governance might affect human interaction. NOTE 1. Urban free-running or the uses of the built environment for urban sport. About parkour, Berg (2011: 1) states: “It’s kinda like skateboarding, only without the skateboard.” REFERENCES Berg, Nate. 2011 (November 29). “Parkour Is Not a Crime (Except When It Is),” The Atlantic Cities . Retrieved May 28, 2013, http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2011/11/parkour-not-crime/598/. Gaines, Shana. 2011 (June 9). “Skateboarders are a Nuisance on Public Streets.” Newport Patch , Newport, MA. Retrieved May 28, 2013, http://newport.patch.com/blog_posts/skateboarders-are-a-nuisance-on-public-streets. Lemert, Edwin M. 1974. “Beyond Mead: The Societal Reaction to Deviance.” Social Problems 21(4): 457–468. Lyng, S. 1990. “Edgework: A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk Taking.” American Journal of Sociol- ogy 95(4): 851–886. Postelle, Brian. 2010 (March 10). “It’s a Grind: Police Crackdown Sparks Calls for Retooled Skateboard Ordinance.” Mountain Xpress . Retrieved May 28, 2013, http://www.mountainx.com/article/27486/Its-a-grind- Police-crackdown-sparks-calls-for-retooled-skateboard-ordinance. Rajah, Valli. 2007. “Resistance as Edgework in Violent Intimate Relationships of Drug-Involved Women.” British Journal of Criminology 47(2): 196–213. http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2011/11/parkour-not-crime/598/ http://newport.patch.com/blog_posts/skateboarders-are-a-nuisance-on-public-streets http://www.mountainx.com/article/27486/Its-a-grind-Police-crackdown-sparks-calls-for-retooled-skateboard-ordinance http://www.mountainx.com/article/27486/Its-a-grind-Police-crackdown-sparks-calls-for-retooled-skateboard-ordinance Beyond Mead The Societal Reaction to Deviance Edwin Lemert What I prefer to call the sociology of devi- ance now appears to be under attack from so many quarters, both for what it is and what it is not, that a sense of embattlement is ines- capable. The diverse, perverse, and tangen- tial nature of the criticisms makes it diffi cult to tell friend from foe. Sensitive to this state of affairs, Peter Manning (1973) in a review essay of surpassing excellence asserts that a grey fog has settled over the fi eld. This I can discount as the natural fog of good men’s minds, but his further allegations that the theoretical impetus of deviance sociology is spent and that a state of exhaustion and con- ceptual decay prevails, I found painful and much harder to reconcile with my propri- etary interests. I should say parenthetically that read- ing the essay left me spelled by the beauty of its words and niceties of expression, as well as overwhelmed by its sense of proph- ecy. It recalled me to an old auctorial ideal espoused by James Branch Cabell, namely that we should write beautifully of things as they are. But having had time to cast off Manning’s spell, I conclude that sociologists sometimes write beautifully of things as they are not and that in striving for rhetorical sym- metry their conclusions may go beyond what facts will support. In this case I must object that the allegations of its sadness and senility ignore the theoretical potential of deviance sociology, its continuing research output, its infl uence on the diversion movement in criminal justice, and its striking impact on younger, highly articulate sociologists in Britain. Granting the slow stain and constant erosion of all ideas, it seems to me that even with age deviance sociology still is “majestic in decay.” But without further pause on the deca- dence issue, I would like to deal with what may cause some of the faithful to cry sacri- lege, namely the defi ciencies of G. H. Mead’s conception of symbolic interaction and their implications for the study of deviance. My purpose is not to add to the theoretical con- fusion but to clear some of it away and hope- fully free up sociological energies to exploit in the measure it deserves its least worked area, namely the societal reaction. In order to maximize the clarity of my discussion I will recap what the term has meant to me. Some years ago in my early work on devi- ance I used the term societal reaction to comprehend a number of processes by which societies respond to deviants either infor- mally or through their offi cially delegated agencies (Lemert, 1951). While communi- cation of invidious defi nitions of persons or groups and the public expression of disap- proval were included as part of the societal reaction, the important point was made that these had to be validated in order to be socio- logically meaningful. Validation was con- ceived as effective social control taking form as isolation, segregation, penalties, supervi- sion, or some kind of organized “treatment.” BEYOND MEAD | 213 In effect, this was a kind of middle range conceptual orientation to a body of data. Societal reaction theory distinguished objective as well as subjective aspects of devi- ance, recognizing a relationship between the nature, degree, extent, and visibility of devi- ance and corresponding form and intensity of the societal reaction. It also allowed that attributes of deviants and the form of their deviance affected the way in which societal defi nitions were internalized, most easily seen in biological anomalies and physical handicaps. Among the objective infl uences on the societal reaction were noted technol- ogy, procedures, and limitation of agency personnel and resources. However, these did not get much elaboration or application, save in the discussion of changing tolerances for crime. Then, as in my later work on deviance (Lemert, 1973), I emphasized the need to begin the analysis with the societal reaction, more particularly social control, rather than with etiology. Herein lay the distinctiveness of the societal reaction approach, which sought to show how deviance was shaped and sta- bilized by efforts to eliminate or ameliorate it. In retrospect, the break with structural conceptions of deviance and the traditional concern of sociology with causes was by no means complete. This I now believe to have been less a matter of theoretical asymmetry than an encounter with a perennial problem of sociological theory, namely how to estab- lish a connection between symbolic systems, social systems, and physical systems, with- out denying the obvious fact that human beings make choices that affect as well as are affected by the system. According to J. F. Scott’s (1963) informed analysis, even the grand theorist of our age, Talcott Parsons, failed to reach an ultimate solution of this problem. This question was pretty well obscured during the 1950s and 1960s, probably because of the tremendous growth in our national production and the belief that affl uence was easily procurable for all, abet- ted by Keynesian economic theory aimed at little more than preventive maintenance of the marvelous machine making it all pos- sible. But recently the avalanche of popula- tion growth, swift exhaustion of resources, environmental destruction, plus an “energy crisis” have made an awareness that human choices can either sustain or destroy the physical and technological basis on which they are made. Physical environments for- merly taken as constants and merely limit- ing now can be seen changing in foreseeable time spans, and it becomes possible to speak of responses and feedback from the physical world. Even the vulgarization and deserved criticism of the ecology movement cannot quiet the deepening appreciation that man is inescapably part of a larger biophysical system. SYMBOLIC INTERACTION Over the decades of the present century soci- ology moved steadily away from early social science, which had sought standing ground on biology, geography, and economics. Within sociology, social psychologists pushed farthest along this path, retaining only some nomi- nal allegiance to organic and natural history analogies. And within social psychology, it has been those sociologists concerned with deviance who have laid the greatest and most exclusive emphasis on the sociopsychological process as the determining element in social life. It has been asserted that the one theme uniting the otherwise diverse views of label- ing theorists, Neo-Chicagoans, or West Coast school, as they are variously called, is their fealty to the symbolic interactionism of G. H. Mead (Schur, 1969). Nevertheless, it may be asked whether the prevailing defi nition of deviance as a group creation through labeling and the adoption of an “underdog” view of the symbolic pro- cess do not do a disservice to Mead. Labeling | EDWIN LEMERT214 unfortunately conveys an impression of inter - action that is both sociologistic and unilateral; in the process deviants who are “success- fully labeled” lose their individuality; they appear, as Bordua (1967) says, like “empty organisms” or, as Gouldner (1968) puts it, “like men on their backs” (Walton, 1973). The extreme subjectivism made explicit by the underdog perspective, refl ecting sym- pathy for the victim and antipathy towards the establishment, also distorts by magnify- ing the exploitative and arbitrary features of the societal reaction. But more important, it leaves little or no place for human choice at either level of interaction. Actually the diffi culties may lie in the ambiguities and uncertainties of Mead’s ideas themselves. While Mead reconciled the objective and the subjective in general terms by making self and other dual aspects of a common behavioral process, the specifi cs of the process with respect to choice-making were far from clear. Other strictures inhere in Mead’s conception of the societal other; his unformed ideas about society, primarily that of one generalized other, are a poor source for a modern theory of the societal reaction (Kolb, 1967; Meltzer, 1967). This is amply demonstrated in the dramatistic descriptions of the societal reaction which revolve around the idea of symbolic interaction. GROUP INTERACTION Group interaction is best understood as a process resting on evaluation in which indi- viduals sort out their purposes or values in terms of their dependence on groups neces- sary for their satisfaction. In so doing they give up some values in order to satisfy oth- ers, at the least possible sacrifi ce. The pat- tern of group action which results will refl ect the claims and power of all those involved in the interaction, and the priorities it follows often are at considerable variance from the value hierarchies of individual participants. When a chain of interaction occurs between groups, the disparity between values domi- nate in fi nal action, and the values of any one group member may be enormous. Police may acquiesce in positions of legislation taken by their representative association which deeply offend their sense of morality and justice because other values which have been given precedence are at stake in concurrent legis- lation. Legislators, too, may be captured by their group commitments so that they must give due pass to bills which are grossly con- trary to values they personally espouse. The order in which interests, claims, or values get satisfi ed refl ects not only group allegiance but also the availability of means for their satisfaction and the costs of such means, measurable by time, energy, and other values expended. Laws and rules made by this kind of process often express the val- ues and norms of no group or person but rather their dilemmas, compromises, expe- ditious adherence to procedures, and stric- tures of time and budgets. For this reason it becomes diffi cult or impossible to predict the emergence of new defi nitions and controls of deviance by introspecting or “taking the role of the other” to discover what it is the minds of those making the change. Nor can predictions be made successfully by imput- ing cultures, subcultures, or lifestyles to the agents of change. What has been said is well illustrated by reference to the interaction of a variety of professional associations which took part in revising the Juvenile Court Law in California in 1961, a change which narrowed the juris- diction of the court and effectively modifi ed defi nitions of delinquency (Lemert, 1970). Each association sorted out the proposed changes in terms of its own values, support- ing or resisting according to whether the changes were seen as a means of achieving their existing values or called for sacrifi ces deemed intolerable. In the change, proba- tion offi cers gave up their accustomed right to employ a number of informal procedures BEYOND MEAD | 215 but got more power vis-à-vis the police in decisions to detain juveniles. Police lost this power but got badly needed clarifi cation of arrest powers. Judges lost their considerable freedom to handle the court informally, but they along with interested attorneys gained by the introduction of guarantees of certain rights to minors. All three professional groups had splits for and against the changes, and their con- fl icting positions were arrived at for differ- ent reasons and in different ways. Ultimately resistance among probation offi cers disap- peared because the resisters had to choose between continued opposition and preser- vation of their association, which it threat- ened to destroy. Opposition among judges centered around one of their members who remained against the changes through- out but ultimately chose not to risk loss of reputation among his other colleagues by protracted resistance. Police resistance, pri- marily among Juvenile Offi cers from the south state, got stymied by the structure of their lobbying committee, which was domi- nated by chiefs who were more concerned with evidentiary bills and a death penalty bill than they were with juvenile justice. STRUCTURES AND THE SOCIETAL REACTION It is clear from what has been said that social structures infl uenced the outcome of the leg- islation in question. This happened in sev- eral ways, such as limiting the access of some groups to the legislature, allocating power in a manner so that the decision of one com- mittee was crucial, and the special autonomy to act given to the group which initiated the changes. However, here I wish to empha- size for theoretical reasons how structures become instrumentally important as vehicles or channels by which feedback from direct experience with the objective world modifi es choice—in this instance how new structures affect dissemination of new knowledge which selects out old patterns or paradigms. The movement to change the Juvenile Court Law, although it had outside leader- ship, was something less than a moral cru- sade, nor could it be described realistically as a popular movement shaped by public opinion. Leaders were a few attorneys, some probation offi cers, correctional administra- tors, and college professors, from among whom was organized a commission within the California Youth Authority (CYA) and the Department of Corrections. Joint spon- sorship by the two organizations and later loss of interest by the CYA top people in the movement made it much like an autonomous staff operation. Several of the attorneys were attracted to the movement in its early stages mainly from frustrating encounters with highhanded judges in juvenile courts, but the focus and articulation of the movement owed much to organizational features intro- duced with creation of the CYA. In essence, the movement was a challenge to the traditional parens patriae conception of the juvenile court, although it was not so represented. Social action grew out of an accumulation of new facts and information that raised serious doubts about the effi cacy of the basic philosophy of the court. The main source of such information was input at the Board created for a different purpose, to hear and dispose all cases referred to CYA. This, together with reports from its fi eld consultant division, allowed staff and Board members for the fi rst time, circa 1944, to develop a statewide impression of what the juvenile courts were like in fact and to begin to appreciate the discrepancies between their ideology and their performance. A number of Board members after repeatedly listening to stories of youth coming before them grew convinced that injustices were being done. The problem of the Commission became one of convincing persons with power to change the law that this was true. Given this general stance, the Commission did in a | EDWIN LEMERT216 sense try to reconstruct the symbolic reality of the juvenile court, chiefl y by means of a statewide survey, hearings, and presentations before legislative committees. But their report was late in appearing and was not very good at that, and the Commission’s presentations before the powerful Senate Judiciary Com- mittee, a majority of whose members were opposed to any change, fell short. The event which did more than any other to undercut and select out the existing parens patriae conception of the juvenile court came from the unsolicited testimony of a single upstate judge who had come to defend the old style court and fi ght the changes sought by the Commission. A somewhat quaint, anachronistic fi gure in a black suit and a furled umbrella, he told in fi ne detail how he ran what was in effect an inquisitorial system of juvenile justice, ordering arrested youths into detention until by confessing their mis- deeds they showed the remorse he consid- ered necessary for their rehabilitation. The impact on a committee composed entirely of lawyers, former district attorneys, and a former judge was like that of a bomb in an echo chamber. This strongly indicates that when a radi- cal change is contemplated on the basis of new ideas about reality, it most likely occurs when there is a validation of the ideas in direct sensory experience—in this case a liv- ing breathing judge of the type the commis- sioners ineptly tried to fi x as an image. The situation was dramatic because it was so real and because it was not staged. Legislators—at least those in California— are well accustomed to staged presentations and highly sophisticated efforts to create realities favorable to the causes of lobbyists. As a matter of fact, they have committee tech- niques of their own designed to cope with these, that which might be called counter- staging, set up to give the impression of responding to the voices of the public. Under- neath, legislators tend to be tough-minded, and the prevalence of lawyers among them sets rigorous standards for what will be accepted as facts or evidence. That they have problems of obtaining objective measures of the harmful effects of deviance and of conse- quences of proposed programs for its control none will deny. The problems face social sci- entists as well as legislators, but they do not seem suffi cient reason to believe that legisla- tors have no way of getting feedback from the objective world. It remains to comment on the effects of direct experience with physical or ecologi- cal consequences of patterns of social con- trol as infl uences on change. From these fl ow costs, by which is meant the time, energy, and money costs of means to implement various methods of control. In a context of change this refers to anticipated as well as experienced costs. An important principle is that changes in the defi nition and control of deviance may be due not to any alteration in value systems but to changes in their costs of satisfaction. An increase in costs, such as the time needed to deliver a youth to detention, may change the disposition of cases by police or probation offi cers even though their pref- erences are to follow an old pattern. Anticipated changes in the costs of means to ends affected both the support for and opposition to the 1961 Juvenile Court Law revision. Los Angeles county sheriff people favored the change because the new arrest procedures simplifi ed and helped the effi - ciency of their delinquency control opera- tions. Police, on the other hand, both north and south, were concerned that the 48-hour limit imposed in the new law for investi- gations prior to detention hearings would make their jobs impossible. And indeed this was the case so far as their old procedures were concerned, especially in counties like Los Angeles, which had set up a detention control unit within its probation depart- ment. As a result, it became harder to use the juvenile court as an adjunct for extra-legal police methods. “Weekenders,” youth swept up by police and detained in order to break BEYOND MEAD | 217 up or curb local disorders, tended to disap- pear as a category. Judges, probation offi cers, supervisors, and county executives in many instances were painfully aware that the proposed law revision would cost a great deal more money in order to provide counsel for minors, engage court reporters, and prepare records for court hearings. How to raise such funds was a critical issue in a number of counties. The requirement of two and possibly three court hearings could only increase the work- load of the court and probation department, which meant either more tax funds or greater expenditures of time and effort by court per- sonnel from judges on down. The strong opposition to the law change by police and probation offi cers in the south- ern part of the state came from recognition of the hard fact that it would end the use of jail for detention, which was an intrinsic fea- ture of the delinquency control system there. This eventuality was felt keenly in Long Beach, where a new wing of the jail had been constructed for such a purpose. Higher standards of proof mandated by the law change and the new power of proba- tion offi cers to dismiss at intake meant that more time was care had to go into police investigations and reports. This was more fully appreciated after some experience with the new law, and it fostered a changed cat- egorical attitude that “either you have a case, or you don’t.” An organizational refl ection of this change was the decision of the Los Ange- les Police to eliminate its juvenile bureau and turn its work over to the detective bureau. Herein may lie one of the main outcomes of the 1961 law change, namely a grow- ing tendency to redefi ne delinquency more exclusively as law violations and to differ- entiate such cases from so-called delinquent tendencies cases, many of which began to be handled by other means. Comments now are heard from probation offi cers that “601s [the code term for such cases] are on their way out.” CONCLUSION It has been my contention that existing the- ories of deviance are ill suited to account for the complexities of the societal reaction in modern society. In place of a sociopsy- chological model I have proposed a group interaction model and tried to show how it clarifi es the shifting signifi cance of ends and means and their costs in the emergence of new patterns of social control. The chief gain is a method for specifying the way in which human choices affect the societal reaction without generalizing the claims of others or reducing them to reifi ed ideas of culture, class, or power. It also shows how costs of changes in social control feed back into deci- sions to make changes, without the necessity of relying on older deterministic conceptions of the effects of the physical world on the social. The possibility exists that the special subject matter of procedural law change within a bureaucratic context of correc- tional agencies puts the group interaction model in a more favorable light than if it were applied to substantive legislation of a more obviously “moral” nature, such as marijuana laws, temperance laws, and anti- pornography statutes. Yet I note a recent study of the evolution of our marijuana laws which advisedly chooses an organizational perspective emphasizing bureaucratic utili- tarian values in its explanation (Dickson, 1968). I am also reminded of A. M. Lee’s (1944) older pluralistic analysis of the tem- perance movement, which still stands unrec- onciled with the symbolic crusade theory of the same phenomenon. A study of social control in Cuba, touch- ing on censorship and sex behavior, not only has challenged the validity of the notion of moral entrepreneurs but also accentuates the need to fi t concepts of social control to the differentiation of interests and groups in par- ticular societies (Looney, 1973). All of which tells me that deviance sociologists can do | EDWIN LEMERT218 better with working tool concepts than with ambitious theory. They obviously “can’t go home again” to old-style structural, posi- tivist sociology any more than conserva- tive sociologists can stomach the extremes of labeling theory. But there may be a less pretentious midground on which to meet—if not they, then a less committed generation of sociologists yet to come. REFERENCES Becker, Howard. 1963. Outsiders . Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Bordua, David. 1967. “Recent Trends: Deviant Behav- ior and Social Control.” Amer. Acad. Polit. Soc. Sci- ence 57: 149–163. Chambliss, William. 1964. “A Sociological Analysis of the Law of Vagrancy.” Social Problems 12: 67–77. Cottrell, W. F. 1972. Technology, Man and Progress . Columbus: Charles Merrill Pubs. Dickson, Donald. 1968. “Bureaucracy and Morality: An Organizational Perspective on a Moral Crusade.” Social Problems 16: 143–156. Douglas, Jack. 1970. Deviance and Respectability . New York: Basic Books. Garfi nkel, Harold. 1956. “Conditions of Successful Deg- radation Ceremonies.” Amer. Jr. Sociol . 61: 420–424. Goode, Erich. 1969. “Marihuana and the Politics of Reality.” Jr. Health and Social Behavior 10: 84. Gouldner, Alvin. 1968. “The Sociologist as Partisan: Sociology and the Welfare State.” American Sociolo- gist (May): 103–116. Gusfi eld, Joseph. 1966. Symbolic Crusade . Urbana: Univ. Illinois Press. Hall, Jerome. 1935. Theft, Law and Society . Indianapo- lis: Bobbs Merrill. Kolb, William. 1967. “A Critical Evaluation of Mead’s ‘I’ and ‘Me’ Concepts.” In Symbolic Interaction (eds. Jerome Manis and Bernard Meltzer). Boston: Allyn and Bacon. 191–196. Lee, A. M. 1944. “Techniques of Reform: An Analysis of the New Prohibition Drive.” Amer. Sociol. Rev . 9: 60–69. Lemert, Edwin. 1951. Social Pathology . New York: McGraw-Hill. Lemert, Edwin. 1970. Legal Action and Social Change . Chicago: Aldine Pub. Lemert, Edwin. 1973. Human Deviance, Social Prob- lems and Social Control . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Liazos, Alexander. 1972. “The Poverty of the Sociology of Deviance: Nuts, Sluts and Perverts.” Social Prob- lems 20: 103–120. Looney, Martin. 1973. “Social Control in Cuba.” In Politics and Deviance (eds. Ian and Laurie Taylor). London: Penguin. 42–60. Lyman, Standford, and Marvin Scott. 1970. A Sociology of the Absurd . New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Manning, Peter. 1973. “Survey Essay on Deviance.” Contemporary Sociology 2: 123–128. Mead, G. H. 1928 . “The Psychology of Primitive Justice.” American Journal of Sociology 23 (1918): 577–602. Meltzer, Bernard N. 1967. “Mead’s Social Psychology.” In Symbolic Interaction (eds. Jerome Manis and Ber- nard Meltzer). Boston: Allyn and Bacon. 15–26. Scott, John. 1963. “Changing Foundations of a Parso- nian Scheme of Action.” Amer. Soc. Rev . 28: 716–734. Scott, Robert A. 1970. “Construction of Conceptions of Stigma by Professional Experts.” In Deviance and Respectability, the Social Construction of Moral Meanings (ed. Jack E. Douglas). New York: Basic Books. 255–290. Schur, Edwin. 1969. “Reaction to Deviance: A Critical Assessment.” Amer. Jr. Sociol . 75: 309–322. Tannenbaum, Frank. 1937. Crime and the Community . New York: Col. Univ. Press. Taylor, Ian, and Laurie Taylor. 1973. Politics and Devi- ance . London: Penguin. Walton, Paul. 1973. “The Case of the Weathermen: Social Reaction and Radical Commitment.” In Poli- tics and Deviance (eds. Ian and Laurie Taylor). Lon- don: Penguin. Edgework A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk-Taking Stephen Lyng Voluntary risk-taking is an activity that attracts a sizable number of people in Amer- ican society but has been largely ignored by sociologists. A literature review is presented that points to a number of shortcomings in existing studies, most of which are associ- ated with the psychological reductionism that predominates in this area of study. An effort is made to provide a sociologi- cal account of voluntary risk-taking by (1) introducing a new classifying concept— edgework—based on numerous themes emerging from primary and secondary data on risk-taking and (2) explaining edgework in terms of the newly emerging social psy- chological perspective produced from the synthesis of the Marxian and Meadian frameworks. The concept of edgework highlights the most sociologically relevant features of voluntary risk-taking, while the Marx and Mead synthesis offers a frame- work for tracing the connections between various aspects of risk-taking behavior and structural characteristics of modern Ameri- can society at both the micro- and mac- rolevels. This approach ties together such factors as political economic variables, at one end of the continuum, and individual sensations and feelings, at the other end. Among the many paradoxes of the mod- ern age, one that has been the focus of much attention recently from the American media is particularly puzzling. While there seems to be general agreement among members of contemporary American society about the value of reducing threats to individual well-being, there are many who actively seek experiences that involve a high potential for personal injury or death. 1 High-risk sports such as hang gliding, skydiving, scuba div- ing, rock climbing, and the like have enjoyed unprecedented growth in the past several decades even as political institutions in West- ern societies have sought to reduce the risks of injury in the workplace and elsewhere. The contradiction in American society between the public agenda to reduce the risk of injury and death and the private agenda to increase such risks deserves the attention of sociologists. In looking for social scientifi c litera- ture that bears on this issue, one is natu- rally drawn to the fi eld of risk analysis. An examination of this body of research reveals much work dealing with the assessment and management of technological and natural hazards but a complete absence of research on voluntary risk-taking behavior. As one authority on risk analysis notes (Heimer 1988), this problem is due, in part, to the dominance of a psychological model of risk- taking that views anticipated rewards as the primary motivation for risk-taking behavior (cf. Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky 1982). This approach, however, cannot be recon- ciled with one of the principal features of voluntary risk-taking—the fact that some people place a higher value on the experi- ence of risk-taking than they do on achieving | STEPHEN LYNG220 the fi nal ends of the risky undertaking. In another line of criticism, James Short (1984) complains that the focus of research in risk analysis has been so narrow as to exclude even the “bottom line” issue of the fi eld; that is, determining what makes risks accept- able. I support his call for a more expansive approach and further suggest that attention be directed to an even more puzzling issue— the problem of what makes risk-taking nec- essary for the well-being of some people. Although voluntary risk-taking has been ignored by students of risk analysis and sociologists generally, a literature on this subject does exist. A diverse group of social and behavioral scientists has attempted in earlier decades to explain the phenomenon. No one, however, has provided a thoroughly sociological explanation—an account that would explain high-risk behavior in terms of a socially constituted self in a historically specifi c social environment. The aim of this reading is to provide such an account. THE CONCEPT OF EDGEWORK The idea of edgework is the product of several diverse infl uences. The term itself is borrowed from the journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who has used it to describe a variety of anarchic human experiences, the most infamous being his experimenta- tion with drugs. Thompson’s journalistic accounts of many different types of edge- work give powerful expression to the essen- tial character of this experience. Indeed, negotiating the boundary between life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, and sanity and insanity is a central theme in Thompson’s work (1971, 1979). The fi rst effort to analyze edgework within a social scientifi c framework was under- taken by Lyng and Snow (1986) in an earlier study. This project involved a fi ve-year eth- nographic study of a group of skydivers. As a “jump pilot” for a local skydiving center, I was able to gain access to the complex sub- culture of skydiving. Field research was con- ducted on the skydiving subculture with a combination of techniques including partici- pant observation, semistructured interviews, and document analysis. My status as jump pilot permitted me to collect participant/observational data on the world of skydiving. Because the jump pilot is responsible for transporting skydivers to jump altitude, he or she is able to observe all aspects of the core activity of the group. Also, the jump pilot’s special function in jumping activities gives him or her “insider” status, even though he or she may not be a skydiver. Thus, after the fi rst year of study, I became suffi ciently well integrated into the group to be included in most informal gath- erings of skydivers outside of weekend jump- ing activities. Although it is always diffi cult to get skydivers to describe their feelings about the sport (see below), the more refl ec- tive mood that sometimes prevailed during these social gatherings yielded valuable data on the skydiving experience. Thus, as jump pilot, I was able to observe the most intimate details of the group’s activ- ities. These observations were recorded in the form of fi eld notes written up at the end of most weekends at the drop zone (an area approved by the FAA for parachute drops) and after many skydiver social events. The accuracy of participant/observational data was also checked in intensive semistruc- tured interviews with strategic respondents. In these interviews, which totaled scores of hours, respondents were asked to describe the experience of dealing with the various risks associated with the sport. Finally, to ensure the representativeness of the obser- vational and interview data, I perused lit- erature that circulated within the national skydiving network. Technical manuals (see, e.g., Works 1975) and related publications, as well as many issues of Parachutist maga- zine, were examined for information that would help identify the social psychological EDGEWORK | 221 factors that lead people to participate in a high-risk sport like skydiving. All the fi nd- ings emerging from interviews and document analysis were double-checked with addi- tional fi rsthand observations I made in my dual role as jump pilot and novice skydiver. 2 As noted in the earlier study, some of the features that defi ne the edgework con- cept were delineated by a specifi c “vocabu- lary of motive” employed by the skydivers. Although this was just one of three separate motivational perspectives used at different times by the group, I eventually came to regard the edgework perspective as theo- retically useful for understanding risk-taking in general. This view emerged from my examination of various accounts of high-risk activities, ranging from other thrill sports (downhill skiing, car racing, etc.) to wartime combat situations and business entrepre- neurship. These accounts are astonishingly similar to the descriptions provided by the respondents in my study. Indeed, the com- mon patterns seem to point to a nomothetic potential for the concept of edgework. Because of my personal access to a body of rich primary data on the sport of skydiv- ing, I have chosen to focus on this sport as the principal substantive illustration of the edgework concept. But I also make use of illustrative material from sources dealing with other types of high-risk activities in order to demonstrate the wider application of the concept. 3 Emerging from these data are empirical patterns that can be orga- nized into three separate categories: (1) the kinds of activities that qualify as edgework, (2) the specifi c individual characteristics and capacities that are relevant to the edgework experience, and (3) the subjective sensations associated with participation in edgework. Discussing edgework in terms of the fi rst dimension demonstrates the broad scope of the concept while directing attention to the features common to all forms of edgework. Focusing on the second dimension helps to identify the individual-level factors that refl ect most clearly the macrostructural determinants of the edgework pattern. And, fi nally, the third dimension is concerned with empirical patterns belonging to perhaps the most “private” level of individual experi- ence. The consistency of these private expe- riences across various forms of edgework lends support to the claimed validity of the edgework concept. Edgework Activities Activities that can be subsumed under the edgework concept have one central feature in common: they all involve a clearly observ- able threat to one’s physical or mental well- being or one’s sense of an ordered existence. The archetypical edgework experience is one in which the individual’s failure to meet the challenge at hand will result in death or, at the very least, debilitating injury. This type of edgework is best illustrated by such dan- gerous sports as skydiving, hang gliding, rock climbing, motorcycle racing/car racing, and downhill ski racing or by such danger- ous occupations as fi re fi ghting, test piloting, combat soldiering, movie stunt work, and police work. The threat of death or injury is ever-present in such activities, although par- ticipants often claim that only those “who don’t know what they’re doing” are at risk. While such death-defying activities are the quintessential form of edgework, the concept has much wider application. The “edge,” or boundary line, confronted by the edge- worker can be defi ned in many different ways: life versus death, consciousness versus unconsciousness, sanity versus insanity, an ordered sense of self and environment versus a disordered self and environment. This more general defi nition of the edge is consistent with Hunter Thompson’s conceptualization of certain kinds of drug use as edgework. Alcohol users who engage in binge drink- ing negotiate the line between conscious- ness and unconsciousness, while the use of hallucinogenic drugs may push one over the | STEPHEN LYNG222 line separating an ordered from a disordered sense of self and environment. Thompson establishes an explicit link between the lat- ter form of edgework and the life-and-death variety in the following interview statement: PLAYBOY: Do you believe religious things about drugs? THOMPSON: No, I never have. That’s my main argument with the drug culture. I’ve never believed in that guru trip; you know, God, nirvana, that kind of oppressive, hipper-than-thou bullshit. I like to just gobble the stuff right out in the street and see what happens, take my chances, just stomp on my own accelerator. It’s like getting on a racing bike and all of a sudden you’re doing 120 miles per hour into a curve that has sand all over it and you think, Holy Jesus, here we go, and you lay it over till the pegs hit the street and metal starts to spark. If you’re good enough, you can pull it out, but sometimes you end up in the emergency room with some bastard in a white suit sewing your scalp back on. PLAYBOY: Is that what you call “edgework”? THOMPSON: Well, that’s one aspect of it, I guess—in that you have to be good when you take nasty risks, or you’ll lose it, and then you’re in serious trouble. ( Playboy 1974, p. 78) Another form of edgework sometimes asso- ciated with excessive drug use involves nego- tiating the boundary between sanity and insanity. This boundary line can be reached through other means as well—for example, when some “workaholics” seek to push themselves to the very limits of sanity. In abstract terms, edgework is best understood as an approach to the bound- ary between order and disorder, form and formlessness. As we will see shortly, edge- workers typically seek to defi ne the limits of performance for a particular object or form. One category of edgework involves efforts to discover the performance limits of certain types of technology, as when test pilots take their airplanes “to the outside of the enve- lope” (i.e., pushing it to its aerodynamic limits) or when race-car drivers push their cars to their mechanical limits. Another cat- egory consists of testing the limits of body or mind, as illustrated by marathon runners attempting to discover their physical limits or artists endeavoring to realize their creative potential through intense work schedules. In many cases, edgeworkers explore the perfor- mance limits of both themselves and a mate- rial form; with the increasingly sophisticated nature of modern technology, individuals must sometimes push themselves to the outer limits of human performance in order to reach the performance limits of the technol- ogy under their control. Edgework Skills Another common feature of the activities I have classifi ed as edgework is that they all involve the use of specifi c individual capaci- ties. One such capacity has already been identifi ed: the exercise of the particular skills required to discover the performance limits of a piece of technology or other form. Indeed, edgeworkers regard the opportunity for the development and use of skills as the most valuable aspect of the experience. Skydivers are typically very preoccupied with their own and others’ skills in the art of fl ying one’s body in free-fall, and the status hierarchy in the group tends to center on this character- istic. Edgework in drug use can also involve skilled performance, as revealed in Hunter EDGEWORK | 223 Thompson’s statement that “you have to be good when you take nasty risks, or you’ll lose it, and then you’re in serious trouble.” Of course, the emphasis on skilled per- formance is not, in and of itself, unique to high-risk activities. People who devote lei- sure time to such activities as home improve- ment and fi shing do so in part because these activities allow for the development and use of various skills. But edgeworkers claim to possess a special ability, one that transcends activity-specifi c skills such as those needed for driving a car, riding a motorcycle, and fl ying an airplane or one’s body in free-fall. This unique skill, which applies to all types of edgework, is the ability to maintain con- trol over a situation that verges on complete chaos, a situation most people would regard as entirely uncontrollable. The more specifi c aptitudes required for this type of compe- tence involve the ability to avoid being para- lyzed by fear and the capacity to focus one’s attention and actions on what is most crucial for survival. Thus, most edgeworkers regard this general skill as essentially cognitive in nature, and they often refer to it as a special form of “mental toughness.” This view is especially prominent among those who par- ticipate in more athletic forms of edgework (endurance running, etc.). In surveying various forms of edgework, I found that many participants regard this special “survival capacity” as an innate abil- ity. They fi nd support for this belief in the instinct-like character of edgework action— the fact that people respond automatically without thinking. A related and somewhat ironic presupposition about the capacity is revealed in Tom Wolfe’s (1979) ethnography of the test-pilot subculture. Wolfe describes an interesting tautology that pilots employ for determining who possesses “the right stuff”; that is, the basic survival instinct under discussion here. Because they believe that having this capacity will insure against accidents, a fatal crash by one of their com- rades is taken as direct evidence that he or she never possessed “the right stuff” in the fi rst place. I have observed a similar attitude on the part of skydivers. When people are killed or injured in skydiving accidents, it does not suggest to them that some risks in the sport are beyond anyone’s ability to man- age; it merely indicates that not everyone involved in skydiving possesses the innate survival capacity. Such beliefs are associated with an elit- ist orientation among some edgeworkers who maintain that these innate edgeworking capacities are possessed by only a select few and who often feel a powerful solidarity with one another based on their perceived elite sta- tus. In some cases, this solidarity transcends the boundaries of interpersonal networks so that even people who practice very differ- ent forms of edgework regard one another as members of the same select group. A logi- cal consequence of this belief is the notion that a demonstrable capacity for “crowding the edge” in one domain is evidence of one’s ability to handle other forms of edgework. In accordance with this belief, individuals accomplished in one type of edgework often try their hands at other types as well. 4 Edgework Sensations Although different types of edgework do not produce precisely the same sensations, the pri- mary and secondary data assembled for this study reveal a number of common themes. First, participants in virtually all types of edge- work claim that the experience produces a sense of “self-realization,” “self-actualization,” or “self-determination.” In the pure form of edgework, individuals experience themselves as instinctively acting entities, which leaves them with a purifi ed and magnifi ed sense of self. As one skydiver noted about his experi- ence with a parachute malfunction, “I wasn’t thinking at all—I just did what I had to do. It was the right thing to do too. And after it was over, I felt really alive and pure.” In edgework, the ego is called forth in a dramatic way. | STEPHEN LYNG224 This sensation is also accompanied by a specifi c sequence of emotions. In those forms of edgework involving a threat of death or injury, the individual typically feels a sig- nifi cant degree of fear during the initial, anticipatory phases of the experience. This fi nding, which persists across many variet- ies of edgework, should dispel the popular stereotype of risk-takers as fearless individu- als. Even skydivers with thousands of jumps report being very nervous and fearful in the 15 or 20 minutes before reaching jump alti- tude (a fi nding corroborated by Klausner 1968). But as one moves to the fi nal phases of the experience, fear gives way to a sense of exhilaration and omnipotence. Having survived the challenge, one feels capable of dealing with any threatening situation. This no doubt contributes to the elitist orientation of some edgework groups. The edgework experience can also involve alterations in perception and consciousness. Participants in many different types of edge- work report that, at the height of the expe- rience (as they approach the edge), their perceptual fi eld becomes highly focused: background factors recede from view, and their perception narrows to only those fac- tors that immediately determine success or failure in negotiating the edge. In this state of mind, edgeworkers not only are oblivious to extraneous environmental factors, but they also lose their ability to gauge the passage of time in the usual fashion. Time may pass either much faster or slower than usual: sky- divers experience 45 seconds of free-fall as an eternity, while rock climbers sense many hours on the cliffs as “just a few minutes.” Focused perception also correlates with a sense of cognitive control over the essential “objects” in the environment or a feeling of identity with these objects. Edgeworkers sometimes speak of a feeling of “oneness” with the object or environment. For example, motorcycle racers and test pilots describe a feeling of “being one with their machines,” a state in which they feel capable of exercising mental control over the machines. Skydivers are particularly instructive on this point. In describing how to fl y one’s body in free-fall, jumpers emphasize the need to “think” one’s way through space: “If you try to physically force your body into the correct confi gu- ration, you won’t be able to go where you want. You have to ‘think’ your way from point A to point B . It’s impossible to do this though unless you’ve reached a state of being completely comfortable with the air.” 5 Another prominent theme is the sense of the edgework experience as a kind of “hyper- reality.” Despite the out-of-the ordinary character of edgework, participants often describe the experience as being much more real than the circumstances of day-to-day existence. This view is expressed in a sky- diver’s description of the various stages of a jump: “While we’re riding in the airplane on the way to jump altitude, I always feel scared and a little amazed that I’m fi xing to do this bizarre thing—jump out of an airplane! But as soon as I exit the plane, it’s like stepping into another dimension. Suddenly everything seems very real and very correct. Free-fall is much more real than everyday existence.” One last sensation that arises in edgework may appear to undermine my approach. Although the preceding discussion is based on a body of rich descriptive data reported by edgeworkers themselves, many edgework enthusiasts regard the experience as inef- fable. They maintain that language simply cannot capture the essence of edgework and therefore see it as a waste of time to attempt to describe the experience. Indeed, some believe that talking about edgework should be avoided because it contaminates one’s subjective appreciation of the experi- ence. Fortunately, not all edgeworkers hold this view, as indicated by the growing body of primary data on this subject. 6 The characteristics and sensations I have described obviously vary in intensity from one form of edgework to another. For instance, fear and the sensations associated with it are EDGEWORK | 225 obviously more pronounced in the life-and- death circumstances of skydiving than they are in the consciousness-versus-unconsciousness edgework of excessive alcohol use. However, edgeworkers tend to search for more purifi ed forms of edgework. Some achieve this goal by artifi cially increasing the risks, as when skydivers jump under the infl uence of drugs or when mountain climbers make an ascent without oxygen tanks. These patterns suggest another general principle of edgework—the commitment to get as close as possible to the edge without going over it. Finally, it is important to discuss concepts relevant to voluntary risk-taking that bear some resemblance to the notion of edgework. In an early essay on this subject, Erving Goff- man conceptualizes risk-taking behavior as “action,” which he defi nes as behavior that is consequential for the individual, that has problematic outcomes, and that is under- taken for its own sake (1967, p. 185). Goff- man’s empirical illustrations of the concept of action include many of the same activities I have classifi ed as edgework: high-risk occu- pations and leisure activities, combat experi- ence, drug use, and the like. The difference between edgework and action, however, can be found in the broader scope of Goffman’s conceptualization, especially his inclusion of such activities as gambling and thrill-seeking in his illustrative material. The data I have examined indicate that these latter activities are not properly classifi ed as edgework. Edgeworkers are not typically interested in thrill-seeking or gambling because they dislike placing themselves in threatening sit- uations involving circumstances they cannot control. Since amusement-park rides or simi- lar activities involve placing one’s fate in the hands of a ride operator of unknown com- petence, these activities are usually avoided. As indicated above, edgeworkers have high regard for their own abilities to deal with danger but low regard for the abilities of those outside edgework circles. Moreover, they feel equally uncomfortable when their well-being is left to the whims of “fate.” Edgeworkers do not place much value on a pure gamble, no matter what the odds may be. What they seek is the chance to exercise skill in negotiating a challenge rather than turn their fate over to the roll of the dice. 7 A second concept that has much in com- mon with the edgework idea is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (1985, p. 491) notion of “fl ow,” which refers to a state of focused attention or deep concentration on a limited set of stimuli, accompanied by a distorted sense of time, a feeling of personal transcen- dence, and merging of the individual with the objects at hand. But while these characteris- tics bear an obvious resemblance to the edge- work sensations discussed above, fl ow differs from edgework in some important ways. For instance, the structural parameters of the two experiences are fundamentally different: Every conscious experience lies on a contin- uum ranging from boring sameness at one end to enjoyable diversity at the center and, fi nally, to anxiety-producing chaos at the further end. It is in the enjoyable middle regions of expe- rience that one’s attention is fully effective. This optimal state of involvement with experi- ence, or fl ow, is in contrast with the extremes of boredom and anxiety, which can be seen as states of alienated attention. (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981, p. 185) As we have seen, experiences belonging to the “enjoyable middle regions” cannot be clas- sifi ed as edgework since, by defi nition, edge- work involves the extreme state referred to by these authors as “anxiety-producing chaos.” The different structural correlates of the two types of experience account for some differ- ences in sensation as well. While the fl ow state produces a loss of self-consciousness (Csik- szentmihalyi 1985, p. 491), edgework stimu- lates a heightened sense of self and a feeling of omnipotence, sensations described above as self-determination or self-actualization. An examination of the similarities and differences between edgework and these | STEPHEN LYNG226 other concepts suggests that they may each refer to different dimensions of the same general phenomenon. It appears that edge- work activities represent a distinct subset of those activities that Goffman has classifi ed as action. At both levels, people seem to experi- ence elements of the fl ow phenomenon, a set of sensations that can characterize a broader range of activities, including some forms of play and certain types of work. Although it is beyond the scope of the present study to sort out the precise connections among these related concepts, this is an important matter for future research in this area. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS I have endeavored in this reading to articu- late a new approach for understanding volun- tary risk-taking. To conceive of this form of behavior as edgework is to understand it as a type of experiential anarchy in which the indi- vidual moves beyond the realm of established social patterns to the very fringes of ordered reality. The fact that many people fi nd this type of experience alluring and seek to repeat it as often as possible is an important critical statement on the nature of modern social life. There can be little doubt that the greatest impediment to further progress in the study of voluntary risk-taking is the lack of data on this important subject. It is hoped that the present study will help to guide future empirical analyses in this area of research. Complete validation of the model I have proposed will require, at the very least, more evidence relating to the institutional circumstances (especially in the domain of work) of edgework enthusiasts—in particu- lar, data that measure the degree to which alienation and oversocialization characterize the institutional routines of those who value the edgework experience. Also, the pres- ent framework would acquire even greater explanatory utility if it can be documented that the number of Americans engaging in edgework is increasing (relative to other kinds of leisure activities) with the number of people who experience alienation and oversocialization in their institutional roles. I have specifi cally avoided the implication that this reading tests such a thesis because of the lack of relevant data, but this is clearly one important avenue for future research. As a fi nal note, I would like to call atten- tion to an even greater paradox than the one referred to at the beginning of this reading. It is certainly strange that people volun- tarily place themselves at risk even as public organizations endeavor to reduce the risks of living in modern society. It is even more startling to realize that these people value risk-taking because it is the only means they have for achieving self-determination and authenticity. The same society that offers so much in the way of material “quality of life” also propels many of us to the limits of our mortal existence in search of ourselves and our humanity. NOTES 1. A recent cover story in Time magazine (Skow 1983) is indicative of the increased media attention to dangerous sports and daring exploits in the past decade. Another example of the recent interest in voluntary risk taking is its celebration in the popu- lar culture. The catchphrase of the 1980s seems to be the exhortation to “go for it.” The merits of actively seeking high-risk situations appear as a dominant theme in many pop cultural domains as well. In popular music, a high-energy, “take it to the limit” style is dominant. And in television pro- gramming and advertising, series characters and the users of advertised products are often engaged in some exciting, high-risk endeavor. Finally, the movie industry has also played a signifi cant role in giving expression to this theme; witness the suc- cess in recent years of the Indiana Jones and similar movies. 2. The only study within this tradition perhaps exempt from this criticism is Michael Balint’s (1959) analy- sis of the “philobatic/ocnophilic” continuum. 3. The author completed a parachute training course and made a number of jumps during the period of study. 4. A representative sampling of the secondary sources used in this part of the study include the following: EDGEWORK | 227 aircraft test piloting (Thompson 1979; Wolfe 1979), mountain climbing (Mitchell 1983), com- bat soldiering (Marshall 1968), prostitution (James 1980), drug use (Thompson 1971, 1979), gam- bling (Kusyszyn 1980), scuba diving (Blau 1980), rock climbing (Fawcett 1987), ice climbing (Lowe 1987), auto racing (Wilkinson 1973), motorcycle racing ( Cycle 1985–88), endurance sports (Gross 1986), downhill skiing (Loudis et al. 1986), and criminal behavior (Toch 1980). 5. This pattern was especially prevalent among the group of skydivers observed in this study. Mem- bers of the group made explicit conceptual con- nections between skydiving and other high-risk activities such as high-speed motorcycle riding, hang gliding, drug use, and so on (see Lyng and Snow 1986). 6. 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Underground Publishing. Zucherman, M., E. A. Kolin, L. Price, and I. Zoob. 1964. “Development of a Sensation-Seeking Scale.” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 28: 477–82. Resistance as Edgework in Violent Intimate Relationships of Drug-Involved Women Valli Rajah INTRODUCTION Early research on intimate partner violence ( IPV ) minimized women’s ability to shape their own lives. Women were seen as ‘trapped’ in their oppressive positions by gender inequali- ties, broadly defi ned. Later literature recog- nized women’s active adaptations to a hostile relationship environment—their ability to make realistic appraisals of risk and to struc- ture their responses accordingly (Dunn 2005). With its primary focus on the effects of vio- lence, this body of literature nevertheless still conceived of violently victimized women pri- marily as objects of oppressive forces. Recent scholarly work has explored women’s active attempts to resist male control and violence through a range of acts, including self-defence and retaliation, challenging their partners’ fi nancial control, seeking informal assistance through friends and family and seeking for- mal assistance through social-control agen- cies (such as the police), all in an effort to stem their partners’ use of violence (Abraham 2000). By whatever means and to whatever purpose—to secure critical resources, to enhance physical safety, to police a subjec- tively important symbolic boundary—some degree of resistance to extreme male control appears to be an imperative to women in vio- lent intimate relationships. Not so much counterbalancing as coexist- ing with the imperative to resist patriarchal control is a set of factors encouraging many violently victimized women to preserve their relationships. While feminist scholars origi- nally chalked women’s susceptibility to such factors up to false consciousness, subsequent research untangled the complexity of the phenomenon. Notably, recent research has examined women’s lives up close and has tried, without stigmatizing this course of action, to explain why some women choose to remain in and even work to maintain their violent intimate relationships (Dunn 2005). The costs and benefi ts of such relationships vary with context. For inner-city women, for instance, violent men may still be valued for the material support they provide (Raphael 2000), and their presence in the household may enhance women’s social status and increase their children’s physical safety (Fine et al. 2000). Yet, for any woman who adapts to rather than abandons a violent intimate relationship, the dual imperatives to resist patriarchal control, on one hand, and to maintain the relationship, on the other, cre- ate a situation of sociological ambivalence, in which the multiple, contradictory roles she inhabits give rise to potentially confl ict- ing normative expectations and privileges (Merton and Barber 1976; Connidis and McMullin 2002). Typically, cultural con- ventions and social relations necessitate that women manage sociological ambivalence in intimate relationships through oscillating practices of accommodation and resistance (Connidis and McMullin 2002). | VALLI RAJAH230 This reading looks at a population of poor, drug-using, largely African American and Puerto Rican women with habitually violent male intimate partners to examine one particular practice: the use of edge- work as resistance to violent exploitation and patriarchal control. It is based upon an empirical investigation and the analyses pre- sented here have important implications for criminology, particularly for a body of IPV scholarship that examines women’s lived experience of violence. The analyses are informed by, and add to, research conducted in other areas of criminology—research that recognizes the body not merely as an entity that constrains or enables certain kinds of crime or victimization but as central to the social order generally and to criminal action or performance particularly (Katz 1988; Ferrell and Sanders 1995). From this per- spective, IPV can be viewed as a criminal practice that is constructed, experienced and even avoided in and through embodied practices, discourses and social relation- ships (Monaghan 2004). This is not to say that existing IPV research has completely ignored the importance of the body. It has argued, for instance, that men often con- strain and visibly injure women’s bodies as part of larger processes of control. Impor- tantly, however, this paper demonstrates the specifi c importance of an embodied perspec- tive when evaluating women’s actions in relationships characterized by IPV. Likewise, victim-precipitation theories (Hindelang et al. 1981) suggesting that women act in ways that increase their risk of victimization have been criticized for ignoring the asym- metrical power relations that help explain violence against women and the ways in which women regulate or adapt their prac- tices and even their bodies to avoid it. The analyses presented here suggest that when women resist IPV with a skilful, embodied performance, they not only self-regulate but also exercise control over themselves and over a given interaction, which in turn yields its own embodied rewards. Finally, developing the embodied perspective here proposed may be of particular importance to criminology given the legal and criminal justice responses to IPV that increasingly identify the body as a site on which specifi c legal determinations are to be made. In New York state, for instance, where this research was conducted, a 1996 amendment to the Family Protection and Domestic Violence Intervention Act requires that police offi cers ascertain degrees of physical injury and dif- ferentiate offensive from defensive wounds when making domestic-violence arrests 1 [NY Crim. Proc. Law § 140.10(4)(c) (McK- inney Supp. 2001)]. RESISTANCE Resistance—which can be broadly under- stood as nonconformist behaviour that ques- tions the legitimacy of a prevailing social order—may be a necessary element in any relationship of dominance (Foucault 1978; McFarland 2004), but in the intimate rela- tionships examined here, its consequences can be severe. Research has linked the high rates of partner violence that drug-involved women experience—more than two to three times the 21–34 per cent range found in surveys of the general population (El-Bassel et al. 2005)—to their social marginalization and symbolic degradation (Ettorre 2004). Approximately 90 per cent of this study’s participants reported a lifetime prevalence of physical assault in their intimate rela- tionships, and roughly three-quarters expe- rienced some form of sexual coercion by an intimate partner during their lifetimes. For more than two-thirds of the women, an attack by an intimate partner resulted in physical injury, with half of such cases causing unconsciousness, causing broken bones or requiring a visit to a doctor. Study participants experienced comparable rates and intensity of violence with their current RESISTANCE AS EDGEWORK IN VIOLENT INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS OF DRUG-INVOLVED WOMEN | 231 intimate partners, who were the principal focus of discussion in this study. In light of their experience with partner violence and their sociologically ambiva- lent position, it is not surprising that study participants rarely adopted overt means to resist their partners’ controlling behaviour. Research has made similar fi ndings for resis- tance in very different relations similarly marked by a signifi cant imbalance of power, such as relationships between peasants and oppressive overseers. These studies assume that ‘oppressors’ usually suppress any per- ceived challenge to their authority and that individuals facing the threat of retaliation for their actions, and often operating in situ- ations of near-constant surveillance, must fi nd unique, less open forms of resistance if they are to resist. In such contexts, individu- als creatively reinvent and extend the mean- ings of everyday actions to express their opposition while masking their true inten- tions (Scott 1985). Physical acts of resistance are sometimes employed, though typically in ways that obscure their full meaning, as when oppressed workers feign illness to oppose their exploitation. The situation of one labourer among many acting against the wishes of a control- ling power is rather different, however, from the situation of a wife disobeying her violent and controlling husband. Without the cover of anonymity, one intimate partner openly resisting the controlling powers of another runs the obvious risk of reprisals. Further- more, violent retaliation to an overt act of resistance solidifi es the meaning of the resis- tant act and may tangibly impact the rela- tionship in ways that the woman does not desire. Covert action, on the other hand, provides protection from violent retalia- tion, and because of its ambiguity, it also allows multiple meanings to be attached to it, enabling a greater range of actions to be taken in the future. The minority, drug-using women in this study undertake a wide variety of both overt and covert acts in defi ance of their part- ners’ authority. Here, I examine a particular form of this resistance in which meaning is somewhat obscured, though not so much as to render the act risk-free and devoid of embodied rewards. I analyse instances of such resistance as ‘edgework’—a term origi- nally used to describe volitional risk-taking activities like skydiving—activities in which participants knowingly court the danger of physical injury but deploy context-specifi c expertise as their means of avoiding such injury. Two interrelated questions are here addressed: (1) What constitutes edgework, and why does it make sense as a resistance strategy in the context of a violent intimate relationship? (2) What kind of edgework- resistance do these women engage in, and what are the risks and benefi ts of their actions? The answers to these questions will add to existing scholarship on edgework (Lyng 2005) by recognizing the phenom- enon in the context of everyday life and by exploring how its practice might be differ- entiated across gender, class and race. This reading also advances resistance literature by examining an underdeveloped perspec- tive on the benefi ts of resistance, and it joins a well-developed body of scholarship call- ing for greater clarifi cation of the impact of resistance (Rubin 1996; Hollander and Ein- wohner 2004). EDGEWORK AS RESISTANCE The concept of edgework was originally developed to describe dangerous recreational activities like skydiving—voluntary behav- iours undertaken in a highly controlled fash- ion but entailing a clearly observable threat to one’s physical well-being (Lyng 1990). The concept was extended to describe simi- lar behaviour by those who pursue danger- ous professions such as emergency rescue work (Lois 2005). As different as skydiving | VALLI RAJAH232 and rescue work may be, they share several factors from the perspective of the edgework paradigm. Skydivers and rescue workers alike engage in intense preparation before putting themselves in harm’s way. Unpre- pared individuals undertaking either activity would fi nd the line between safety and dan- ger to be thin. An edgeworker, on the other hand, through careful preparation, trans- forms a clear line between safety and danger into a risk-fi lled but survivable border zone (Milovanovic 2005). Metaphorically speak- ing, he turns a nearly perpendicular drop-off from a plane of total security into a steep but navigable edge from which he may retreat to safety but on which he will pay dearly for any false move. From a sociological standpoint, edge- work takes place not just within a bound- ary zone between safety and harm but also between order and chaos, or between nor- mative and nonnormative practices (Lyng 2005). In approaching the limits of physi- cal safety, edgeworkers are freed from social roles. When self-refl ection falls away, indi- viduals experience transcendence marked not primarily by fear but by intense feel- ings of excitement, self-determination and even omnipotence (Lyng 1990). Edgework can be viewed as a form of resistance to specifi c contradictions of late capitalism, wherein institutions increasingly privilege self-control, calculation and routinization while themselves being considerably desta- bilized (O’Malley and Mugford 1994; Lyng 2005). In the context of social-institutional restrictions and risks, edgework can also be conceptualized as an ‘ethic’ and skill set that individuals develop to navigate an envi- ronment that fails to provide them with a coherent social experience (McDonald 1999; Young 2003; Lyng 2005). A coherent social experience, of course, is exactly what an indi- vidual whose social position is characterized by extreme sociological ambivalence lacks. I propose, therefore, to extend the edgework paradigm by applying it to an inquiry into oppressive intimate relationships. In this context, edgework functions not as a way in which individuals momentarily escape the fi gurative strictures of modern social existence but as a way in which they might periodically challenge the literal strictures of their oppressed position. For women involved in intimate relation- ships marked by a history of drug use and violence, edgework represents a mode of resistance to patriarchal privilege and con- trol. As it does for other individuals in very different contexts, edgework for this study’s participants entails a conscious departure from a zone of safety into a zone of relative danger. It entails courting physical harm by defying their violent partners’ wishes absent any practical exigency demanding that they do so. It requires context-specifi c expertise, born of intense preparation. And when car- ried out successfully, it delivers embodied rewards. An examination of the processes discussed above requires a methodology that allows us to capture women’s lived experience up close. INVESTIGATION A combined theoretical and convenience- sampling strategy was used to recruit 50 women from three Methadone Maintenance Treatment Programs (MMTPs) in New York City to participate in 98 in-depth interviews and a close-ended survey questionnaire over a two-and-a-half-year period. Potential par- ticipants were told that the study was not connected to the clinic in any way and that its aim was to gain a better understanding of the lives of women on methadone generally and of their experiences in relationships par- ticularly. At fi rst, women were scheduled to take part in interviews on a fi rst-come, fi rst- served basis. Then, as interview slots started to fi ll up, particular women were targeted so that the pool of interview participants would match the racial/ethnic background of the RESISTANCE AS EDGEWORK IN VIOLENT INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS OF DRUG-INVOLVED WOMEN | 233 clinic population as a whole, which was roughly 58 per cent Latino (predominantly Puerto Rican), 27 per cent African American and 16 per cent Caucasian. A woman was deemed eligible for the study if she was ‘drug-involved’ and if, based on her responses to the revised CTS2 scale (Straus et al. 1996), she acknowledged being ‘abused’ 2 by a ‘primary’ heterosex- ual romantic partner during the past year. Drug-involvement was defi ned by eligibility requirements for methadone treatment: at least one year of opiate use and demonstrated tolerance and abstinence (withdrawal) symp- toms (Hartel 1993). A ‘primary partner’ was defi ned as a person whom the respondent described as a boyfriend, spouse, ex-spouse, regular male sexual partner or the father of her children and with whom the respondent had: (1) engaged in a regular dating or sexual relationship within the past year; (2) lived with in the past year and formerly had a dating or sexual relationship; or (3) shared childcare responsibilities within the past year and formerly had a dating or sexual rela- tionship. This broad defi nition of intimate partners is similar to that commonly used in other domestic-violence research (Fagan and Browne 1994). Participants were paid $20 for each interview that they completed. All participants completed a baseline in- depth interview and a closed-ended survey instrument that investigated demographic characteristics. Interviews focused on partici- pants’ personal biographies and the broader cultural and social forces that shaped their lived experience. Respondents were asked to reconstruct the transactions that occurred within several distinct incidences of IPV. A second in-depth interview was undertaken with a subsample of 30 women who met an additional sampling criterion: that their pri- mary partners were also drug-involved dur- ing the course of their relationships with the participants. The second in-depth interview covered several topical areas to examine not only the ways in which the women in the study had engaged in and responded to con- fl ict in their relationships but also how fi nan- cial and drug interdependencies impacted these dynamics. Additional questions focused on women’s own use of violence in their rela- tionships, how such violent engagements began and how they were resolved. Finally, a third interview was conducted with a further subsample of 18 women who had partici- pated in the fi rst two interviews and who had been in the longest-lasting relationships to ascertain the impact that relationship longev- ity may have on women’s responses to IPV. An open-ended, longitudinal, multiple- wave design was used to augment the intimacy between the researcher and the interviewees, to encourage freer disclosure and to provide an internal check on the consistency of inter- viewees’ responses. In an effort to ensure that women’s accounts of their experiences were not overly constructed by the research protocol, I employed an ‘active interviewing’ approach (Holstein and Gubrium 1997). All interviews were audiotaped. The data in this paper are based on the 93 in-depth inter- views that were transcribed verbatim. (Five initial baseline interviews were excluded.) To ensure confi dentiality, all names of partici- pants have been changed. DATA ORGANIZATION Sample Characteristics The overall sample included in this analy- sis includes seven Caucasians, 23 Latinas (including 20 Puerto Ricans) and 15 African Americans—proportions that roughly match the racial/ethnic characteristics of the clinic population as a whole. The average age of study participants was 38. The women in this study generally fi t the profi le of individuals typically classifi ed as members of the under- class. The majority were raised in families plagued by various social problems, includ- ing poverty, parental absence or neglect, sui- cide, drug addiction and violence. They have | VALLI RAJAH234 continued to experience many of these same problems in their own adult lives. In the fi rst year of this study, the average annual income of the women was $5,442. During the previ- ous year, almost a quarter had been homeless, and roughly three-quarters reported having too little money to feed themselves and their families. Almost all participants began bear- ing children before the age of 18, and they cared for these children—when they retained custody—as single mothers. The majority of the women did not fi nish high school, and during the study’s fi rst year, 95 per cent were unemployed, and roughly 85 per cent depended on government assistance for their survival. Because of the changing terms of welfare policy, the majority of these partici- pants had recently seen or expected to see their public benefi ts cut or terminated in the near future. Further deepening the poverty of the women in the study was their history of drug use. Every participant had a history of heroin addiction, and the majority had been in methadone treatment for over fi ve years. Their intimate partners had similar histories of drug use. Most of the women were poly- drug users at the time of their fi rst interview, reportedly using heroin, crack and other forms of cocaine in addition to methadone. The majority of the women had been in the relationships they discussed in this study for more than seven years and had shared a household with this male partner during at least some of that period. Like other drug- involved women, study participants have histories of exposure to other forms of vio- lence in their lives, including physical and sexual abuse in childhood and various forms of street violence as adults (see Maher 1997; Sterk 1999). ANALYSIS Edgework is a concept that was originally developed to explain dangerous recreational and professional activities. Translating it to a very different kind of risk-taking activity— resistance to violence and control in an inti- mate relationship—reveals certain signifi cant differences that expand the edgework con- cept rather than pushing it beyond its useful limits. Risk Thresholds and the Rewards of Resistance A fundamental quality of edgework is the sensation that it delivers—the sometimes transcendent thrill of putting oneself in harm’s way and surviving (Lyng 2005). Edgework as a form of resistance in violent intimate relationships appears to deliver similar rewards—not thrills, perhaps, but at least a sense of accomplishment and per- sonal authorship for having defi ed the con- straints of a controlling intimate partner. An act that constitutes defi ance in one relation- ship, however, may not do so in another because the meaning of an act varies from setting to setting. Furthermore, the negative consequences of defi ance may be far greater in one relationship than in another. It stands to reason, then, that the rewards experi- enced by different women undertaking the same act of resistance will vary with the risk environment of each woman’s intimate relationship. Grace is an African American woman who, at the time of our interviews, had been married to her husband for more than 25 years. Grace recounted that she would fantasize about poisoning her husband’s food or putting ground glass in it to damage his internal organs. She also explained, how- ever, that while she ‘pictured’ herself per- forming these acts, she would never commit them because they would distance her from the impact and pleasure of her resistance: Grace: I’d rather take a stick and whack him up his head, cause that way I could feel it. Maybe that’s colder. If I was to hit him with a stick, I’ve RESISTANCE AS EDGEWORK IN VIOLENT INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS OF DRUG-INVOLVED WOMEN | 235 swung, I connected, and I hit him. I could see the pain and the anger and his head go back from the blow. And I could see that I did it. (2B) For Lucia, a Puerto Rican woman, on the other hand, a covert act of resistance that Grace would regard as unsatisfying carries with it some of the satisfaction Grace says she could gain only through open, physical resistance: Lucia: I would do little things like, if I would make him a sandwich or something, and if the bread fell on the fl oor I would pick it up and wipe it off and put it back. . . . I’ll put it back in and give it to him. VR: How does it affect you when you do things like put the bread from the fl oor into the sandwich? Lucia: I don’t know, it’s just knowing that I did something that he wouldn’t like, you know? Just knowing that if he knew that I did that, he would blow a fi t. . . . Just knowing that I did that would give me like that little edge. (161B) While Grace’s husband had beaten her severely at times, Grace estimated that this had happened a dozen times in their 25 years together. Lucia’s experience was differ- ent. The danger of violence in Lucia’s inti- mate relationship was pervasive, and severe physical abuse regularly occurred. Not sur- prisingly, Lucia’s threshold for deriving sat- isfaction from an act of resistance was far lower than Grace’s. If edgework were defi ned solely in terms of taking risks and experienc- ing affective rewards, then the subjectivity of women’s perceptions of risks and rewards would render the concept so broad as to be of little value. Edgework, however, has other defi ning characteristics, both as originally applied to high-risk recreational activities and violent intimate relationships. Preparation for Edgework A sine qua non of edgework is the acquisi- tion of special knowledge and/or skills that make a dangerous activity safe enough to undertake. In an edgework activity like sky- diving, the laws of physics present all partici- pants with the same risks, whether they jump for the fi rst or for the thousandth time. Like fi ghter pilots and fi refi ghters, skydivers gain mastery of their chosen risk-taking activity only through extensive fi rsthand experience, but they gain their basic skills and knowledge through formal training. The predictable nature of skydiving does not negate its dan- gers, but it has allowed for the development of a universally applicable safety curriculum. Given the variable risk environments from one intimate relationship to the next, no such objective safety guidelines apply to preparing for the kind of edgework discussed here. Yet, while fi rsthand experience may be the most important teacher for women resisting male violence and control in their intimate rela- tionships, a kind of baseline early training often does play a crucial role. In childhood, more than a quarter of study participants witnessed violence between their parents or primary caregivers, and in most cases this violence was directed toward respondents’ mothers. Earlier studies have found that witnessing violence in child- hood may increase a woman’s aggressive responses to interpersonal confl ict and her risk of being abused by an intimate partner (O’Leary 1988). The accounts I gathered were more nuanced, however, when it came to the impact of witnessing a mother’s vio- lent victimization. It appears that watching their mothers try to manage male violence gave study participants an early lesson in what and what not to do in their own violent relationships. A long-term history of drug involvement provides a further common background of preparation for edgework, a body of knowl- edge and set of skills on which women | VALLI RAJAH236 frequently call in managing their violent partners. This experience and knowledge refl ect an addict’s habitus (Bourdieu 2001)— the skills a drug user develops in interaction with other drug users which enable her to secure drugs, fi nesse the conditions under which she uses and manage her involvement in drug treatment. Study participants empha- sized that their relationships with drug-using intimate partners were different from their relationships with other fellow drug-users because of their affective basis. Yet, even in their intimate relations, these women employed skills and strategies learned through drug use to manage the problems they had in their relationships. They learned, for instance, how their partners’ patterns of drug use could be exploited in the interest of minimizing risk when undertaking an act of resistance. Women frequently reported, for instance, that both they and their part- ners wanted ‘quiet’ time after being medi- cated at methadone treatment programmes, so they would arrange things accordingly to minimize the likelihood that confl ict would erupt if one partner disturbed the other. Women also recognized that approaching their partners at certain specifi c points in their drug cycles could lessen their risk that these men would become violent. Roberta, an African American woman, explains how she strategically raised issues of concern that might provoke her partner’s anger: Roberta: When I know he don’t have noth- ing in his system, not even metha- done, you know, and it’s early in the morning, we just woke up, and we’re getting ready to come to our programs . . . So when he’s not high, and I’m not high and have nothing in our system, then I would try to talk to him about things that upset me or things that I didn’t like, or how to improve, make things better and everything, and then he would be agreeable and understandable and everything right. (28B) Several other women reported employing a strategy similar to Roberta’s, while others reported timing their acts of open resistance to periods when their partners were in the throes of withdrawal because at these times their partners would be too ill to retaliate. Finally, preparation for edgework as resis- tance to intimate partner violence can be seen in the skill set and knowledge base gained by women through fi rsthand experience acting within a particular violent relationship. Having lived, hustled and taken drugs with their male partners sometimes over decades, women were aware of their various partners’ likes, dislikes, strengths and weaknesses. The women rou- tinely acted on the basis of this knowledge in every aspect of their relationships, including in their acts of resistance. As Lucia, the extremely cautious risk-taker quoted earlier, said: I’ve lived with him [my partner] for nine years, it’s gonna be ten years and I know his weaknesses, I know his sleeping pat- tern. I know him. So, I know I COULD hurt him. Now he knows it, too, [so] it’s like a tug of war you know. (161B) Preparation for edgework in this context, however, also entails learning how far one can push the envelope. As with any danger- ous activity, one can either approach a risk zone cautiously or headlong. While Lucia might be viewed as pursuing the former course, Anna, another study participant, took the latter. She recounted the following story about pretending to her partner that there was a rival for her affections: Anna: I told [my partner] that, you know, ‘It’s not working between us, so I think we should start seeing other people.’ He goes ‘Why, you got somebody?’ I said ‘Well, I met somebody. I’m not going with them, RESISTANCE AS EDGEWORK IN VIOLENT INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS OF DRUG-INVOLVED WOMEN | 237 I didn’t make love to him or noth- ing like that.’ And then my fos- ter brother happened to call right after. . . . [My partner] goes, ‘Oh, your lover is already calling.’ Then he turned around and threw one of those thick-ass, long, this-color crys- tal ashtrays—those thick ones, those big round ones. He hit me and my head split here. I had a blood clot on my head, my brain. That was the worst thing I coulda done. (123B) Several women in the study strongly empha- sized that when it comes to violence, ‘every man is different’. We can extend this to the basic idea that the context of each act of violence and resistance is unique, as are the require- ments of each ‘successful’ act of edgework. These assumptions about the specifi city of edgework resistance notwithstanding, situ- ations characterized by acute sociological ambivalence lend themselves especially well to edgework resistance. For women, one such situation occurs around sexual practices, which involve inherently confl icting social constructions of women’s sexuality. The women I spoke with articulated confl icting perspectives regarding sex in intimate rela- tionships. On one hand, they espoused the belief that a woman should maintain an inti- mate relationship only to the extent that it is sexually satisfying and allows for emotional closeness and self-expression (cf. Giddens 1992). Yet, in tension with this perspective, the women in this study also reported work- ing to satisfy their partners’ sexual needs and desires as part of their ‘wifely duties’, some- times at great personal cost. Drug use and the public images associ- ated with the sex practices of drug-involved women are implicated in women’s sex lives as well. Drug use can negatively affect an individual’s capacity to perform sexually and enjoy sexual activity and can even alter the perceived meaning of sexual activity. More- over, male partners both forced unwanted sexual activity on study participants and controlled how these women experienced sex while high (El-Bassel et al. 2003). At the same time, women are haunted by promi- nent popular images associated with drug- involved women such as that of the ‘crack whore’—a woman so degraded that she will wantonly use her sexuality to secure resources for drugs and will engage in sex- ual activity simply because crack makes her desire sex (Campbell 2000). Although such public images do not match the reality of their sex lives, 3 the women I spoke with were cognizant of this imagery and sought to dis- tance themselves from it. Both for the sake of intimacy and because of the real fear of vio- lent victimization, women typically met their partners’ demands and restrictions when it came to sex, but not always. Examples of Well Executed Edgework Resistance Individuals who resist often do so sponta- neously and opportunistically, minimizing the risks associated with opposing domi- nant actors (Scott 1985). Even spontaneous acts of edgework resistance, however, draw upon knowledge and experiences that, in effect, constitute preparation for resistance. Frustrated with her inability to infl uence her partner Tony’s patterns of violence through talk and cooperation, a Puerto Rican study participant seized an unplanned opportunity to resist her partner’s controlling behaviour with a well played act of edgework: Ciara: I went down to the store and I was talking to Slick. . . . Slick told me, ‘Ciara, when you come back, don’t go to your house. Just keep going all the way up to the other apartment,’ to where he’s at. You know what I did fi rst, though? I knock on my door, and I drop the bags, instead of taking the bags with me. . . . Tony opened the door, and I said, ‘Tony, | VALLI RAJAH238 I’ll be back.’ And he said, ‘Where you goin’?’ And he see Slick goin’ up. But he was scared of Slick, because [Slick]’s a drug dealer . . . ‘cause he got guns, whatever. I knew he was scared of him. He know you can’t fuck with him, ’cause you’re gonna get your ass whipped. I said, ‘Listen, I’ll be right back. I gotta go upstairs, I gotta do something.’ I stayed half an hour upstairs. On the face of it, Ciara’s provocative act was an extremely risky kind of resistance. She continues her narrative: When I was coming down the stairs, I was thinking to myself, ‘Oh man, Tony’s gonna be pissed off. He’s gonna try to hit me or somethin.’ I thought like that—boom! [Ciara makes a hitting motion in the air]—coming at me. But he wasn’t on drugs—he was clean. So I guess, I don’t know, for that or the frightness about Slick, or I don’t know what, when I came in that house, and he said, ‘What was it that you had to do that took you half an hour? What, you was with Slick upstairs?’ [I said] ‘So, what? I was just stay up in my friend’s house.’ He was with this face [Ciara makes a grimace] sitting down, won- dering, thinking. [. . .] So I just chilled out, whatever. Then I took my shower, whatever, and we never spoke about it. What makes this act successful edgework is not only that she escaped retaliation but also that she escaped retaliation specifi cally because her partner’s freedom of action was constrained by factors of which Ciara was very much aware. Ciara opportunistically chose to resist in a specifi c context in which her partner had every reason to accept her denials and thereby render her edgework successful. It is also worth noting that Tony was not high—a factor that Ciara earlier explained diminishes the likelihood that he will use violence against her. Ciara experienced several pleasures through her act of edgework. First, Ciara pre- sumably derived pleasure from the attentions of Slick, a man whom she reveals, later in her interview, she fi nds sexually attractive. Sec- ond, and critically, Ciara also experienced the pleasure that accompanies self-authoring a course of action and defying her often oppres- sive partner. As she concludes her story: He never, NEVER asked me [about Slick] no more, but I could see it. See, he never messed with me ’cause he was scared. I think that if it would have been some- body else, he would have probably went upstairs [after me] or whatever. (200B) Ciara’s well played act of edgework helped stop her partner from retaliating with violence—a course of action that he has taken many times before. A mastery of context selection can also be played out more subtly in edgework. To understand the story excerpted below, it is important to know that the study partici- pant, Louisa, was highly skilled at manipu- lating men sexually because of her experience as a sex worker. Louisa relates an example of how she would defy her violent partner’s sexual expectations, which included his desire for acts she associated with sex work: Louisa: I would start off like uninterested, where he had to do more of the work [and] where he wasn’t get- ting his fulfi llment. And he knew that my capabilities was far more advanced and he didn’t know why I wasn’t putting out, you under- stand? Then, all of a sudden, when he least expected it, boom. I would just whip it on him and it would be over with, cause he couldn’t take it, you know? Then he would wish that I stayed the way I was, cause it RESISTANCE AS EDGEWORK IN VIOLENT INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS OF DRUG-INVOLVED WOMEN | 239 woulda last him longer, you know what I mean? (63B) Louisa made it clear to me that in any other context, such an act of defi ance on her part would have invited a serious and violent response from her partner. But beyond involv- ing the exercise of context-specifi c expertise, what makes her act such a fi ne example of edgework is Louisa’s selection of a sexual context for her defi ance. The thrill and pleasure associated with the edgework per- formed by both Louisa and Ciara derives in part because both women believed their part- ners had a level of awareness that they were being thwarted. While this made the risks they were taking real, both women counted on their partners’ not responding with vio- lence because doing so would acknowledge the emasculating defi ance and illuminate the men’s tenuous control. As Louisa continued: And he say, ‘Please stop, wait, wait, if you don’t I’m a come.’ And he would be like, ‘Oh god. I know you must think I’m a real wimp.’ Cause it would be, and this is no lie, I could count up to sixty, and it be fi nished. Louisa describes her feelings in bringing her mastery to bear in an act of defi ance: Louisa: I knew my qualifi cations. I was on the street for a couple of years you get to learn each man, their weak spots, stuff like that. . . . I knew everything about him, what not to do, what to do. [I’d tell myself,] ‘Oh you could make a man stand on his head if you wanted to.’ I would pat myself on the back, you know what I mean? He would be begging me to stop because I was too good. (63B) As we can see, Louisa expressed a sense of accomplishment and personal authorship that are the ultimate goal of successful edgework. DISCUSSION Recent scholarship examines the everyday life experiences of women in violent relation- ships and challenges conventional under- standings of such women as passive actors trapped by their experiences. What is left undeveloped in much of this work, however, is an examination of how women author their own experiences even in the midst of extremely oppressive situations. The present research attempts to fi ll part of this gap by drawing on scholarship on resistance, socio- logical ambivalence and edgework. Poor, drug-using, largely African Ameri- can and Puerto Rican women with habitually violent male partners experience profound sociological ambivalence in their intimate relationships, operating under contradictory imperatives to resist their partners’ violence and patriarchal control without threatening the stability of their relationships. Edgework is a mode of resistance that serves these com- peting imperatives while giving oppressed women the opportunity to experience the rewards of self-authorship. In the context of intimate relationships, the specialized knowledge that is a defi ning characteristic of edgework is largely habitual and gained in daily life. In terms of risks and rewards, however, the volitional acts described here and undertaken by women in defi ance of their violent male partners closely approxi- mate the risks and rewards of ‘traditional’ edgework. Scholars have noted that the kind of activi- ties typically associated with edgework— skydiving, stock-trading—are typically out of reach for poor minorities (Miller 1991; O’Malley and Mugford 1994). However, the risky environments navigated daily by poor minorities in the inner city, and par- ticularly by those who use drugs, can be viewed as training ground for various other kinds of edgework. Employing the skills they have acquired in their daily lives to the edge- work they practice in their violent intimate | VALLI RAJAH240 relationships, women not only respond to risks posed by their partners, but they also play with the line that separates safety from danger— a defi ning aspect of edgework. It is worth noting that most of the exam- ples of resistance cited earlier involved sexu- ality and sexual fi delity. In every aspect of their intimate relationships, study partici- pants fi nd their actions constrained by the threat of male violence, yet they are also aware of the power they hold in the con- text of sexual relations, whether because of cultural meanings broadly associated with women’s sexuality, because of the especially high value placed on sex as a form of capital in contexts of long-term drug use, or because of some combination of both (Maher 1997; Bourdieu 2001). In examining strategies of resistance by which women leverage this power, the research reported here adds an important new perspective to existing lit- erature by suggesting that edgework may be differentiated across gender, class and race. The resistance concept itself is also refi ned by this research in several ways. Existing research has been criticized for its failure to specify when resistance is likely to occur. This paper argues that women are particu- larly prone to and may be particularly capa- ble of resisting masculine domination when negotiating sociological ambivalence in their intimate relationships. Existing resistance scholarship has also been criticized for fall- ing into one of two extremes: either allowing almost any act to be interpreted as resistance (Scott 1985) or leaving too little room for the possibility of resistance by overplaying the social and cultural forces that limit it (Radway 1991). By applying the concept of edgework to the intimate sphere, this read- ing lays out one way in which oppressed women can and do perform clear and spe- cifi c acts of resistance to patriarchal control, even in the face of strong forces discourag- ing such action. Finally, this research adds a previously missing piece to the resistance lit- erature, which has pointed to the embodied pleasures and escape of resistance without necessarily articulating the conditions that produce such pleasures. Finally, it is important to acknowledge that while edgework as a form of resistance to intimate partner violence may offer vis- ceral rewards, it does not necessarily consti- tute a victory for women and may even help to reproduce gender inequality. Instances of failed edgework, in particular, may have dire repercussions for women. Nevertheless, the embodied experience of successful edgework may lead women to identify contradictions in their social position, which may, in turn, lead to changes in consciousness that coun- teract their oppression. NOTES 1. The recognition that procedural problems with the implementation of this 1994 act had contributed to the wrongful arrest of individuals in domestic disputes led to the addition, two years later, of a “Primary Physical Aggressor” (PPA) provision to the law [N. Y. Crim. Proc. Law § 140.10 (4)(c) (McKinney Supp. 2001]. When making arrest deci- sions, police offi cers are directed to identify the Primary Physical Aggressor (PPA) by evaluating the following four factors: (1) the comparative extent of any injuries infl icted by and between the par- ties; (2) whether either party is threatening or has threatened future harm against another household member; (3) whether either party has a prior his- tory of domestic violence that can be reasonably ascertained; (4) whether either party acted defen- sively to protect himself or herself from injury. 2. The Confl ict Tactics Scale 2 defi nes violence as “an act carried out with the intention or perceived intention of causing pain or injury to another per- son” and examines physical, sexual and emotional acts that meet these criteria (Hudson and MacIn- tosh 1981). Because violence is a subjective expe- rience, when women characterized as “violent” a phenomenon outside of this defi nition, I report it (DeKeseredy and Schwartz 1998). 3. For instance, typically, women described how when they were using cocaine or crack, they “felt sexy” or sensual but did not actually want physical con- tact. In contrast, crack use increased their partners’ desire to have sex. It is notable that crack had oppo- site and incompatible effects on their sexual desires and the sexual desires of their partners. Predictably, this often encouraged confl ict between them. RESISTANCE AS EDGEWORK IN VIOLENT INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS OF DRUG-INVOLVED WOMEN | 241 REFERENCES Abraham, M. 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(2003), ‘Merton with Energy, Katz with Struc- ture: The Sociology of Vindictiveness and the Crimi- nology of Transgression’, Theoretical Criminology , 7: 388–414. Connections Parkour through Labeling, Resistance, and Edgework John J. Brent INTRODUCTION Unclipping the front support strap from his backpack, he walks to the end of the rooftop to get a better view of the landing obscured by the building’s height. The plan is to jump approximately 20 feet from one rooftop to the next. Rather than taking the conventional route to the next build- ing by utilizing elevators, stairs, sidewalks, and doors, this participant of parkour reconstructs rooftops within the city as mere launching and landing platforms. In essence, his plan challenges and resist the norms and rules built into the environment to reappropriate rooftops and ledges as sites of exhilaration. After taking a quick look over the edge, he returns to the center of the building where he prepares for the jump. The backpack, in order to reduce weight and imbalance, is ditched; shoe laces are tightened and tucked in; and a couple run passes are taken to ensure proper footing. Across the way, a friend helps guarantee a successful landing by examining the area and remov- ing any potentially hazardous debris. At this point, the jump has been discussed, planned, and thoroughly scrutinized. Without hesitation he takes off, resembling a sprinter trying to maximize the limited running space. Reaching the edge of the building his right foot plants with inches to spare, his left knee forcefully drives up, and both arms swing forward to help initiate the jump. Despite the power and force generated, his body regroups into a symmetrical form as he soars across the gap. Should the jump fail, pavement, metal trash dumpsters, and a few parked cars are all that’s left to break his fall. However, midway through the skill it is clear he has the distance to reach the roof- top across the ally. The task now has quickly shifted from the jump to negotiating a safe landing. As both feet touch down a safe distance from the ledge, his body coils to absorb the impact of the landing and reduce the possibility of injury. Still carrying a good deal of forward momentum, he tucks his right shoulder and seamlessly transitions into a forward roll before springing up to his feet. As he looks back, excitement runs through his body, there is a sense of satisfaction, thrill, and—of course—celebration. This is parkour. As the description above highlights, parkour (or free-running) is often marked by its physical displays of uninhibited behavior, daring feats of unconventional skill, and sheer wonderment for both practitioners and onlookers. Although founded in the small suburb of Lisses in Paris during the 1980s, this international phenomenon has become a lifestyle sport practiced by many. The primary goal of parkour is to travel the city by running, jumping, balancing, climbing, and vaulting over encountered obstacles as effi ciently and fl uidly as possible (Bavin- ton 2007). By showcasing daring leaps, exciting acrobatics, and unrestrained movement, this new sport has generated massive audiences and has become part of popular culture. This | JOHN J. BRENT244 is evidenced by the growing number of movies, commercials, clothing lines, Web sites, and gyms catering to the activity of parkour. Despite its appeal to many, parkour is considered an urban nuisance by many because it violates norms about how public space is to be used (Thomson 2008). Being a risk-laden activity that is marginalized by society yet alluring to its practitioners, this new urban sport provides a rich fi eld for theoretical investigation. In the reading, I use parkour to contrast the labeling, resistance, and edgework perspec- tives. This reading proposes that edgework is an important theoretical perspective that has and will continue to advance our understanding of deviance in contemporary society. More specifi cally, labeling theory has argued that social reactions to deviant behavior amount to informal and formal social control of those who engaged in it. Labels and stigma were believed to shame deviants into more conforming behavior. Contemporary ideas about social control in society (Grattet 2011), however, feature a much more invasive and excessive set of tools and practices. Researchers link this shift to the failure of the criminal justice system to provide effective security to the public. As Garland (2001) argues, individuals now face an unprecedented “culture of control” whereby ordinary behaviors have become subject to monitoring and regulation. Consequentially, societal reac- tions now extend far beyond mere labels and stigma; they have expanded to much grander notions about governing individuals in everyday life. In response to this culture of control, edgework offers what contemporary society often deprives: the possibility for self-determination, uninhibited behavior, emotional outbursts, and spontaneous expression. More importantly, edgework provides opportunity for seizing control and realizing choice, expression, and autonomy. This reading offers an overview of the basic tenants of labeling theory, resistance, and edgework and how each understands the practice of parkour—that is, free-running—in urban space. Further, this reading considers how an edgework activity, such as parkour, can be understood as a reaction to society’s preoccupation with safety and order. Lastly, by offer- ing a comparison of these conceptual frameworks, we can see the value of both classic and contemporary ideas of deviance in everyday life. PARKOUR AS A DEVIANT LABEL Labeling theory is primarily concerned with how society reacts to nonnormative behaviors. It does not consider certain individuals or actions inherently deviant. Therefore, parkour is not deviant per se but only becomes so when people defi ne it that way and sanction traceurs (free-runners). This societal reaction perspective, outlined in the Lemert (1974) reading in this section, refers to the processes through which individuals and groups respond to socially defi nitions of deviance. Central to this perspective, he adds, are the “expressions of disap- proval” that are validated by sources of social control. That is, the labeling perspective is equipped to consider how free-running becomes (re)constructed as a social problem and urban nuisance. In short, special consideration is given to the disapproving societal reaction, not the act itself found in violation of established rules or laws. In addition to examining why certain behaviors earn a deviant status, the labeling or soci- etal reaction perspective also considers the successful application of the deviant label and its respective punishment. The reading by Lemert (1974), for instance, emphasizes that deviance studies should not only study societal reactions but, more importantly, the sources of social control that seek to “eliminate or ameliorate” deviant acts. In that same vein, Becker’s (1963) CONNECTIONS | 245 seminal work Outsiders , shifted attention away from the causes of nonconformity to bet- ter consider how and why some acts are negatively labeled and punished. Becker (1963: 9) writes that deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender.’ The deviant is one to whom that label has successfully been applied; deviant behavior is behavior that people so label. Although parkour is currently popular, it has been viewed by authorities as a social disruption and nuisance to others. These reactions have culminated in both informal and formal sanctions against those engaging in free-running. As Lemert (1974) and the label- ing theory would suggest, parkour was once constructed as a social problem by negative societal reactions, the application of the deviant label, and corresponding punishments. Although most states have not enacted legislation against the practice of free-running, it is still vulnerable to sanctions that come with trespassing, defacing public property, and public disorder laws. While early labeling theory has focused on the process and consequence of deviant labels, recent studies have begun to situate the social construction of deviance alongside greater social control in society (Grattet 2011). No longer are the core themes of labeling theory reserved for the deviant or criminal. Instead, they have helped establish a new mode of governance throughout society. Governance refers to new processes, actions, and forms of discipline that seek to rule individuals and society more broadly. This notion of contempo- rary governance closely relates to the labeling framework as each focus on the role of social control when handling deviant acts. Social theorists, for example, argue that modern social control practices and policies have made predicting, identifying, and managing risks that threaten the order, effi ciency, and security of society a central objective (Erikson 2007; Simon 2007). These practices have paved the way for an escalating culture of control shaping the operation of schools, workplaces, and public spaces (Garland 2001; Simon 2007). The ulti- mate task of this new paradigm of control is to maximize certainty in an uncertain world (Erikson 2007). Harking back to the labeling framework, resultant crime control practices are designed to expand defi nitions of deviance so to as manage an ever-broadening set of perceived threats to safety and order. These are oftentimes established by imposing rational- ity, reason, and order onto irrationality, emotion, and disorder. These developments have barricaded many avenues for authentic excitement, experience, and thrill-seeking—a practice that may push young people to society’s seductive and illicit margins. Labeling theory, thus, provided a framework for understanding social control via the cre- ation of deviant labels, sanctions, and social stigmatization. While meant to quash deviance initially, modern forms of social control have been intensifi ed to include surveillance and security in everyday life. In other words, original formulations of labeling theory fall short in delivering the types of social control modern society demands. This, in turn, creates the possibility for new forms of resistance. PARKOUR AS RESISTANCE As stated above, the preoccupation with security has, in turn, created new forms of deviance. These deviant acts are often considered forms of resistance against modern social control | JOHN J. BRENT246 practices that have blocked many avenues for self-expression and excitement. Parkour is one such act because it represents young people’s desire for a sense of autonomy and power that goes against societal norms (see Presdee 2000). It is a strike back against regulations about safety and order. Thus, the transgressive nature of deviance seduces people into resist- ing social control. Recent scholarship suggests that acts of resistance and deviance have the ability to expose oppressive conditions forced upon individuals (Cohen 2004; Rajah 2007; Brotherton 2008, 2011). Through this lens, resistance provides the means to establish a sense of control and individual fulfi llment in an increasingly regulated world. The urban practice of parkour is said to stand in opposition to the governance model of society. Despite its growing appeal, support is often limited given both the strenuous physical requirements and—more importantly—lingering hesitance regarding free-running generally. For instance, in the parkour documentary Jump London , the mayor of Lisses discusses his reluctance to the once-emerging sport: Regarding this new discipline in our town, right at the beginning of my offi ce as mayor, I was, I must say, quite surprised and worried because everyone could see young people up and down the walls like cats. I can’t prevent young people from doing that, they are responsible for themselves. We can explain the risks to them, make available the equipment that they need, and if they feel like jumping, they can jump in total safety on mattresses and not on schools during lessons and retirement homes frightening elderly people. Parkour fi nds meaning in the intersection among risk, expression, and resistance. Ordi- nary objects and spaces, such as railings, stair cases, parking levels, and street lamps, provide traceurs the means for creativity, expression, and purposive action. According to the Web site American Parkour, the signifi cance of this phenomenon is that “it introduces us to complete freedom from restraining obstacles, and it is this freedom amidst the routine and regimenta- tion of much of the modern society that make parkour very appealing.” Studies of parkour suggests it exists as a symbolic act; a form of resistance against the restraining qualities of the contemporary city. Bravington (2007), for instance, uncovered that traceurs upset authority within the city’s environment by reappropriating preplanned and predetermined space and using it in an alternative manner. Its objective becomes the discovery of original and creative ways to negotiate, move through, and reappropriate fi xed city-space. For the traceur, city benches, which designate places to sit, are transformed into vault- ing platforms; guardrails meant to guide and manage movement become openings to dive through; and rooftops deemed “off limits” become surfaces to leap across. As one practitio- ner states, they often view and interact with the city in very different terms: I think living in big cities like London is a crazy life. People don’t look around them, they go straight on, they go to work, then go home, then sleep, then wake up and go. . . I think life in the city is too stressful as it is. We see the city as a playground ( Jump London ). Through employing specialized skills and voluntarily engaging in risk-taking activity, tra- ceurs corrupt the functional purpose of the city by turning even the most controlling monodi- mensional environment into spaces of opportunity, creative inhabitation, free expression, and disorder. As participants approach this boundary between order and disorder, Parkour provides the literal and metaphorical “edge” needed to challenge the social, cultural, and political constraints that have materialized in cities across the United States. CONNECTIONS | 247 PARKOUR AS EDGEWORK Similar to the resistance framework, an expanding interest has emerged seeking to understand the individual motivations driving deviant acts (Ferrell et al. 2008; Katz 1988; Lyng 1990). One area of this fi eld, conceptualized as edgework, explores the voluntary participation in risk- taking activities that involve “a clearly visible threat” that individuals must negotiate by using specialized skill sets and particular individual abilities (Lyng 1990). This is a new concept often utilized to explore the internal and cultural dynamics of deviance. Engaging in risk-taking activities is, thus, viewed as a way to fulfi ll a need for control, self-determination, stimulation, and arousal; it becomes a mechanism of resistance against oppression and restraint. By way of example, the reading by Rajah (2007) utilizes the edgework perspective to examine the lived experiences of poor, minority, and drug-involved women in violent rela- tionships. Her research challenges the notion that women with few resources and in abusive relationships are passive actors. She fi nds that the women she studied resist violent exploita- tion and patriarchal control by employing skillful edgework acts. That is, women not only exercise self-control, they also draw from past experiences and knowledge to control poten- tially dangerous interactions. For example, one of Rajah’s respondents resisted her violent partner’s controlling behavior by exploiting his fears of another man in their building. By skillfully leveraging this knowledge, she was able to leave her apartment, negotiate a violent situation, and gain various rewards for doing so. Edgework type actions, as Rajah discovers, offer women the means necessary to contest their oppressive conditions by offering opportu- nities of defi ance and self-authorship. Lyng (1990: 883) describes the larger signifi cance of resistance, marginality, and edgework activities when he claims they are forms of “experiential anarchy” that challenge estab- lished social patterns in efforts to achieve self-actualization and determination. Here, edge- work offers what contemporary society often deprives: the possibility for self-determination, uninhibited behavior, emotional outbursts, and spontaneous expression. Robert Pires, inter- viewed for Jump London , summarizes this point when he says: The sport is a way for expressing one’s self, a way of escaping, a way out. Most importantly for people who come from urban areas. It’s good because it allows you to see many things and I’m happy because it sets them free. More importantly for Lyng, edgework provides opportunity for seizing control, a way to challenge the societal reactions to disorder that strip one of choice, expression, and autonomy. Edgework considers three primary aspects of voluntary risk taking: the activity itself, the skill set required to perform the activity, and subjective sensations. There can be little doubt that the performance of parkour exemplifi es the concept of edgework as young people negotiate multiple story free falls, perform dangerous urban acrobatics, and vault from one building rooftop to another. A health and safety consultant featured in Jump London speaks directly to the specialized skills needed to confront the dangerous nature of parkour: When I fi rst saw them doing one of their jumps for real as opposed to on video tape, my heart was in my throat I have to say. Because no matter what safety measures you put in place and how much planning goes into it, you still think, this in inherently dangerous, it’s still a dangerous thing to do. But you realize that the guys that are doing it are extremely competent, physically they are built for it, they are very light, they are very strong, and they’ve had years of training and experience. | JOHN J. BRENT248 Traceurs, however, not only employ specifi c skills to avoid physical dangers, they do so to pursue liberation from the stifl ing conditions brought about by the acts and processes employed to govern individuals in modern society. As Lyng discovered, the foremost motiva- tion for traceurs—and edgework practitioners more generally—is the feeling of being ush- ered uncontrollably through life by “unidentifi able forces that rob one of true individual choice” (1990: 870). This framework thus applies well as participants voluntarily engage in a classifi cation of high-risk behavior in attempts to confront ideas of safety and governance. Aside from challenging social norms and cultural constructions of space, parkour cel- ebrates what modern governance and the contemporary city space often deny. Accordingly, the attraction to edgework phenomena survives beyond the act itself; it lives in the emotional rewards and sensational qualities of the social performance or free-running. For instance, Brown (2012), while highlighting its central qualities, states that “the tensions of life fi nd a physical manifestation for release through parkour, leaving the practitioner with the relative and reported feeling of freedom.” He continues that traceurs, by negotiating the literal and metaphorical edge, are afforded emotional, physical, and mental rewards not yet experi- enced; more specifi cally, a sense of autonomy, an outlet for expression, and ownership over one’s own activities. This form of urban resistance or urban anarchy attempts to reclaim the cityscape and take back the urban streets. Ferrell (2001: 78) highlights the similarity between edgeworkers and anarchists when he argues: Both edgeworkers and anarchists share a profound passion . . . they are junkies for the seductive, intoxicating tension between artistry and abandon, for the dialectic of chaos and control, for that “strange music” that plays when you stretch your lick, but stretch it right. It’s the emergent interplay that defi nes edgework and anarchism, and the potential for human actualization that they both offer—in fl eeting moments, a sort of magic emerges: You get to grab hold and let go at the same time. Herein is a primary motivation for engaging in risk-taking activities according to edgework: a need for arousal and excitement, a form of disorderly behavior that resists the perils and jeopardizes of modern society (Lyng 1990). Parkour can be interpreted as resistance, as a symbolic form of opposition against the limiting composition of the city. By redefi ning the use of space, disrupting its disciplinary functions, and reappropriating the environment, traceurs effectively challenge social norms, break free from cultural constraints, and create opportunity among the most bounding struc- tures (Geyh 2006; Brown 2009; Bennett 2011). Through its nonconforming and unusual practice, the movements of parkour represent the willful transgression where the need to explore and create overrides the infl uence of everyday conventions. As a form of resistance, parkour provides the means necessary to escape from under current structures and condi- tions imposing restraint, rationality, and control. By reconstructing ones environment and reappropriating space, parkour is, as Fromm would argue, “rooted in the unbearableness of individual powerlessness and isolation” (1941: 177). Therefore, deviant activities such as parkour provide individuals with a sense of autonomy; they allow performances of unhin- dered expression and afford power in moments of marginality. CONCLUSION Although the labeling perspective never addressed parkour specifi cally, it discussed social control as a form of symbolic pressure to get people to conform by threatening their identities CONNECTIONS | 249 through labels and stigmatization. When viewed this way, free-runners are constructed as social misfi ts because they are disturbing norms about the acceptable use of public space. Rather than examining parkour itself, labeling teaches us that such behavior is likely to provoke a negative societal reaction, brand traceurs deviant, and deliver still other puni- tive sanctions. These ideas of social control have been expanded, giving rise to intensifi ed forms of individual and societal governance. As a form of resistance against such control, parkour provides the avenue by which individuals may challenge the current structures and conditions imposing restraint, rationality, and control. By reconstructing and reappropri- ating physical environments, parkour offers a pushback against individual powerlessness. Now, parkour amounts to what is termed edgework as individuals voluntarily engage in risk-taking activities by employing the necessary skills to do so in efforts to achieve subjective rewards. As Lyng (1990) and others have documented, these rewards often take the form of self-determination, stimulation, free expression, and autonomy. Interpreting free-running through these frameworks uncovers a number of common attributes spanning labeling, resistance, and edgework. Shared by each theoretical frame- work is a focus on social interaction, meaningful defi nitions, constructed realities, and ideas of social control. While cornerstones of the early societal reaction perspective, these attributes have been passed forward into new theoretical interpretations of deviance. Trac- ing the elaboration of labeling uncovers that a growing literature has begun to demonstrate that the central tenants, themes, and underpinnings of the societal reaction perspective have given rise to contemporary studies of social control within sociology and criminol- ogy (Grattet 2011). As societal reactions call for increased safety and security, the labeling process has intensifi ed to include routinized control that seeks to identify and manage any perceived threats to social order. These more invasive types of control have begun limiting opportunities for excitement and individual autonomy. As scholars have proposed, resis- tance via deviant conduct offers what contemporary society often deprives: the possibil- ity for uninhibited behavior, emotional outbursts, and spontaneous expression (Presdee 2000; Ferrell et al. 2008). Often conceptualized as edgework, this fi eld explores moments of extreme risk taking that challenge the societal reactions to disorder that strip one of agency. Despite these similarities, there are a few noteworthy departures between the perspectives. As Best (2004) highlights, labeling theorists began focusing on deviants; romanticizing them as being sympathetic and victims of social ills. That is, greater emphasis has been given to gaining what Ferrell (1996) refers to as Criminological Verstehen —an empathetic apprecia- tion for moments of marginality, transgression, and criminal involvement. While labeling theory focused on the social response and process by which deviant statuses were created and applied, edgework reorients the study of deviance to better consider the response of those being labeled. Accordingly, the deviant is the primary topic of investigation, not the societal responses and processes by which labels are created and applied as with labeling theory. Along with this new focus, conceptual developments like edgework are often better equipped to examine the situated signifi cance of deviant behavior, critique large social condi- tions, and consider the agency of those being labeled. Despite differences, this reading sug- gests that earlier strands of the societal reaction perspective can be found in recent theorizing about crime and deviance. Instead of viewing edgework as a departure from labeling, this work highlights their theoretical linkages and demonstrates that the concept of edgework has ushered a number of early labeling theory’s major features into contemporary studies of deviance. | JOHN J. BRENT250 CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS 1. Discuss some reasons for why the shift from labeling theory to resistance resulted in greater attention toward deviants and their actions rather than societal reactions. 2. As the readings by Lyng and Rajah highlight, edgework practices can take many forms (i.e., base jumping, skydiving, deception, and manipulation). Keeping this in mind, iden- tify other possible forms of edgework, their goals, and their potential rewards to those engaging in them. 3. While resistance and edgework have similar conceptual tenants, use the readings to com- pare and contrast these theoretical perspectives. REFERENCES Bavinton, N. 2007. “From Obstacles to Opportunities: Parkour, Leisure, and the Reinterpretation of Constraints.” Annals of Leisure Research 10: 391–412. Becker, H. S. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance . London: Free Press Glencoe. Bennett, L. 2011. “Bunkerology: A Case Study in the Theory and Practice of Urban Exploration.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29: 421–434. Brotherton, D. C. 2008. “Beyond Social Reproduction: Bringing Resistance Back in Gang Theory.” Theoretical Criminology 12(1): 55–77. Brotherton, D. C. 2011. Banished to the Homeland: Dominican Deportees and Their Stories of Exile . New York: Columbia University Press. Brown, N. “The Art of Displacement: Parkour as a Challenge to Social Perceptions of Body and Space.” Retrieved June 6, 2012, http://www.aughty.org/pdf/art_of_displacement . Cohen, C. J. 2004. “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics.” Du Bois Review 1(1): 27–45. Ferrell, J. 1996. Crime of Style: Urban Graffi ti and the Politics of Criminality . Boston: Northeastern University Press. Ferrell, J. 2001. Tearing Down the Streets: Adventures in Urban Anarchy . New York: Palgrave. Ferrell, J. 2006. Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking, and Street Scavenging . New York: New York University Press. Ferrell, J., Hayward, K., and Young, J. 2008. Cultural Criminology . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ferrell, J., Milovanovic, D., and Lyng, S. 2001. “Edgework, Media Practices, and the Elongation of Meaning: A Theoretical Ethnography of the Bridge Day Event.” Theoretical Criminology 5(2): 177–202. Fromm, E. 1941. Escape from Freedom . New York: Henry Holt. Garland, D. 2001. Culture of Control . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Geyh, P. 2006. “Urban Free Flow: A Poetics of Parkour.” Journal of Media and Culture 9(3). Retrieved September 17, 2013, http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/06-geyh.php. Grattet, R. 2011. “Societal Reactions to Deviance.” Annual Review of Sociology 37: 185–204. Hayward, K. 2004. City Limits: Crime, Consumer Culture and the Urban Experience . London: Glass House Press. Katz, J. 1988. Seductions of Crime . New York: Basic Books. Lemert, E.M. 1974. “Beyond Mead: The Societal Reaction to Deviance.” Social Problems 21(4): 457–468. Lyng, S. 1990. “Edgework: A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk Taking.” American Journal of Sociol- ogy 95: 851–886. Presdee, M. 2000. Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Crime . London: Routledge. Rajah, V. 2007. “Resistance as Edgework in Violent Intimate Relationships of Drug-Involved Women.” British Journal of Criminology 47: 196–213. Simon, J. 2007. Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Cre- ated a Culture of Fear . Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.aughty.org/pdf/art_of_displacement http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/06-geyh.php SECTION 6 Stigma, Carnival, and the Grotesque Body This page intentionally left blank Introduction Tammy L. Anderson Do you think the human body can be painted, shaped, and decorated in any fashion, or should there be limits to how individuals treat it? Consider music stars Adam Levine (from the group Maroon 5 or TV’s The Voice ) and Lil Wayne, Emmy-winning hip hop artist. Both are covered in tattoos and/or piercings that some would consider disgraceful or an abomina- tion. 1 Even if you support Adam and Lil Wayne in decorating their bodies as they have, to what extent do you approve or disapprove of others—less famous—for doing just that? Is there a line to be drawn, and, if so, where do you draw it? Moreover, do you have one set of standards for one type of body modifi cation (i.e., tattoos or piercings) and a different set for others having a different body style or shape (i.e., extreme obesity or emaciation)? Section 6 contrasts stigma with the newer, postmodern idea of carnival of the grotesque using various types of body deviance—such as tattooing, piercing, and obesity—to help you better understand deviance in our society today. An excerpt from Goffman’s classic book explains the concept of stigma and abominations of the body such as physical deformities, while the Monaghan reading discusses bears, feedees, and so-called big handsome men from the postmodern carnival of the grotesque perspective. Along with these readings, Kang and Jones offer some important context about tattooing and body deviance in America. The con- nections reading by David Lane then ties together the major points and outlines a future pathway for deviance in areas of aesthetics and the body. An objective of this section is to get you thinking about the importance of aesthetic and body norms and how they impact our lives. Face it, we are bombarded with standards for our physical selves daily and must learn how to manage our own and others’ efforts to control them. For example, Kang and Jones argue that tattoos are a way for young people to resist social pressures to conform to appearance principles. In their reading, Christine explains, “I want everyone to know that I’m sick of being told what to do and how to look.” Clini- cians and researchers (Caplan, Komaromi, and Rhodes 1996), on the other hand, seem to endorse appearance-based standards by classifying obsessive tattooing as an act of self-harm or obsessive behavior. Even Lil Wayne cautioned, “I have no problem with people going and getting a billion tattoos. But why are you doing it?” (Rose 2011). The answer to Lil Wayne’s question—to why people live with deviant bodies—can begin by learning about stigma and carnival of the grotesque. Stigma. The word originally referred to bodily signs—like tattoos—designed to expose something morally problematic about the individual. It is a special relationship between a | TAMMY L. ANDERSON254 trait or condition that disallowed its bearer to exist as a normal member of society. Over time, the word expanded to represent deeply discrediting facts that could tarnish reputations, reduce life chances, and even exact a social death. The Goffman reading in this section specifi es three types of stigma. Weaknesses of individ- ual character were a form of earned stigma since they resulted from bad decision-making and maladaptive behavior by people with poor values and improper socialization. David Lane points out that tattooing and obesity could be classifi ed as this type of stigma because they involve lifestyle choices. Thus, weaknesses of character are morally based. Abominations of the body represented another type and come closest to the defi nition of body deviance. People born with bodily deformities were viewed as having conditions over which they often had little control but a great deal of shame. The blind, deaf, paraplegic, or epileptic, accord- ing to Goffman, were varieties of people with abominations of the body. This type of stigma was more closely rooted in medical defi nitions of deviance, yet there often existed moral condemnation as well. Finally, tribal stigmas were those associated with minority racial and ethnic backgrounds. Since people are born with a racial and ethnic classifi cation and identity, there was little the tribally stigmatized could do about their discredited identities. Recently, sociologists have begun paying more attention to the physical body and what it signifi es about life in our society. This growing literature, as well as people like Adam Levine, Lil Wayne, and Gaining Gabi (see Preface), might challenge Goffman’s ideas about body stigma and get us to see things in new ways. One such innovation, and perhaps alternative to Goffman’s stigma, is Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1941) term carnival of the grotesque. It refers to a happening that establishes an alternative social order that departs dramatically from the codes and norms we have about daily comportment. Specifi cally, the carnival refers to the location where the alternative social order is set, while the grotesque refers to the outrageous behaviors or characteristics of the people who gather therein. This includes the exaggeration of bodily features deemed “unfi t” or “freakish.” The alternative social order of the carnival is maintained through expressions of folk humor, rituals of degradation, and satire. In this process, participants are reborn and are bolstered by a temporary and alternative folk con- sciousness. Here, actors experience a birth, life, and death that celebrate the vulgar charac- teristics of their bodies; that is, the grotesque. It is a second “way of life” that is often denied or rejected by conventional society. The pairing of Goffman’s stigma and Bakhtin’s carnival and the grotesque centers on shame with respect to body deviance. While Goffman noted that abominations of the body marked people with stigma and disgrace, Bakhtin views outrageous and weird body types and expressions as powerful statements of the self and refl ections of a more utopian society. Kang and Jones provide an example. The reading opens with a quote from a “24-year-old, insecure female who isn’t a perfect, thin, beautiful supermodel.” She reports that her tattoo has helped her feel better about her body: “It is rearing up on its hind legs with its wings spread like it’s about to take off, much like the way I want to break free of my self-doubt and start loving me for me.” A central distinction between stigma and carnival of the grotesque is whether the body is a social entity or an earthly object. While Goffman noted that abominations of the body marked people with stigma and shame, postmodernists like Bakhtin and Monaghan remind us of its power. In short, stigma may exact a social death, but the body lives on. The salience of this point should not be underestimated. By now, most of us know that there will be some stigma and condemnation for people engaging in outrageous acts of body deviance—like the big handsome men in Monaghan’s study, Gaining Gabi from the Preface, INTRODUCTION | 255 or the heavily tattooed Lane quotes in his connections reading. We might even be amused by them celebrating their grotesque bodies in unique (carnival-like) places. But how do we respond when body deviance is motivated by more “legitimate” concerns or medical conditions and impacts someone we know or can empathize with? For example, how do we imagine amputees who live without prosthetic limbs or deaf people who refuse to get cochlear implants? Do we expect them to sit in shame or sign their way through it? What about the woman who has been diagnosed with breast cancer? Do you expect her to get reconstructive surgery (breast implants) after a mastectomy or will you support her deci- sion to do as women from the Kang and Jones reading did: get tattoos, which express mean- ing of the disease on their lives, to cover their mastectomy scars? These types of empowered responses to “deformed” bodies demand our attention, and the future of deviance should envision new ways to explain them and the ever-growing aesthetic and appearance-based norms in our society. NOTE 1. Goffman wrote that abominations of the body were a type of stigma that represented moral failings or medical deformities or defi ciencies. REFERENCES Bakhtin, M. M. (1993). Rabelais and His World . Trans. H. Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Origi- nally published 1941. Caplan, R., Komaromi, J., and Rhodes, M. (1996). Obsessive-compulsive disorder and tattooing and bizarre sexual practice. British Journal of Psychiatry, 168(3), 379-380. Rose, S. (2011, May 25). Celeb Style: Lil Wayne. Accessed February 21, 2013, http://sandrarose.com/2011/05/celeb- style-lil-wayne/. http://sandrarose.com/2011/05/celebstyle-lil-wayne/ http://sandrarose.com/2011/05/celebstyle-lil-wayne/ Stigma and Social Identity Erving Goffman The Greeks, who were apparently strong on visual aids, originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifi er. The signs were cut or burnt into the body and advertised that the bearer was a slave, a criminal, or a traitor— a blemished person, ritually polluted, to be avoided, especially in public places. Later, in Christian times, two layers of metaphor were added to the term: the fi rst referred to bodily signs of holy grace that took the form of eruptive blossoms on the skin; the second, a medical allusion to this religious allusion, referred to bodily signs of physical disorder. Today the term is widely used in something like the original literal sense but is applied more to the disgrace itself than to the bodily evidence of it. Furthermore, shifts have occurred in the kinds of disgrace that arouse concern. Students, however, have made little effort to describe the structural preconditions of stigma or even to provide a defi nition of the concept itself. It seems nec- essary, therefore, to try at the beginning to sketch in some very general assumptions and defi nitions. PRELIMINARY CONCEPTIONS Society establishes the means of categorizing persons and the complement of attributes felt to be ordinary and natural for members of each of these categories. Social settings establish the categories of persons likely to be encoun- tered there. The routines of social intercourse in established settings allow us to deal with anticipated others without special attention or thought. When a stranger comes into our presence, then, fi rst appearances are likely to enable us to anticipate his category and attri- butes, his social identity —to use a term that is better than soc ial status because personal attributes such as “honesty” are involved, as well as structural ones, like “occupation.” We lean on these anticipations that we have, transforming them into normative expecta- tions, into righteously presented demands. Typically, we do not become aware that we have made these demands or aware of what they are until an active question arises as to whether or not they will be fulfi lled. It is then that we are likely to realize that all along we had been making certain assumptions as to what the individual before us ought to be. Thus, the demands we make might better be called demands made “in effect,” and the character we impute to the individual might better be seen as an imputation made in potential retrospect—a characterization “in effect,” a virtual social identity . The category and attributes he could in fact be proved to possess will be called his actual social identity . While the stranger is present before us, evi- dence can arise of his possessing an attribute that makes him different from others in the category of persons available for him to be STIGMA AND SOCIAL IDENTITY | 257 and of a less desirable kind—in the extreme, a person who is quite thoroughly bad, or dangerous, or weak. He is thus reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one. Such an attri- bute is a stigma, especially when its discred- iting effect is very extensive; sometimes it is also called a failing, a shortcoming, a handi- cap. It constitutes a special discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity. Note that there are other types of discrep- ancy between virtual and actual social iden- tity; for example, the kind that causes us to reclassify an individual from one socially anticipated category to a different but equally well-anticipated one and the kind that causes us to alter our estimation of the individual upward. Note, too, that not all undesirable attributes are at issue but only those which are incongruous with our stereotype of what a given type of individual should be. The term stigma , then, will be used to refer to an attribute that is deeply discredit- ing, but it should be seen that a language of relationships, not attributes, is really needed. An attribute that stigmatizes one type of pos- sessor can confi rm the usualness of another and therefore is neither creditable nor dis- creditable as a thing in itself. For example, some jobs in America cause holders without the expected college education to conceal this fact; other jobs, however, can lead the few of their holders who have a higher education to keep this a secret, lest they be marked as fail- ures and outsiders. Similarly, a middle-class boy may feel no compunction in being seen going to the library; a professional criminal, however, writes: I can remember before now on more than one occasion, for instance, going into a public library near where I was living, and looking over my shoulder a couple of times before I actually went in just to make sure no one who knew me was standing about and seeing me do it. 1 So, too, an individual who desires to fi ght for his country may conceal a physical defect, lest his claimed physical status be discredited; later, the same individual, embit- tered and trying to get out of the army, may succeed in gaining admission to the army hospital, where he would be discredited if discovered in not really having an acute sick- ness. 2 A stigma, then, is really a special kind of relationship between attribute and stereo- type, although I don’t propose to continue to say so, in part because there are impor- tant attributes that almost everywhere in our society are discrediting. The term stigma and its synonyms conceal a double perspective: does the stigmatized individual assume his differentness is known about already or is evident on the spot, or does he assume it is neither known about by those present nor immediately perceivable by them? In the fi rst case one deals with the plight of the discredited ; in the second, with that of the discreditable . This is an important difference, even though a particular stigma- tized individual is likely to have experience with both situations. I will begin with the sit- uation of the discredited and move on to the discreditable but not always separate the two. Three grossly different types of stigma may be mentioned. First there are abomi- nations of the body—the various physical deformities. Next there are blemishes of individual character perceived as weak will, domineering or unnatural passions, treach- erous and rigid beliefs, and dishonesty, these being inferred from a known record of, for example, mental disorder, imprison- ment, addiction, alcoholism, homosexuality, unemployment, suicidal attempts, and radi- cal political behavior. Finally there are the tribal stigmata of race, nation, and religion; these being stigma that can be transmitted through lineages and equally contaminate all members of a family. 3 In all of these various instances of stigma, however, including those the Greeks had in mind, the same sociologi- cal features are found: an individual who might have been received easily in ordinary social intercourse possesses a trait that can | ERVING GOFFMAN258 obtrude itself upon attention and turn those of us whom he meets away from him, break- ing the claim that his other attributes have on us. He possesses a stigma, an undesired differentness from what we had anticipated. We and those who do not depart negatively from the particular expectations at issue I shall call the normals . The attitudes we normals have toward a person with a stigma, and the actions we take in regard to him, are well-known, since these responses are what benevolent social action is designed to soften and ameliorate. By defi nition, of course, we believe the per- son with a stigma is not quite human. On this assumption we exercise varieties of dis- crimination, through which we effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce his life chances. We construct a stigma theory, an ideology to explain his inferiority and account for the danger he represents, sometimes rationaliz- ing an animosity based on other differences, such as those of social class. 4 We use specifi c stigma terms such as cripple , bastard , moron in our daily discourse as a source of meta- phor and imagery, typically without giving thought to the original meaning. 5 We tend to impute a wide range of imperfections on the basis of the original one 6 and at the same time to impute some desirable but undesired attributes, often of a supernatural cast, such as “sixth sense” or “understanding”: 7 For some, there may be a hesitancy about touching or steering the blind, while for oth- ers, the perceived failure to see may be gen- eralized into a gestalt of disability, so that the individual shouts at the blind as if they were deaf or attempts to lift them as if they were crippled. Those confronting the blind may have a whole range of belief that is anchored in the stereotype. For instance, they may think they are subject to unique judgment, assuming the blinded individual draws on special chan- nels of information unavailable to others. 8 Further, we may perceive his defensive response to his situation as a direct expression of his defect and then see both defect and response as just retribution for something he or his parents or his tribe did and hence a justifi cation of the way we treat him. 9 Now turn from the normal to the per- son he is normal against. It seems generally true that members of a social category may strongly support a standard of judgment that they and others agree does not directly apply to them. Thus it is that a business- man may demand womanly behavior from females or ascetic behavior from monks and not construe himself as someone who ought to realize either of these styles of conduct. The distinction is between realizing a norm and merely supporting it. The issue of stigma does not arise here but only where there is some expectation on all sides that those in a given category should not only support a particular norm but also realize it. Also, it seems possible for an individual to fail to live up to what we effectively demand of him and yet be relatively untouched by this failure; insulated by his alienation, pro- tected by identity beliefs of his own, he feels that he is a full-fl edged normal human being and that we are the ones who are not quite human. He bears a stigma but does not seem to be impressed or repentant about doing so. This possibility is celebrated in exemplary tales about Mennonites, Gypsies, shameless scoundrels, and very orthodox Jews. In America at present, however, separate systems of honor seem to be on the decline. The stigmatized individual tends to hold the same beliefs about identity that we do; this is a pivotal fact. His deepest feelings about what he is may be his sense of being a “nor- mal person,” a human being like anyone else, a person, therefore, who deserves a fair chance and a fair break. 10 (Actually, however phrased, he bases his claims not on what he thinks is due everyone but only everyone of a selected social category into which he unquestionably fi ts; for example, anyone of his age, sex, profession, and so forth.) Yet he may perceive, usually quite correctly, that STIGMA AND SOCIAL IDENTITY | 259 whatever others profess, they do not really “accept” him and are not ready to make contact with him on “equal grounds.” 11 Fur- ther, the standards he has incorporated from the wider society equip him to be intimately alive to what others see as his failing, inevi- tably causing him, if only for moments, to agree that he does indeed fall short of what he really ought to be. Shame becomes a cen- tral possibility, arising from the individual’s perception of one of his own attributes as being a defi ling thing to possess and one he can readily see himself as not possessing. The immediate presence of normals is likely to reinforce this split between self- demands and self, but in fact self-hate and self-derogation can also occur when only he and a mirror are about: When I got up at last . . . and had learned to walk again, one day I took a hand glass and went to a long mirror to look at myself, and I went alone. I didn’t want anyone . . . to know how I felt when I saw myself for the fi rst time. But there was no noise, no outcry; I didn’t scream with rage when I saw myself. I just felt numb. That person in the mirror couldn’t be me. I felt inside like a healthy, ordinary, lucky person—oh, not like the one in the mirror! Yet when I turned my face to the mirror there were my own eyes look- ing back, hot with shame . . . when I did not cry or make any sound, it became impossible that I should speak of it to anyone, and the confu- sion and the panic of my discovery were locked inside me then and there, to be faced alone, for a very long time to come. 12 Over and over I forgot what I had seen in the mirror. It could not penetrate into the inte- rior of my mind and become an integral part of me. I felt as if it had nothing to do with me; it was only a disguise. But it was not the kind of disguise which is put on voluntarily by the person who wears it, and which is intended to confuse other people as to one’s identity. My disguise had been put on me without my consent or knowledge like the ones in fairy tales, and it was I myself who was confused by it, as to my own identity. I looked in the mirror, and was horror-struck because I did not recognize myself. In the place where I was standing, with that per- sistent romantic elation in me, as if I were a favored fortunate person to whom every- thing was possible, I saw a stranger, a lit- tle, pitiable, hideous fi gure, and a face that became, as I stared at it, painful and blushing with shame. It was only a disguise, but it was on me, for life. It was there, it was there, it was real. Every one of those encounters was like a blow on the head. They left me dazed and dumb and senseless every-time, until slowly and stubbornly my robust persistent illusion of well-being and of personal beauty spread all through me again, and I forgot the irrelevant reality and was all unprepared and vulnerable again. 13 The central feature of the stigmatized indi- vidual’s situation in life can now be stated. It is a question of what is often, if vaguely, called “acceptance.” Those who have deal- ings with him fail to accord him the respect and regard which the uncontaminated aspects of his social identity have led them to anticipate extending and have led him to anticipate receiving; he echoes this denial by fi nding that some of his own attributes war- rant it. How does the stigmatized person respond to his situation? In some cases it will be pos- sible for him to make a direct attempt to cor- rect what he sees as the objective basis of his failing, as when a physically deformed per- son undergoes plastic surgery, a blind person eye treatment, an illiterate remedial educa- tion, a homosexual psychotherapy. (Where such repair is possible, what often results is not the acquisition of fully normal status but a transformation of self from someone with a particular blemish into someone with a record of having corrected a particular blem- ish.) Here proneness to “victimization” is to be cited, a result of the stigmatized person’s exposure to fraudulent servers selling speech correction, skin lighteners, body stretchers, youth restorers (as in rejuvenation through | ERVING GOFFMAN260 fertilized egg yolk treatment), cures through faith, and poise in conversation. Whether a practical technique or fraud is involved, the quest, often secret, that results provides a special indication of the extremes to which the stigmatized can be willing to go and hence the painfulness of the situation that leads them to these extremes. One illustra- tion may be cited: Miss Peck [a pioneer New York social worker for the hard of hearing] said that in the early days the quacks and get-rich-quick medi- cine men who abounded saw the League [for the hard of hearing] as their happy hunting ground, ideal for the promotion of magnetic head caps, miraculous vibrating machines, artifi cial eardrums, blowers, inhalers, massag- ers, magic oils, balsams, and other guaranteed, sure-fi re, positive, and permanent cure-alls for incurable deafness. Advertisements for such hokum (until the 1920’s when the American Medical Association moved in with an investi- gation campaign) beset the hard of hearing in the pages of the daily press, even in reputable magazines. 14 The stigmatized individual can also attempt to correct his condition indirectly by devoting much private effort to the mastery of areas of activity ordinarily felt to be closed on inciden- tal and physical grounds to one with his short- coming. This is illustrated by the lame person who learns or relearns to swim, ride, play ten- nis, or fl y an airplane, or the blind person who becomes expert at skiing and mountain climb- ing. 15 Tortured learning may be associated, of course, with the tortured performance of what is learned, as when an individual, confi ned to a wheelchair, manages to take to the dance fl oor with a girl in some kind of mimicry of dancing. 16 Finally, the person with a shame- ful differentness can break with what is called reality and obstinately attempt to employ an unconventional interpretation of the charac- ter of his social identity. The stigmatized individual is likely to use his stigma for “secondary gains,” as an excuse for ill success that has come his way for other reasons: For years the scar, harelip or misshapen nose has been looked on as a handicap, and its importance in the social and emotional adjust- ment is unconsciously all embracing. It is the “hook” on which the patient has hung all inadequacies, all dissatisfactions, all procrasti- nations and all unpleasant duties of social life, and he has come to depend on it not only as a reasonable escape from competition but as a protection from social responsibility. When one removes this factor by surgical repair, the patient is cast adrift from the more or less acceptable emotional protection it has offered and soon he fi nds, to his surprise and discomfort, that life is not all smooth sailing even for those with unblemished, “ordinary” faces. He is unprepared to cope with this situ- ation without the support of a “handicap,” and he may turn to the less simple, but similar, protection of the behavior patterns of neuras- thenia, hysterical conversion, hypochondriasis or the acute anxiety states. 17 He may also see the trials he has suffered as a blessing in disguise, especially because of what it is felt that suffering can teach one about life and people: But now, far away from the hospital experi- ence, I can evaluate what I have learned. [A mother permanently disabled by polio writes.] For it wasn’t only suffering: it was also learning through suffering. I know my aware- ness of people has deepened and increased, that those who are close to me can count on me to turn all my mind and heart and attention to their problems. I could not have learned that dashing all over a tennis court. 18 Correspondingly, he can come to reassess the limitations of normals, as a multiple sclerotic suggests: Both healthy minds and healthy bodies may be crippled. The fact that “normal” people can get around, can see, can hear, doesn’t mean that they are seeing or hearing. They can be STIGMA AND SOCIAL IDENTITY | 261 very blind to the things that spoil their happi- ness, very deaf to the pleas of others for kind- ness; when I think of them I do not feel any more crippled or disabled than they. Perhaps in some small way I can be the means of open- ing their eyes to the beauties around us: things like a warm handclasp, a voice that is anxious to cheer, a spring breeze, music to listen to, a friendly nod. These people are important to me, and I like to feel that I can help them. 19 And a blind writer: That would lead immediately to the thought that there are many occurrences which can diminish satisfaction in living far more effec- tively than blindness, and that lead would be an entirely healthy one to take. In this light, we can perceive, for instance, that some inad- equacy like the inability to accept human love, which can effectively diminish satisfaction of living almost to the vanishing point, is far more a tragedy than blindness. But it is unusual for the man who suffers from such a malady even to know he has it and self pity is, therefore, impossible for him. 20 And a cripple: As life went on, I learned of many, many dif- ferent kinds of handicap, not only the physical ones, and I began to realize that the words of the crippled girl in the extract above [words of bitterness] could just as well have been spo- ken by young women who had never needed crutches, women who felt inferior and differ- ent because of ugliness, or inability to bear children, or helplessness in contacting people, or many other reasons. 21 The responses of the normal and of the stig- matized that have been considered so far are ones which can occur over protracted periods of time and in isolation from current contact between normals and stigmatized. 22 This book, however, is specifi cally concerned with the issue of “mixed contacts”—the moments when stigmatized and normal are in the same “social situation”; that is, in one another’s immediate physical presence, whether in a conversation-like encounter or in the mere co-presence of an unfocused gathering. The very anticipation of such contacts can of course lead normals and the stigmatized to arrange life so as to avoid them. Presum- ably this will have larger consequences for the stigmatized, since more arranging will usually be necessary on their part: Before her disfi gurement [amputation of the distal half of her nose] Mrs. Dover, who lived with one of her two married daughters, had been an independent, warm and friendly woman who enjoyed traveling, shopping, and visiting her many relatives. The disfi gurement of her face, however, resulted in a defi nite alteration in her way of living. The fi rst two or three years she seldom left her daughter’s home, preferring to remain in her room or to sit in the backyard. “I was heartsick,” she said. “The door had been shut on my life.” 23 Lacking the salutary feedback of daily social intercourse with others, the self-isolate can become suspicious, depressed, hostile, anx- ious, and bewildered. Sullivan’s version may be cited: The awareness of inferiority means that one is unable to keep out of consciousness the formu- lation of some chronic feeling of the worst sort of insecurity, and this means that one suffers anxiety and perhaps even something worse, if jealousy is really worse than anxiety. The fear that others can disrespect a person because of something he shows means that he is always insecure in his contact with other people; and this insecurity arises, not from mysterious and somewhat disguised sources, as a great deal of our anxiety does, but from something which he knows he cannot fi x. Now that represents an almost fatal defi ciency of the self-system, since the self is unable to disguise or exclude a defi nite formulation that reads, “I am inferior. Therefore people will dislike me and I cannot be secure with them.” 24 When normals and stigmatized do in fact enter one another’s immediate presence, especially when they there attempt to sustain | ERVING GOFFMAN262 a joint conversational encounter, there occurs one of the primal scenes of sociology; for, in many cases, these moments will be the ones when the causes and effects of stigma must be directly confronted by both sides. The stigmatized individual may fi nd that he feels unsure of how we normals will identify him and receive him. 25 An illustra- tion may be cited from a student of physical disability: Uncertainty of status for the disabled person obtains over a wide range of social interac- tions in addition to that of employment. The blind, the ill, the deaf, the crippled can never be sure what the attitude of a new acquain- tance will be, whether it will be rejective or accepting, until the contact has been made. This is exactly the position of the adolescent, the light-skinned Negro, the second generation immigrant, the socially mobile person and the woman who has entered a predominantly mas- culine occupation. 26 This uncertainty arises not merely from the stigmatized individual’s not knowing which of several categories he will be placed in but also, where the placement is favorable, from his knowing that in their hearts the others may be defi ning him in terms of his stigma: And I always feel this with straight people— that whenever they’re being nice to me, pleas- ant to me, all the time really, underneath they’re only assessing me as a criminal and nothing else. It’s too late for me to be any dif- ferent now to what I am, but I still feel this keenly, that that’s their only approach, and they’re quite incapable of accepting me as any- thing else. 27 Thus in the stigmatized arises the sense of not knowing what the others present are “really” thinking about him. Further, during mixed contacts, the stig- matized individual is likely to feel that he is “on,” 28 having to be self-conscious and cal- culating about the impression he is making, to a degree and in areas of conduct which he assumes others are not. Also, he is likely to feel that the usual scheme of interpretation for everyday events has been undermined. His minor accom- plishments, he feels, may be assessed as signs of remarkable and noteworthy capacities in the circumstances. A professional criminal provides an illustration: “You know, it’s really amazing you should read books like this, I’m staggered I am. I should’ve thought you’d read paper-backed thrillers, things with lurid covers, books like that. And here you are with Claud Cockburn, Hugh Klare, Simone de Beauvoir, and Law- rence Durrell!” You know, he didn’t see this as an insulting remark at all: in fact, I think he thought he was being honest in telling me how mistaken he was. And that’s exactly the sort of patron- izing you get from straight people if you’re a criminal. “Fancy that!” they say. “In some ways you’re just like a human being!” I’m not kidding, it makes me want to choke the bleed- ing life out of them. 29 A blind person provides another illustration: His once most ordinary deeds—walking non- chalantly up the street, locating the peas on his plate, lighting a cigarette—are no longer ordinary. He becomes an unusual person. If he performs them with fi nesse and assurance they excite the same kind of wonderment inspired by a magician who pulls rabbits out of hats. 30 At the same time, minor failings or incidental impropriety may, he feels, be interpreted as a direct expression of his stigmatized different- ness. Ex–mental patients, for example, are sometimes afraid to engage in sharp inter- changes with a spouse or employer because of what a show of emotion might be taken as a sign of. Mental defectives face a similar contingency: It also happens that if a person of low intel- lectual ability gets into some sort of trouble the diffi culty is more or less automatically attrib- uted to “mental defect” whereas if a person of “normal intelligence” gets into a similar diffi culty, it is not regarded as symptomatic of anything in particular. 31 STIGMA AND SOCIAL IDENTITY | 263 A one-legged girl, recalling her experience with sports, provides other illustrations: Whenever I fell, out swarmed the women in droves, clucking and fretting like a bunch of bereft mother hens. It was kind of them, and in retrospect I appreciate their solicitude, but at the time I resented and was greatly embar- rassed by their interference. For they assumed that no routine hazard to skating—no stick or stone—upset my fl ying wheels. It was a fore- gone conclusion that I fell because I was a poor, helpless cripple. 32 Not one of them shouted with outrage, “That dangerous wild bronco threw her!”— which, God forgive, he did technically. It was like a horrible ghostly visitation of my old roller- skating days. All the good people lamented in chorus, “That poor, poor girl fell off!” 33 When the stigmatized person’s failing can be perceived by our merely directing attention (typically, visual) to him—when, in short, he is a discredited, not discreditable, person—he is likely to feel that to be present among nor- mals nakedly exposes him to invasions of pri- vacy, 34 experienced most pointedly perhaps when children simply stare at him. 35 This dis- pleasure in being exposed can be increased by the conversations strangers may feel free to strike up with him, conversations in which they express what he takes to be morbid curiosity about his condition or in which they proffer help that he does not need or want. 36 One might add that there are certain classic formulae for these kinds of conversa- tions: “My dear girl, how did you get your quiggle”; “My great uncle had a quiggle, so I feel I know all about your problem” ; “You know I’ve always said that quiggles are good family men and look after their own poor”; “Tell me, how do you manage to bathe with a quiggle?” The implication of these overtures is that the stigmatized individual is a person who can be approached by strangers at will, providing only that they are sympathetic to the plight of persons of his kind. Given what the stigmatized individual may well face upon entering a mixed social situation, he may anticipatorily respond by defensive cowering. This may be illustrated from an early study of some German unem- ployed during the Depression, the words being those of a 43-year-old mason: How hard and humiliating it is to bear the name of an unemployed man. When I go out, I cast down my eyes because I feel myself wholly inferior. When I go along the street, it seems to me that I can’t be compared with an average citizen, that everybody is pointing at me with his fi nger. I instinctively avoid meeting anyone. Former acquaintances and friends of better times are no longer so cordial. They greet me indifferently when we meet. They no longer offer me a cigarette and their eyes seem to say, “You are not worth it, you don’t work.” 37 A crippled girl provides an illustrative analysis: When . . . I began to walk out alone in the streets of our town . . . I found then that wherever I had to pass three or four children together on the sidewalk, if I happened to be alone, they would shout at me, . . . Sometimes they even ran after me, shouting and jeering. This was something I didn’t know how to face, and it seemed as if I couldn’t bear it. . . . For awhile those encounters in the street fi lled me with a cold dread of all unknown children . . . One day I suddenly realized that I had become so self-conscious and afraid of all strange children that, like animals, they knew I was afraid, so that even the mildest and most amiable of them were automatically prompted to derision by my own shrinking and dread. 38 Instead of cowering, the stigmatized individ- ual may attempt to approach mixed contacts with hostile bravado, but this can induce from others its own set of troublesome recip- rocations. It may be added that the stigma- tized person sometimes vacillates between cowering and bravado, racing from one to the other, thus demonstrating one central way in which ordinary face-to-face interac- tion can run wild. I am suggesting, then, that the stigmatized individual—at least the “visibly” stigmatized | ERVING GOFFMAN264 one—will have special reasons for feeling that mixed social situations make for anx- ious unanchored interaction. But if this is so, then it is to be suspected that we nor- mals will fi nd these situations shaky, too. We will feel that the stigmatized individual is either too aggressive or too shamefaced and in either case too ready to read unintended meanings into our actions. We ourselves may feel that if we show direct sympathetic con- cern for his condition, we may be overstep- ping ourselves, and yet if we actually forget that he has a failing, we are likely to make impossible demands of him or unthinkingly slight his fellow sufferers. Each potential source of discomfort for him when we are with him can become something we sense he is aware of, aware that we are aware of, and even aware of our state of awareness about his awareness; the stage is then set for the infi nite regress of mutual consideration that Meadian social psychology tells us how to begin but not how to terminate. Given what both the stigmatized and we normals introduce into mixed social situa- tions, it is understandable that all will not go smoothly. We are likely to attempt to carry on as though in fact he wholly fi tted one of the types of person naturally available to us in the situation, whether this means treating him as someone better than we feel he might be or someone worse than we feel he prob- ably is. If neither of these tacks is possible, then we may try to act as if he were a “non- person” and not present at all as someone of whom ritual notice is to be taken. He, in turn, is likely to go along with these strate- gies, at least initially. In consequence, attention is furtively with- drawn from its obligatory targets, and self- consciousness and “other-consciousness” occurs, expressed in the pathology of interaction— uneasiness.39 As described in the case of the physically handicapped: Whether the handicap is overtly and tactlessly responded to as such or, as is more commonly the case, no explicit reference is made to it, the underlying condition of heightened, narrowed, awareness causes the interaction to be articu- lated too exclusively in terms of it. This, as my informants described it, is usually accompa- nied by one or more of the familiar signs of discomfort and stickiness: the guarded refer- ences, the common everyday words suddenly made taboo, the fi xed stare elsewhere, the arti- fi cial levity, the compulsive loquaciousness, the awk ward solemnity. 40 In social situations with an individual known or perceived to have a stigma, we are likely, then, to employ categorizations that do not fi t, and we and he are likely to experience uneasiness. Of course, there is often signifi - cant movement from this starting point. And since the stigmatized person is likely to be more often faced with these situations than are we, he is likely to become the more adept at managing them. NOTES 1. T. Parker and R. Allerton, The Courage of His Convictions (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1962), p. 109. 2. In this connection, see the review by M. Meltzer, “Countermanipulation through Malingering,” in A. Biderman and H. Zimmer, eds., The Manip- ulation of Human Behavior (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1961), pp. 277–304. 3. In recent history, especially in Britain, low-class status functioned as an important tribal stigma, the sins of the parents, or at least their milieu, being visited on the child, should the child rise improperly far above his initial station. The man- agement of class stigma is of course a central theme in the English novel. 4. D. Riesman, “Some Observations Concerning Marginality,” Phylon, Second Quarter, 1951, 122. 5. The case regarding mental patients is presented by T. J. Scheff in a forthcoming paper. 6. In regard to the blind, see E. Henrich and L. Krie- gel, eds., Experiments in Survival (New York: Association for the Aid of Crippled Children, 1961), pp. 152 and 186; and H. Chevigny, My Eyes Have a Cold Nose (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, paperbound, 1962), p. 201. 7. In the words of one blind woman, “I was asked to endorse a perfume, presumably because being sight- less my sense of smell was super-discriminating.” STIGMA AND SOCIAL IDENTITY | 265 See T. Keitlen (with N. Lobsenz), Farewell to Fear (New York: Avon, 1962), p. 10. 8. A. G. Gowman, The War Blind in American Social Structure (New York: American Foundation for the Blind, 1957), p. 198. 9. For examples, see Macgregor et al., op. cit., throughout. 10. The notion of “normal human being” may have its source in the medical approach to humanity or in the tendency of large-scale bureaucratic organizations, such as the nation state, to treat all members in some respects as equal. Whatever its origins, it seems to provide the basic imag- ery through which laymen currently conceive of themselves. Interestingly, a convention seems to have emerged in popular life-story writing where a questionable person proves his claim to nor- malcy by citing his acquisition of a spouse and children and, oddly, by attesting to his spending Christmas and Thanksgiving with them. 11. A criminal’s view of this nonacceptance is presented in Parker and Allerton, o p. cit., pp. 110–111. 12. K. B. Hathaway, The Little Locksmith (New York: Coward-McCann, 1943), p. 41, in Wright, op. cit., p. 157. 13. Ibid., pp. 46–47. For general treatments of the self-disliking sentiments, see K. Lewin, Resolving Social Confl icts, Part III (New York: Harper & Row, 1948); A. Kardiner and L. Ovesey, The Mark of Oppression: A Psychosocial Study of the Ameri- can Negro (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1951); and E. H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1950). 14. F. Warfi eld, Keep Listening (New York: Viking Press, 1957), p. 76. See also H. von Hentig, The Criminal and His Victim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948), p. 101. 15. Keitlen, op. cit., Chap. 12, pp. 117–129 and Chap. 14, pp. 137–149. See also Chevigny, op. cit., pp. 85–86. 16. Henrich and Kriegel, op. cit., p. 49. 17. W. Y. Baker and L. H. Smith, “Facial Disfi gure- ment and Personality,” Journal of the American Medical Association, CXII(1939), 303. Mac- gregor et al., op. cit., p. 57 ff., provide an illus- tration of a man who used his big red nose for a crutch. 18. Henrich and Kriegel, op. cit., p. 19. 19. Ibid., p. 35. 20. Chevigny, op. cit., p. 154. 21. F. Carling, And Yet We Are Human (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962), pp. 23–24. 22. For one review, see G. W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (New York: Anchor Books, 1958). 23. Macgregor et al., op. cit., pp. 91–92. 24. From Clinical Studies in Psychiatry, H. S. Perry, M. L. Gawel, and M. Gibbon, eds. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1956), p. 145. 25. R. Barker, “The Social Psychology of Physical Dis- ability,” Journal of Social Issues, IV (1948), 34, suggests that stigmatized persons “live on a social- psychological frontier,” constantly facing new sit- uations. See also Macgregor et al., op. cit., p. 87, where the suggestion is made that the grossly deformed need suffer less doubt about their recep- tion in interaction than the less visibly deformed. 26. Barker, op. cit., p. 33. 27. Parker and Allerton, op. cit., p. 111. 28. This special kind of self-consciousness is analyzed in S. Messinger et al., “Life as Theater: Some Notes on the Dramaturgic Approach to Social Reality,” Sociometry, XXV(1962), 98–110. 29. Parker and Allerton, op. cit., p. 111. 30. Chevigny, op. cit., p. 140. 31. L. A. Dexter, “A Social Theory of Mental Defi - ciency,” American Journal of Mental Defi ciency, LXII (1958), 923. For another study of the mental defective as a stigmatized person, see S. E. Perry, “Some Theoretical Problems of Mental Defi ciency and Their Action Implications,” Psychiatry, XVII(1954), 45–73. 32. Baker, Out on a Limb (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, n.d.), p. 22. 33. Ibid., p. 73. 34. This theme is well treated in R. K. White, B. A. Wright, and T. Dembo, “Studies in Adjustment to Visible Injuries: Evaluation of Curiosity by the Injured,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psy- chology, XLIII(1948), 13–28. 35. For example, Henrich and Kriegel, op. cit., p. 184. 36. See Wright, op. cit., “The Problem of Sympathy,” pp. 233–237. 37. S. Zawadski and P. Lazarsfeld, “The Psychologi- cal Consequences of Unemployment,” Journal of Social Psychology, VI(1935), 239. 38. Hathaway, op. cit., pp. 155–157, in S. Richard- son, “The Social Psychological Consequences of Handicapping,” unpublished paper presented at the 1962 American Sociological Association Con- vention, Washington, DC, 7–8. 39. For a general treatment, see E. Goffman, “Alien- ation from Interaction,” Human Relations, X (1957), 47–60. 40. F. Davis. “Deviance Disavowal: the Management of Strained Interaction by the Visibly Handi- capped,” Social Problems, IX (1961), 123. See also White, Wright, and Dembo, op. cit., pp. 26–27. Why Do People Get Tattoos? Miliann Kang and Katherine Jones Who gets tattoos, and why? A self-described “24-year-old, insecure female who isn’t a perfect, thin, beautiful supermodel” writes in the Body Modifi cation e-zine that her Pega- sus tattoo has helped her overcome hatred of her body. “It is rearing up on its hind legs with its wings spread like it’s about to take off, much like the way I want to break free of my self-doubt and start loving me for me.” The same e-zine carries an account of an operations manager at a Borders Books and Café who says about hiring tattooed employ- ees, “We look for it. It makes things more interesting and more fun.” While these indi- viduals give varied and multilayered mean- ings to their own and other’s tattoos, their personal assertions are sometimes at odds with the pervasive popular interpretations of tattoos as signs of rebellion or faddishness. The growing number of enthusiasts exhibit a broad array of tattooing practices, from a discreet fl ower on the hip to full-body and facial tattoos. According to a 2003 survey by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio State University, 15 percent of the U.S. adult population has tattoos, and the fi gure rises to 28 percent for adults younger than 25. In addition, 88 percent of those interviewed said they know at least one person who has a tattoo. According to U.S. News and World Report , tattooing was the sixth fastest- growing retail business in 1997. What accounts for the rising popularity and vis- ibility of tattoos? Most tattooed people see their tattoos as unique aspects of themselves, but sociologists who study tattooing focus on group patterns and overall trends. They examine the infl u- ence of media and consumer culture and the infl uence of gender, sexuality, race, and class on “body politics.” While no single explana- tion accounts for the increasing popularity of tattoos, researchers fi nd that people use tattoos to express who they are, what they have lived through, and how they see them- selves in relation to others and to their social worlds. Studies also fi nd that people cannot fully control the meaning of their own tat- tooed bodies; the social contexts in which they live shape the responses to and interpre- tations of their tattoos by others. Paul Sweetman writes, “The popular image of the tattooee as young, male and working- class is now increasingly outdated, as more and more men and women, of various age- groups and socio-economic backgrounds, choose to enter the tattoo studio.” In trying to understand these new tattooees, we focus on three groups—youth, women, and mem- bers of tattoo subcultures. We then discuss whether tattoos actually satisfy the aims of those who get them. TATTOOED YOUTH Tattooing is especially popular among teen- agers and college students. At a stage when WHY DO PEOPLE GET TATTOOS? | 267 young people are seeking to assert their independence, tattoos may provide a way to ground a sense of self in a seemingly chang- ing and insecure world. Myrna Armstrong and her collaborators have examined the prevalence of tattooing (as well as body piercing) among today’s teenagers. Through the results of two sur- veys, one based on 642 high school students in Texas and one based on a national sample of 1,762 students, they conclude that most tattooed adolescents, contrary to stereo- types, are high-achieving students and rarely report gang affi liations. Since the 1980s, tattooing has won a fol- lowing among teenagers and college stu- dents, who have altered the reputation of tattooed people from that of criminals and laborers to that of artists and free think- ers. Whereas many cities, including New York, once banned tattoo parlors, they have become ubiquitous in most college towns. Numerous Hollywood celebrities, musicians, and models have visible tattoos, including Angelina Jolie, Lucy Liu, Janet Jackson, Johnny Depp, and Nick Carter—inspiring many youth to emulate their pop idols by becoming tattooed. This has resulted in what Michael Atkinson calls the “supermarket era” of tattooing, marked by easy availabil- ity and consumer choice. Despite this aura of mass consumption, Atkinson fi nds that tattoos and the tattoo- ing experience give young people feelings of greater control and authority over their own lives. Christine, for example, explains her tattoos as an effort to reclaim her body from the pressures of school, peers, and par- ents. “I want everyone to know that I’m sick of being told what to do and how to look.” Tattoos can become a symbolic battleground between adolescents asserting autonomy over their own bodies and authority fi gures trying to enforce standard codes of appearance. Adolescents may also use tattoos as a way to signify and solidify group memberships as they move between schools and communities. Susan’s tattoo enforces her ties to childhood friends. “We grew up in [town] together, and these fl owers [pointing to tattoo] were painted all over the gym in our elementary school. . . . I love knowing my girls and I will always be together like that.” Another young woman, Renee, describes to Atkinson how several women from her residence hall fl oor decided together to get tattoos of their uni- versity logo. While these individuals believe that tattoos can provide some semblance of belonging and security in a changing world, these promises of permanence often fall short in the face of real personal transitions and shifting social norms. Eve, a young woman interviewed for this reading, explains that she and her fi ancé plan to get tattoos on the day they sign their mar- riage license. The tattoo “symbolizes perma - nence, something long lasting but also a journey.” She argues that these tattoos are not about teenage rebellion but about commemo- rating a passage to adulthood and a committed relationship. In an age when the divorce rate hovers around 50 percent, the tattoo emerges as a poignant if shaky symbol of an attempt to sustain a long-term relationship. Eve empha- sizes that even if she eventually divorces, she still wants a memento of her marriage because it marks an important era in her life. As these young people illustrate, tattoos are a powerful means by which a generation can assert independence and commemorate important events, ranging from going away to college to living alone for the fi rst time to getting married. In marking these rites of passage, young people give tattoos multiple and at times contradictory meanings. While some invoke tattoos as rebellion or rejec- tion of authority fi gures and mainstream values, others utilize them in more nuanced ways to assert their own defi nitions of matu- rity and autonomy. Whatever the particular statements that young people are making with their tattoos, the act of getting a tat- too increasingly serves as a vehicle to mark adulthood. | MILIANN KANG AND KATHERINE JONES268 TATTOOING WOMEN Women’s interest in tattooing has also been increasing in the United States since the 1960s. Today almost half of tattooed people are women, according to various sources. A 2003 Harris poll found that 15 percent of women and 16 percent of men have tat- toos. (The same poll found that 31 percent of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals had at least one tattoo.) Tattooing offers many women control over their own bodies. Some have used the tattoo to challenge the limited roles of wife and mother and to explore other ways to defi ne themselves. Around the turn of the last century, aristocratic women in England, France, and the United States, including Win- ston Churchill’s mother and members of the Vanderbilt family, sported tattoos. Margo DeMello asserts that many Victorian women were drawn to tattoos as a way of demon- strating that they were “less likely to accept the idea of the quiet, pale, and bounded female body.” In addition, she says, “Tat- toos have long been a sign of that resistance within the working class.” Perceptions of tattooed women as sexu- ally promiscuous and lower class have a long history. Albert Parry describes a rape case in late-1920s Boston in which the prosecutor, upon realizing that the young woman he was defending had a tattoo, requested that the case be dropped. The judge and jury released the two men who raped her on the grounds that they had been misled by the butterfl y on her leg. As with many women in rape cases, the defendant herself was put on trial, and her tattoo was seen as evidence of her guilt, overriding whatever meaning she herself hoped to assert through it. While men and women both get tattoos, men are more likely to use tattoos to rein- force traditional notions of masculinity, whereas women often both defy and repro- duce conventional standards of femininity. In interviews with Atkinson, Caroline states, “Women nowadays believe that whatever men can do women can do better, and that includes tattooing.” Zeta explains that tat- toos provide a concrete way of challenging traditional gender norms: “I could talk and talk and talk about wearing grungy clothes and not dyeing my hair to look like a Barbie doll, and no one would care since all of that is superfi cial.” While Zeta believes the per- manence of a tattoo demonstrates a deep and tangible commitment to alternative gender defi nitions, other women use tattoos to con- form to mainstream standards of femininity. As tattoos become more common, they are less able to express subversive defi ni- tions of women and their bodies. Atkinson argues that many of the young women he interviewed used their tattoos to enforce rather than challenge traditional feminin- ity. Their tattoos were placed in either eas- ily hidden or sexualized areas of the body such as the shoulder, hip, or lower back. The images were also traditionally feminine, such as animals, fl owers, and hearts. Stephanie Farinelli, a regular participant in tattoo con- tests, describes to Miffl in how mainstream expectations for feminine beauty shape these competitions: “I felt that I was not feminine- looking enough and scantily clad enough to win. I got a wardrobe change, went on a diet, and won fi rst place the following year.” DeMello argues that while feminist scholars have rushed to embrace tattooing’s liberatory potential for women, “people aren’t inter- ested in the women who get men’s names on them, or who get what their men want on them because it’s sexy and feminine rather than ‘empowering.’ ” Even when women seek freedom and power over their own bodies, the meanings women attach to their tattoos are “culturally written over” by the larger society. Braun- berger gives the example of Elaine Schieve, a North Dakota lawyer who got a tattoo of a Nile River goddess on her right ankle to celebrate her 60th birthday and the “libera- tion of menopause”—only to be confronted WHY DO PEOPLE GET TATTOOS? | 269 by friends concerned about the reactions of her husband and male colleagues who do not take women seriously in the law profes- sion. Even among well-meaning friends, her intention of celebrating a personal passage was overshadowed by the social contexts in which women must struggle to achieve pro- fessional respect. Women have pioneered the use of tat- toos to reclaim their bodies from traumatic experiences, including disease and abuse. Recently, women recovering from breast cancer have sought tattoos, both to create a new aesthetic for mastectomy scars and to express the devastating effects of the disease. Tattoo artist Sasha Merritt, recognizing the importance of tattooing in the healing pro- cess for women who have mastectomy scars, advertises a special rate for breast cancer sur- vivors at the Women’s Cancer Resource Cen- ter in Oakland, California. Andree Connors, a California writer with a rose tattoo over her mastectomy scar, told Ms. Magazine in 1992, “This is an invisible epidemic: every- one looks ‘normal’ because they’re wear- ing prostheses. So the message does not get across to the world that we are being killed off by breast cancer.” Marking their bodies with tattoos helps women to feel they are reclaiming lost or violated parts of themselves—an especially important process for women healing from abuse or trauma. In an interview with Atkin- son, Marion describes her participation in a sexual abuse survivor’s group in which ten of the women had gotten tattoos: “Each of us has taken a turn writing a story about our tattoo and what it means. We present them at group meetings and go over how tattooing helps women feel in control of our bodies.” Women may use tattooing to reclaim their bodies not only from violence or illness but from more everyday experiences of feeling unattractive, weak, or different—like the young woman with the Pegasus tattoo. While some critics regard tattooing as another form of self-mutilation, and this indeed may be true in some cases, the self-described experi- ences of most tattooees seem to contradict this interpretation. Whereas most people who engage in cutting are ashamed of and attempt to hide their scars, most tattooees regard their tattoos as sources of pride and works of art, even those who hesitate to dis- play them in public. For many women, tattooing is a complex practice that involves both conformity and resistance to the expectation that their bod- ies be attractive to men. While historically many women have sought tattoos as a way to transgress gender norms, contemporary women increasingly seek tattoos as conven- tional markers of feminine beauty. In both cases, women have used tattoos as vehicles to create a sense of community with other women around shared experiences, even including abuse or disease. TATTOO SUBCULTURES Some of those who modify their bodies in extreme ways by becoming heavily tattooed defi ne themselves as neo- or modern primi- tives and identify with tribal tattooing prac- tices. Neo-primitives defi ne their movement in opposition to modern society and view body modifi cation as a way of reconnect- ing to primal experiences. While the tattoos worn by neo-primitives may be similar to those worn by others, many neo-primitives embrace tattoos and body modifi cation as a spiritual experience and seek out modern primitive tattoo artists who take a ritualis- tic approach. Jamie Summers, a tattoo art- ist chronicled by Miffl in, sees tattooing as a “metamorphic rite.” Some neo-primitive tattoo artists arrange ceremonies to coincide with phases of the moon or include chant- ing, drumming, and burning of sage in their sessions. For many neo-primitives, the tattoo not only becomes a primary source of iden- tity but also shapes a sense of group mem- bership. Thus, rather than being antisocial, | MILIANN KANG AND KATHERINE JONES270 Victoria Pitts states that heavily tattooed people form bonds with others in the body modifi cation subculture. The shared prac- tice of using tattooing to “provoke disdain, accept risk and push the envelope of body aesthetics” creates strong group ties. Statistics on modern primitives are hard to fi nd because the category is hard to defi ne. Many modern primitives may also be mem- bers of other subcultures such as gay and lesbian, S and M, and fetish communities. While some tattoo artists may incorporate elements of modern primitive ceremony into their practices, they might not identify with the modern primitive movement. Also, the modern primitive practice of deeply personal and heavily symbolic tattooing has been taken up by people outside this community. Some individuals may not identify them- selves as modern primitives yet still consider themselves part of a tattoo community. Often referred to as “tattoo enthusiasts,” they not only have lots of tattoos but also share a commitment to associating with others who have tattoos and to a lifestyle in which tat- toos are central. According to DeMello, activities such as reading tattoo publications, attending tattoo conventions, and participat- ing in Internet chat rooms give members of a tattoo subculture a “sense that they have found people who are like them and who are not like everyone else.” This sense of shared values is especially true for those who use tattooing to criticize the consumer values of capitalist society. Cliff, a self-proclaimed neo-primitive inter- viewed by Atkinson, regards his tattoos as challenging the spiritual emptiness of our culture. “I was tired of looking like everyone else, and walking around like a zombie in my own body. Ripping up your body with tat- toos is a way of getting in touch with yourself and others who are tired of being spiritually beaten down by our culture.” Ironically, while some individuals invoke tattooing as a critique of consumer society, tattoos have themselves become a popular commodity. As tattoos become more main- stream, some modern primitives engage in increasingly extreme practices to differenti- ate themselves. “When it [tattooing] gets embraced by the culture-at-large, somehow they take the rough edges off and make it palatable—cute-ify it and render it safe,” says Don Ed Hardy in Modern Primitives . Tat- too artist Greg Kulz adds, “People are going for the extreme experience—whatever’s accepted becomes boring, so you have to have something new.” While tattoo enthusiasts argue that tat- toos are an expression of freedom and con- trol over the body, their tattooing practices are highly sensitive to shifting social trends. And while many hard-core and neo-primitive people are regarded as marginalized and even freakish by mainstream society, they are part of established groups with their own codes of belief and norms of behavior. LIMITATIONS The message that a person intends to com- municate through a tattoo is not always the message received by others. The complex motivations of people who get tattoos are fi ltered through historical and cultural lenses that often impose unintended and unwanted meanings on their tattooed bodies. A per- son’s choice of imagery, location of the tat- too, and whether or not to cover it are all infl uenced by that person’s social context. Despite their increasing popularity, tat- toos still carry stigma and can provoke dis- crimination. The University of California at Los Angeles conducted a “Business Attire Survey” in 1999 which revealed that 90 per- cent of campus recruiters looked negatively on tattoos. Despite evidence to the contrary, teenagers with tattoos are more likely to be perceived as gang members, drug users, dropouts, and troublemakers. A study by Armstrong and McConnell shows that medi- cal professionals still often attribute tattoos WHY DO PEOPLE GET TATTOOS? | 271 to gang affi liation. Racial and ethnic minori- ties are especially likely to have their tattoos perceived as marks of gang membership or criminal behavior. Defense attorneys often advise their clients that visible tattoos can have a negative infl uence on middle-class (and white) jurors and judges. Young people may fi nd it necessary to cover their tattoos not only when looking for work but also on the job. Once employed, many people still need to keep their tat- toos covered or face situations like that of a receptionist in San Diego interviewed by Miffl in: “People think I’m stupid until they talk to me. They think because you look dif- ferent you have no respect for society and that you’re not educated.” Thus, while they may desire the tattoo as a mark of individu- ality, rebellion, or creative expression, some tattooees have diffi culty reconciling their own intentions with negative social percep- tions of their tattoos. Furthermore, hardcore forms of tattooing—such as full-body and facial tattoos—result in stronger stigmatiza- tion that can affect employability and social acceptability in ways that a small, easily hid- den tattoo would not. Tattoos also can create tensions in inter- personal relations. In Atkinson’s study, Adele reveals, “I go home at night and cry sometimes because I don’t have the brass to stand up and ask people to accept me for how I look” with a tattoo. Rena agonized over getting a tattoo when she noticed her father’s reaction to a tattooed friend: “My dad won’t even talk to her anymore when she comes by the house.” In the end, she decided to place her tattoo where no one, especially her family, could see it. Even when a tattoo symbolizes positive relationships or accomplishments to the bearer, friends and family may still interpret it negatively. Contradictory interpretations of tattoos may also confront those who wish to make political or social statements. Doug explains to Atkinson that his swastika tattoos were his way to reclaim the ancient symbol from its connections with Nazism. But he covers them because he is afraid they will be misun- derstood, marking him as a white suprema- cist. The historical symbolism and common cultural understanding attached to this design overshadow Doug’s intended message. In addition, tattoos in and of themselves do little to change social conditions and may contribute to the very conditions they seek to challenge. The anticonsumer values expressed by many neo-primitives and tat- too enthusiasts are undermined by the mar- keting of tattoos as fashionable and chic. Pitts reports that attempts to use tattoos to counter demeaning and objectifying images of women have been subverted by the popu- larization of tattooed bodies in pornographic magazines, videos, and strip shows. The tattoo speaks to the ongoing, com- plex need for humans to express themselves through the appearance of their bodies. The tattooed body serves as a canvas to record the struggles between conformity and resis- tance, power and victimization, individual- ism and group membership. These struggles motivate both radical and mundane forms of tattooing. The popularity of tattoos attests to their power as vehicles for self-expression, commemoration, community building, and social commentary. At the same time, the tattoo’s messages are limited by misinterpre- tation and the stigma that still attaches to tattooed people. Big Handsome Men, Bears, and Others Virtual Constructions of ‘Fat Male Embodiment’ Lee F. Monaghan I don’t know if anyone else is watching the new Road Rules [US TV programme], where they’re in the South Pacifi c. I caught some of it tonight and their challenge was that the two guys had to put on a Chippendales-type dance show at this drag bar, while the girls had to get at least fi fty people to show up to it. One of the guys was a BHM [Big Handsome Man] and their show was SO GOOD! Both of the guys wore thongs about the size of your average piece of Kleenex, and they were pretty good danc- ers. The crowd absolutely loved them, and so did the judges. Not because they thought it was funny to see a big guy dancing around like that, but because they really thought they were good. And in two out of the three categories, the BHM guy got a higher score than the skinny guy!!!! Big guys rule!!!! (Posted on a fat acceptance Internet discus- sion board by a Female Fat Admirer or FFA) FATNESS AND THE MANAGEMENT OF SPOILED MASCULINE IDENTITIES The appropriateness of fatness has long been bounded and regulated in Western culture, even when fat bodies are sexed as male. Note, for instance, William Banting’s 1863 A Letter on Corpulence (cf. Huff, 2001), Falstaff’s proclaimed frailty, Shakespeare’s Henry IV and cultural commentary on the medical category ‘morbid [ sic ] obesity’ since Hippocrates (Gilman, 2004: 11). Of course, this does not translate to a naturalized and universal condemnation of fatness. Forms of fat embodiment have long had historical and cross-cultural currency. Mennell (1991: 147), for example, notes that ‘healthy stout- ness’ and ‘the magnifi cent amplitude of the human frame’ constituted the cultural model in medieval and early modern Europe. The anthropology of the body tells a similar story, especially in relation to female fecun- dity (Brain, 1979). However, in contempo- rary Anglophone culture, such bodily capital is often ‘discredited’; that is, it is a stigma which, unlike ‘discreditable’ stigma, is imme- diately evident during face-to-face interac- tion (Goffman, 1968: 14). Once good, fat bodies putatively belong to the bad and/or the ugly according to the defi nitional workings of ‘somatic society’— an increasingly global society where ‘major political and personal problems are both problematized in the body and expressed through it’ (Turner, 1996: 1). This degra- dation, which is currently being extended to Asia and Pacifi c regions (where body mass, in contrast to the United Kingdom and the United States, is positively corre- lated with socioeconomic status), is certifi ed and accentuated by the Western disease- focused biomedical model (International Diabetes Institute, 2000). According to the World Health Organization (WHO, 1998), ‘overweight’ and ‘obesity’ are reaching ‘epidemic’ proportions in both developed BIG HANDSOME MEN, BEARS, AND OTHERS | 273 TABLE 24.1 A typology of ‘fat’ male body-subjects and their cybersociates Generic types of fat male body Subtypes Supportive cybersociates Big Handsome Men (BHM) Super Size BHM (SSBHM) Female Fat Admirers (FFA), including but not limited to Big Teen BHM Beautiful Women (BBW) Big Handsome Black Men (BHBM) Size Acceptance community more generally ‘Cuddly’ Bears Daddy or Polar Bear Other Bears and thinner subtypes (e.g. the Otter and Wolf ) Cub Gay Bear Lovers or Admirerss more generally Hybrids and other subtypes (e.g. Chubby or Grizzly Bear, Big Teddy Bear, Black Bear) STR8 women who admire ‘bear-like’ men Other large hirsute men identifi ed as heterosexual (STR8) Bears Other Big/Fat Males Chubbies Chubby Chasers, Encouragers or Gay Fat Admirers Gainers Feeders Belly Builders Feedees Various others, including those supporting or admiring BHM and Bears Foodees Gluttons and developing nations. Compounding the stigma of fatness, such pathologizing typi- fi cations are increasingly taken for granted in the English-speaking world. Even so, alternative defi nitions exist in various com- municative contexts. Using qualitative data generated in Anglophone cyberspace, this reading explores more positive typi- fi cations of fat male embodiment—social constructions which could be described as ‘virtual’ given their digital expression and ‘connotation[s] of “not quite”, adequate for practical purposes even if not strictly the real thing’ (Hine, 2000: 65). Extending Goffman’s (1968) arguments about stigma, such typi- fi cations are also ‘virtual’ in another sense, representing expectations which may fi gure in the management of spoiled identities. BIG HANDSOME MEN: PUTTING ON(LINE) A DESIRABLE BODY AND FACE This typifi cation is relatively inclusive. One of my contacts wrote: ‘Any fat guy is a BHM, be he gay, teenager, African American, Asian or if he comes from Jupiter’ (AdorableFFA, email: 11 May 2004). However, in practice, this universality is highly circumscribed. If reference is made to sexuality, the BHM label is largely constructed within heterosexual | LEE F. MONAGHAN274 self-accepting (SA) groups (some meet off- as well as online). Although primarily cater- ing to Big Beautiful Women (BBW), and their typically slim male Fat Admirers (FAs), these (cyber-)groups also offer acceptance, support and heterosexual validation for fat men. Online, self-typifying BHM (or, more modestly, ‘big men’) often seek corporeal connections and off-line dating opportuni- ties with Female Fat Admirers (FFAs). This is illustrated below. Here ‘nice and thick’ refers to the author’s offl ine body, rather than intel- lect, amidst similar postings where geograph- ically locatable BHM described their eye and hair colour, as well as weight and height: Any FFA’s in California? Hi, I’m a big man in Santa Barbara, I would just love to meet a woman who appreciates someone nice and thick. If you’re a FFA who is hungry for a date, email me! (Posting on a BHM/FFA discussion board) In contrast to gay male typifi cations (dis- cussed below), the genus BHM is relatively homogeneous. When differentiation was observed, this often coincided with the heavy off-line stigma associated with particular cat- egories of fat male. These include adolescents (Teen BHM), who are often considered ‘body conscious’ (WHO, 1998: 61), and those clin- ically defi ned as ‘morbidly [ sic ] obese’ (Super Size BHM). The typifi cation Big Handsome Black Men (BHBM) was unusual, despite AdorableFFA’s ethnically inclusive defi ni- tion. Following Mosher (2001: 176), this could be due to a more accommodating attitude to fat among African Americans. However, I did observe one self-typifying BHBM (reportedly weighing 260 pounds at 5 feet 10 inches) admonish African Ameri- can women for ignoring or insulting their fat ‘brothers’ offl ine. However, while all BHM may be vulnerable to offl ine stigma, or ‘non- person treatment’ (Goffman, 1959), the Internet allows fl eshy bodies to become more durable and valued cyborgs. For Haraway (1991: 175), cyborgs embrace technology in order to exercise ‘the power to survive . . . to mark the world that marked them as other, [to] reverse and displace hierarchical dual- isms’ such as ugly and handsome. Following Wernick (1991), this also meshes with a pro- motional culture where men, like women, are increasingly being constructed as fl eshy advertisements for the self. The BHM label is a ‘personal front’ (Goff- man, 1959) in the theatre of life. As part of the online presentation or promotion of self, BHM seek acceptance and heterosexual matching through ‘face work’ (Goffman, 1967), which could more appropriately be termed ‘screen work’. This work, sometimes manifest in lighthearted sociability, draws positive meanings from the symbolism of the desirable (handsome) male face (on the cultural signifi cance of the face, see Synnott, 1989). Photographs purportedly depict- ing the BHM’s face and favourable self- comparisons to ‘famous faces’ (e.g. the BHBM mentioned above claimed he looked like Sidney Poitier) may also render this ‘screen work’ more corporeally grounded. Here the Internet provides a stage upon which ‘real’ fat males may (virtually) construct a self that (partially) transcends the increas- ing bodyism of somatic society. Though, as indicated below, corpulent male bodies (fat body parts below the neck) are still relevant, contrasting with common representations of fat as ‘an unwanted appendage of the head- self’ (Millman, 1980; cited by Mosher, 2001: 174). These male body-selves also include those typifi ed as SSBHM in SA circles: Once, on a ‘You’re Too Fat to Be All That’ epi- sode of Ricki Lake, I heard a 500 pound man describe his belly as ‘the playground’. ‘Ladies love the playground!’, he said. ‘They love to ride and slide and do the glide’. It was a hor- rible episode, but man, did I laugh. And I now call my belly the playground. And I still laugh. I’ve been called many things, but the best was ‘big, sexy beast’. (A BHM responding to FFAs on a fat-acceptance discussion board) BIG HANDSOME MEN, BEARS, AND OTHERS | 275 SA cyber-groups typically comprise ‘the own and the wise’ (Goffman, 1968). These cybersociates are instrumental in manufac- turing favourable (recognizably human) versions of fat male embodiment. Through collaborative efforts, participants promote a ‘line’ (Goffman, 1967) which, in the words of AdorableFFA, ‘is designed to make both the person of size and the public aware that fatness does not imply ugliness’ (email: 11 May 2004). The consistency of this shared viewpoint—along with its promotion of civil liberties, social support and legitimacy— leads me to suggest that it is a relatively proactive, rather than reactive, stance. Julie, who, like AdorableFFA, was a key member of a prominent fat activist group, also stated that fat men unaffi liated to SA organizations are BHM irrespective of their own aware- ness or promotion of fat civil rights (email: 26 December 2003). To borrow from, and modify, Marxist social thought, these ‘fat- male-bodies-in-themselves’ may lack politi- cal consciousness but they share discredited corporeal capital and are therefore potential advocates of fat civil rights. The materiality of offl ine bodies, as well as being an important aspect of participants’ online defi nitions and interactions, was recurrent during interviewing. In response to my questioning, Julie added that ‘real- life’ BHM (experienced by her as unique individuals rather than social types) do not have to be facially handsome. This, in turn, countered the suggestion that the BHM typi- fi cation simply perpetuates the importance of actual physical looks (email, 26 Decem- ber 2003). In short, the handsome ‘face’ in face (and screen) work does not have to be realistic; rather, it is a virtual construction which is aligned with particular expectations and emotions, calling forth supportive social responses as part of a more general cult of the self (Goffman, 1967). Of course, such efforts to fi ght stigma actually consolidate a public conception of fatness as a ‘real thing’ and fat people as constituting a ‘real’ group (cf. Goffman, 1968: 139). Transforming ‘fat- bodies-in-themselves’ into ‘fat-bodies-for- themselves’ may therefore have its downside, as well as its advantages (also, see LeBesco, 2004: 89, 137). Because desire is an important dimension in the constitution of acting bodies, it is worth underscoring its relevance in the context of BHM/BBW/FFA sexual social relations. Sex- ual desire, socially patterned according to ‘a joint system of prohibition and incitement’ (Connell, 1987: 112), is produced relation- ally. Organized within what Connell terms the ‘structure of cathexis’ (1987: 112), this ‘mode of desire’ determines fat men’s eligi- bility for sexual matching and ‘interpellates’ them as ‘sexual objects’ (Turner, 1996: 46). As noted, the ‘reality’ of physical appear- ance/attraction may be disavowed online for political reasons, yet the BHM typifi cation connotes sexual (physical) desirability rather than mere acceptability. Offl ine, Gimlin (2002: 136) observes that many fat women belonging to a prominent US organization (The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance or NAAFA) do not fi nd fat men sexually desirable. Confi rmatory evidence is available online. However, there is also, methodologically speaking, much ‘negative evidence’, that is, more positive online mean- ings. Cyber-support from FFAs and others (e.g. BBW and the larger SA community) is revisited below in a discussion of the virtual construction of viable masculinities. BEARS: ‘CUDDLY’ HIRSUTE TYPES IN GAY CULTURE This typifi cation ‘includes many big men deemed fat and denigrated by the main- stream of gay male social and community networks’ (Textor, 1999: 223). In-group purists would disagree, but this is a relatively inclusive and self-referential label which overlaps with other identity categories (cf. LeBesco, 2004: 90). Similar to BHM, Bears | LEE F. MONAGHAN276 also engage in processes of self-acceptance and promotion. This proactive stance is espe- cially relevant in gay male culture given the intensity of bodyism and ‘aesthetic inequal- ity’ (Synnott, 1989). Gay culture, more so than heterosexual culture, objectifi es a standard image of male beauty: ‘the young, blond, smooth-skinned, gym-buffed’ model type or “twink” ’ (Wright, 1997: 2). Bears seek to transcend this body ideal through their symbolic style and advocated codes of self-body relatedness: The most common defi nition of a ‘bear’ is a man who is hairy, has facial hair, and a cuddly body. However, the word ‘bear’ means many things to different people, even within the bear movement. Many men who do not have one or all of these characteristics defi ne themselves as bears, making the term a very loose one. Suffi ce it to say, ‘bear’ is often defi ned as more of an attitude than anything else—a sense of comfort with our natural masculinity and bodies that is not slavish to the vogues of male attractiveness that is so common in gay circles and the cul- ture at large. (Bear Information Website) Thinner and less hirsute types sometimes embrace this identity. And, similar to the pos- sibility of rotund gay men being described as ‘big’ and handsome, heterosexual men with a ‘bear-like’ appearance could also be typi- fi ed as Bears. However, responding to ‘het- erosexual [STR8] bears’ or ‘women looking for them’, the above Website administrators write: ‘Heterosexuals are always welcome to use our resources, and we will gladly link in heterosexual-related bear sites, should they come to our attention. But unfortunately, at present, we aren’t aware of any.’ This open and communicative stance toward others suggests that Bears can be highly supportive and accepting. There are many Bear subtypes. In the mordant words of one IRC participant: ‘Bears have more self-identifi cation strata than regular people have underwear’ (Wolf Man). ‘Cybearspace’ is informative. Websites describe ‘subclasses of bear’ including Cubs, who are typically younger, smaller and possi- bly less experienced group members; Daddy Bears (or Polar Bears) who are typically older (greying) and (sexually) superordinate to Cubs; and Otters and Wolves who are ‘thin bears, the wolf being more aggressive’ (Bear Information Website). Because Table 24.1 is structured at the generic level according to typifi cations of ‘fat’ male body-subjects, Otters and Wolves are categorized as cyber- sociates of ‘cuddly’ Bears. However, there are many other sizeable subtypes. For example, ethnic variation is signifi ed by labels such as Black Bear though ‘the predominant types of bears are “American Bears” who are typi- cally Caucasian males’ (Bear Admirer Web- site). Some are hybrids with other generic types: Grizzlies are gay males whose physi- cal characteristics border those of Bears and large Chubbies (see discussion below). Systems of relevance, including motiva- tional relevances which refl ect participants’ (sexual) interest in big men, render further differentiation possible. Indeed, the ‘inner horizon’ or ‘frame of further determination’ (Schutz, 1966: 95) of this typifi cation can become extremely variegated. Drawing from Turner (1996: 47), it may be stated that Bears live their sensual, sexual yet resistant lives via the heterogeneous categories of a homoerotic mode of desire. ‘Because “Bears” mean so many things to different people, because bears come in all shapes and sizes and have differ- ent sexual proclivities’, and also given the purported expense of placing personal ads to meet potential sex partners, the administra- tors of one Website offer what they describe as ‘an incredibly scientifi c system to describe bears and bear-like men’ (Bear Information Website). Admittedly ‘somewhat tongue-in- cheek’ (Wright, 1997: 33), the so-called ‘Natural Bear Code’ differentiates types on the basis of various eroticized bodily dimen- sions. These include facial hair (length, thick- ness and tidiness), body hair (chest, back, buttocks, etc.), other aspects of the physique BIG HANDSOME MEN, BEARS, AND OTHERS | 277 (e.g. height, muscularity, weight), bodily comportment and action (e.g. dominance, passivity, sexual proclivities). Focusing upon bodily bigness, codes exist for Round Bears, Big Teddy Bears, Big Boned Bears and Bears with a Tummy. Heaviness is not always relevant, but ‘cuddly’ types with ‘bear bellies’ are common and are desired. This, in turn, may render fatness an explic- itly eroticized ‘body project’ (Shilling, 2003), where being a ‘man of girth’ is not simply accepted but positively embraced and culti- vated as part of an alternative gay identity. This is discussed below in relation to Gain- ers. However, while the value of fatness (and other bodily capital such as youthful- ness) is being infl ated in the US gay male cultural economy following the devastating impact of AIDS (Kruger, 1998), there are limits. AIDS ‘wasting syndrome’ and hor- rifi c images of the emaciated ‘homosexual body’ have not simply resulted in a gay fat utopia. Even Bears sometimes police types of fat male body, constituting their subjectivity by producing excluded and abjected Others (LeBesco, 2004: 5, 91). OTHER FAT-FRIENDLY TYPIFICATIONS There are other typifi cations and associated relevances. For example, eating ‘excessively’ is a primary concern among Gluttons while the gay eroticization of corpulence is the- matic among Chubbies and Chubby Chas- ers. Inseparable from the history of Christian asceticism, where eating and sex have long been considered ‘gross activities of the body’ (Turner, 1996: 49), other recalcitrant types embody an amalgam of corporeal concerns. In pursuing greater pleasures from eating and growing, Gainers or Feedees seek eroti- cized relations with Encouragers or Feeders. This gives an explicitly sexual twist to what Campos (2004: 70) terms ‘food porn’—the investment of quasi-erotic qualities and com- pensatory sexual meanings to food. Focusing fi rst upon the gay male commu- nity, the Chubby label is common. Existing on/offl ine, Chubbies can be differentiated from other large gay men along two axes, namely (1) their physical characteristics and (2) self–body relatedness. First, these men tend to be bigger than their bear-like cousins: ‘[Unlike] the “traditional” bear types, “chub- bies” have sumo wrestling builds’ (Bear Admirer Website). Other physical charac- teristics are also relevant. For example, hair can act as a symbolic marker for (overlap- ping) membership categorization, belonging and rejection. Harry, a bearded, middle-aged man reportedly weighing 400 pounds and self-typifying as a Chubby, wrote: ‘Chubbies who are not bears (no beard, no body hair) feel excluded by some bears’ (email: 12 June 2004). Second, Chubbies do self-acceptance/ promotion work, seeking recognition and/ or sexual validation via the Internet. How- ever, they are typically dissatisfi ed with their weight, adopting more of a reactive rather than proactive stance. Certainly Harry felt his weight was ‘a bit much’, adding ‘if I could, I’d like to be under 300 [pounds]’ (email: 12 June 2004). Another gay contact, Ray, reportedly weighing 250 pounds, said more generally: ‘I think of chubbies as the big guys who are big not by choice and wish they were thin (usually complain all the time about the diet they should start tomorrow!)’ (email: 13 January 2004). However, while ‘most chubbies want to weigh less’ (Harry, email: 12 June 2004), their corpulence is eroticized. The Internet and offl ine convergences, organized by ‘fat- friendly’ European and US gay clubs, offer spaces for sexual expression and matching. Websites for and by Chubbies and Chubby Chasers (who may not necessarily be ‘big’ themselves) are often sexually explicit. Some are commercial porn sites, though others are personal homepages. Again, white eth- nicity and US nationality are often taken for granted, though some Websites present other nationalities and ethnicities. Several | LEE F. MONAGHAN278 sites I came across described the biographies and romantic hopes of African American Chubbies—cyber-bodies whose weight and ethnicity have reportedly led to offl ine dis- crimination and subordination in gay culture. Other typifi cations refer to (typically smaller) men who actively embrace and pos- sibly eroticize fattening processes. Here, if only in imagination, the internal and external spaces of the (cyber)body are constructed as ‘free territory’—a place of liberty and licence that may be manipulated, adorned and pene- trated according to the owners’ intentions and will (cf. Lyman and Scott, 1970: 106). Gain- ers and Belly Builders are typically, though not necessarily, gay men whose bodies, or spe- cifi c body parts (the stomach), are in a state of ‘unfi nishedness’ (Shilling, 2003). Similar to the ‘grotesque medieval body’ (Bakhtin, 1965), they happily resist being devoured by the world by consuming, growing and play- fully partaking of the world. As an aside, it is interesting to note that clinicians, without any irony or recognition of the fat-bellied cyborg, refer to accumulated abdominal fat as ‘android obesity’ (WHO, 1998: 7). It would be wrong to view Websites (and the typifi cations used therein) as exclusively heterosexual or gay. Ray, who hosted an internationally popular Gainer Website, wrote: ‘Over recent years more straights [heterosexuals] seem to be showing up in typically gay “places” so the line blurs’ (email: 15 March 2004). Understandings gleaned from an early visit to a Gainer/ Builder chat room suggest that men iden- tifying as heterosexual in everyday life (i.e. claiming to be married to women) visit such spaces, albeit with the intention of making gay sexual contacts. Drawing from Waskul’s (2005) concept of ‘alter-sexuality’ or liminal sexuality, there is nothing unusual about this: cyberspace provides suitable conditions for safely ‘bounded’ reinventions of the sexual self which may contrast radically with every- day life. Nonetheless, essentialist construc- tions of sexuality often prevail. For example, those providing the aforementioned ‘freebie’ IRC room sought to include straight men. Distinguishing their space from other ‘chub sites’, they encouraged the appreciation and cultivation of men’s fat stomachs by focusing upon ‘guts’ not genitals. Even so, gay male sexuality remained highly thematic. Whether reference is made to gay or het- erosexually oriented cyberspace, emphasis may shift from weight-gain fantasies to the pleasures of eating. Often there is overlap. Either way, dyadic relationships may be sought with supportive cybersociates as part of the expression, production and direction of discreditable desires (including desires which some participants describe as ‘mildly’ masochistic). These resistances against dietary and sexual restraint entail praise and/ or playful degradation in techno-sexualized contexts. (If actual physical interaction does not occur, then the telephone may serve as a more immediate alternative to text-based interaction.) Here erotic fantasies and fi c- tional stories render food, sex and expanding/ expansive bodies pivotal concerns. Food is not necessarily a compensation for sex in these representations; rather, food may complement the sensual pleasures of sexual relations (e.g. eating chocolate cake which is smeared on a sexual partner’s naked body). Textor (1999) discusses this in relation to US gay men, where Gainers form eroticized feeding relationships with Encouragers. Sim- ilar relationships are forged in heterosexual space, though participants may typify as Feedees and Feeders and call their practice Feederism. An FFA elaborates, noting subtle distinctions and the fact that gay men do not have a monopoly on the Gainer label: As far as gainers/feedees go, they may or may not be fat. For many, the feeding and gain is just a fantasy, because their real life circum- stances do not allow them to feel they can get as fat as they want. Many of course are already quite chubby or fat, want to get even fatter, and are interested in a woman who wants to feed them and then tease them about their excess girth. You can even split up the gainer and the feedee into two different categories, as BIG HANDSOME MEN, BEARS, AND OTHERS | 279 each may have a different end to attaining sex- ual pleasure. The gainer wants to gain weight because he fi nds the feeling of having the extra weight erotic, and wants to please his FFA [qua Feeder], or at least wants her to notice his extra fl ab. The Feedee may or may not want to gain, but fi nds the fullness and sensual experi- ence of indulging to be the most erotic aspect. I think there’s usually overlap, but a distinction is worth noting. I think both carry a hint of the masochism role, but there are subtle differ- ences. (WarmFFA, email: 12 May 2004) Feederism in cyberspace sometimes entails role-play between two self-identifi ed hetero- sexual men, with one adopting the role of a female Feeder in a ‘mutual-pretence aware- ness context’ (Glaser and Strauss, 1964). Drawing from ethnomethodological studies of gender attribution, this is an instance of social cognition and interpretation trans- forming ‘naturalistic’ bodies according to shared structures of practical relevance (Connell, 1987: 78). Following Featherstone (1995: 233), this may also be described as ‘computer cross-dressing’ which destabilizes boundaries such as sex and gender, intimacy and anonymity, organic and cybernetic, real- ity and fantasy. Other typifi cations in heterosexually ori- ented space include Glutton and Foodee. They too lend weight to the sociological tru- ism that ‘food is not just something to eat’ (Murcott, 1998: 14). Their relatedness to supportive others, comprising dyadic (sexu- alized) feeding and eroticized weight gain, may be less central but they collectively emphasize gluttonous pleasures. These rele- vances encode an open disregard for medical models of healthy diet—models which often clash with people’s gustatory habits and pref- erences (Beardsworth and Keil, 1997: 256). In the gluttony email group I subscribed to, there was often a caustic championing of fat people’s rights to share in the public’s growing fascination with eating (cf. Mur- cott, 1998: 1). Here tales of gluttony were posted in an atmosphere of camaraderie and acceptance. (Re)producing a shameless orientation to fat male embodiment, infor- mation was circulated on competitive eat- ing events, ‘all-you-can-eat’ restaurants and fattening recipes. In contrast to bourgeois stylization, refi nement and distinction, ‘the crudely material reality’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 203) of eating was celebrated as part of the performance of gender, class and identity. That said, other issues were also discussed, including discrimination, ambivalence about weight gain, affordability of food and the eroticization of those BBW who publicly display gustatory verve, fl esh and a desire to become even fatter. Finally, typifi cations may be defi ned rela- tionally independent of possible incumbents’ feelings (cf. Schutz, 1964: 45). Typifi cations may even be constructed in ‘closed aware- ness contexts’ (Glaser and Strauss, 1964) characterized by gendered power relations and a traditional sexual division of domes- tic labour. For example, a self-typifying male Glutton may become a Feedee by forming a ‘food-centric’ relationship with a woman (Feeder) independent of her knowledge or self-identity. The host of the gluttony group cited above, writing in a character- istically self-assured style, makes this clear when advising other male Gluttons on how to form offl ine commensal relations with a female Feeder: Here’s my advice for fi nding a female feeder. Go to a personals website. A BBW site might be more likely to yield positive responses. Or just put an ad in the regular local newspaper. NEVER specify that you are looking for a female feeder. No one knows what that means. Most female feeders are not really consciously aware of their preferences. Many of them have not discovered this side of themselves because they have not met the right man to bring it out in them. IN your ad, just say something like ‘Must be a good cook’. That’s all you really need to say. You might mention that you are ‘a bit of a glutton’. Be certain to include dining out and picnics and such in your list of inter- ests. You’ll probably get several responses. In the initial phone call, be sure to chat about | LEE F. MONAGHAN280 your favorite foods and inquire about hers and her favorite recipes. From the way she talks about food or the interest she shows in your preferences, you may get a feeling if she is a potential feeder. Design your fi rst date so that several food encounters are included. Dem- onstrate your strong appetite to her without drawing attention to it. Note her reaction. If the response is neutral to intrigue you have a promising lead. The acid test will come a few dates later when you know her well enough to share a home cooked meal at her place. A potential female feeder will have picked up on your abnormally well-developed appetite in the course of a date or two. She will pre- pare generous quantities of food in multiple courses. If she makes a ‘diet’ meal or fails to offer seconds, or gives you a lecture for eating too much, you may have someone too hung up on dietary restraint to ever satisfy you. (Al, host of a ‘Food and Drink’ Website) VIRTUALLY CONSTRUCTING ACCEPTABLE, ADMIRABLE OR RESISTANT MASCULINITIES The above gendered typifi cations fi gure within online schemes of orientation and interpreta- tion and have implications for positive sub- jectivity. At a time when the obesity industry is actively constructing overweight as a seri- ous problem, the Internet provides space for alternative defi nitions of fat male embodiment. Some common ways of managing spoiled mas- culine identities online are outlined below under four headings: (1) appeals to ‘real’ or ‘natural’ masculinity; (2) the admiration and eroticiza- tion of fat men’s bodies; (3) transgression, fun and the carnivalesque; and (4) the pragmatics and politics of fat male embodiment. Appeals to ‘Real’ or ‘Natural’ Masculinity Constructions of normative masculinity are multidimensional, incorporating factors such as employment, marital status and father- hood (Watson, 2000). Yet, in the context of bodyism, fatness may be used to emasculate male bodies or render them subordinate on masculine hierarchies. In contemporary Anglophone culture, fatness symbolizes lack of self-discipline and adherence to masculin- ist imperatives such as being active and in control. Participants in various SA groups challenge this effacement. Whether focus- ing upon heterosexual or gay male groups, the competing rhetoric is clear: fat men have ‘real’ or ‘natural’ bodies. Similar to Watson’s male interviewees, cyber-persona criticized media images of ‘ideal’ men’s bodies on the basis that such bodies are unrepresentative of the ‘normal bloke’s everyday body’ (Watson, 2000: 80). Men often know ‘ideal’ or ‘perfect’ physiques require body-maintenance regimes, render- ing the hard-edged male body ‘an artifi cial creation’ (2000: 117; also, see Monaghan, 2001). Nonetheless, given the importance of sport as a gendered institution, men may still align themselves with the functionality, if not the aesthetics, of an exercised body. By reportedly engaging in physically demanding (male-coded) sports, ‘big’ men seek to coun- ter negative (feminized) stereotypes. Their vocabularies of motive derive additional weight if the type of male body invoked is ‘gigantic in all its qualities’ rather than ‘pathologically fat’ (Gilman, 2004: 53). One contributor to a mixed-sex SA discussion board wrote the following, joining others in condemning a ‘fat discriminatory’ article in a men’s health and fi tness magazine: Well I was offended by this [article] a lot because as a big man none of the things said in that article are true. I am an athlete. I train in dojos, gyms and I spar with pro wrestlers to this day. I am 6 feet 7 inches and 400 pounds. I wear a size 18 shoe. I have never liked Men’s Health [magazine] in general because they’re only concerning themselves with the image of the perfect man and not the real man. (Gargan- tua, Big Men’s discussion board) Bears also typically accept many trappings of hegemonic masculinity. The historical asso- ciation between male homosexuality and BIG HANDSOME MEN, BEARS, AND OTHERS | 281 effeminacy undeniably promotes complex- ity and contradiction within this subculture (Wright, 1997: 11). Yet, key dimensions of masculinity are embraced, including self- confi dence and assurance. The symbolism of body and facial hair, physical bulk and male-coded activity are also relevant. Bears self-present as having the ‘correct attitude’ towards their ‘natural’ ageing male bod- ies, hair on the body and face differentiates men from women (baldness is acceptable for the same reason), ‘the battle of the bulge’ is rejected (it is typically associated with the feminine), and being camp is replaced by a sense of being an ‘everyday guy’ who also happens to be gay. Comfort with other men’s bodies is also framed in terms of ‘real’ masculinity—Bears are not ‘afraid’ to touch others, for example. Other types also engage online in mascu- line validating processes. For example, Belly Builders assert control and licence over their ‘body territory’ (Lyman and Scott, 1970: 106) in response to a society that dispraises the ‘obese’ for their putative lack of control. Gluttons emphasize ‘man-size’ appetites, the capacity for sheer quantitative stuffi ng and the enjoyment of food without fear of calories (also, see Bordo, 1993: 132–4). Aligned with female Feeders, male Feedees reiterate tradi- tional gendered stereotypes where women lovingly cook their men ‘masculine’ foods such as meat. Here the ‘gendered accumula- tion process’ discussed by Connell (2002: 25) takes a specifi cally embodied form. The space- occupying male body is also relevant: being or becoming a ‘bulky’ man from overeating and/ or reduced physical activity may represent an easier approach to ‘bodybuilding’ than lifting weights. Many gay Gainers, self-presenting as former athletes (ex-Jocks), reportedly take this stance offl ine (Textor, 1999: 228). Admiring and Eroticizing Fat Men’s Bodies Fatness is potentially problematic for men regardless of their achievements or non- corporeal indicators of acceptability, respect- ability and desirability. Despite coming from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds (including the professions), unmarried fat men in a Canadian study blamed their lack of success in dating, and loneliness, on their weight (Joanisse and Synnott, 1999: 54). Correspondingly, SA cyber-communities rep- resent possible oases of support and admira- tion, which, in some instances, extends to the explicit eroticization of fat men’s bodies. As noted, BHM seek to efface the per- ceived ugliness of fatness by putting on(line) a desirable body and face. Such ‘screen work’ may be tentative (real-life rejection may be mentioned, for example), but some cyberso- ciates are highly supportive. Those reporting offl ine relationships with fat men, including women who have struggled to reinterpret their own fat, sometimes offer encourage- ment. As expressed within a heterosexual Gainer group: Subject: Yeah, she’s gaining!! Once I accepted the fact that fat does not make me a bad per- son, it was easy to give in to my natural ten- dency to be fat as well as my feelings that fat is erotic and desirable. I not only like being fat, I like Fred [partner] to be fat too. So I rub his belly and encourage him. What about you? Would you like to be fat? Would she like it if you were fat too? (Sugar Plum Fairy, Weight- Watching group email) And, referring to the same Men’s Health magazine article discussed above by Gargan- tua and cybersociates (‘Thirty-One Reasons I’m Still Fat’), another FFA cited and con- curred with one of these reasons: ‘“There actually exists a completely viable group of really hot women who are bored with totally buff, cut, in-shape guys.” You bet, we FFAs are here!’ (Ruben’s Girl, Big Men’s discussion board). Ruben’s Girl, who self- presented as an SSBBW married to a BHM, also initiated an extended group discussion on complementary masculine adjectives for BHM. Here BHM were described as massive, burly, imposing, robust, awesome, powerful, | LEE F. MONAGHAN282 cuddly and magnifi cent. This conversation ritual elevated BHM to sacred status (cf. Goffman, 1967). In this little social system, these rituals prompted BHM to thank their cybersociates for offering esteem and valida- tion. Renewed hope in fi nding romance was similarly expressed in other (free to access) SA groups by those self-presenting as single men who had spent their lives thinking their fatness was an insurmountable barrier to close, intimate heterosexual relationships. Of course, gender asymmetry must be rec- ognized. An important feminist argument is that women’s physical appearance is more often emphasized in a broader objectifying and sexist culture. It is unsurprising, there- fore, that BHM may be praised for qualities extending beyond their looks, such as per- sonality, intelligence, charm and conversa- tion skills. However, fat men may also be favourably positioned on sexual hierarchies because of, rather than despite, their size. WarmFFA’s Website expressed admira- tion and lascivious heterosexual attention towards fat men. These men included fi lm and TV stars (e.g. Robbie Coltrane), musi- cians (e.g. Popa Chubby), athletes (e.g. sumo wrestlers) and historical fi gures such as Dan- iel Lambert who was described as one of England’s biggest men, reputedly weighing as much as 52 stone (also, see Gilman, 2004: 98). Positioned as ‘eye candy’ for the FFA, visitors to this Website were offered links to photographs of fat men (some of them available through gay-themed sites) with the stated intention of serving ‘our female lustful eyes as well’ (WarmFFA’s Website). The range of acceptable or desirable male body types is reportedly much narrower in gay culture, rendering many gay men inse- cure about their looks (Locke, 1997). One response is to reject the objectifi cation (sym- bolic feminization) of gay men’s bodies where the emphasis upon beauty is recast as an impediment to intimacy (Wright, 1997: 9). However, many SA spaces promote the gay eroticization of expansive male bodies. Textor’s (1999) work on representations of fat men and homosexual desire within the big men’s magazine media is extendable to cyberspace. Similar to magazines, ‘an erotic lexicon is in place’ forming ‘a discourse of desire’ which refl ects and produces an imag- ined community wherein fat men have sex- ual currency (Textor, 1999: 218). However, structures of sexuality and cathexis produce mixed emotions (Connell, 1987: 112). Similar to BBW/FA sexual social relations (Gimlin, 2002), some ‘big’ gay men are ambivalent about this sexual validation (objectifi cation). Several gay cybersociates claimed that Chubbies are suspicious of slim Chasers because they are often predatory types, sexually ‘grazing’ on ‘big’ men who lack self-esteem and are needy of love. Harry elaborated upon this, indicating that erotic reciprocity in these (offl ine) power relations is based on an unequal exchange: Chubbies have issues with chasers because chasers’ desires can come off as a fetish, being more interested in the fat than the whole pic- ture. When they say ‘the bigger the better’ it boils their whole attraction down to one thing. Chasers can be only interested in sex and go from one chubby to another. A slim chaser can do this because they are a scarce commodity. At [offl ine chubby club], although about half of the guys are chasers, only half of those chasers are slim guys. Even with chubbies who have a degree of self-acceptance, having a handsome, young, slim or muscular guy interested in you can boost your self-esteem. But this sets them up for a crash when that person leaves. (email: 12 June 2004) Transgression, Fun, and the Carnivalesque The stigma of fatness is often challenged in a convivial atmosphere, characterized by fun and enjoyment rather than illness and disease. Again, sexual desire is relevant. However, in exploring other (interrelated) themes, I will briefl y consider online representations of feeding and fattening processes. For Gainers, BIG HANDSOME MEN, BEARS, AND OTHERS | 283 Belly Builders, Gluttons and Feedees, the vicarious pleasures of gluttony and/or body modifi cation are central. For them, oppro- brium is fl amboyantly resisted through the assertive ‘technique of self-fl aunting’ (Joanisse and Synnott, 1999: 64). The following sup- portive interchange in a mixed-sex Gainer group humorously refers to measurable offl ine bodies and seasonal celebrations. Even in contexts of corporeal transgression, food is socially ordered, patterned and encoded (cf. Mennell, 1991: 10): Subject: Have gained, how do I know? Kevin wrote: I went out today and I think I have gained, my fl y on my jeans would not stay up, the pres- sure of that extra belly was not going to give in. :) [symbol signifi es a smiling face]. Just as well it is winter and I had a large loose jumper so you could not tell anyway, blush. I am now a good 173 cm in girth, when I was 168 cm I was 172 kg so I estimate that I am now 176– 178 kg or about 390 lbs, I am aiming for 180 cm by Xmas. Reply (on the same day) from Jake: Dude, I think you’ll make it to your goal by Christmas, after all you’re so close now and still 4 months away, with 3–4 big eating holi- days ahead of you too, make the most of those and I believe you’ll be comfortably over your goal by Christmas. . . . I only wish it was me that big. (Weight-Watching group emails) In late modernity, the body and its appe- tites are increasingly regulated by the (self-) imposed imperatives of health (Lupton, 1997)—a contradiction, to be sure, given the stimulus continually to consume food- stuffs in capitalist economies. However, unlike the bourgeois ‘civilized body’ (Elias, 2000), which disciplines its own appetites and bodily boundaries according to (increas- ingly medicalized) middle-class dictates (Lupton, 2000), types of fat male cyberbody celebrate unrestrained yet patterned con- sumption. Comparable to bingeing among some women, this is ‘a virtual inevitability’ (Bordo, 1993: 130) in a culture where fat people (regardless of gender) are increasingly told to deny their hunger. Here participants seek to resist cultural injunctions against the unapologetically fat by enthusiastically and unashamedly embracing fat identities and bodies, and fattening processes. Similar to Rabelais and his world, members of these groups typically exaggerate and caricature the negative, the inappropriate (Bakhtin, 1965: 306). Here monstrous appetites and bellies (a typical grotesque hyperbola) acquire an extreme and fantastic character. A series of morphed photographs depicting a Belly Builder’s fattening career (with dates and accumulating poundage written next to a massively expanding torso) or images of forced feeding among Fatties (e.g. a funnel and tube for administering liquidized calories) mock common proprieties. If only ephemer- ally, the Internet gives rich expression to ‘the second life of the people’—a space where the ‘civilising of appetite’ (Mennell, 1991) and the (medicalized) regulation of fat bodies are resisted and mocked. Such processes, which lend themselves to a symbolic interactionist analysis of lim- inality and the emergence of personhood (Waskul, 2005), are not idiosyncratic. Some postmodern academic books similarly resist healthist injunctions against fat, fatness and gluttonous feeding. Extolling the virtues of periodically permitting oneself the sensual experience of gluttony (‘the beastlike satis- faction of a bloated belly’), Klein (1996: 60) writes: ‘You need once in a while to trans- gress the barrier between eating well and eat- ing like a pig, in order to understand what eating well might mean.’ Interestingly, this idea of ‘eating like a pig’—painfully impli- cated in forms of public harassment against fat people (Joanisse and Synnott, 1999: 58–9)—fi gures within premodern carni- valesque imagery where participants sub- vert high/low distinctions between humans and (dirty) animals. This also occurs within online feeding communities; here politically correct labels are playfully rejected—‘fat | LEE F. MONAGHAN284 greedy pig’ is preferable to ‘plus size person’. For Goffman (1968: 155–9), self-derogation is ‘understandable within a framework of normal psychology’ where the ‘normal devi- ant’ derives ‘sad pleasure’ through ‘vicarious rebelliousness’. Of course, as discussed by Langman (2004) when researching cyber- porn, the ‘grotesque degradation’ of subor- dinated others (usually women) represents the ‘dark side’ of carnivalization (a case of humiliation rather than admiration). Hence, and on a political note that converges with Bakhtin’s comments (1965) on degradation and betterment, derogatory labels are only acceptable when used among (certain groups of) fat people. For Jake, this parallels the black community’s appropriation of the term nigger (spelt ‘nigga’) where repeated use is intended to defuse negative meanings and ‘hurtful feelings towards us’ (email: 9 Febru- ary 2004). The Pragmatics and Politics of Fat Male Embodiment Common diffi culties and common solutions to fat embodiment are discussed online. The keyword here is support for those encounter- ing (and perhaps hoping successfully to chal- lenge) an unaccommodating ‘real’ world. Importantly, prominent SA groups do not offi cially support mainstream efforts to neu- tralize fat bodies through restrictive dieting and other techniques of contraction. (After all, that would reinforce the acceptability of slimness among those who are unwilling and/or unable to become and remain slim.) Rather, the everyday practicalities and expe- riences of being fat are discussed, alongside what might be done to redress social discrim- ination and promote wider tolerance. How- ever, while political concerns are often clearly articulated by fat women aligned with femi- nism (Gimlin, 2002), the politics of fat male embodiment largely concern the gendered ‘politics of identity’ (Goffman, 1968: 149). Regarding pragmatics, communication and advice abound on tackling the routine, everyday diffi culties of being large. Themes include fi nding suitable clothes suppliers; ensuring good health regardless of size; dealing with prejudiced clinicians; travel- ling comfortably (cramped aircraft seating is particularly problematic); buying rein- forced furniture and other everyday items. This communication is also often gendered in form and/or content. For example, the pri- vate motor vehicle—a symbol of masculine autonomy and independence—sometimes fi gures within information requests. Such requests may also enact male homo-sociability and solidarity: It’s time for a new ride. My 95 Ford Taurus has 190,000 miles and is starting to nickel and dime me to death. I’d like to get a pickup or a car, but need something I can fi t into com- fortably. I’m 6 feet 2 inches, 500# [pounds] have a 68-inch waist, to give you some idea. I’d like to hear what you guys are comfortable in so I have some idea where to look. I tried a Chevy Silverado with a cab and a half and was jammed in like a sardine! A little help from my friends . . . (Mr. Round, Big Men’s discussion board) Such talk reproduces a supportive context where fat men are not condemned for their ‘excessive’ weight. It also reinforces a resistant position against those who would urge the ‘obese’ to embark upon a diffi cult-to-sustain and reportedly risky weight-loss regime (cf. Campos, 2004). Pragmatics are also intertwined with gen- dered body politics. The politicization of women’s bodies is well documented and is clearly articulated with second-wave femi- nism (e.g. Boston Women’s Health Collective, 1971). There the female body is claimed to be a political, material subject constituted by and through ‘antifat’ cultural representations (Textor, 1999: 223). Following feminism’s impact upon female body consciousness, many fat women in the United States have BIG HANDSOME MEN, BEARS, AND OTHERS | 285 organized and mobilized their efforts in order to protest against size discrimination in the real world. Men (who may also, but not necessarily, be fat) are also supportive. However, as observed in NAAFA, the offi cial politicized stance is often secondary to the male FA’s eroticization of fat women’s bod- ies (Gimlin, 2002; though see LeBesco, 2004: 37). This is highly problematic for others contributing to more politically minded SA cyber-groups. There are parallels with the gay male com- munity. Textor (1999: 234) states: ‘Feminist and lesbian insistencies upon the body as materially central to politics have infl uenced the fl ourishing of the [gay] big men’s move- ment in the 1990s [but] a sexual focus pre- dominates.’ Even so, micropolitical concerns are still expressed online albeit in response to general political apathy. After stating that Chubbies ‘hate political stuff’, one partici- pant (Harry, who also wrote for a US ‘chub’ newsletter) urged his peers to be ‘political not polite’ in everyday life. This carefully framed admonition was expressed after an observed enactment of stigma was left unchallenged during an offl ine chub convention. Bears are not preoccupied with politicized social change either. Their gender politics are largely confi ned to intramale relation- ships and practices (Wright, 1997: 7). Ray offered an explanation, after I asked whether fat gay men were politically motivated in the same way as female fat activists. For him, fat men’s and women’s different political orientation is due to inequitable (gendered) body norms. However, while containing an element of truth, I would treat these words as a display of perspective, or moral forms, rather than an unmediated view of somatic society. It is a functionally resistant stance, which, like Joanisse and Synnott’s (1999) observations, entails transcendence and pro- jected self-confi dence. In Ray’s words: I think this relates back to the age-old ‘women as objects’ not as people issue. Fat men (up to a point) are seen as powerful and successful. Fat women, the opposite. I think that men can carry themselves positively and somehow have the ability to give off the sense that what I am is OK with me—that many women fi nd harder to accomplish. (email: 29 January 2004) Goffman (1968), in focusing upon stigma management and group alignment, com- ments upon the politics of identity. Here in-groups present the stigmatized individual with an ego or felt identity largely in politi- cal phrasings. This is perhaps the most suit- able conceptual framework for exploring the online gender politics of fat male embodi- ment. According to Goffman, if the stig- matized ‘adopts the right line [then] he will have come to terms with himself and be a whole man; he will be an adult with dignity and respect’ (1968: 149). While Ray told me ‘adopting the right attitude’ is an essential yet largely individual accomplishment, he recognized that the social situation of many fat gay men has profi ted from others in the big men’s movement. In his words, ‘Bears helped us all by saying I am just who I am and I’m not going to fi t into some stupid mould you may have’ (email: 29 January 2004). Here ‘advocated codes of conduct’ (Goffman, 1968: 135) provide (some types of) fat gay men not merely with a platform and a politics but with recipes for an appro- priate attitude regarding the gendered self. For others, such as Gluttons, Gainers and Feedees, recipes quite literally provide a poli- tics of pleasure which virtually unite people seeking positively to engage with, rather than retreat from, the world. However, the ‘not quite’-ness of virtuality (Hine, 2000) should be reiterated. Experiential bodies may bestow ‘the accent of reality’ upon cyberspace but there remains a ‘paramount reality’ (Schutz, 1970) which exerts its ‘unbearable weight’ (Bordo, 1993) on discredited offl ine bodies. Unsurpris- ingly, therefore, intimate and enduring rela- tionships with supportive consociates—real fl esh-and-blood bodies—are often valued by | LEE F. MONAGHAN286 those wishing to ‘live the dream’ of fat accep- tance or admiration (Jake, Weight-Watching group, email). CONCLUSION: EXPANDING AND EMBODYING GENDERED STUDIES OF FATNESS Reference to the ‘gendered dimensions’ of fatness is often interpreted to mean wom- en’s dissatisfaction with their body weight. Within the social sciences, steps are being taken to ‘bring in’ gendered meanings of fatness as they relate to males at various stages of the life course, but this emergent literature is limited. Furthermore, embod- ied sociology is seldom advanced in cur- rent studies; that is, an approach which rereads classic social theory when treating bodies as the source, location and medium of society (Shilling, 2003). Because corpu- lent male bodies are increasingly discred- ited in somatic society, I used interpretive and embodied sociology to explore some of the ways in which cyberspace may pro- vide alternative, validating meanings. After reporting and analysing relevant ethnogra- phy, several observations are worth making. There are clear efforts to reinterpret the gendered (masculine) meanings of fatness online. Although internationally relevant, these efforts are largely enacted on SA Web- sites whose members and designers are from the United States: a nation known for pro- moting a sense of entitlement and rugged individualism among its citizenry. Within these digital spaces participants actively challenge degraded and degrading body norms which refl ect and reproduce pre- dominantly white, middle-class cultural ide- als (the streamlined, rationalized, civilized body). Here forms of fat male embodiment become ‘virtually’ acceptable, admirable and even sexually desirable. Ideal typically, these are correct bodies rather than correctable bodies. ‘Screen work’ and embodied ‘identity work’ are thus conjoined as participants seek to invert negative meanings and construct (however fl eetingly) viable masculinities. There is also a playfulness to fatness and eating, representing an interesting contrast to the pathology of obesity and the ratio- nalization of diet. And, because pain may be socially infl icted through stigma, efforts to ameliorate these negative meanings and emotions through ‘screen work’ could be considered healthful. Despite being, or rather, because they are, reduced versions of their ‘real’ physical selves, cyberbodies renegotiate stigma with- out eschewing the immediate corporeality of fatness. Ethnomethodologically speak- ing, the reduced tangibility of fatness online provides suitable conditions for successful ‘infl ation ceremonies’; that is, the inverse of Garfi nkel’s (1956) degradation ceremony, with cyberbodies practically accomplishing increased social worth. Not to be shame- fully left behind the screen (scene), types of ‘big’ or ‘fat’ male body-subjects occupy the centre of an electronic stage and are digitally amplifi ed (symbolically cloaked with magi- cal costumes) and/or normalized with poten- tially real consequences for offl ine actors and audiences. Infl ationary practices— comprising advocated codes of self–body relatedness, socially constructed sexualities and other relevances—redress stigma by re-presenting otherwise discredited mate- rial bodies. Online, the corporeal matter of corpulent male body-subjects therefore mat- ters, regardless of the degree to which cyber- bodies are alter-bodies which depart from everyday life. In SA cyberspace, corporeality is a necessary condition and organizing prin- ciple for online sociality—mediated forms of embodied interaction which interface with the hardware and software of lived bodies in complex ways. Organic bodies are thus inseparable from these techno-processes, rendering online constructions of fat male embodiment virtual in another sense: they are not merely social constructions because BIG HANDSOME MEN, BEARS, AND OTHERS | 287 they are anchored in ‘real’ fl eshy selves (the binary blurring cyborg). Supportive cybersociates are integral to and integrated into the digital manufactur- ing of more positive typifi cations. Whether corpulent male bodies are typifi ed as young or old, black or white, big or super-size, het- erosexual or gay, others provide support and possibly renewed hope for an emotionally fulfi lling life. Researching male embodiment necessarily entails exploring a social world which extends beyond, while encompassing, bodies sexed/gendered as male/masculine. Similar to offl ine life, virtually construct- ing viable masculinities online is an inter- actional process comprising inter- as well as intragendered social relations. And, as may be expected, supportive cybersociates also explicitly or implicitly enact plural sexualities and other identities (e.g. ethnicity, age and social class) while co-constituting a fi eld of hierarchical social relations. Criticism of and resistance toward stigmatizing body norms are therefore entangled with the uncritical reproduction of somatic society. In short, vir- tual constructions of fat male embodiment depend upon dividing practices and iniqui- tous meanings which hierarchically grade bodies: some bodies may be ‘too fat’ or the ‘wrong’ colour while others, such as wom- en’s bodies, may be expected domestically to service heterosexual men. Of course, and this is a double-edged sword, cybersociates know online expectations, identities, sexu- alities and bodies may contrast dramatically with offl ine life. Nonetheless, authenticity and trust are valued. This, in turn, interfaces with offl ine opportunities for dating, social- ity and conviviality. While cyberspace provides a treasure- house of positive meanings, interactions and previously unknown opportunities, manag- ing spoiled identities online is ultimately a contradictory and limited project. This is not simply due to the ever-present possibility of encountering so-called ‘trolls’, who establish trust before enacting stigma, or the ultimate ‘fl atness’ of cyberspace compared to the physicality of fatness. Crucially, constructing alternative defi nitions of fatness is dependent upon reifi ed, negative typifi cations. Restated, favourable online constructions derive their meanings by implicitly and explicitly repro- ducing stigmatizing body norms: positive and negative typifi cations are not polar opposites but mutually informing and interdependent social constructs. Unsurprisingly, therefore, participants sometimes express ambivalence about being fat and practices which increase body fat. For example, those wholeheartedly endorsing carnivalesque gluttony sometimes voice regret about their reported size. Stigma is also sometimes enacted by supposedly sup- portive cybersociates. During such instances, actual (everyday) typifi cations of fatness also become virtual (digital) constructions—an unfortunate convergence which creates a stig- matizing divergence between some fat men’s virtual identities (desire to be valued) and actual (tainted) identities (Goffman, 1968). Before closing this reading, I will briefl y add to recent commentary on the usefulness of classic social theory for studies of the body and society, as well as reiterate the case for an embodied sociology. While key body the- orists such as Williams and Bendelow (1998) and Shilling (2003) have critically fl eshed out the relevance of classic sociologists (e.g. Goffman, Simmel, Weber), other interpretive sociologists have been sidelined. On the basis of my research, Schutz should be recognized as an important source of reference for body studies. Focusing upon typifi cations and the intersubjectively constructed life-world, Schutz certainly appears to have been more concerned with developing a social theory of cognition rather than sexed/gendered bod- ies and the embodiment of social action. However, similar to other classic work, Schutz s writings may be reread in corporeal terms as part of a broader effort to over- come some of the problematic dualisms in social theory. Cognition is not disembodied, with fe/male social actors intersubjectively | LEE F. MONAGHAN288 (intercorporeally) constructing life-worlds (dream-worlds and fantasies), which may be governed by the laws of the body and plea- sure (Monaghan, 2002). This is exemplifi ed in Dionysian contexts where eating and sex are topically and motivationally relevant. Furthermore, Schutzian phenomenology is extendable to cyberspace, where body-subjects are structured according to shared systems of typifi cation and relevance. Embodied sociology clearly has much to offer. It is attentive to the sociality of lived bodies and the embodiment of the social. Even when studying supposedly disembod- ied spaces such as the Internet, there is a complex intermixing of minds, bodies and society. The indivisibility of human corpo- reality, sociality and cognitive/emotional dimensions means that social scientists are increasingly addressing the importance of embodiment while also drawing insights from the sociological tradition. Based upon my own engagement with the body literature and ongoing empirical work, I envision an exciting and highly relevant research agenda. With one foot in classic and recent social the- ory and the other in an increasingly digitally mediated 21st century, embodied sociology has the potential critically to advance our knowledge of an expanding and expansive somatic society. Of course, this theoretical argument acquires particular meaning and relevance given the current societal focus upon ‘obesity’ in a global context. 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Connections Explaining Body Deviance with Stigma and Carnival of the Grotesque David C. Lane At 600 pounds, Goddess Patty, advertises herself as the Queen of Squashing. She performs “Eating, Squashing, Crushing . . . NAKED!”—all for paying customers. Goddess Patty’s case is not an isolated incident; rather, she is part of a growing industry of adult mod- els that features women with larger bodies. In this world of modeling, she is known as a SSBBW (Super Size Big Beautiful Woman), representing the largest of these models. Others, who have yet to gain such weight, but who are still large enough, are considered BBWs (Big Beautiful Women). Within this world, cellulite and large bellies are celebrated as aestheti- cally and sexually pleasurable. Recently, I met Glen, a 38-year-old, white male, in Baltimore while conducting inter- views. Glen works as a tattooist, and one day he shared a conversation with me about how he feels when visiting some public places. Glen: I have a lot of really visible stuff [tattoos], and no matter how acceptable people want to say it is, I see what happens when I go to malls and shit like that, and it’s still, it’s not as acceptable as people make it out to be. Dave: What happens when you go to malls? Glen: Oh, I mean they look over and put their purses on the other arm or hang onto it with both hands, walk on the other side, point and stare. You’ll be looking at clothes or some- thing and have people physically grab your arm and look at it and stuff. And if I went up to some woman and grabbed her arm to look at her jewelry, you know what I mean. Not only are Glen’s arms covered, but he is tattooed across his knuckles, neck, face, and ear lobes. It is easy to pick him out in a crowd as he has little ability to hide these marks in public. While Glen does not regret being tattooed, he certainly feels that his tattoos mark him from the rest of the population. While these stories seem to be unrelated, fatness and being tattooed share similarities. First, the incidence of them seems to be on the rise, as indicated in the reading by Kang and Jones in this section. Obesity has garnered enough public interest that many have labeled it an epi- demic in the United States and England. Walking around my college campus, I observe many young adults who have tattoos. Tattoos are now increasingly seen on celebrities, athletes, and artists; and media provide up-to-date accounts about their altered bodies. Second, both obesity and tattooing involve lifestyle choices. No one is born with a tattoo or weighing 600 pounds. Both these outcomes require dedication, planning, and effort to achieve. Third, they can both be understood as forms of body deviance. Body deviance refers to nonnormative traits, behaviors, CONNECTIONS | 291 and conditions of the physical self. It includes things like gender reassignment, body building, and cutting or self-injury. The objective of this essay is to discuss how old and new ideas about deviance can enhance our understanding of radical body modifi cations like tattooing and obesity. In short, how can we make sense of body deviance today and how does this differ from what it meant in the past? How do alternative sociological viewpoints help us appreciate Goddess Patty and Glen’s devi- ance? I begin with stigma; a classic sociological deviance approach and then pivot to a more contemporary viewpoint—carnival and the grotesque—that is anchored in postmodernism. GOFFMAN AND STIGMA Stigma emerged from symbolic interactionism (Goffman 1963) and was best articulated by Erving Goffman in his 1963 book Stigma . Excerpts of his work are included in this section of this book. A stigma is the result of a social process that links a trait or characteristic with a stereotype. It is used to explain how people attain a deviant identity and manage it in differ- ent settings. In this reading, I focus on forms of body deviance that carry stigmatizing traits. Goffman (1963) specifi ed three types of stigma: (1) abominations of the body, which are physical traits that can be observed visually; (2) blemishes of character, or the fl aws of the individual, such as beliefs, values, and personal history; and (3) tribal, which are “race, nation, and religion, these being things that are transmitted through lineages” (Goffman 1963: 4). This reading will specifi cally focus on fatness and tattooing as abominations of the body because it is the type of stigma most relevant to body deviance. Goffman (1963: 3) notes that a stigma is “an attribute that is deeply discrediting.” A stigma is a trait or mark that is associated with a stereotype. As an abomination of the body, tattooing “defaces” the body beautiful and, perhaps, leads some to stereotype a heav- ily tattooed person as a criminal. For Glen, the stereotypes associated with being heavily tattooed also lead to being shunned in public. Persistent stereotypes, like the association of tattoos to criminality, are what reinforce the boundaries of between normal and deviant. When a stigma is known, it subordinates the stigmatized to others. Stigmas possess so much ill repute the bearer suffers, Goffman argued, a social death. Moreover, stigmatized persons are denied equal opportunity to construct an identity as a normal member of society. Goffman also noted they were discriminated against. Revisiting Glen’s description, we know he is denied the ability to be an equal member of society. People moving to the other side of the street, or women clutching their purse in his presence, indicates that normals may perceive him as a type of a social threat. Over time Glen learns to treat his body with shame and guilt in certain settings. In other words, he is less human and more like a freak or object to be ogled. Goffman would argue that Glen’s dilemma is because his tattoos are an abomination of the body. With body deviance, some attributes become a master status. Goffman notes that a master sta- tus is a trait that dominates a person’s identity. Master statuses are especially problematic, as the stigmatized cannot escape being defi ned by that identity. Being obese or heavily tattooed is a form of body deviance that is highly visible, and diffi cult to hide, and each can become a master status. Finally, Glen’s story highlights how the context of stigma contains specifi c objects, a physi- cal location, and other social actors. In every social setting, people act and through their interaction, meaning is created. Not all stigmas carry the same stereotypes across settings. Glen’s tattoos are stigmatizing when he is in the presence of members of an older generation in the mall. However, in the tattoo shop, older persons may appreciate knowing that Glen | DAVID C. LANE292 is heavily tattooed and that he will be the one producing their tattoos. On the one hand, the physical location of the encounter is changing; on the other, the motivations of the actors Glen encounters are different. If less visibly tattooed on the face and neck, Glen would be able to use objects, such as clothing, to cover up his tattoos when in contexts where he feels stigmatized. Stigmas vary across social contexts, and what is stigmatizing to some groups of society may not be stigmatizing to others. CARNIVAL AND GROTESQUE BODIES The Monaghan reading in this section offers a very different viewpoint on these kinds of deviance. In a study on “big handsome men”(BHM) and “bears” (obese heterosexual and gay males who aspire to be large for sexual reasons), Monaghan views body deviance from a carnival of the grotesque perspective. Carnival describes a social setting where people, such as BHM or bears, create different sets of norms about their bodies’ shape and functions. In these physical or virtual (online) spaces, people celebrate new norms and establish an alterna- tive interpretation of the world. In other words, “[C]arnival represents a world upside-down, but most importantly a world that is restructured through laughter” (Presdee 2000: 40). Looking at Monaghan’s (2005) reading in this book, it is easy to understand the actions of these men as carnival behavior. Online communities for BHM and bears create new norms about body deviance that celebrate grotesque joys of their body becoming larger over time, and online communities construct norms that embrace forbidden pleasures. While Goffman (1963) argued stigma led to a social death, scholars like Monaghan claim par- ticipation in the carnival works to celebrate deviance, such as being obese or heavily tattooed, as participants are considered reborn in this temporary situation. Bakhtin (1968: 7) states, “The carnival is not a spectacle seen by people, they live it, and everyone participates, because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom”. When Goddess Patty engages in acts of gluttony, crushing, and squashing, she is no longer a stigmatized obese woman. Instead, people in this carnivalesque space fi nd pleasure and gratifi cation derived from behaviors which are typically understood as unpleasant. In this order, Goddess Patty and her followers are living the idea, either by assisting in her gaining weight or being crushed by her. In other words, these actors create a subjective experience, which can only be understood through participation in the carnival. Another current deviance concept is grotesque realism. Grotesque realism is the literary term for body degradation and derogatory humor. In the carnival, grotesque realism occurs as participants celebrate the vulgar features of the body (urine, feces, sexual functions, blood, eating, drinking, and vomit). For example, the fat men in Monaghan’s research celebrated gluttony and weight gain. One of Monaghan’s subjects explains: I went out today and I think I have gained, my fl y on my jeans would not stay up, the pressure of that extra belly was not going to give in. :) [symbol signifi es a smiling face]. Just as well it is winter and I had a large loose jumper on so you could not tell anyway, blush. I am now a good 173 cm in girth, when I was 168 cm, I was 172 kg, so I estimate that I am now 176–178 kg or about 390 lbs. I am aiming for 180 cm by Xmas. (2005: 101) Rituals of degradation during the carnival strip away all that is holy, spiritual, or fl awless and celebrate that which is deemed foul, vulgar, or appalling. For example, some of God- dess Patty’s patrons fi nd her bed sores enticing and even want to clean them for her. Thus, CONNECTIONS | 293 grotesque bodies are celebrated for their vulgar features, which are bawdily embraced by participants at the carnival. Grotesque bodies are “radical deviations from the norm—by way of exceeding it” (Shabot 2006: 229). Since grotesque bodies differ from the norm, they are a form of deviance. Goddess Patty’s physical self is a grotesque body. She claims to weigh over 600 pounds, which clearly exceeds norms regarding body size. Additionally, this kind of excessiveness is celebrated and tied to sexuality. Finally, grotesque realism can function as resistance. In deviance, resistance refers to the ways people intentionally engage in deviant behavior to challenge norms. For Goddess Patty, her size was the result of a conscious decision to gain weight over time. Embracing her curves was one way she challenged the norms regarding female body size. Instead of striving to fi t within the ideal of thinness for women, Patty claims her size is sexy. In other words, grotesque bodies are liberated from existing norms, and actors create a meaningful alternative that challenges the distinction between normal and deviant. IDENTITY One way to approach obesity and tattooing is to understand how deviant identities come into existence. Stigma and carnival of the grotesque emphasize how identity is created through a social process. However, each concept interprets the process of identity creation in a different manner. Stigma explains identity under the symbolic interactionist tradition. In this approach, identity refers to the characteristics or attributes that are an indicator of a person’s self. Iden- tities are confi rmed though a social process where a person(1) presents themselves to others, (2) receives a reaction from others, and (3) refl exively evaluates his or herself in light of the reactions of others. Identities are based in the ways that we categorize the reactions of others. For stigmatized persons their identities are oppressed, equating to a social death. Angus Vail, a sociologist of deviance, and a tattoo enthusiast, explains how he learned of his deviant identity at the grocery store: Retail establishments, like nursing homes and hospitals, have code words that the employees use to call security’s attention to potential trouble. . .at the Safeway near my apartment in Portland, it was “Johnny.” I know this because I heard many a call for “Johnny” to come to my aisle which I was shopping during the summer, and every time it was followed by a security guard standing, very conspicuously, at the end of the aisle, watching me. During the school year, Johnny became unnecessary. Why the seasonal change? During the school year I used to stop into Safeway on my way home from teaching, usually wearing jeans with a shirt and tie. During the summer, though, I walked to Safeway from my apartment, usually wearing shorts and a tank top. Shorts and tank tops don’t do an especially effective job at covering close to 100 hours worth of tattoos. Without visible tattoos, I was innocuous, no “trouble” at all; and when my tattoos showed I was dangerous—a “trouble” maker. (2008: 26) In this example, Dr. Vail is able to understand his stigmatized identity as it is confi rmed by others. In the summertime, Safeway security (or formal agents of social control) reacted to the presence of his tattoos, thereby allowing him to see himself as a “threat” to order. How- ever, he also passes as a normal, when his tattoos are covered during the school year. The lack of reaction by others, demonstrates Dr. Vail is effectively managing his identity to pass as a nontattooed person. It is only when he is able to interpret other’s reactions that Dr. Vail knows if his identity is stigmatized in a given setting. | DAVID C. LANE294 Dr. Vail’s stigmatized identity arises from a social process where a stereotype is created. This stereotype is created from the cultural values or beliefs which designate tattooing as a violation of norms. For example, in the United States, many of us associate tattooing with criminality. There is truth to this claim. In many societies, historically, criminals were marked with tattoos, as the following excerpt from sociologist Clinton Sanders suggests: “The dis- reputable connections of tattooing in the west . . . lead conventional members of society to defi ne people with tattoos negatively. In turn, discussions of tattooed persons generated by psychiatric and criminological analysts refl ect (and reinforce) these commonplace defi ni- tions” (Sanders 1989: 36).These stereotypes insist that being heavily tattooed is a behavior of criminals or psychological misfi ts. This is further evidenced by the behaviors of young workers in Kang and Jones’s (2007: 46) piece. Many feel that visible tattoos will lead to them being negatively judged in the workplace, and they attempt to pass as normal while working by altering their attire. In contrast, carnival of the grotesque is a deviance concept that can be used to understand identity creation in a different way from stigma. First, it explains how actors celebrate their body deviance, embracing and enjoying it. Second, carnival of the grotesque understands identity as temporary. Since the carnival is a fl eeting event, and people are born anew, the identities devel- oped can be temporary. In other words, many deviant actors are only deviant for a short amount of time. In the carnival, obesity is an identity to be celebrated, yet, when the carnival is over, the obese identity will no longer be celebrated and accepted. By the mid 1970s there was a wave of identity movements in the United States. One of the smaller movements was the Fat Acceptance Movement (FAM). FAM activists challenged the notion that their bodies were abnormal or deviant. To embrace their deviance FAM activists began to have Fat-Ins. Fat-Ins were carnival-like events where people could celebrate what it meant to be fat. At the fi rst Fat-In, in 1967, “they carried banners (‘Fat Power,’ ‘Think Fat,’ ‘Buddha Was Fat’), wore buttons (‘Help Cure Emaciation, Take a Fat Girl to Dinner’), and performed anti-slim rituals (they ceremoniously burned diet books, a large photograph of Twiggy the teenaged ectomorph, who is one of the world’s leading mannequins, and stabbed a cold, fat watermelon)” (“Curves Have Their Day” 1967: 54). Participants handed out free candy and created clothing, accessories, and adornments out of food or candy, and most of all, they indulged in eating. By coming together and celebrating obesity, actors were embracing their deviant identities. At Fat-Ins various activities facilitate embracing deviant identities through jubilation. In this setting, burning diet books was a comedic ritual that allowed participants to be born anew. As such, they were able to reinterpret their body deviance and celebrate it as part of their identity. Participants were destroying the sources of knowledge that defi ned their bodies negatively, and they reveled in this destruction. By eating and handing out free candy, participants were engaging in behaviors that are associated with being fat. During the Fat-In, participants can engage in these behaviors without violating any norms. A Fat-In is an alternative social order and lived experi- ence. In this setting both fat and skinny people can celebrate the behaviors linked to obesity. LANGUAGE Language, or how people talk about things, plays a signifi cant role in defi ning deviance. It is central to shaping reality because it contains meaning. Language conveys expectations of what a society or group considers normal or deviant. It defi nes who or what behaviors are deviant. CONNECTIONS | 295 It is useful to think of how language is used to shape body deviance. Stigmas are created and reinforced by beliefs and conceptions. As Goffman stated, stigmas are rooted in a “language of relationships” (Goffman 1963: 3). This language of relationships is a language of stereotypes created by those in power who defi ne what is deviant and how members of society should interpret violations of norms. Thinking about body size, language is used to decide what body sizes are normal. According to health professionals and the institution of medicine (Sobal 1995), body sizes that are too big pose an increased health risk. By posing body size as a health risk, norms are created for which bodies are appropriate and which bodies are deviant. In this situa- tion, those bodies which deviate too far from the norm (skinny or fat) are defi ned as unhealthy, and this is justifi ed by stating that these body sizes pose a health risk to members of society. Powerful people have in the resources and authority to justify agendas about body size, including how to talk and think about the body as normal (Best 2013). Recently, Surgeon General Dr. Benjamin, has advocated a “national grassroots effort to reverse the current obesity crisis.” In the Surgeon General’s Vision for a Healthy Nation, it is stated that “every one of us has an important role to play in the prevention and control of obesity” (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2010: 1). Further, obesity is such an epidemic that, adults are at increased risk for many serious health conditions, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes and its complications, coronary heart disease, stroke, gallbladder disease, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea, and respiratory problems, as well as endometrial, breast, prostate, and colon cancers. (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2010: 1) The fi rst statement targets body size by claiming that some bodies are problematic and need to be controlled, monitored, or supervised. It is reinforced by claiming that uncontrolled bodies are linked to conditions that may lead to premature death. By scientifi c measures, those who fall between 18.5 and 24.9% of the Body Mass Index (BMI) are considered to have normal bodies. All others are defi ned as obese or too skinny, hence medically abnormal, or deviant. Goffman stated that a “language of relationships” is needed to understand stigma. This means that language determines which bodies are deviant. In this case an agent of the state—Surgeon General Benjamin—dictates ideal body sizes and justifi es them with institutional and medical- ized language. Reading through the statement from the Department of Health and Human Ser- vices, it is clear that obesity carries the stereotypes of lacking self-control, lethargy, negligence, and moral inferiority. The language of obesity justifi es a reason for people who have this stigma to be controlled, supervised, or monitored. While stigma is used to explain how dominant groups use language to shape deviance, gro- tesque bodies can be used to understand how actors use language to embrace their body devi- ance. The language of grotesque bodies challenges the boundaries that defi ne norms. In the carnival, language alters, changes, or challenges the defi nitions of deviance. Bodies that pur- posefully violate norms, do so with a motive, which challenges the boundary between normal and deviant. In this perspective, deviant bodies can be understood as an attempt to enact social change. Carnival bodies are a form of resistance to defi nitions of deviance. 1 Monaghan’s reading in this book discusses the challenge that deviant bodies pose to the accepted language. Social actors create new meanings, which challenge or resist ideal body sizes. These actors fi nd admirable traits in bodies that violate social norms. Not only are dif- ferent aesthetics being appreciated, but some of these actors even view these larger bodies in a bawdy, eroticized manner, and others actively encourage the process of gaining weight. These people are taking control over the language used to defi ne their bodies. By creating | DAVID C. LANE296 new terms and meanings, they reject the ideology that justifi es normal body size. With new language that admires grotesque bodies, they are resisting the norms of society. Another way to use this concept is to think of grotesque bodies as attempts to change norms. Activists in the fat positive movement have attempted to redefi ne the debate over health and body size. They claim that people with a BMI of 25% are not all deviant. Further, the BMI index, is an attempt to enforce a norm that does not accept the wider range of body shapes and sizes. Recently, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) released the Health At Every Size initiative (NAAFA 2013). This initiative claims that health is a complex concept, measured by emotional, spiritual, physical, and psychological well- being. Additionally, they argue there is a diversity of body types which deviate from medical standards. NAAFA entices people to embrace their bodies, even if they do not fi t within the normal standards. It challenges the boundaries of what types of bodies can be considered healthy by insisting that health consists of more than weight or size. Moreover, these chal- lenges are made in the political realm. In both of these examples, fat people are attempting to redefi ne the language which defi nes them as deviant. Not all forms of body deviance are clearly stigma or carnival of the grotesque. What is ini- tially intended to be a stigma can become a mark of resistance. For example, punitive tattoo- ing has been used by different societies; it is the practice of marking criminals with tattoos. By applying a tattoo to a deviant, the deviant now has a permanent, stigmatizing mark to let others know about his or her social position. During the Edo Period (1603–1887), in Japan, tattoos were used to mark criminals. It was so important that tattoos be reserved for marking criminals that the state outlawed any disfi gurement of the body. While these were intended to be stigmatizing marks, criminals soon began to embrace the practice. They would cover up their punitive tattoos with even larger, more elaborate tattoo designs (Taylor 1997). When criminals manipulated punitive tattoos, they created new norms that reclaimed their bodies from state oppression. Similarly, the reading by Kang and Jones in this book explains how a number of people with different social statuses use the practice of tattooing to redefi ne how they view their identities. Tattoos help these people construct a positive image of the self. SOCIAL ORGANIZATION When sociologists speak of social organization, they move the analysis beyond the indi- vidual. Social organization refers to the recurring patterns of interaction among members of society. In the fi eld of deviance, social organization reveals the relationships that deviants and nondeviants share with one another. Finding organization helps actors to make sense of the world, and it facilitates behavior and available choices for it. One way to depict the organization of stigmas is to discuss how patterns of relationships between in-groups and out-groups come into existence. For Goffman (1963), stigmatized persons must fi rst learn which social group they belong to. When interviewing tattoo wear- ers, one of Sanders’s interviewees describes the process of identifying with what is termed an “in-group”: Having a tattoo is like belonging to a club. I love seeing tattoos on other people. I go up and talk with other people with tattoos. It gives me an excuse because I’m not just going up to talk with them, I can say, “I have one, too.” I think maybe subconsciously I got (the tattoo) to be part of that special club. (1989: 53) CONNECTIONS | 297 By having a tattoo, this person was able to align with his or her in-group. This in-group is comprised of all people who share the same stigma. It provides the stigmatized actor with rules of conduct for managing their stigma in front of others. A second aspect of social organization is the relationship that stigmatized persons share with out-groups. In this process, the stigmatized person learns of his or her deviant social position by understanding the relationship between his or her in-group and other out-groups. Usually I’m fairly careful about who I show my tattoos to. I don’t show them to people at work unless they are really close friends of mine and I know I won’t get any kind of hassle because of them. I routinely hide my tattoos . . . I generally hide them from people who wouldn’t understand or people who could potentially cause me trouble. I hide them from my boss and from a lot of the people I work with because there is no reason for them to know. (interview in Sanders 1989: 54) In this case the tattooed person realizes his or her body is considered deviant in the professional world, but in his or her leisure time with in-group members, his or her tattoos are acceptable. The stigmatized person must, therefore, manage his or her stigma differently across social set- tings. In sum, the social organization of stigma occurs as actors identify who belongs to which social group and what social position that person has as a result of being in it. Similar to stigma, the social organization of the carnival can be used to understand how peo- ple come to embrace body deviance. The carnival provides an alternative social order where all people are accepted. For example, DeMello describes attending a tattoo convention, which celebrates body deviance: Anything goes and conventional social rules are frowned on. Men and women disrobe in public [showing] their nipple piercings, thong bikinis and pubic hair. They oil each other’s near-naked bod- ies, and . . . people also get tattooed at conventions, so the spectacle of the body grimacing in pain is also evident. Tattoo conventions are marked by ritual inversion, exaggeration, and excessiveness of all kinds. (2000: 30) Grotesque bodies can only be understood in light of the order that people create around them. In this alternative social organization, both normals and deviants are welcome and celebrate those who have deviant bodies. The carnival functions as a space where participants can celebrate and embrace transgres- sion of social norms. As evidenced, “Heavily tattooed men and women use tattoo conven- tions in much the same way that circus attractions used freak shows—as a platform for public spectacle—the difference being that conventioneers view their audiences as like mined enthusiasts, not thrill-seeking-oglers” (Miffl in 2001: 142). Participants in the carnival are understood as supporting members who embrace the practice of tattooing. This is a form of organization that must be lived and experienced. Tattoo conventions then redistribute power by celebrating the corporeal aspects that participants share and have affection for. Moreover, an alternative social structure is established, a structure that provides an escape or release from the conventional world. CONCLUSION This “connections” reading has used heavily tattooed and fat persons as examples of body deviance. It demonstrates that stigma and the carnival of the grotesque provide separate out- comes when examining phenomena that may appear similar on the surface. These concepts | DAVID C. LANE298 are developed from different interpretations of society. For sociologists, this means under- standing how these concepts are used to explain deviant identities, ideologies that justify forms of deviance, and patterns of social organization among deviants. While both stigma and grotesque help to explain body deviance, each concept carries its own set of assumptions. These are assumptions about the nature of society and social devi- ance. These concepts are not interchangeable, and each can be used to examine different aspects of body deviance. Figure 25.1 provides a summary breakdown of the difference between stigma and carnival of the grotesque when applied to three key social processes: identity, language, and social organi- zation. Each of these attributes is useful for understanding specifi c elements of deviance. But we are still left with a conundrum: deciding what types of deviance are best explained by stigma and which are best explained by carnival of the grotesque. This is the task that students of deviance face. CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS 1. Imagine you are in the audience watching the legendary performer and musician Elvis. As a sociologist of deviance, explain his body deviance using concepts from this chapter. 2. Analyze a different form of body deviance using one of the two concepts. Explain why the concept you chose was more appropriate for analyzing this form of body deviance. 3. Evaluate the concepts of stigma and carnival of the grotesque. What contributions do they provide to sociology? How do they help to understand body deviance? What are the shortcomings of each? NOTE 1. It is important to note that carnival bodies and the carnival are not always a form of resistance (Presdee 2000). In her critique of the carnival, Douglass (1966) states that carnivals may actually reinforce conformity and adherence to the conventional order, effectively limiting the potential that resistance is occurring. In this per- spective, conventionalization of the carnival (such as Mardi Gras) allows participants to briefl y act out their fantasy of resistance in a manner that does not threaten the interest of elites. The carnival functions to tempo- rarily satiate politicized challenges to the conventional order. REFERENCES Bakhtin, Mikhail Mickhailovic. 1984. Rebalais and His World , translated by H. Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Best, Joel. 2013. Social Problems . 2nd edition. New York: W. W. Norton. Figure 25.1 Comparison Between Stigma and Carnival Stigma Carnival of the Grotesque/ Grotesque Realism Identity Body deviance is devalued, or shunned Body deviance is celebrated as part of the self Language Defi nitions of body deviance are defi ned by powerful Defi nitions of body deviance are defi ned by anyone Social Organization Body deviance is shunned; deviants are unwelcomed outsiders New norms are created, body deviance is celebrated, and everyone is welcome CONNECTIONS | 299 “Curves Have Their Day in Park; 500 at a ‘Fat-in’ Call for Obesity.” 1967 (June 5). New York Times , 54. DeMello, Margo. 2000. Bodies of Inscription . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts in Pollution and Taboo. New York: Praeger. Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity . New York: Simon & Schuster. Kang, Milliann and Jones, Katherine. 2007. “Why do People Get Tattoos?” Contexts 6: 42–47. Miffl in, Margot. 2001. Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo . New York: Juno Books. Monaghan, Lee F. 2005. “Big Handsome Men, Bears and Others: Virtual Constructions of ‘Fat Male Embodi- ment.’ ” Body and Society 11: 81–111. National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA). 2013. “Health At Every Size (HAES)”. Retrieved August 29, 2013, http://www.naafaonline.com/dev2/education/haes.html. Presdee, Mike. 2000. Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Crime . New York: Routledge. Sanders, Clinton. 1989. Customizing the Body: The Art and Culture of Tattooing . Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Shabot, Sarah Cohen. 2006. “Grotesque Bodies: A Response to Disembodied Cyborgs.” Journal of Gender Studies 15: 223–235. Sobal, Jeffery. 1995. “The Medicalization and Demedicalization of Obesity.” Pp. 67–90 in Eating Agendas: Food and Nutrition as Social Problems , edited by D. Maurer and J. Sobal. New York: Aldine De Grutyer. Taylor, Mark C. 1997. Hiding . Chicago: University Press. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 2010. The Surgeon General’s Vision for a Healthy and Fit Nation. Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Offi ce of the Surgeon General. Vail, Angus. 2008. “Personal Account of a Tattoo Collector.” Pp. 26–31 in Extreme Deviance , edited by E. Goode and A. Vail. Los Angeles: Pine Forge Press. http://www.naafaonline.com/dev2/education/haes.html This page intentionally left blank SECTION 7 Deviant Careers, Identity, and Lifecourse Criminology This page intentionally left blank Introduction Tammy L. Anderson Nancy became a prostitute at age 17. She explained, “I started selling drugs at fi rst and then I went and did a double date with a girl. I made $300 in like 15 minutes and so I was like, ‘Whoa, I’m in the wrong profession.’ ” In Bakersfi eld, California, police are cracking down on prostitutes like Nancy and the men who command her services. She has been arrested and sent to jail many times, but remains undeterred. She states: “The longest they’ve [police and courts] held me is like 19 hours on a cite and release, and I mean to me that’s just like sleep, you know, for me to come back out to work so it [arrest] really doesn’t do anything.” (Cook 2013: 1) Every day in the United States, thousands of people, like Nancy, are arrested for criminal offenses and enter the criminal justice system while another large group is released or tran- sitioned out onto probation or parole. According to a recent Federal Government report (Carson and Sobel 2012), 688,800 people were admitted to the U.S. prison system (state and federal) in 2011, while 688,384 were released from it. That amounts to about 1,887 people entering prison each day, while about 1,885 leave it. This movement into and out of prison—or deviance more generally—has captivated social scientists for decades. They have studied ways to prevent people like Nancy from getting involved in crime in the fi rst place or discovering ways to help them stop committing it (deterrence). While we can think of entry and exit into prison or jail as benchmarks of our criminal justice system, they might represent something much more extensive in the lives of individual lawbreakers. For example, breaking the law, being arrested or convicted, and serv- ing time may be simple facts of a lifestyle in deviance, as Nancy tells us. Such ways of life can persist for substantial periods of time and feature a lot of crime. Moreover, most people are not caught and arrested the fi rst time they ever break the law. Individuals, like Nancy, “get away” with a lot of deviance. Criminologists call undetected offending the “dark fi gure of crime,” while Becker called it secret deviance. The readings in Section 7 help us understand this phenomenon. They are about lifestyles in crime and deviance. Readings by Becker, Sampson and Laub, Oselin, and Bonistall and Ralston explain deviant lifestyles or criminal careers in two different ways. Becker uses a deviant career concept to explain how people become marijuana smokers. His work artic- ulated how smoking marijuana led to the involvement with deviant groups and changes in identity which enmeshed smokers in deviant lifestyles. Alternatively, a more contempo- rary lifecourse criminology approach by Sampson and Laub (in this volume) is concerned with long-term patterns of crime (trajectories) and the events that can alter their pathways | TAMMY L. ANDERSON304 (transitions). Their reading in this section addresses the causes of childhood crime and juve- nile delinquency and how they change over time. While Becker and Sampson and Laub discuss drug use and delinquency, readings by Oselin and Bonistall and Ralston target prostitution, specifi cally street-level sex work performed by women like Nancy. There are many types of prostitution today (e.g., escort services, street walkers, and brothels or house prostitutes, to name a few), and the larger sex work industry— of which street prostitution is only a small part—is a global industry with up to six million women (Branigan 2013) engaged in commercial vice at hotels, massage parlors, strip clubs, karaoke bars, hair salons, parks, and so on. A main objective of this book is learning to see deviance through multiple lenses—such as the deviant career or lifecourse criminology framework. Embracing alternative viewpoints may assist students in their future jobs in social service, criminal justice, and other agencies and institutions that deal with populations considered deviant or problematic. Imagine, for a moment, that you are a probation offi cer assigned to keep a convicted prostitute—like Nancy—out of trouble with the law. Would you focus on her willingness to change and how she sees herself and her life (an identity issue) or on what causes her to trade sex for money (external cause issue) or engage in other deviant behaviors? This question contrasts some core differences between the classic term deviant careers with the more contemporary lifecourse criminology approach. In the Becker (1963) reading in this section, you will learn about the deviant career idea. Becker defi ned deviant careers as a series of statuses, achievements, and roles associated with deviant behavior. He highlighted the shifts in identity that accompanied it. Becker maintained that individuals became enmeshed in deviant lifestyles and developed deviant identities as their nonconforming behaviors accu- mulated. One result from this could be life on the margins of society with the possibility of long-term alienation. The deviant identity was, therefore, critical in infl uencing the present and future trajectory of nonconforming behavior and society’s reaction to it. Lifecourse criminology, on the other hand, is concerned with changes in offending and problem behaviors over time. This approach is articulated in the Sampson and Laub (1994) reading in this section. The lifecourse perspective gives increased importance to patterns in criminal behavior over time and the causes of them. In short, lifecourse criminology looks at what predicts the prevalence of criminal behavior over time as people age. There are important similarities and differences between deviant careers and lifecourse criminology that might be relevant to your work as a probation offi cer. For example, you might believe both self-identity and initial causes for becoming a prostitute are ultimately linked in handling a prostitute’s and other offenders’ predicaments. This combined deviant career and lifecourse criminology idea is the position Oselin takes in her reading in this sec- tion. However, understanding the fundamental differences between the classic idea of deviant careers with the more contemporary lifecourse criminology approach—and how they mat- ter to us—is taken up by Emily Bonistall and Kevin Ralston in their connections reading on prostitution. Bonistall and Ralston note that the deviant career term does not explain why people like Nancy or Betty, who they profi le in their connections reading, initially commit deviant acts. Nor does it identify the causes of behavior. However, identifying the causes of crime is a central aspect of lifecourse criminology. Practitioners, criminal justice offi cials, and scholars fi nd this very helpful in shaping social policy to control crime. Thus, they would advise probation offi cers to focus on external causes when working with Nancy or other offenders. Finally, research on deviant careers has been based in labeling theory and has employed qualitative methodologies INTRODUCTION | 305 to investigate deviance. On the contrary, lifecourse criminology boasts sophisticated use of quantitative methodologies and statistics and functionalist theories of crime to track offend- ing and its predictors over time. The ability of lifecourse criminology to identify how much prostitution Nancy and others engage in, as well as when it does and why, captivates the public and is essential to policy-makers and interventionists who seek to reduce it. As you read the readings in this section, consider how these two approaches might be use- ful in addressing how various types of unconventional behavior develops, persists, and termi- nates. To what extent will focusing on defi nitions of who we are (identity) (a deviant career viewpoint) or external causes and transitions (lifecourse criminology) provide the answers? REFERENCES Branigan, Tania. 2013 (May 13). “China’s Anti-Prostitution Policies ‘Lead to Increase in Abuse of Sex Workers,’” The Guardian . Retrieved April 16, 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/14/china-prostitution- increase-abuse-workers. Carson, E. Ann and Sobel, William J. 2012. “Prisoners in 2011,” BJS Bulletin , December, NCJ 239808. Cook, Rachael. 2013 (February 17). “Prostitute ‘Nancy’ Shares Her Story: ‘You Can Lose Your Life If You’re Out Here.’” Huffi ngton Post . Retrieved May 22, 2013, http://www.huffi ngtonpost.com/2013/02/18/prostitute-nancy- story_n_2706020.html. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/14/china-prostitution-increase-abuse-workers http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/14/china-prostitution-increase-abuse-workers http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/18/prostitute-nancy-story_n_2706020.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/18/prostitute-nancy-story_n_2706020.html Outsiders Kinds of Deviance: A Sequential Model Howard S. Becker DEVIANT CAREERS The fi rst step in most deviant careers is the commission of a nonconforming act, an act that breaks some particular set of rules. How are we to account for the fi rst step? People usually think of deviant acts as motivated. They believe that the person who commits a deviant act, even for the fi rst time (and perhaps especially for the fi rst time), does so purposely. His purpose may or may not be entirely conscious, but there is a motive force behind it. We shall turn to the consideration of cases of intentional nonconformity in a moment, but fi rst I must point out that many nonconforming acts are committed by people who have no intention of doing so; these clearly require a different explanation. Unintended acts of deviance can prob- ably be accounted for relatively simply. They imply an ignorance of the existence of the rule, or of the fact that it was applicable in this case, or to this particular person. But it is necessary to account for the lack of aware- ness. How does it happen that the person does not know his act is improper? Persons deeply involved in a particular subculture (such as a religious or ethnic subculture) may simply be unaware that everyone does not act “that way” and thereby commit an impropriety. There may, in fact, be struc- tured areas of ignorance of particular rules. Mary Haas has pointed out the interesting case of interlingual word taboos. 1 Words which are perfectly proper in one language have a “dirty” meaning in another. So the person, innocently using a word common in his own language, fi nds that he has shocked and horrifi ed his listeners who come from a different culture. In analyzing cases of intended nonconfor- mity, people usually ask about motivation: why does the person want to do the deviant thing he does? The question assumes that the basic difference between deviants and those who conform lies in the character of their motivation. Many theories have been pro- pounded to explain why some people have deviant motivations and others do not. Psy- chological theories fi nd the cause of deviant motivations and acts in the individual’s early experiences, which produce unconscious needs that must be satisfi ed if the individual is to maintain his equilibrium. Sociological theories look for socially structured sources of “strain” in the society, social positions which have confl icting demands placed upon them such that the individual seeks an illegit- imate way of solving the problems his posi- tion presents him with. (Merton’s famous theory of anomie fi ts into this category.) 2 But the assumption on which these approaches are based may be entirely false. There is no reason to assume that only those who fi nally commit a deviant act actually have the impulse to do so. It is much more likely that most people experience deviant impulses OUTSIDERS | 307 frequently. At least in fantasy, people are much more deviant than they appear. Instead of asking why deviants want to do things that are disapproved of, we might better ask why conventional people do not follow through on the deviant impulses they have. Something of an answer to this question may be found in the process of commitment through which the “normal” person becomes progressively involved in conventional insti- tutions and behavior. In speaking of commit- ment, 3 I refer to the process through which several kinds of interests become bound up with carrying out certain lines of behavior to which they seem formally extraneous. What happens is that the individual, as a consequence of actions he has taken in the past or the operation of various institutional routines, fi nds he must adhere to certain lines of behavior because many other activi- ties than the one he is immediately engaged in will be adversely affected if he does not. The middle-class youth must not quit school because his occupational future depends on receiving a certain amount of schooling. The conventional person must not indulge his interests in narcotics, for example, because much more than the pursuit of immediate pleasure is involved; his job, his family, and his reputation in his neighborhood may seem to him to depend on his continuing to avoid temptation. In fact, the normal development of people in our society (and probably in any soci- ety) can be seen as a series of progressively increasing commitments to conventional norms and institutions. The “normal” per- son, when he discovers a deviant impulse in himself, is able to check that impulse by thinking of the manifold consequences act- ing on it would produce for him. He has staked too much on continuing to be normal to allow himself to be swayed by unconven- tional impulses. This suggests that in looking at cases of intended nonconformity we must ask how the person manages to avoid the impact of conventional commitments. He may do so in one of two ways. First of all, in the course of growing up the person may somehow have avoided entangling alliances with conven- tional society. He may, thus, be free to follow his impulses. The person who does not have a reputation to maintain or a conventional job he must keep may follow his impulses. He has nothing staked on continuing to appear conventional. However, most people remain sensitive to conventional codes of conduct and must deal with their sensitivities in order to engage in a deviant act for the fi rst time. Sykes and Matza have suggested that delinquents actu- ally feel strong impulses to be law-abiding and deal with them by techniques of neutral- ization: “justifi cations for deviance that are seen as valid by the delinquent but not by the legal system or society at large.” They dis- tinguish a number of techniques for neutral- izing the force of law-abiding values: In so far as the delinquent can defi ne himself as lacking responsibility for his deviant actions, the disapproval of self or others is sharply reduced in effectiveness as a restraining infl u- ence. . . . The delinquent approaches a “bil- liard ball” conception of himself in which he sees himself as helplessly propelled into new situations. . . . By learning to view himself as more acted upon than acting, the delinquent prepares the way for deviance from the domi- nant normative system without the necessity of a frontal assault on the norms themselves. . . . A second major technique of neutraliza- tion centers on the injury or harm involved in the delinquent act. . . . For the delinquent . . . wrongfulness may turn on the question of whether or not anyone has clearly been hurt by his deviance, and this matter is open to a vari- ety of interpretations. . . . Auto theft may be viewed as “borrowing,” and gang fi ghting may be seen as a private quarrel, an agreed upon duel between two willing parties, and thus of no concern to the community at large. . . . The moral indignation of self and others may be neutralized by an insistence that the injury is not wrong in light of the circumstances. | HOWARD S. BECKER308 The injury, it may be claimed, is not really an injury; rather, it is a form of rightful retaliation or punishment. Assaults on homosexuals or suspected homosexuals, attacks on members of minority groups who are said to have got- ten “out of place,” vandalism as revenge on an unfair teacher or school offi cial, thefts from a “crooked” store owner—all may be hurts infl icted on a transgressor, in the eyes of the delinquent. . . . A fourth technique of neutralization would appear to involve a condemnation of the con- demners. . . . His condemners, he may claim, are hypocrites, deviants in disguise, or impelled by personal spite. . . . By attacking others, the wrongfulness of his own behavior is more eas- ily repressed or lost to view. . . . Internal and external social controls may be neutralized by sacrifi cing the demands of the larger society for the demands of the smaller social groups to which the delinquent belongs such as the sibling pair, the gang, or the friendship clique. . . . The most important point is that deviation from certain norms may occur not because the norms are rejected but because other norms, held to be more press- ing or involving a higher loyalty, are accorded precedence. 4 In some cases a nonconforming act may appear necessary or expedient to a person otherwise law-abiding. Undertaken in pur- suit of legitimate interests, the deviant act becomes, if not quite proper, at least not quite improper. In a novel dealing with a young Italian American doctor we fi nd a good example. 5 The young man, just out of medical school, would like to have a prac- tice that is not built on the fact of his being Italian. But, being Italian, he fi nds it dif- fi cult to gain acceptance from the Yankee practitioners of his community. One day he is suddenly asked by one of the biggest sur- geons to handle a case for him and thinks that he is fi nally being admitted to the refer- ral system of the better doctors in town. But when the patient arrives at his offi ce, he fi nds the case is an illegal abortion. Mis- takenly seeing the referral as the fi rst step in a regular relationship with the surgeon, he performs the operation. This act, although improper, is thought necessary to building his career. But we are not so much interested in the person who commits a deviant act once as in the person who sustains a pattern of devi- ance over a long period of time, who makes of deviance a way of life, who organizes his identity around a pattern of deviant behav- ior. It is not the casual experimenters with homosexuality (who turned up in such sur- prisingly large numbers in the Kinsey Report) that we want to fi nd out about but the man who follows a pattern of homosexual activ- ity throughout his adult life. One of the mechanisms that lead from casual experimentation to a more sustained pattern of deviant activity is the development of deviant motives and interests. We shall examine this process in detail later, when we consider the career of the marijuana user. Here it is suffi cient to say that many kinds of deviant activity spring from motives which are socially learned. Before engaging in the activity on a more or less regular basis, the person has no notion of the pleasures to be derived from it; he learns these in the course of interaction with more experienced devi- ants. He learns to be aware of new kinds of experiences and to think of them as pleasur- able. What may well have been a random impulse to try something new becomes a set- tled taste for something already known and experienced. The vocabularies in which devi- ant motivations are phrased reveal that their users acquire them in interaction with other deviants. The individual learns, in short, to participate in a subculture organized around the particular deviant activity. Deviant motivations have a social charac- ter even when most of the activity is carried on in a private, secret, and solitary fashion. In such cases, various media of communication may take the place of face-to-face interac- tion in inducting the individual into the cul- ture. The pornographic pictures I mentioned OUTSIDERS | 309 earlier were described to prospective buy- ers in a stylized language. Ordinary words were used in a technical shorthand designed to whet specifi c tastes. The word bondage , for instance, was used repeatedly to refer to pictures of women restrained in handcuffs or straitjackets. One does not acquire a taste for “bondage photos” without having learned what they are and how they may be enjoyed. One of the most crucial steps in the pro- cess of building a stable pattern of deviant behavior is likely to be the experience of being caught and publicly labeled as a devi- ant. Whether a person takes this step or not depends not so much on what he does as on what other people do, on whether or not they enforce the rule he has violated. Although I will consider the circumstances under which enforcement takes place in some detail later, two notes are in order here. First of all, even though no one else discov- ers the nonconformity or enforces the rules against it, the individual who has committed the impropriety may himself act as enforcer. He may brand himself as deviant because of what he has done and punish himself in one way or another for his behavior. This is not always or necessarily the case but may occur. Second, there may be cases like those described by psychoanalysts in which the individual really wants to get caught and perpetrates his deviant act in such a way that it is almost sure he will be. In any case, being caught and branded as deviant has important consequences for one’s further social participation and self-image. The most important consequence is a dras- tic change in the individual’s public identity. Committing the improper act and being pub- licly caught at it place him in a new status. He has been revealed as a different kind of person from the kind he was supposed to be. He is labeled a “fairy,” “dope fi end,” “nut,” or “lunatic” and treated accordingly. In analyzing the consequences of assuming a deviant identity let us make use of Hughes’s distinction between master and auxiliary status traits. Hughes notes that most statuses have one key trait which serves to distinguish those who belong from those who do not. Thus the doctor, whatever else he may be, is a person who has a certifi cate stating that he has ful- fi lled certain requirements and is licensed to practice medicine; this is the master trait. As Hughes points out, in our society a doctor is also informally expected to have a number of auxiliary traits: most people expect him to be upper middle class, white, male, and Protes- tant. When he is not there is a sense that he has in some way failed to fi ll the bill. Simi- larly, though skin color is the master status trait determining who is Negro and who is white, Negroes are informally expected to have certain status traits and not to have oth- ers; people are surprised and fi nd it anoma- lous if a Negro turns out to be a doctor or a college professor. People often have the master status trait but lack some of the aux- iliary, informally expected characteristics; for example, one may be a doctor but be female or Negro. Hughes deals with this phenomenon in regard to statuses that are well thought of, desired, and desirable (noting that one may have the formal qualifi cations for entry into a status but be denied full entry because of lack of the proper auxiliary traits), but the same process occurs in the case of deviant statuses. Possession of one deviant trait may have a generalized symbolic value, so that people automatically assume that its bearer possesses other undesirable traits allegedly associated with it. To be labeled a criminal one need only commit a single criminal offense, and this is all the term formally refers to. Yet the word carries a number of connotations specifying auxiliary traits characteristic of anyone bear- ing the label. A man who has been convicted of housebreaking and thereby labeled crimi- nal is presumed to be a person likely to break into other houses; the police, in rounding up known offenders for investigation after a crime has been committed, operate on this | HOWARD S. BECKER310 premise. Further, he is considered likely to commit other kinds of crimes as well, because he has shown himself to be a person without “respect for the law.” Thus, appre- hension for one deviant act exposes a person to the likelihood that he will be regarded as deviant or undesirable in other respects. There is one other element in Hughes’s analysis we can borrow with profi t: the dis- tinction between master and subordinate statuses. Some statuses, in our society as in others, override all other statuses and have a certain priority. Race is one of these. Mem- bership in the Negro race, as socially defi ned, will override most other status consider- ations in most other situations; the fact that one is a physician or middle class or female will not protect one from being treated as a Negro fi rst and any of these other things second. The status of deviant (depending on the kind of deviance) is this kind of master status. One receives the status as a result of breaking a rule, and the identifi cation proves to be more important than most others. One will be identifi ed as a deviant fi rst, before other identifi cations are made. The question is raised: “What kind of person would break such an important rule?” And the answer is given: “One who is different from the rest of us, who cannot or will not act as a moral human being and therefore might break other important rules.” The deviant identifi - cation becomes the controlling one. Treating a person as though he were gener- ally rather than specifi cally deviant produces a self-fulfi lling prophecy. It sets in motion several mechanisms which conspire to shape the person in the image people have of him. 6 In the fi rst place, one tends to be cut off, after being identifi ed as deviant, from par- ticipation in more conventional groups, even though the specifi c consequences of the par- ticular deviant activity might never of itself have caused the isolation had there not also been the public knowledge of and reaction to it. For example, being a homosexual may not affect one’s ability to do offi ce work, but to be known as a homosexual in an offi ce may make it impossible to continue working there. Similarly, though the effects of opiate drugs may not impair one’s working ability, to be known as an addict will probably lead to losing one’s job. In such cases, the indi- vidual fi nds it diffi cult to conform to other rules which he had no intention or desire to break, and perforce fi nds himself deviant in these areas as well. The homosexual who is deprived of a “respectable” job by the dis- covery of his deviance may drift into uncon- ventional, marginal occupations where it does not make so much difference. The drug addict fi nds himself forced into other illegiti- mate kinds of activity, such as robbery and theft, by the refusal of respectable employers to have him around. When the deviant is caught, he is treated in accordance with the popular diagnosis of why he is that way, and the treatment itself may likewise produce increasing devi- ance. The drug addict, popularly considered to be a weak-willed individual who cannot forego the indecent pleasures afforded him by opiates, is treated repressively. He is for- bidden to use drugs. Since he cannot get drugs legally, he must get them illegally. This forces the market underground and pushes the price of drugs up far beyond the current legitimate market price into a bracket that few can afford on an ordinary salary. Hence the treatment of the addict’s deviance places him in a position where it will probably be necessary to resort to deceit and crime in order to support his habit. 7 The behavior is a consequence of the public reaction to the deviance rather than a consequence of the inherent qualities of the deviant act. Put more generally, the point is that the treatment of deviants denies them the ordi- nary means of carrying on the routines of everyday life open to most people. Because of this denial, the deviant must of necessity develop illegitimate routines. The infl uence of public reaction may be direct, as in the instances considered above, or indirect, a OUTSIDERS | 311 consequence of the integrated character of the society in which the deviant lives. Societies are integrated in the sense that social arrangements in one sphere of activity mesh with other activities in other spheres in particular ways and depend on the existence of these other arrangements. Certain kinds of work lives presuppose a certain kind of family life, as we shall see when we consider the case of the dance musician. Many varieties of deviance create diffi cul- ties by failing to mesh with expectations in other areas of life. Homosexuality is a case in point. Homosexuals have diffi culty in any area of social activity in which the assump- tion of normal sexual interests and propensi- ties for marriage is made without question. In stable work organizations such as large business or industrial organizations there are often points at which the man who would be successful should marry; not to do so will make it diffi cult for him to do the things that are necessary for success in the organization and will thus thwart his ambitions. The neces- sity of marrying often creates diffi cult enough problems for the normal male and places the homosexual in an almost impossible posi- tion. Similarly, in some male work groups where heterosexual prowess is required to retain esteem in the group, the homosexual has obvious diffi culties. Failure to meet the expectations of others may force the indi- vidual to attempt deviant ways of achieving results automatic for the normal person. Obviously, everyone caught in one deviant act and labeled a deviant does not move inev- itably toward greater deviance in the way the preceding remarks might suggest. The proph- ecies do not always confi rm themselves; the mechanisms do not always work. What fac- tors tend to slow down or halt the movement toward increasing deviance? Under what cir- cumstances do they come into play? One suggestion as to how the person may be immunized against increasing deviance is found in a recent study of juvenile delinquents who “hustle” homosexuals. 8 These boys act as homosexual prostitutes to confi rmed adult homosexuals. Yet they do not themselves become homosexual. Several things account for their failure to continue this kind of sex- ual deviancy. First, they are protected from police action by the fact that they are minors. If they are apprehended in a homosexual act, they will be treated as exploited children, although in fact they are the exploiters; the law makes the adult guilty. Second, they look on the homosexual acts they engage in simply as a means of making money that is safer and quicker than robbery or similar activities. Third, the standards of their peer group, while permitting homosexual prosti- tution, allow only one kind of activity and forbid them to get any special pleasure out of it or to permit any expressions of endear- ment from the adult with whom they have relations. Infractions of these rules, or other deviations from normal heterosexual activity, are severely punished by the boy’s fellows. Apprehension may not lead to increas- ing deviance if the situation in which the individual is apprehended for the fi rst time occurs at a point where he can still choose between alternate lines of action. Faced, for the fi rst time, with the possible ultimate and drastic consequences of what he is doing, he may decide that he does not want to take the deviant road and turn back. If he makes the right choice, he will be welcomed back into the conventional community, but if he makes the wrong move, he will be rejected and start a cycle of increasing deviance. Ray has shown, in the case of drug addicts, how diffi cult it can be to reverse a deviant cycle. 9 He points out that drug addicts fre- quently attempt to cure themselves and that the motivation underlying their attempts is an effort to show nonaddicts whose opinions they respect that they are really not as bad as they are thought to be. On breaking their habit successfully, they fi nd, to their dismay, that people still treat them as though they were addicts (on the premise, apparently, of “once a junkie, always a junkie”). | HOWARD S. BECKER312 A fi nal step in the career of a deviant is movement into an organized deviant group. When a person makes a defi nite move into an organized group—or when he realizes and accepts the fact that he has already done so— it has a powerful impact on his conception of himself. A drug addict once told me that the moment she felt she was really “hooked” was when she realized she no longer had any friends who were not drug addicts. Members of organized deviant groups of course have one thing in common: their devi- ance. It gives them a sense of common fate, of being in the same boat. From a sense of common fate, from having to face the same problems, grows a deviant subculture: a set of perspectives and understandings about what the world is like and how to deal with it and a set of routine activities based on those perspectives. Membership in such a group solidifi es a deviant identity. Moving into an organized deviant group has several consequences for the career of the deviant. First of all, deviant groups tend, more than deviant individuals, to be pushed into rationalizing their position. At an extreme, they develop a very complicated historical, legal, and psychological justifi ca- tion for their deviant activity. The homo- sexual community is a good case. Magazines and books by homosexuals and for homo- sexuals include historical articles about famous homosexuals in history. They con- tain articles on the biology and physiology of sex, designed to show that homosexuality is a “normal” sexual response. They contain legal articles, pleading for civil liberties for homosexuals. 10 Taken together, this material provides a working philosophy for the active homosexual, explaining to him why he is the way he is, that other people have also been that way, and why it is all right for him to be that way. Most deviant groups have a self-justifying rationale (or “ideology”), although seldom is it as well worked out as that of the homo- sexual. While such rationales do operate, as pointed out earlier, to neutralize the con- ventional attitudes that deviants may still fi nd in themselves toward their own behav- ior, they also perform another function. They furnish the individual with reasons that appear sound for continuing the line of activ- ity he has begun. A person who quiets his own doubts by adopting the rationale moves into a more principled and consistent kind of deviance than was possible for him before adopting it. The second thing that happens when one moves into a deviant group is that he learns how to carry on his deviant activity with a minimum of trouble. All the problems he faces in evading enforcement of the rule he is breaking have been faced before by others. Solutions have been worked out. Thus, the young thief meets older thieves who, more experienced than he is, explain to him how to get rid of stolen merchandise without run- ning the risk of being caught. Every deviant group has a great stock of lore on such sub- jects and the new recruit learns it quickly. Thus, the deviant who enters an orga- nized and institutionalized deviant group is more likely than ever before to continue in his ways. He has learned, on the one hand, how to avoid trouble and, on the other hand, a rationale for continuing. One further fact deserves mention. The rationales of deviant groups tend to contain a general repudiation of conventional moral rules, conventional institutions, and the entire conventional world. NOTES 1. Mary R. Haas, “Interlingual Word Taboos,” American Anthropologist , 53 (July–September, 1951), 338–344. 2. Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Struc- ture (New York: Free Press, 1957), pp. 131–194. 3. I have dealt with this concept at greater length in “Notes on the Concept of Commitment,” Ameri- can Journal of Sociology , LXVI (July, 1960), 32–40. See also Erving Goffman, Encounters: OUTSIDERS | 313 Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (Indi- anapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1961), pp. 88–110; and Gregory P. Stone, “Clothing and Social Rela- tions: A Study of Appearance in the Context of Community Life” (unpublished Ph.D. disserta- tion, Department of Sociology, University of Chi- cago, 1959). 4. Gresham M. Sykes and David Matza, “Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of Delinquency,” American Sociological Review , 22 (December, 1957), 667–669. 5. Guido D’Agostino, Olives on the Apple Tree (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1940). I am grate- ful to Everett C. Hughes for calling this novel to my attention. 6. Everett C. Hughes, “Dilemmas and Contradic- tions of Status,” American Journal of Sociology , (March, 1945), 353–359. 7. Ibid. 8. See Marsh Ray, “The Cycle of Abstinence and Relapse Among Heroin Addicts,” Social Prob- lems , 9 (Fall, 1961), 132–140. 9. See Drug Addiction: Crime or Disease? Interim and Final Reports of the Joint Committee of the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association on Narcotic Drugs (Bloom- ington: Indiana University Press, 1961). 10. Albert J. Reiss, Jr., “The Social Integration of Queers and Peers,” Social Problems , 9 (Fall, 1961), 102–120. Crime and Deviance in the Life-Course Robert J. Sampson and John H. Laub INTRODUCTION Accepted wisdom holds that crime is com- mitted disproportionately by adolescents. According to data from the United States and other industrialized countries, property and violent crime rise rapidly in the teen- age years to a peak at about ages 16 and 18, respectively, with a decline thereafter until old age (Hirschi & Gottfredson 1983, Far- rington 1986, Flanagan & Maguire 1990). The overrepresentation of youth in crime has been demonstrated using multiple sources of measurement—whether offi cial arrest reports (Federal Bureau of Investigation 1990), self- reports of offending (Rowe & Tittle 1977), or victim reports of the ages of offend- ers (Hindelang 1981). It is thus generally accepted that, in the aggregate, age-specifi c crime rates peak in the late teenage years and then decline with age. The age–crime curve has had a profound impact on the organization and content of sociological studies of crime by channeling research to a focus on adolescents. As a result sociological criminology has traditionally neglected the theoretical signifi cance of child- hood characteristics and the link between early childhood behaviors and later adult outcomes (see Robins 1966, McCord 1979, Caspi et al 1989, Farrington 1989, Gott- fredson & Hirschi 1990, Loeber & LeBlanc 1990, Sampson & Laub 1990). Although criminal behavior does peak in the teenage years, evidence reviewed below indicates an early onset of delinquency as well as continu- ity of criminal behavior over the life-course. By concentrating on the teenage years, socio- logical perspectives on crime have thus failed to address the life-span implications of child- hood behavior. At the same time, criminologists have not devoted much attention to the other end of the spectrum—desistance from crime and the transitions from criminal to noncrimi- nal behavior in adulthood (Shover 1985, Cusson & Pinsonneault 1986, Gartner & Piliavin 1988). As Rutter (1988a: 3) argues, we know little about “escape from the risk process” and whether predictors of desis- tance are unique or simply the opposite of criminogenic factors. Therefore, not only has the early life-course been neglected but so has the relevance of social transitions in young adulthood and the factors explaining desistance from crime as people age. In this reading we confront these issues by bringing both childhood and adulthood back into the criminological picture of age and crime. To accomplish this goal we syn- thesize and integrate the research literature on the life-course and crime. As described below, the life-course perspective highlights continuities and discontinuities in behavior over time and the social infl uences of age- graded transitions and life events. Hence, the life-course is concerned not only with early childhood experiences but also with salient CRIME AND DEVIANCE IN THE LIFE-COURSE | 315 events and socialization in adulthood. To the extent that the adult life-course does explain variation in adult crime unaccounted for by childhood development, change must be con- sidered part of the explanatory framework in criminology, along with the stability of early individual differences. The life-course perspective also bears on recent controversies that have embroiled criminology. While all agree that the issue of age and crime is important, confl icting views have emerged on the implications of age for the study of crime and deviance. Hirschi & Gottfredson (1983) argue that the age-crime curve is invariant over different times, places, crime types, and demographic subgroups. Moreover, they believe that age has a direct effect on crime that cannot be explained by social factors, that the causes of crime are the same at every age, and hence that longitudinal research is not needed to study the causes of crime (see also Gottfredson & Hirschi 1987, 1988, 1990). By contrast, Farrington (1986) argues that the age–crime curve refl ects varia- tions in prevalence rather than incidence and that incidence does not vary consistently with age. He also presents evidence to suggest that the relation between age and crime varies over time and by offense type, location, and gender. Blumstein & Cohen (1979) argue fur- ther that individual crime rates are constant during a criminal career, implying that arrest rates do not always decrease with age for all offenders (see also Blumstein et al 1988). Accordingly, even fundamental “facts” about the age–crime relationship and their implications for research design are subject to much debate. This predicament provides yet another motivation to link the study of age and crime to the life-course perspective. Indeed, the data on age and crime lend them- selves naturally to a concern with how crimi- nal behavior changes as individuals pass through different stages of the life-course. By integrating knowledge on crime with age-graded transitions in the life-course, our review attempts to shed further light on the age–crime debate. This reading is organized in the following manner. Before assessing the criminological literature directly, we fi rst highlight major ideas in life-course research and theory. In subsequent sections we then examine the research on continuity (stability) and discon- tinuities (change) in crime over the life-course. In the fi nal sections, we outline a research agenda on age and crime that stems from a reconceptualization of stability and change. THE LIFE-COURSE PERSPECTIVE The life-course has been defi ned as “path- ways through the age differentiated life span,” where age differentiation “is manifested in expectations and options that impinge on deci- sion processes and the course of events that give shape to life stages, transitions, and turn- ing points” (Elder 1985: 17). Similarly, Caspi et al (1990: 15) conceive of the life-course as a “sequence of culturally defi ned age-graded roles and social transitions that are enacted over time.” Age-graded transitions are embed- ded in social institutions and are subject to historical change (Elder 1975, 1991). Two central concepts underlie the analy- sis of life-course dynamics. A trajectory is a pathway or line of development over the life span such as work life, marriage, parenthood, self-esteem, and criminal behavior. Trajecto- ries refer to long-term patterns and sequences of behavior. Transitions are marked by spe- cifi c life events (e.g. fi rst job or fi rst marriage) that are embedded in trajectories and evolve over shorter time spans—“changes in state that are more or less abrupt” (Elder 1985: 31–32). Some transitions are age-graded and some are not; hence, what is often assumed to be important is the normative timing and sequencing of changes in roles, statuses, or other socially defi ned positions along some consensual dimension (Jessor et al 1991). For example, Hogan (1980) emphasizes the | ROBERT J. SAMPSON AND JOHN H. LAUB316 duration of time (spells) between a change in state and the ordering of events, such as fi rst job or fi rst marriage, on occupational status and earnings in adulthood. Caspi et al (1990: 25) argue that delays in social transitions (e.g. being “off-time”) produce confl icting obligations that enhance later diffi culties (see also Rindfuss et al 1987). As a result, life- course analyses are often characterized by a focus on the duration, timing, and ordering of major life events and their consequences for later social development. The interlocking nature of trajecto- ries and transitions may generate turning points or a change in the life-course (Elder 1985: 32). Adaptation to life events is cru- cial because the same event or transition followed by different adaptations can lead to different trajectories (Elder 1985: 35). The long-term view embodied by the life- course focus on trajectories implies a strong connection between childhood events and experiences in adulthood. However, the simultaneous shorter-term view also implies that transitions or turning points can modify life trajectories—they can “redirect paths.” Social institutions and triggering life events that may modify trajectories include school, work, the military, marriage, and parent- hood (see e.g. Elder 1986, Rutter et al 1990, Sampson & Laub 1990). In addition to the study of trajectories of change and the continuity between childhood behavior and later adulthood outcomes, the life-course framework encompasses at least three other themes: (i) a concern with the social meanings of age throughout the life- course, (ii) intergenerational transmission of social patterns, and (iii) the effects of mac- rolevel events (e.g. Great Depression, World War II) and structural location (e.g. class and gender) on individual life histories (see Elder 1974, 1985). As Elder (1991) notes, a major objective of the study of the life-course is to link social history and social structure to the unfolding of human lives. To address these themes individual lives are studied through time, with particular attention devoted to aging, cohort effects, historical context, and the social infl uence of age-graded transitions. Naturally, prospective longitudinal research designs form the heart of life-course research. Of all the themes emphasized in life-course research, the extent of stability and change in both behavior and personality attributes over time is perhaps the most complex. Sta- bility versus change in behavior is also one of the most hotly debated and controversial issues in the social sciences (Brim & Kagan 1980a, Baltes & Nesselroade 1984, Dannefer 1984). Given its pivotal role we thus turn to an assessment of the research literature as it bears on stability and change in criminal behavior. Although personality development is obviously an important topic (see Block 1971, Caspi 1987), space considerations demand that we focus primarily on behavior. As we shall see, the research literature con- tains evidence for both continuity and change in deviant behavior over the life-course. STABILITY OF CRIME AND DEVIANCE Unlike sociological criminology, the fi eld of developmental psychology has long been concerned with the continuity of mal- adaptive behaviors (Brim & Kagan 1980a, Caspi & Bem 1990). As such, a large por- tion of the longitudinal evidence on stability comes from psychologists and others who study “antisocial behavior” generally, where the legal concept of crime may or may not be a component. An example is the study of aggression in psychology (Olweus 1979). In exploring this research tradition, our purpose is to highlight the extent to which deviant childhood behaviors have important ramifi cations, whether criminal or noncrimi- nal, in later adult life. Our point of departure is the widely reported claim that individual differences in antisocial behavior are stable across the life-course (Robins 1966, Jessor et al 1977, CRIME AND DEVIANCE IN THE LIFE-COURSE | 317 1991, Olweus 1979, Loeber 1982, Hues- mann et al 1984, Caspi et al 1987, Gott- fredson & Hirschi 1990). The stability of crime and antisocial behavior over time is often defi ned as homotypic continuity, which refers to the continuity of similar behaviors or phenotypic attributes over time (Caspi & Bem 1990: 553). For example, in an infl uen- tial study of the aggressiveness of 600 sub- jects, their parents, and their children over a 22-year period, Huesmann et al (1984) found that early aggressiveness predicted later aggression and criminal violence. They concluded that “aggression can be viewed as a persistent trait that . . . possesses sub- stantial cross-situational constancy” (1984: 1120). An earlier study by Robins (1966) also found a high level of stability in crime and aggression over time. More generally, Olweus’s (1979) com- prehensive review of over 16 studies on aggressive behavior revealed “substantial” stability—the correlation between early aggressive behavior and later criminality averaged .68 for the studies reviewed (1979: 854–55). Loeber (1982) completed a similar review of the extant literature in many disci- plines and concluded that a “consensus” has been reached in favor of the stability hypoth- esis: “Children who initially display high rates of antisocial behavior are more likely to persist in this behavior than children who initially show lower rates of antisocial behav- ior” (1982: 1433). Recent empirical studies documenting stability in criminal and deviant behavior across time include West & Far- rington (1977), Elliott et al (1985), Wolfgang et al (1987), Shannon (1988), and Jessor et al (1991). Although more comprehensive, these fi ndings are not new. Over 50 years ago the Gluecks found that virtually all of the 510 reformatory inmates in their study of crimi- nal careers “had experience in serious anti- social conduct” (Glueck & Glueck 1930: 142). Their data also confi rmed “the early genesis of antisocial careers” (1930: 143). In addition, the Gluecks’ follow-up of 1,000 males originally studied in Unraveling Juve- nile Delinquency (1950) revealed remarkable continuities. As they argued in Delinquents and Non-Delinquents in Perspective : “While the majority of boys originally included in the nondelinquent control group contin- ued, down the years, to remain essentially law-abiding, the greatest majority of those originally included in the delinquent group continued to commit all sorts of crimes in the 17–25 age-span” (1968: 170). Findings regarding behavioral or homotypic conti- nuity are thus supported by a rich body of empirical research that spans several decades (for more extensive discussion see Robins 1966, 1978, West & Farrington 1977, Gott- fredson & Hirschi 1990). In fact, much as the Gluecks reported earlier, Robins (1978) summarized results from her studies of four male cohorts by stating that “adult antisocial behavior virtually requires childhood antiso- cial behavior” (1978: 611). Perhaps more intriguing, the linkage between childhood misbehavior and adult outcomes is found across life domains that go well beyond the legal concept of crime. This phenomenon is usually defi ned as hetero- typic continuity—continuity of an inferred genotypic attribute presumed to underlie diverse phenotypic behaviors (Caspi & Bem 1990: 553). For instance, a specifi c behav- ior in childhood might not be predictive of the exact same behavior in later adulthood but might still be associated with behaviors that are conceptually consistent with that earlier behavior (Caspi & Moffi tt 1991: 4). Although not always criminal per se, adult behaviors falling in this category might include excessive drinking, traffi c violations, marital confl ict or abuse, and harsh discipline of children. Gottfredson & Hirschi (1990: 91) invoke a similar idea when they refer to adult behaviors “analogous” to crime such as acci- dents, smoking, and sexual promiscuity. Evidence for the behavioral coherence implied by heterotypic continuity is found | ROBERT J. SAMPSON AND JOHN H. LAUB318 in the Huesmann et al (1984) study, where they report that aggression in childhood was related not just to adult crime but to spouse abuse, drunk driving, moving violations, and severe punishment of offspring. Other stud- ies reporting a similar coalescence of deviant and criminal acts over time include Rob- ins (1966), West & Farrington (1977), and Jessor et al (1991). It is interesting that the fi ndings of heterotypic continuity generated largely by psychologists are quite consistent with criminological research, showing little or no specialization in crime as people age (Wolfgang et al 1972, Blumstein et al 1986, Osgood et al 1988, Elliott et al 1989). Invoking another dimension of hetero- typic continuity, Caspi (1987) has argued that personality characteristics in childhood (e.g. ill tempered behavior) will not only appear across time but will be manifested in a number of diverse situations. Specifi cally, Caspi (1987: 1211) found that the tendency toward explosive, undercontrolled behavior in childhood was recreated over time, espe- cially in problems with subordination (e.g. in education, military, and work settings) and in situations that required negotiating interpersonal confl icts (e.g. marriage and parenting). For example, children who dis- play temper tantrums in childhood are more likely to abort their involvement with educa- tion, which in turn is related to a wide range of adult outcomes such as unemployment, job instability, and low income. In Deviant Children Grown Up , Lee Robins also found strong relations between childhood antiso- cial behavior and adult employment status, occupational status, job stability, income, and mobility (1966: 95–102). Robins went so far as to conclude that “antisocial behav- ior [in childhood] predicts class status more effi ciently than class status predicts anti- social behavior” (1966: 305). In a similar vein, Sampson & Laub’s (1990) reanaly- sis of longitudinal data from the Gluecks’ archives found that childhood antisocial behavior strongly predicted not just adult criminality but outcomes as diverse as job- lessness, divorce, welfare dependence, and educational failure—independent of child- hood economic status and IQ. Implications for Social Theories of Crime There is ample evidence that antisocial behavior is relatively stable across stages of the life-course, regardless of traditional sociological variables like stratifi cation. As Caspi & Moffi tt (1991: 2) conclude, robust continuities in antisocial behavior have been revealed over the past 50 years in different nations (e.g. Canada, England, Finland, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United States) and with multiple methods of assessment (e.g. offi cial records, teacher ratings, parent reports, and peer nominations of aggressive behavior). These replications across time and space yield an impressive generalization that is rare in the social sciences. Antisocial behavior in childhood also pre- dicts a wide range of troublesome adult out- comes, supporting Hagan & Palloni’s (1988) observation that delinquent and criminal events “are linked into life trajectories of broader signifi cance, whether those trajec- tories are criminal or noncriminal in form” (1988: 90, see also Hagan 1991). Because most research by criminologists has focused either on the teenage years or adult behavior limited to crime, this idea has not been well integrated into the criminological literature. As a result of this dual neglect, sociological approaches to crime have been vulnerable to attack for not coming to grips with the impli- cations of behavioral stability. Not surpris- ingly, developmental psychologists have long seized on stability to argue for the primacy of early childhood and the irrelevance of the adult life-course. But even recent social theo- ries of crime take much the same tack, deny- ing that adult life-course transitions can have any real effect on adult criminal behavior. For example, Gottfredson & Hirschi (1990: 238) argue that ordinary life events (e.g. jobs, CRIME AND DEVIANCE IN THE LIFE-COURSE | 319 getting married, becoming a parent) have lit- tle effect on criminal behavior because crime rates decline with age “whether or not these events occur.” They go on to argue that the life-course assumption that such events are important neglects its own evidence on the stability of personal characteristics (1990: 237, see also Gottfredson & Hirschi 1987). And, since crime emerges early in the life- course, traditional sociological variables (e.g. peers, labor market, marriage) are again presumed impotent. The reasoning is that since crime emerges before sociological vari- ables appear, the latter cannot be important, even in modifying known trajectories. A dominant viewpoint in criminology is therefore that stability in crime over the life- course is generated by population heteroge- neity in an underlying criminal propensity that is established early in life and remains stable over time (Wilson & Herrnstein 1985, Gottfredson & Hirschi 1990, Nagin & Pater- noster 1991). Precisely because individual differences in the predisposition to commit crime emerge early and are stable, childhood and adult crime will be positively correlated. The hypothesized causes of early propen- sity cover a number of factors, including lack of self-control (Gottfredson & Hirschi 1990), parental criminality (Farrington et al 1975), impulsivity (Wilson & Hermstein 1985), and even heredity (Rowe & Osgood 1984). Although primarily methodological in nature, the heterogeneity argument has import for theoretical understanding, implying that the correlation between past and future delin- quency is not causal. Rather, the correlation is spurious because of the heterogeneity of the population in its propensity to crime. It is clear that traditional approaches to stability leave little room for the relevance of sociological theories of age-graded tran- sitions. As it turns out, however, whether the glass of stability appears half-empty or half-full seems to result at least as much from theoretical predilections as from empiri- cal reality. Moreover, not only are there important discontinuities in crime that need to be explained, a reconsideration of the evidence suggests that stability itself may be explained by sociological infl uences over the life-course. To assess these alterative concep- tions we fi rst review the evidence on change, followed by a revisionist look at the explana- tion of stability. CONCLUSION The traditional hostility among sociologists toward research establishing early child- hood differences in delinquency and antiso- cial behavior that remain stable over time is unwarranted. Not only can stability be stud- ied sociologically, its fl ip side is change, and the latter appears to be systematically struc- tured by adult bonds to social institutions. The unique advantage of a sociological per- spective on the life-course is that it brings the formative period of childhood back into the picture yet recognizes that individuals can change through interaction with key social institutions as they age. With improvements in measurement and conceptualization, the prospects appear bright for future research to uncover the interlocking trajectories of crime, deviance, and human development. REFERENCES Abbott, A., and Hrycak, A. 1990. “Measuring Resem- blance in sequence Data: An Optimal Matching Anal- ysis of Musicians’ Careers.” Am. J. Sociol . 96: 144–85. 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Weighing the Consequences of a Deviant Career Factors Leading to an Exit from Prostitution Sharon S. Oselin Sex workers have long piqued the curiosity of both academics and the general public because their work violates prevalent social norms and therefore is often considered devi- ant. Prostitution, 1 one of the oldest recorded types of sex work, continues to prosper throughout the world as it has emerged in various forms, ranging from courtesans to street prostitutes. To date, there is copious research on sex workers, including their daily experiences (Pearl 1987), legal issues affecting their work (Chapkis 2000; Weitzer 2000a), and causal factors pulling women into the trade (Barton 2006; O’Neill and Barberet 2000). Overall, there is much less academic examination of how and why women leave the trade. Within this research, there are two prevailing foci that account for this transi- tion. First, scholars emphasize that individu- als who work in prostitution are situated within particular social economic statuses that make sex work a more appealing option and preclude (or make diffi cult) their exits (Brock 1998; Jeffrey and MacDonald 2006; Miller 1986; Rosen and Venkatesh 2008). In this scenario, sex work is a rational decision, and these broader conditions keep individu- als in the trade (Rosen and Venkatesh 2008). The second approach focuses less on struc- turally based circumstances and more on internal factors that are linked to exits, such as having personal reasons/motivations (Dalla 2006; Sanders 2007) and turning points that cause cognitive changes (Månsson and Hedin 1999). An alternative way to conceptualize exit- ing is to view prostitution as a role, associ- ated with certain behaviors and statuses. Ebaugh (1988) refers to the process of shed- ding one role and adopting another as “role exiting.” Research on exiting deviant roles concludes these are especially diffi cult to leave due to labeling, stigma, and, in some cases, the associated criminal status. In the United States, street prostitutes are typically thought of as deviants and criminals who therefore occupy a low-status position. Due to the specifi c socio-legal constraints placed on these individuals, where they are devi- ant and criminalized yet not provided many resources, leaving the trade may be both a desirable goal and more diffi cult to achieve single-handedly. Prostitution-helping orga- nizations 2 (PHOs) can serve to facilitate this exiting process. Building on these works, this study exam- ines the factors that cultivate an exit from prostitution. I fi nd structural or individual explanations do not fully capture how mul- tiple factors combine to pull women off the streets. Rather, I contend it is both internal and external factors that lead women to initially exit prostitution by enrolling in a PHO. I structure my analysis according to these four factors—having reasons for leav- ing, experiencing turning points, learning of a PHO, and the role of bridge parties. In | SHARON S. OSELIN324 order to address these concerns, I draw on interviews with thirty-six U.S. female street prostitutes who engage in heterosexual sex. This sample is ideal to address this research question because these individuals were in the process of transitioning out of the trade during my fi eldwork as they enrolled in PHOs. These fi ndings hold implications for theoretical advancements in research on sex workers (prostitutes), role exiting, and devi- ant populations. LEAVING THE TRADE Given the focus of this study is on the factors that result in leaving the role of prostitute, it is important to underscore the relevance of roles for individuals. Roles provide a vantage point for understanding the world around us and inform our subsequent behaviors. Indi- viduals often take on various roles through- out their lives and transition from one role to another over the life course, which is known as role exiting. Indeed, some research asserts that role exiting is a pivotal step that subse- quently enables new role acquisition (Ebaugh 1988; Howard 2006). Ebaugh’s (1988) work on role exiting examines the stages individ- uals pass through as they leave a role: fi rst doubts, the seeking and weighing of alterna- tives, turning points and their functions in the role-exit process, and establishing an ex-role identity. Many of these stages are preparatory and important components leading to role exit. With a few exceptions, most sociological research on roles focuses solely on the social- ization and internalization of new roles while neglecting other aspects of the exiting process (Howard 2006). When this process is applied to roles that are deemed criminal, it can be considered desistance (Giordano, Cernkov- ich, and Rudolph 2002; Giordano, Deines, and Cernkovich 2006). While I focus primar- ily on role exiting in this study, these fi ndings also offer implications for the analogous pro- cess of desistance among street prostitutes. Research fi nds individuals who attempt to leave “deviant” roles must contend with unique conditions associated with them (Sanders 2007; Snow and Anderson 1993; Uggen, Manza, and Behren 2004). Similarly, street prostitutes experience a high degree of stigma and labeling due to their visibility, involvement with the criminal justice system, and because they work in a trade that vio- lates culturally prevalent mores and norms. As a result, many prostitutes tend to conceal their past history in the trade after exiting (Sanders 2007). Dalla (2006) highlights the ways women exit prostitution and contends they do so through three avenues: jail, PHOs, and on their own. Her study examines the motiva- tions for leaving, which include relational factors, restrictive factors (e.g., physical deterioration), spirituality, cumulative bur- dens (e.g., hitting bottom), and being in a transitional context (e.g., jail). Moreover, Sanders (2007) produced one of the most comprehensive studies on exiting prostitu- tion when she compared indoor and outdoor sex workers and developed a typology of pathways out of sex work that consisted of reactionary exits, gradual planning, natural progression, and yo-yoing. The ability and resources to exit prostitu- tion though may be hampered by the socio- legal contexts in which these individuals are immersed. Brock (1998) claims the rise in Canadian legislation concerning sex work, in an effort to “contain and control” these activities, was ineffective and only shifted the workers to alternative areas. Consequently, these increasingly punitive legal changes did not decrease the number of prostitutes nor did they facilitate exiting. Månsson and Hedin (1999) conducted research on Swed- ish street prostitutes who left sex work, in a context that is “interventionist” in nature, and note three turning points that cultivate this transition: eye-opening events, traumatic events, and positive life events. This research was conducted within various settings, each WEIGHING THE CONSEQUENCES OF A DEVIANT CAREER | 325 having specifi c laws and values that likely infl uence the exiting process. The combination of particular socio-legal contexts that criminalize prostitution, drug use, arrests and violence can create circum- stances that make exiting an especially ardu- ous task (Cusick and Hickman 2005; Sanders 2007). For instance, Cusick and Hickman (2005) point out that prostitution and drug use mutually reinforce each another, mak- ing this population especially “vulnerable” and effectively “trapping” them in the trade unless sobriety is achieved. To date, extant studies explore the motivations for leaving, turning points of change, and laws that shape exiting. Building off this body of work, this study aims to contribute by analyzing the combination of factors that result in an ini- tial exit from street prostitution, particularly among women who utilize the services of a PHO. DATA COLLECTION AND METHODOLOGY In order to gain access to prostitutes, I chose to intern and work with PHOs: nonprofi t programs that specifi cally aim to help and serve prostitutes. I located thirty-three 3 PHOs across the United States, through extensive Internet searches and snowball sampling, and selected four of them where I conducted in-depth ethnographic work—New Hori- zons, Phoenix, Safe Place, and Seeds. I chose these four PHOs based on the following factors: modes of entrée, the organizational structure, temporality, and regional location (see Table 28.1). Scholars assert these factors are important considerations, either because they had been previously neglected or proved relevant to studies on role exiting and/or desistance (Ebaugh 1988; Goffman 1961; Hanson 2002). Receiving director approval to research at these sites was another impor- tant concern in the selection process. I completed this research between 2002 and 2006 and spent an average of three months at each site conducting participant observation and formal and informal interviews. The data in this study draw specifi cally on the quali- tative interviews I conducted with thirty-six clients (approximately nine women per site). These women range in age from 20 to 55, with a majority in their thirties and forties. The interviews focused on the following top- ics: past histories in prostitution, life-course events, experiences on the streets, family relationships, identity, reasons for leaving prostitution and entering the program, inter- actions with the criminal justice system, and future goals. I conducted the tape-recorded interviews in a private setting to ensure con- fi dentiality and assigned each interviewee a pseudonym for protection. Throughout these interviews, the women espoused stories that contained fairly simplistic cause-and-effect narratives (Tilly 2006). I did not fi nd there to be any signifi cant differences among these four samples. FACTORS LEADING TO AN EXIT Many studies on exiting prostitution focus on one or two factors that pull women out TABLE 28.1 Variation among Selected Prostitution-Helping Organization Modes of Entrée Organization Structure Temporality Region New Horizons Both Total institution 1.5–2 years Midwest Phoenix Both Total institution 1.5–2 years West Coast Safe Place Both Quasi-total institution 3 months Midwest Seeds Involuntary Day program 2 weeks East Coast | SHARON S. OSELIN326 of the trade, such as reasons for leaving (Dalla 2006; Sanders 2007), turning points (Månsson and Hedin 1999; Sanders 2007), or structural impediments (Brock 1998; Rosen and Venkatesh 2008). In this analysis of street prostitutes, I fi nd it is a combination of both internal (reasons for leaving, turning points) and external factors (learning of a PHO, bridge parties) that lead women to initially exit prostitution as they enter PHOs. Reasons for Leaving Prostitution A central component associated with leav- ing prostitution is having reasons for exit- ing that can also serve as motivating factors. The respondents in this sample all provided reasons for quitting, with an average of 2.55 reasons given per woman. Dalla (2006) ana- lyzed the motivations for exiting prostitution, which included relational factors, restrictive factors (e.g., physical deterioration), spiritu- ality, cumulative burdens (e.g., hitting bot- tom), and being in a transitional context (e.g., jail). Similarly, Sanders (2007) uncov- ers reasons prostitutes leave (such as vio- lence, sobriety, health issues) and connects them to a typology of pathways out of sex work. The above contributions lay impor- tant theoretical groundwork for understand- ing the motivations for exiting, yet at times, these accounts tend to be insuffi ciently con- textualized by the background and life expe- riences of the individual. Thus, I consider how unique individual characteristics and experiences come into play as women formu- late reasons for leaving the streets. During these interviews, I asked a series of questions about how and why women left prostitution. One common theme that emerged in the responses was being raised in a religious household and a strong desire to “get right with God.” Shondra, a 41-year- old who worked in prostitution for over fi fteen years, highlighted the important role a Higher Power played throughout her life, even while she worked on the streets. She explained how religion was a big part of her childhood and her faith eventually became a primary motivation to leave: My mom was a Jehovah witness and that’s the religion I was raised in. I always had faith. When I was working on the streets, I kept praying to God: This is not me. Why do I keep doing this? Why can’t I stop? God help me stop. . . . He was always there knocking I just had to open up the door to allow him to come in and help me stop. Tiffany, who was raised Baptist, also viewed her faith as an ongoing process that inspired her to quit: It’s because I actually felt the hurt that I was putting up on the Heavenly Father and Christ. That was the ultimate straw that broke the camel’s back. I promised myself I would never hurt them again and that gives me all the rea- sons more than I’m going to stop. The other reasons I don’t like it no more, like going to prison or for my kids . . . none of those worked. It is God who gives me strength to make the choice. Another reason for leaving was witness- ing and experiencing excessive violence on the streets. While violence in impoverished urban contexts tends to be heightened (Miller 2008), some prostitutes experienced more violent encounters than others, which in turn produced fears of future violence or even death. For some, these concerns emerged and intensifi ed to become a central reason to leave the lifestyle. Shondra, in addition to having religious motivations, also pointed to the increased violence on the streets that was too much for her to bear: Really, I thought I was going to die in the life because I didn’t see any way out no matter how much I wanted it to end. Things were get- ting worse on the streets day by day. I’ve seen about fi ve prostitutes I knew end up dead in garbage cans. WEIGHING THE CONSEQUENCES OF A DEVIANT CAREER | 327 Jenna concurred that the violence she expe- rienced while working in prostitution for twenty-seven years was a major reason she wanted to leave: I was almost killed by my last john and I ran for my life. I knew I needed to get help but I couldn’t stop. It was bad out there . . . I was raped many times and left for dead, having people cut my face up and damage my eye. The amount of negative experiences and fears of them seemed to grow the longer one worked on the streets. In these situa- tions, women often discussed these fears as burdens that left them feeling exhausted and “too old” for this line of work. Barton (2006) refers to these outcomes as a “toll” sex work can take on women. Similarly, the prostitutes who referenced these reasons for leaving typically worked in the trade for a good portion of their adult lives. 4 Amy was a 28-year-old who worked as a prostitute for thirteen years, or nearly half of her life. She claimed to feel the tangible effects of her years on the streets: I was tired of prostituting, yeah I wanted to try and change my life, but I was having a hard time doing it anymore. . . . So I came here, to try to get out of it and off of the streets, so I could do something else because I’m getting way too old for it. Elaine, 39-years-old, who transitioned from stripping to street prostitution, felt seven- teen years as a prostitute burdened her with many mental and emotional problems. She claimed to be exhausted from the work and declared that most girls who leave prostitu- tion are also motivated by this factor: “If they are really, really ready to change their lives [and leave] mostly it’s because they are tired. That’s the main reason you will hear the girls give. They are just burned out by the work.” Although less commonly cited, a few women claimed their sexual orientation served as an impetus to exit prostitution as it became increasingly diffi cult for them to have sex with men. For instance, Debbie had a distain of sex with men because she was a lesbian. Though she said she fi rst knew she was a lesbian at 14, she felt sleeping with men grew more despi- cable over time and ultimately became her motivation to leave: I just got tired of being with different men all the time. The smells, the touches, and all that stuff . . . I’m gay. To be with a man is really fucked up to me. I’d always try to play my way out of the sex by either talking or conning people. I did that very well. For Debbie, not being sexually attracted to men was a signifi cant impediment in this line of work. Many women also pointed to sobriety and the clarity that followed as a reason for leav- ing prostitution. In fact, numerous women stated their sobriety was a precursor to be able to identify their feelings about working in prostitution. All the women in this sample except one admitted to having a drug addic- tion and many stated this kept them in the trade. Accordingly, achieving a period of sobriety was integral to even formulate rea- sons to leave, and for some women the desire to sustain sobriety became a motivation in itself (Cusick and Hickman 2005). Loretta, a routine user of PCP and cocaine for eleven years, said her addiction kept her in pros- titution and once sober she had no need to return. She recalled: My habit was basically what really kept me out there. So I think that when I really decided that I don’t want drugs anymore that helped me with the prostitution thing. Because I don’t need to go out there and sell my body because I didn’t do drugs anymore and that is basically what I was doing it for. So now that I am sober I know that I can do without it. Evette attributed her mental breakdown to drugs and claimed sobriety was paramount | SHARON S. OSELIN328 for her to retain her sanity. She felt working in prostitution was not compatible with her sobriety: I never really thought about leaving before I came to the hospital, but I knew I couldn’t get high no more because I would start hallu- cinating and all kinds of stuff . . . I was scared. I used the whole time I worked the streets. I think once I got sober I got a moment of clar- ity and it dawned on me at that time that that was not the way I wanted to die. Before being sober, I had never thought of leaving. Both Loretta and Evette’s statements suggest that sobriety played a crucial role in even being able to place exiting as a desirable outcome. Another reason that emerged from wom- en’s accounts focused on salvaging relation- ships with their children. Approximately three-quarters of these women had children, and for many, being able to raise their chil- dren, reclaim custody, or simply fulfi ll their motherly duties was an utmost priority. Though Janise lost custody of her children years before, she still wanted to protect them from negative responses they may have faced because of her actions: I started thinking about my kids and that’s why I fi rst considered leaving. They are teenag- ers now and I would never hang around their neighborhood or hang around their friends because I was afraid that I was going to date one of them on accident. If that happened, I feared my kids’ friends would tease them— “Hey man, isn’t that your mom? Your momma sucked my dick.” Rosen and Venkatesh (2008) fi nd that engag- ing in sex work allows parents fl exibility, time, and money to care for their children. In contrast, very few women in this study had custody of their children or even routine con- tact with them, and many claimed the lifestyle associated with sex work precluded them from raising their children. Thus, the desire to perform and reclaim their role as mothers served as a motivation to leave prostitution. Other interpersonal relationships with fam- ily members, partners, or close friends like- wise became a reason to get off the streets. There were two main ways that these rela- tionships motivated women to leave the trade. First, women considered their relation- ships with signifi cant others too important to lose, therefore sustaining the relationship was a prominent reason for quitting. Rosaria explained how she took her fi ancée’s disap- proval of her lifestyle into consideration: When my fi ancée found out I was prostituting he agreed with me that I needed to change my life. He didn’t like the drugs, alcohol or pros- titution . . . the way I was living. So to be with him, I needed to change. Mary similarly claimed she did not want to lose her boyfriend and father of her four children due to her involvement with pros- titution and drugs because she felt he was a “good man.” The second way interpersonal relation- ships became a motivation to quit was when individuals served as role models to prosti- tutes. In these instances, women had connec- tions to other former prostitutes who had successfully left via PHOs. Through their relationships, these role models extolled the virtues of their decision and served as living examples that such a transition was possible. One 52-year-old client stated her motiva- tion to leave prostitution emerged after she witnessed two other women graduate from a PHO and thrive in their new lifestyles. She recounted why she wanted to leave: I saw the evidence through my sister and another lady in my neighborhood that was out on the streets [in prostitution] and doing really bad. I saw the changes in them after they went through the program and that’s what helped motivate me to want to leave. For many sex workers, interpersonal rela- tionships factored prominently as reasons to transition out of the trade. WEIGHING THE CONSEQUENCES OF A DEVIANT CAREER | 329 I fi nd the reasons for exiting prostitution among this group of sex workers largely cor- respond to the fi ndings of previous studies on this topic that include violence, exhaus- tion, relationships, and religious motivations (Dalla 2006; Sanders 2007). Here, I attempt to assess personal biographies (and life expe- riences) in conjunction with the formulation of particular reasons because the former shapes the latter. Understanding the motiva- tions for leaving sheds light on the internal factors involved with this decision, but for these women simply possessing reasons does not automatically generate an exit. Extant research on this topic tends to discuss reasons for leaving as if they alone lead to exits. I con- tend a turning point event is equally impor- tant for bringing these reasons to center stage and subsequently prioritizing leaving. Turning Points of Change Beyond reasons for leaving, women also emp- hasized a turning point event that prompted them to place exiting as a central goal. Turn- ing points, also an internal factor that infl u- ences exiting, can cultivate a shift within a person that brings a new set of priorities and goals to the forefront (Stark and Lofl and 1965). Månsson and Hedin (1999) fi nd turning point events were relevant to leav- ing street prostitution and these consisted of eye-opening events, traumatic events (e.g., violence), and positive life events (e.g., relationships, children). In a similar line of inquiry, Sanders (2007) constructed a typology of transitions out of prostitution and in doing so highlighted various turn- ing points of change for these women, such as violent events and signifi cant life events (e.g., pregnancy or jail). Indeed, she fi nds individual reasons for exiting and turning point events are frequently the same. In this study, I fi nd that although there is some overlap between turning point events and reasons for leaving, most women spoke of them as two distinct categories. Typi- cally, prostitutes cite reasons for exiting that vary from their turning point event, and as a result of experiencing this event, their reasons rise in salience. The follow- ing events functioned as a turning point of change: being arrested, hospitalization, and pregnancy/childbirth. Arrests and Jail. Given that street prostitutes are highly visible to law enforcement, it is not surprising that all the women in this study have been arrested for prostitution at some point throughout their career. This fi nd- ing corroborates previous work that claims street prostitutes have among the highest arrest rates of all sex workers (Alexander 1987). As a result of these arrests, a major- ity of women in this study served jail/prison sentences. Those who had a history of mul- tiple arrests and extensive criminal records spoke of their heightened fears of returning to jail and the prospect of serving long-term prison sentences. When these fears became a reality, they acted as a turning point for approximately three-quarters (twenty-seven of thirty-six) of this sample. Turning points of this nature are what Månsson and Hedin (1999) consider traumatic events that pro- duce a change in perception. The arrests and imprisonment subsequently removed women from street environments, temporar- ily enforced sobriety, and provided a space for personal refl ection that enabled them to reassess their priorities. Recall that Shondra stated her reasons for getting out of prostitution consisted of reli- gious beliefs and intense fears of experiencing violence on the streets. However, these moti- vations did not compel her to exit. It was only when she was rearrested and returned to jail that these motivations to quit became her pri- ority. She explained how her imprisonment evoked a turning point moment in her life: God fi nally rescued me the last time I went to jail, and it fi nally clicked after I was arrested | SHARON S. OSELIN330 that this was God’s way of helping me out. I prayed for God to strengthen my faith in Him and to put Him in my life . . . to feel what I knew was right and what I was raised to believe in. I embraced that and ran with it because that was my lifeline and I knew with no doubt in my mind that if I would have kept going the way I was going I would end up dead. After I was released I went right into the program because I knew this was my one shot. Tisha, a 20-year-old who had been working as a prostitute since she was 9 years old, had a substantial history of arrests and jail time and recently violated her parole. Though she provided multiple reasons why she wanted to leave the streets, such as escalating vio- lence and being “burned out,” her rearrest and the prospect of signifi cant jail time elic- ited a turning point change in her: I was on parole and I got busted for prostitu- tion again. I knew I was going back to prison for a long time, so I called my parole offi cer and asked her to recommend me for Phoenix instead. At that point, I knew something had to change. I got lucky, instead of returning to prison, I got a chance to go there. Similarly, Loretta, a 40-year-old who claimed sobriety was her reason to leave, did not work toward that goal until she was arrested and faced a long stint in the penitentiary. She declared: I had a long rap sheet—from here to El Paso probably. I was arrested for drugs and prosti- tution. And all my misdemeanors turned into felonies. I knew I was going to do some serious time in the penitentiary . . . at least three years. I knew it was time to make a change. These cases emphasize the relevance of arrests and imprisonment, as they served to facilitate turning points of change. This spe- cifi c type of event was particularly relevant among women with substantial histories of arrests and criminal records, where they per- ceived the costs associated with working in prostitution as too great. Hospitalization. Another event that culti- vated a turning point for prostitutes was when they experienced extreme psychologi- cal duress that resulted in hospitalization. This event is also a traumatic turning point (Månsson and Hedin 1999). In these situa- tions, the women attribute their change in thinking to their time spent in the hospital, where they were able to take stock of their situation and formulate alternative options. Less than one-quarter (seven of thirty-six) of the women discuss hospitalization as a turn- ing point moment. Even though Evette had a variety of rea- sons for wanting to leave prostitution, it was the time she spent in a hospital due to a “mental breakdown” that provided a cata- lyst for exiting. She felt her mental instability was a result of her excessive drug use, which was fueled by her work in the trade: I never really thought about stopping [prosti- tution] until the drug thing really took a toll on me mentally. I started hallucinating and began losing my mind and it wasn’t fun. That’s when I really wanted out. When I was in the hospi- tal I recognized that this was it—now or never. Something clicked inside me. After this realization, she stated she could not return to prostitution. Tiffany also suffered from mental illness, which she attributed to her intense drug addic - tion, and had attempted suicide. Her moti- vations for quitting revolved solely around having a “spiritual awakening,” but it was not until she ended up in the hospital that she began to take the necessary steps to exit: I tried to smoke myself to death, drink myself to death, and take pills and had to go to the psychiatric unit for six days. It was during this time that I had the clarity to know that I needed help. When I was released I came right to this program. Both Evette and Tiffany cited multiple rea- sons for leaving prostitution; however, it was only after they were hospitalized for psy- WEIGHING THE CONSEQUENCES OF A DEVIANT CAREER | 331 chiatric problems that they began to expe- rience clarity and a change in thinking that lead them along the path to exiting. These women claimed they had too much to lose if they returned to the streets, including their sanity and well-being, and felt the only way to prevent further damage or death would be to radically alter their lifestyles by leaving prostitution. Pregnancy and Childbirth. Pregnancy and childbirth were linked to the fi nal turning point event but were uncommon as only two women in this sample cited them. Amy stated feelings of exhaustion made her want to leave the trade for years, yet it was preg- nancy and the birth of her last son that pro- duced a turning point in her life that altered her thinking. Shortly after giving birth, her main goal was to leave prostitution so she could be a mother to her children and espe- cially her newborn son: I want my kids back. I realized it was time to stop when I was pregnant with my son and I didn’t want to be doing that anymore since he needed a mother. At that point, I started trying to fi gure out how I could leave . . . what else I could do instead. These events corroborate previous research because they fall under the category of “positive life turning points” (Månsson and Hedin 1999). All the women in this study experienced one of these three turning point events that in turn altered their priorities and goals. Janise stated she would never have left prostitu- tion if she had not experienced a change of heart while in jail. Evette provided a similar account: “No, I never seriously thought of leaving prostitution and if it had not been for my going to the hospital, my social worker and the program, I would still be out there today and probably dead.” The effects of a turning point and the corresponding change in thinking spurred women to gather information about ways to leave prostitution and consider available options for help in this endeavor. Similar to reasons for leaving, turning points can be best understood by examining an individ- ual’s particular biography and experiences and are often associated with role transi- tions (Sampson and Laub 1993). In studies on female desistance from crime, Giordano et al. (2006) conclude that cognitive and moti - vational changes are central to the desistance process. For prostitutes in this study, turning points created a newfound sense of purpose and priorities, where they felt getting out of prostitution was paramount. In order for a PHO to be perceived as a viable option to exit, prostitutes fi rst had to learn about the program and what it offered. They acquired this information through a variety of sources, which I examine in the next section. Learning of a PHO In addition to internal states, external fac- tors also shape the process of initially exiting prostitution. The fi rst of these is having an awareness of a PHO as an avenue through which to leave. Indeed, knowing about a pro- gram and the services it provides can make leaving more appealing and appear attain- able because one can expect certain provi- sions through this association. Research fi nds that marginalized and disadvantaged populations, such as the homeless, benefi t the most when they are informed and utilize services that best match their perceptions and needs (Thompson, Pollio, Eyrich, Brad- bury, and North 2004). In the literature on prostitution and exiting, there is little discus- sion or analysis of the ways through which women learn about programs that can help them transition out of the trade. I fi nd this group of street prostitutes pos- sessed either short- or long-term knowledge of the existence of a local PHO. Three-quarters of these women (twenty-seven of thirty-six) had short-term awareness of a PHO (less than three months) and enrolled within this time frame. The remaining one-quarter (nine of thirty-six) retained long-term knowledge of a PHO, meaning they knew of a nearby | SHARON S. OSELIN332 program for longer than three months but did not enroll until a later point in time. The women who knew about a PHO for longer periods of time acquired this informa- tion through a variety of sources: programs and services affi liated with the PHO, staff associated with affi liated institutions, family members or friends, and the media. PHOs that offered additional services—drop-in cri- sis shelters, street outreach, and jail outreach services—spread the word about their organi- zation through these channels. By providing an array of services, program staff members had numerous avenues through which to dissemi- nate information to street prostitutes and culti- vate interpersonal relationships with them. For instance, Janise fi rst heard of New Horizons when she began using their tempo- rary crisis shelter years earlier: See I was just a client coming in and out of their crisis shelter, getting meals or sleeping. Because I knew that if I joined their residential program, then I’m gonna have to do the right thing. But at that time I wasn’t ready to quit. While she was not ready to quit until a few years later, during her visits to the shelter Janise acquired information about the pro- gram and its services that she later decided to pursue. Other clients claimed they fi rst heard of a PHO when they came across its mobile out- reach unit, whose purpose was to provide condoms, information, and safety tips to street prostitutes. Evette said she fi rst learned of the PHO when interacting with staff mem- bers working in this outreach program: I had always known about them as far as pass- ing out condoms and stuff . . . I even knew them on a fi rst name basis . . . but did I go in for the help and all that? No, I did not. I even lived really close to the residential house, but I never once thought about going there because in my mind there was no help for me. In spite of learning about the residential pro- grams offered by some PHOs, few of these women attempted to enroll because they felt they were not yet ready to exit. Another way the women learned of PHOs was through social workers affi liated with other institutions, such as jails or hospitals. Tiffany stated it was her hospital social worker who provided the details about Safe Place, a PHO she had never heard of previously: I was in the hospital for eight days and the social worker, Mr. Green, came and spoke about this program. He said it was peaceful and there were counselors there an all that . . . that was about two and a half years ago, and that’s how long it took me before I actually ended up here. But it was at that point that the seed was planted. Tiffany’s expression was common, as many women carried knowledge of PHOs around with them as a “seed planted” to be used at a later time. Some women found out about PHOs through their family members or friends. Monique attributed learning about the pro- gram to her sister and a fellow prostitute, both of whom had enrolled years before: I had seen the evidence of the program through my sister, who graduated from the program a few years back. And another lady in my neigh- borhood was also a prostitute and really bad off. She went to the program too and they both did well. They’re now out of the life for good. A friend in jail told Mary about Phoenix for the fi rst time. She recalled: I heard about it at least a year and a half ago from a friend while I was in jail. She went to that program before, but I guess she didn’t do what she needed to stay out because she was back on the streets and in jail. I always kept that in mind. For a few women, like Mary, it was the physi- cal restrictions of incarceration that kept them from enrolling in the program until a later date. Women also acquired information about PHOs from advertisements or articles placed WEIGHING THE CONSEQUENCES OF A DEVIANT CAREER | 333 in local newspapers. Around the same time she learned of the program from her friend, Mary also saw a newspaper article about it that featured the history of the program, the services they offered, and contact informa- tion. Similarly, another client came across an ad in a local paper that “stuck in her mind.” She recited the title of the ad that resonated with her: “Do you want to get out of the life of prostitution?” These women discussed a variety of sources from which they learned of PHOs, informa- tion which eventually infl uenced their deci- sion to leave the streets. Awareness of PHOs did not typically engender a quick transition out of the trade, but instead it was stored away and became a “seed” planted that was acted upon at a later time. The remaining women in this study possessed short-term knowledge of PHOs, where they learned about them at the onset of their enrollment process. Whether it was a short or long period of time, learning about PHOs and consider- ing them a viable option to exit shaped wom- en’s future trajectories and decisions to leave the streets. In spite of the necessary inter- nal conditions (reasons and turning points) and awareness of PHOs, third-party bridges played a signifi cant part in initial exits from prostitution. Third-Party Bridges The fi nal external factor tied to exiting is based on a specifi c type of social network, namely third-party bridges or individuals who connect prostitutes to PHOs. In the social network literature, this third-party bridge is referred to as a “broker,” an actor who mediates exchanges between two other actors not directly linked (Fernandez and Gould 1994). When applied to the case of prostitutes, Månsson and Hedin (1999) highlight how social networks shape the pathways out of prostitution, as individu- als extend emotional and practical support to these women during the transition. But social networks do more than that. In fact, I fi nd women not only learn about programs through their social networks, but they rely on these “bridges” to facilitate their entrance into them. Those who act as bridges have either personal or professional motivations and, in some cases, the power to grant individu- als access to PHOs. Networks research distinguishes between two types of brokers— representatives and gatekeepers—where the fi rst groups’ interests are aligned with the supplier (e.g., PHOs) and the latter groups’ interests are aligned with the customer (e.g., the prostitutes) (Fernandez and Gould 1994). I apply these concepts in order to dif- ferentiate the types of bridges prevalent here. The fi rst type was comprised of individuals who acted as professional bridges or those who had aligned interests with PHOs, as they were largely motivated to connect prostitutes to programs based on their occupational goals and duties. The other type included individuals who became personal bridges and were primarily concerned with the desires of the prostitutes rather than the organizations. To date, extant research on how women leave prostitution does not explore the ways in which bridge parties serve to connect individ- uals to organizations that facilitate their exit. The most common professional bridge that linked women with PHOs were individu- als affi liated with the criminal justice system, such as public defense attorneys, parole offi - cers, and the police. In fact, a little more than half of the clients (twenty of thirty-six) iden- tifi ed a person who worked in one of these occupations as their bridge. These bridges were especially salient for those prostitutes entangled within the criminal justice system, as they informed women about the program and, based upon their power, advocated for this sentence in lieu of imprisonment. Ulti- mately, the fi nal decision is often made by a judge, but attorneys and parole offi cers cer- tainly infl uence these outcomes. Tisha was a client who fi rst heard about Phoenix through a chaplain while in jail and shortly thereafter | SHARON S. OSELIN334 asked her parole offi cer to plead with the judge for placement there. As a bridge party, who had signifi cant power over her sentenc- ing, it was up to her parole offi cer’s discre- tion whether she would be able to enter the PHO. Tisha recalled the sequence of events: I heard about the Phoenix the third time I went to jail through a chaplain who told me there are programs for prostitutes. I’ve never heard of one before that. At that point in time when she came to me I had no hope. Because I did a crime—prostitution—I was on parole. I was looking at 18 months at least in jail. I didn’t know if I was going to get into the program, not because they wouldn’t accept me but because my parole offi cer wouldn’t recom- mend it. . . . I had to go through her fi rst. So I called my parole offi cer and I told her about the program. . . . I didn’t know if she would recommend it for me or not. Finally, she did and I was able to enter. Loretta also stated she learned of a nearby PHO when her defense lawyer suggested she try to get in. He set up a meeting between her and the director of the PHO to see if she would qualify and thereafter advocated for Loretta’s placement in this program rather than a lengthy prison term. She explained: When the public defender said, “I know a long-term program, I’m going to give the director a call and she’s going to come up here to interview you and see if you are eligible,” I said okay because I was ready to quit, I was tired, and I was looking at three years in the penitentiary. Luckily, I got in and I am now a proud program graduate. Janise, who knew of a local PHO for years, explained she fi nally enrolled in it because her lawyer, upon her request, pleaded for her to be placed there rather than serve prison time. She was quick to emphasize that she wanted to enter the program because she knew it was a “life threatening situation” for her, where she would likely die if she contin- ued working on the streets. All three of these women depended on a professional bridge party to recommend and secure their place- ment at a PHO. In rare instances, the police served as the bridge between street prostitutes and PHOs. Although the police had no legal authority to force a woman to enter a PHO, in circum- stances where a woman was willing to accept their suggestion, they served as the effec- tive bridge. Amy, whose last pregnancy and infant son became her turning point, was one of these individuals. She recalled: The cops picked me up and they brought me here, and that was the fi rst time I heard about this program. I thought the program wouldn’t take me, but they did because the cops knew the director. I’ve been here ever since. In Amy’s case, the police offi cer’s relation- ships with the program director eased this transition. Social workers also functioned as bridges to PHOs, and they were especially instru- mental for the women who experienced traumatic events and landed in the hospital. Approximately 22 percent (eight of thirty- six) of the women claimed social workers facilitated their admission into a PHO. For example, Evette emphasized the important role her social worker played in getting her into New Horizons after she wound up in a psychiatric hospital: It was a social worker from the hospital who got me to go to the program. She asked me, “Is this the way you really want to die?” I think in the midst of that encounter I got a moment of clarity and it donned on me it was not. . . . So it was that little conversation with that social worker that fi nally got me here. She set it up so when I was released I came straight here. Tiffany shared a similar story, where she was in a psychiatric hospital after she attempted suicide, and a social worker recommended Safe Place, which she had heard of years before. After receiving the suggestion and WEIGHING THE CONSEQUENCES OF A DEVIANT CAREER | 335 experiencing a turning point, she fi nally felt ready to change and allowed the social worker to orchestrate her placement into the program. Lawyers, parole offi cers, police, and social workers all acted as professional bridges because they shared a mutual interest with the PHOs, which was to get the women out of prostitution and discourage further involvement with the criminal justice system. Acting as brokers between prostitutes and PHOs was benefi cial for the workers profes- sionally, as these placements can ultimately help accomplish occupational goals. As one police captain explained: The police became an advocate for this pro- gram, not only by distributing information to the prostitutes who we were directly involved in the criminal justice system, but also to other agencies, such as courts. You know, if we could keep her from going on the street again by connect[ing] her to this program, we’ve not only helped her, but we’ve accomplished our goal for the community as well. I think it worked as a real good win/win situation for both of us. The professional bridges have formalized relationships with their clients, as the very nature of their jobs promotes and encour- ages citizens to adhere to laws, remain out of crime, and be self-supporting. Thus, it is in their best interests to get women to leave the streets with the hope that many will per- manently implement these lifestyle changes. Family and friends also became bridges between prostitutes and PHOs, and approxi- mately 14 percent (fi ve of thirty-six) of these women mentioned them. These individuals served as personal bridges whose interests primarily aligned with the prostitutes due to their intimate interpersonal relationships. Although Monique fi rst learned of the PHO a few years back, she only decided to actively pursue entering after she experienced a turn- ing point in jail. Upon prioritizing an exit from the trade, she turned to her sister, who had graduated from the PHO a few years prior, for help: I went to call my sister and asked her if they will help me. I asked her, “Will they have a spot for me?” She told me more about them, provided their number, and put in a word for me with the director. I called them and they said as soon as you get released you can come. I came right here from jail after my sentence was done because I knew I couldn’t do it alone. Likewise, Chanelle emphasized how her friend became a crucial link to Phoenix, by not only providing information about the pro- gram and describing the qualifi cations to be accepted but by also giving her the contact information. She explained: Apparently, the director of the program would go to the prison and give presentations about the program, what you had to do to qualify, and so on. So a friend I had in jail saw that, kept that information, and would pass it on to other women in jail who wanted another chance at life but were serious about it. After we became friends, she told me about the program and gave me the phone number. I called them and told them I heard about it through a woman who met the director in jail, said I sincerely wanted to quit prostitution, and asked for an interview. Once my sentence was up I came right here. The personal bridges did not have profes- sional motivations to connect prostitutes to PHOs, but rather their intimate relationships and desire to help these women achieve their goals fueled their actions. Only three women in this sample claimed to have no bridge person facilitate their entrance into a PHO. These women were rare in that they were extremely motivated to seek help from a PHO and, upon learning of their existence, took all the necessary steps to secure a spot in the program. For instance, after learning about Phoenix, Mary took the initiative to enter by persistently calling and checking back with staff members until she was accepted. She described this process: | SHARON S. OSELIN336 And I called and they told me that they didn’t have any beds available. And two months later, she was like, “We don’t have any avail- able now but call me back in a week.” And I called her back and I got one. At that time I had been out of jail since August of last year and I waited all that time, hoping to go there. Why? I was ready to change my life. Mary was unique in that she did not rely on any bridges to help her gain access to the program but put in the footwork herself. An overwhelming majority of the pros- titutes in this sample relied on bridges to secure their enrollment in a PHO. Research suggests that social networks are important to the exiting process overall (Ebaugh 1988) and among prostitutes who leave the trade (Månsson and Hedin 1999). However, these studies focus on the emotional or practical support third parties provide after the exit. I contend bridges perform the integral func- tion of informing women of PHOs and help- ing to place them in these programs prior to their exits. Prostitute Perceptions of PHOs Exiting with the help of PHOs is certainly not the only pathway out of street prostitu- tion. However, given the diffi culties associ- ated with the trade, many of the women in this study claimed they would not have been able to leave if it were not for the resources and support of a PHO. Debbie stated she had thought about leaving prostitution before, but it never happened until she fi nally entered a program: Yes, I couldn’t do it alone. I tried before but it didn’t work. I started to get back on drugs. Or I’d fi nd myself in a predicament that I couldn’t handle and I needed money. Or I would be staying someplace and they would tell me that I had to get out. Where was I going to go? And the only thing I knew was to go and get money from men [through sex] and once I started doing that I started using drugs too. The program offered me a different way out. I knew they helped you get an education, a job, and maintain sobriety. Loretta also perceived Phoenix could teach her how to live a life outside of prostitu- tion: “So I knew it was just time to stop and I didn’t know how and I felt that this place was defi nitely going to show me how. They provided me with so many tools I didn’t have or couldn’t get on my own. They offered me an education so I could get a job and support myself.” Evette stated that when she was ready to leave she did not know how to accomplish that goal alone and turned to New Horizons for help: I didn’t know what I wanted at the time, but I did know that I didn’t want anymore of what I had been getting. I knew something about the program from the street outreach and I knew they had a structured program set up that could really help me. The structure of the program was key to teaching me some sort of responsibility so I could take care of myself without relying on prostitution. Similarly, Monique explained she was unsure how to exit prostitution because her life was such a mess. She realized that a PHO could facilitate this transition because she had seen its success through previous clients: I thought about leaving a million times. I just didn’t know how. When my life was a total mess I knew that for me to get some type of self-worth I had to come here. Because I saw what the program did for my sister and another lady I knew, and the changes they went through, I felt it had to be doing something right. I decided to commit to this program. In short, many of these women perceived they could not surmount the barriers to exiting prostitution on their own. Therefore, they felt utilizing the services and resources of a PHO would help make their transition easier, WEIGHING THE CONSEQUENCES OF A DEVIANT CAREER | 337 pro vide skills and structure, and ultimately improve their chances of success. CONCLUSION Most Americans view prostitutes as crimi- nals and deviants, which positions them in a low-status role and bestows unto them high levels of stigma for working in the trade. Indeed, such socio-legal circumstances likely exacerbate the diffi culties of working in prostitution (Sanders 2007) vis-à-vis other contexts (Månsson and Hedin 1999). Prior studies also fi nd those who occupy deviant roles experience unique circumstances (label- ing, stigma, and other hardships), which make exiting more challenging (Brown 1991; Sanders 2007). This reading contributes to the research on role exiting and prostitution by illuminating the pertinent factors that shape initial exits out of street prostitution, a particularly deviant role. Extant research examines how individuals leave prostitution and concludes it is diffi cult due to structural and economic conditions that act as barriers and keep them immersed within the trade (Jeffrey and MacDonald 2006; Miller 1986; Rosen and Venkatesh 2008). Following this line of reasoning, if their socioeconomic status circumstances changed, then they may be less inclined to continue to work as prostitutes. Conversely, other studies associate internal states (and changes) with exiting prostitution (Cusick and Hickman 2005; Dalla 2006; Månsson and Hedin 1999; Sanders 2007). Such expla- nations focus primarily on reasons (or moti- vations) for leaving and turning points of change that result in an exit from sex work (Dalla 2006; Sanders 2007). Both of these lines of inquiry and their conclusions shed light on why women stay in prostitution and why they leave. Yet neither puts forth an analysis of exiting that consid- ers a multitude of factors that encompass both internal and external circumstances. I fi nd that while internal factors are impor- tant because they imply cognitive shifts and a willingness to leave, it is also the knowledge of available “helping” programs and third- party bridges that shape exits. My fi ndings do not discount these previous theories, but they enrich them by emphasizing it is the combination of internal and external factors that lead prostitutes to exit via PHOs. PHOs indeed provide one alternative to being “trapped” in prostitution as a result of macroforces. For these prostitutes, their structural and economic circumstances did not change prior to leaving nor were their internal alterations enough to incite exits. Instead, it was the culmination of these four factors that pulled prostitutes out of the trade, coupled with the perception that PHOs could provide them tools (skills, structure, opportunities, and support) that would ultimately ease their transition. The role of organizations (PHOs), and what they represented, was crucial to this pro- cess of initial exits, as the women in this sample felt their affi liation with a PHO offered future possibilities and opportuni- ties they otherwise would not have had. In other words, most women anticipated their future lifestyles (including socioeconomic status) would change due to their associa- tion with PHOs. NOTES 1. Some researchers view the term prostitute as a pejo- rative label and consequently advocate for the use of sex worker , a term that emphasizes their labor (see Barton 2001; Leigh 1997). After some consid- eration, I decided to use both terms because I feel the type of sex work one does can result in vastly different experiences. So to solely use the umbrella term sex worker obfuscates the particular experi- ences of street prostitutes that appear to be unique from the experiences of other types of sex workers (e.g., escorts, strippers, phone sex workers, etc.). In using the term prostitute I do not intend to endorse the ideology that the prostitutes are only victims (or criminals) or to de-emphasize the labor involved in their jobs. Instead, I use it to provide clarity for the reader. I want to allow the women’s own stories | SHARON S. OSELIN338 to represent them and the circumstances that are salient in their lives. 2. I use this as an overarching term, labeling all organi- zations that specially provide services for women in prostitution “prostitution-helping organizations.” 3. It is likely there are more than thirty-three of these orga- nizations within the United States, but due to their lack of visibility, it is often diffi cult to locate them. 4. 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Connections Deviant Career and Life-Course Criminology Using Street Prostitution Emily Bonistall and Kevin Ralston INTRODUCTION In a September 2012 article from The Daytona Beach News-Journal titled “An Ex- Prostitute’s Story: ‘I’ve Done It All for Money,’ ” “Betty” talks about her involvement in prostitution and how she decided it was time to leave “the life.” Her story, like many women prostitutes, is complicated. Betty grew up “a chronic runaway who wanted to bolt from the horrible existence she endured in her childhood home in Minneapolis—she said she was raped regularly by her father from the age of 9 until she was 12—Betty went from one foster home and juvenile detention center to the next” (Longa 2012). Betty entered the world of prostitution because she had few other options. “When I was 14 they (my family) stopped looking for me,” Betty said. “I started sleeping outside. One day I was sitting on a bus bench and I met a guy . . . He took me to a house that had other women in it . . . They taught me how to become a prostitute. I became part of their stable.” This teaching “included bringing men into the house so Betty could have sex. Once she had the experience, Betty said she was put out to work on the streets of Minneapolis” (Longa 2012). Betty was able to leave the situation that pushed her into prostitution, but that did not mean her life turned around. Her prostitution led to a crack addiction. “You have to be high (to be a prostitute) . . . You don’t want to feel what they’re (the johns) doing to you . . . Crack was my medication . . . I had to get high in order to have sex with a stranger” (Longa 2012). Because she was still a teenager on the streets and had no other way to support herself, Betty continued her involvement in prostitution and drugs. After 34 years of being involved in prostitution, Betty decided she was ready to end her involvement. However, it was not an easy road. “There are no halfway houses or rehabilita- tion centers that specialize in helping prostitutes shatter the mindset they operate under— selling their bodies to make a quick buck.” Through help from the Daytona Beach Police Department, Betty was able to leave her previous life behind and land a job. “She gets praised at her new job because her work ethic is strong . . . she earns a regular check, she pays her rent and cares for her pets, things most people might take for granted” (Longa 2012). Betty is what we call a street-level prostitute. There are multiple types of prostitution, including escort services, street walkers, and brothels or house prostitutes to name a few. In this reading, we will discuss street prostitution; that is, the same type that Betty engaged in. Street-level prostitution is considered both deviant (breaks social norms) and criminal (breaks a law) in many societies. CONNECTIONS | 341 One way to think about Betty’s life story is through labeling theory and the concept of a deviant career. This approach maintains that all social groups have formal and informal rules regarding what behaviors are acceptable. When those rules are broken (intentionally, unin- tentionally, or even unknowingly), the rule breaker becomes an outsider to the group and their behavior is labeled deviant. Deviance is taken a step further when formal rules, such as laws, are broken. This deems someone not only deviant but also criminal. Labeling theorists argue that deviance is not an inherent quality that exists over time and across cultures. It is, instead, more a result of how people react to that behavior. While many scholars focus on deviant behavior during specifi c stages of life, such as adolescence, others choose to study deviant behavior over the course of a person’s life. This reading begins with an overview of deviant careers , a classic term in the sociology of deviance, and then shifts to a newer way that criminologists have attempted to study criminal behavior over time: life-course criminology. Following this, we explain how the two approaches might view the same nonconventional behavior—that is, prostitution—and people like Betty. Our comparison will show that despite their similarities, the deviant career and life-course criminology perspectives each provide a unique way of understanding prosti- tution that is valuable for research, policy, and interventions in society today. DEVIANT CAREERS One of the most important scholars in the fi eld of deviance is Howard Becker, whose work is included in this section. In his book Outsiders (1963), he defi nes the concept of the deviant career and explains that as deviant behaviors accumulate, the individual becomes enmeshed in deviance as a way of life, which ultimately leads to a deviant identity. Eventually, the devi- ant individual fi nds himself or herself as an outcast of society. This stable pattern of deviant behavior is what he calls the “deviant career,” which is infl uenced by social interactionist concepts, such as labeling, stigma, and self-identity. Labeling theorists argue that deviance is not an inherent quality within a behavior or a person; instead, it is the product of a process that involves responses to that behavior. Social groups in power have the ability to create rules that must apply to the rest of society, and when the rules are broken, it constitutes deviance. The deviance, then, is not the act that is commit- ted but instead is the consequence of the interaction between the person who commits the act and those who respond to it (Becker 1963). Looking back at Betty and her experience with prostitution, it is not the act of prostitution that makes Betty deviant but instead how society views prostitution and the stigmatization of those who engage in the activity (Longa 2012). Becker (1963) maintained that deviance changed throughout the life-course. The idea of the deviant career is that there is an orderly sequence of deviance which follows identifi able steps. There are steps involved in becoming deviant, or entering into deviance, and there is the possibility of exit. Becker (1963) explains that one of the most crucial steps of a deviant career is the experience of being caught and labeled as deviant. Labeling theorists argue that being treated in accordance with a deviant label will shape an individual into becoming the person he or she has been labeled to be. The label is applied when an individual commits (or is caught for) the fi rst act of deviance, which is also called primary deviance. Behaviors that occur as a result of the deviant label are called secondary deviance. In essence, these behav- iors would not have occurred had the individual not experienced the stigma of the label. | EMILY BONISTALL AND KEVIN RALSTON342 For example, Betty explained that she had to use crack in order to engage in prostitu- tion, so a woman may engage in prostitution and turn to drugs to cope with the experience. Here, prostitution is the primary deviance and drug use is secondary deviance. However, if a woman who is using drugs turns to prostitution to make extra money to support her habit, then drug use is the primary deviance and prostitution is the secondary deviance. Under- standing that primary deviance can lead to secondary deviance shows how deviant behaviors accumulate and further enmesh the prostitutes into a deviant way of life. Since deviance is not an objective fact, it may be that behavior deemed normal in one situ- ation will be rendered deviant in another. If society, either formally through offi cial agents of the state (like the police) or informally through peers and colleagues, reacts negatively to the primary deviant or criminal behavior, then prostitutes like Betty will be stigmatized. Stigma is the negative treatment of the individual once they have become labeled as deviant. The stigma related to prostitution has many potential consequences, such as the possibility of losing relationships and social status, and potential imprisonment (Koken 2012). Thus, this stigma is a predominant concern for prostitutes. It is no wonder that Koken (2012) found the prostitutes in her sample managed stigma by remaining “closeted” as sex workers. They actively hid their involvement in prostitution in order to “protect themselves from the loss of status that can accompany being identifi ed as a member of a stigmatized group” (Koken 2012: 209). Women involved in prostitution who abuse drugs, such as cocaine or heroin, experience a sort of double stigma (Sallman 2010). This loss of status can lead to discrimina- tion that denies prostitutes the opportunity to live conventional lives, pushing them to the outskirts of society (Becker 1963). As outsiders, many prostitutes fi nd it very diffi cult to end their deviant behavior. The deviant career framework places much infl uence on the offender’s self-image and self-identity. Being treated in accordance with a deviant label may shape women like Betty into becoming nothing more than the prostitute she is labeled to be. However, Becker (1963) acknowledges that not every individual who is labeled as deviant after committing one devi- ant act will be pushed to the outskirts of society, continue to commit deviant acts, and have a deviant career. The attempt at a deviant career exit is about eliminating stigma and repairing one’s dam- aged identity. For those who are unable to leave prostitution and chose to maintain a devi- ant lifestyle, Becker (1963) argues that the fi nal step in becoming a career deviant is getting involved with a group of similar people. This involvement teaches people like Betty how to rationalize their deviant behavior and how to most easily live a deviant lifestyle. It is this fi nal step that fully transforms Betty and other prostitutes into identifying themselves as deviants. Learning to manage the stigma of a deviant identity, shifting the subcultural attachment, and undergoing the identity transformation are the key aspects of the deviant career. As outlined above, the concept of the deviant career enables us to think about deviant behavior over the course of Betty’s or other prostitutes and deviants’ lives. The focus does not lie on the specifi c deviant behaviors but instead on the societal reaction to those behaviors and the way those reactions infl uence the individual’s self-identity as a deviant. We can see this approach in Sallmann’s (2010) article on women’s experiences with stigma related to prostitution and substance use. First, the women she studied talked about being labeled as “hookers” and “whores,” which depersonalized and objectifi ed them. This objectifi cation set them up to endure a life of violence by pimps and johns, and due to the stigma they received as a prostitute, they were denied the support and legal response they deserved. Sallmann CONNECTIONS | 343 found “their experiences of violence were minimized, dismissed, and/or normalized by both informal and institutional support systems” (2010: 152). As we learned above, once individuals are labeled and stigmatized as deviants, they then experience discrimination and are often pushed to the outskirts of society. Sallmann (2010) explains that in addition to violence, the women in her study were also discriminated against by being (1) denied legal protection or representation, (2) blamed for their experiences of sexual violence, and (3) discriminated against by various social institutions. Recall Becker’s (1963) point that stigma and labeling would alter the deviant individual’s self-identity. Sall- mann (2010) found the immense amount of stigma the women endured permanently altered their self-perceptions and “although the majority of participants were no longer using sub- stances or exchanging sex, some still defi ned themselves by their prior activities” (Sallmann 2010: 153). Other deviant career concepts that can be illuminated using the example of prostitution include primary and secondary deviance. Some scholars fi nd that the primary deviance is prostitution, and that leads to other forms of secondary deviance such as drug use (James 1976). Others fi nd that the primary deviance is drug use, and that leads to the secondary deviance of prostitution (Goldstein 1979). But as we have clearly indicated, regardless of the reason a woman enters prostitution, the behavior is deviant, labeled as such, and stigmatized. Just as Becker (1963) explained that stigma forces deviants to be “outsiders” of society, Oselin (2010: 528) explains that “in the United States, street prostitutes are typically thought of as deviants and criminals who therefore occupy a low-status position.” Their “visibility, involvement with the criminal justice system, and because they work in a trade that violates culturally prevalent mores and norms” brings an immense amount of stigma and labeling onto women prostitutes (Oselin 2010: 530). As you have read, since many prostitutes also engage in other forms of secondary devi- ance, such as drug use, they encounter additional stigma. Due to this low-status position and its associated stigma, there is a lack of resources available to help them leave the trade even when they desire to do so. Many scholars discuss the diffi culty of exiting deviant roles (Snow and Anderson 1993), and leaving the deviant career of prostitution is no less diffi cult. Oselin’s (2010) study gives many internal and external factors that are necessary for success- ful exit from prostitution. The many deviant career concepts introduced thus far in this chapter have been illuminated using the example of prostitution behavior, such as deviance, labeling, stigma, self-identity, and career exit. The following section outlines the way the fi eld of criminology studies crimi- nal behavior over the course of an individual’s life. As you read it, challenge yourself to iden- tify the differences between the two approaches to studying behavior over time. LIFE-COURSE PERSPECTIVE IN CRIMINOLOGY Until recently, criminology has ignored examining crime over the life-course and has instead focused on specifi c points in time. Moreover, the fi eld has been especially concerned with what causes individuals to either commit or not commit crime at certain ages. However, recent studies have attempted to remedy this limited focus by implementing a life-course framework that provides a more complete picture of criminal behavior. This shift has enabled criminologists to illuminate how earlier life events (such as childhood victimization, runaway | EMILY BONISTALL AND KEVIN RALSTON344 behavior, or drug and alcohol use) infl uence a woman’s decision to engage and persist in prostitution behavior. The life-course perspective focuses on the relationship between age and crime by study- ing longitudinally “childhood antisocial behavior, adolescent delinquency, and adult crime” (Sampson and Laub 1992: 63). The life-course perspective incorporates these different areas of research into one, along with a focus on how age and crime are related to each other. One thing that makes the life-course perspective different from other criminological theories is that instead of being a theory, it is a perspective. This means that instead of having a specifi c method or way of thinking about crime attached, the life-course model permits any theory to be used. Sampson and Laub (1992), whose work is included in this book, were early pioneers of the life-course perspective. Their reading in this section, emphasizes the need for criminology to incorporate not only specifi c aspects of crime, including why someone begins engaging in crime and what happens after they become an adult, but also how those factors are con- nected together. The life-course approach “brings the formative period of childhood back into the picture yet recognizes that individuals can change through interaction with key social institutions as they age” (Sampson and Laub 1992: 81). The life-course perspective examines the onset of criminal behavior, the paths taken after the onset of criminal behavior (called trajectories), factors that lead to different trajecto- ries, and what leads to ending criminal behavior (called desistance). Through these different aspects (which are discussed in more detail below), criminologists are now able to examine criminal behavior over a longer period of time compared to criminological theories of the past, which focused on specifi c points in time. Onset refers to the fi rst criminal act in which an individual engages. Traditional models illustrating the connection between age and crimi- nal behavior stress that this behavior occurs at an early age (Moffi tt 1993). The type of onset behavior is infl uenced by a number of factors, including peers, social bonds, and internal ideas about crime. Once an individual commits a criminal act, some of the same factors that determine onset will also determine what type of path the individual will take. Other factors, including whether they are caught or not, are also infl uential. For Betty, her onset was prosti- tution and because of her social setting, she continued to engage in prostitution and perform other deviant acts, such as drug use (Longa 2012). Once an onset of criminal behavior happens, individuals often follow a pathway of criminal behavior through their life. There are multiple pathways an individual can fol- low. Research shows that many people follow a trajectory that begins at a young age, with increased criminal behavior during their teen and early adult years before reducing their criminal behavior and ultimately terminating it completely (Moffi tt 1993). Betty’s experience follows this trajectory, where she began prostitution and drug use at age 14 and continued this criminal behavior until she was an adult (Longa 2012). Since individual’s trajectories are infl uenced by their social context and life events, not everyone will follow the same trajectory as Betty. The events that occur during the prostitute’s lifetime that help determine the type and fre- quency of criminal behavior are called transitions and turning points. Transitions in criminal behavior typically occur during a period of time during an individual’s life characterized by increasing criminal behavior, which for most people occurs during adolescence and into early adulthood. While there are ebbs and fl ows during this part of a trajectory, criminal behavior continues to increase overall. Life events, or transitions, can either lead individuals further into criminal behavior, such as getting involved in prostitution, or can lead them away from CONNECTIONS | 345 criminal behavior, such as having a child or becoming gainfully employed. When an event leads to a reduction in criminal behavior as a whole over the remainder of an individual’s life, a turning point has been achieved; thus a turning point is when a transition changes the individual’s pathway of criminal behavior. When the turning point leads to the total reduction of criminal behavior, desistance from crime has occurred. For most people, this occurs in their early to mid-twenties after a turning point during late adolescence/early adulthood (Moffi tt 1993). However, depending on when the turning point occurs for an individual, desistance from criminal behavior varies. One such example is reentry, or the reentering into society after being imprisoned. During this period of time, an individual reintegrates into society and must end their criminal behaviors in order to lead a conventional life. However, this transition is not always successful and sometimes individuals recidivate or continue to commit criminal behavior. Therefore it is worth noting that just because a turning point has occurred and criminal behavior has less- ened, it is not a guarantee that criminal behavior will not occur again. While the degree of continued criminal behavior varies from individual to individual, the period of time after a turning point has occurred is characterized by reduced criminal behavior and eventual desis- tance from all criminal behavior. Betty is a great example of transitions, turning points, and desistance. As you may recall, she entered prostitution because she was homeless. Once she was involved in prostitution, she began using crack so she could continue engaging in prostitution. The use of crack and her continued engagement in prostitution is a transition that led to more behavior labeled as criminal. Betty’s turning point occurred when she decided she was ready to leave “the life.” During her turning point, she required support from others and because of this support, her turning point led to a desistance in her involvement with prostitution (Longa 2012). As we have explained, both the deviant career and life-course criminology study behavior over the course of an individual’s life. At this point, you should begin seeing the similarities and differences in the way these two approaches accomplish the same goal. As with all crimi- nal behavior, the life-course approach can be applied to prostitution. Some women’s onset to prostitution occurs as a way to fund their drug habits (Goldstein 1979; Potterat et al. 1998), such as Erickson and colleagues’ (2000) study, which found that the women in their study engaged in prostitution behavior in order to get money or crack for their drug addictions. Other scholars have found that onset occurs from a history of sexual abuse (Silbert and Pines 1982; Dalla et al. 2003) or from running away from home (Nadon et al. 1998). While the period of time after the onset of the behavior typically involves occasional and situated pros- titution, many women become trapped by basic needs or because of their label as prostitutes from a criminal record. These events create transitions that lead to engaging in more prosti- tution. At some point, many prostitutes decide to alter their trajectory due to various turning points including eye-opening, traumatic, and positive life events, such as being incarcerated, injured, or becoming pregnant (Mansson and Hedin 1999). Nixon and colleagues (2002) explain that most street prostitutes attempt to leave “the life” after signifi cant or traumatic events, such as getting pregnant, having a child, or being arrested. One of their respondents said, “I never want to be in that little jail cell. I never want to be handcuffed again; it was a very intimidating process for me . . . But that lock-up experience was what did it for me. I was sort of scared straight” (Nixon et al. 2002: 1035). Regardless of the specifi c turning point event, the turning point may lead to a change in behavior resulting in desistance. Oselin (2010) discusses the diffi culty women experience in leaving the trade, and many prostitutes indicate the need for social support, both from their | EMILY BONISTALL AND KEVIN RALSTON346 family networks and support services. Some of the services that lead to success for prosti- tutes who want to leave the trade include housing, transportation, employment, education, and prostitution-helping organizations, like those discussed in the Oselin reading, especially when reentry from incarceration is their turning point. Even still, prostitutes need certain health and support services in order to ensure their turning point and desistance from prosti- tution leads to the end of their criminal trajectory and not simply a transition back into more prostitution behavior. Instead of simply providing a snapshot of a particular point of crimi- nal behavior, the life-course perspective allows for a more complete picture of what women might experience during their entire trajectory in prostitution and other criminal behavior. CONTRASTING THE DEVIANT CAREER AND LIFE-COURSE CRIMINOLOGY The above text indicates that the deviant career and life-course criminology approaches to studying prostitution use different terms but share similar ideas. For example, when dis- cussing the fi rst deviant/criminal act, the deviant career calls it “primary deviance,” and life-course calls it “onset.” When discussing deviance/crime over time, the deviant career calls it the “career,” and life-course calls it “trajectory.” A fi nal similarity is how cessation of deviance/crime is referred to by the deviant career as “role exit” and by life-course as “desistance.” Despite these similarities in conceptualizing the various stages of deviant and criminal behavior, like prostitution, there are at least four major differences between the two approaches that demand our attention: reason for change, agency or the ability to act on one’s own, successful exit, and methodology. REASON FOR CHANGE Both the deviant career and life-course criminology approaches look at how an individu- al’s nonconventional behavior changes over the course of his or her life, but they differ in explaining the causes of it. The deviant career theorizes that an individual’s deviance contin- ues or ceases because of a shift in his or her identity. It is the process of being forced to the outskirts of society, becoming enmeshed in a deviant subculture, and learning to live with the stigma associated with their deviant behavior that shifts the individual’s self-identity to one of a deviant. Remember how the women in Sallmann’s (2010) study internalized the prostitution-related stigma so much so that it caused a permanent shift in self-perception. Similarly, for the individual to successfully exit his or her deviant career, he or she must reject the deviant self-identity and attempt to live without stigma. In either situation, the focus is on the process and the importance of a shifted identity. Thus, the focus of change for the deviant career approach is Betty’s and other prostitutes’ self-identities. Life-course criminology focuses on the outside factors that infl uence the individual’s tra- jectory, as Nixon and colleagues (2002) described with the turning points leading women to exit street prostitution. The various turning points an individual encounters will change the path they are on, either leading them further into a life of crime or toward desistance from it. Therefore in life-course criminology, the emphasis is not on process or identity but instead on life events and outside factors. This is a more externally based focus than the deviant career paradigm, and it would purport that getting prostitutes like Betty to cease deviant behavior takes involvement by community agencies as well as various practitioners, family, and friends. CONNECTIONS | 347 AGENCY A second and related difference between the two approaches is the level of agency afforded the individual. Agency (an individual’s ability to act freely and make their own choices), is often discussed in relation to how the social world infl uences the choices and opportunities an individual has. Sociologists and criminologists debate how much free will, or agency, an individual has due to the constraints of society. The deviant career approach gives individu- als more agency because they must learn to accept or reject their deviant label, as they did in Sallmann’s (2010) study. They must also learn to live with the stigma, adapt and change their lifestyle, and eventually alter their self-identity. Since life-course criminology exerts that external events, or turning points, change the criminal trajectory, there is much less agency given to the individual. Self-determination still plays a role; however, it is more reactive. Recall the woman in Nixon and colleagues’ (2002) article who was “scared straight” from her arrest. Thus, instead of the individual taking an active role as he or she does when using a deviant career framework, the life-course criminological approach places more infl uence on external actors and events than on the individual’s agency. SUCCESSFUL EXIT Both the deviant career and life-course criminology approaches address returning to conven- tional behavior: in the deviant career it is career exit and in life-course criminology it is desis- tance. The major difference is in how each conceptualizes and measures successful return to conventional norms. With deviant careers, an individual has successfully exited a devi- ant role when they are able to manage their stigma and spoiled identity. Sallmann’s (2010) research found that many of the women were afraid that their spoiled identity of their past would be called to attention so even women who were no longer engaging in prostitution behaviors still had to manage their prostitution-related stigma. In life-course criminology, an individual has successfully desisted when he or she does not recidivate criminal behavior. Hence, the difference is in how each approach defi nes success: identity for the deviant career versus behavior for life-course criminology. METHODOLOGY The golden rule of research methods is to let the research question determine how to study the phenomenon in question. As such, the three aforementioned differences between the devi- ant career and life-course criminology favor unique methodologies. The deviant career lends itself to qualitative methods due to its focus on process and concepts such as identity. Studies that utilize a deviant career approach, such as Sallmann’s (2010), utilize qualitative methods in order to uncover the intricacies of process, change, identity, and the respondent’s feelings. Sallmann’s methods included interviews where she asked the respondents to expand on their ideas or thoughts by prompting them with phrases such as, ‘‘Tell me more about that,’’ ‘‘Can you give me an example?’’ or ‘‘What was that like for you?’’ (2010: 149). The interview data was then analyzed by identifying themes that emerged from the women’s narratives. Life-course criminology lends itself to quantitative methods because of its focus on mea- surable events and behaviors. This, however, does not mean that qualitative methods are | EMILY BONISTALL AND KEVIN RALSTON348 not ever used. On the contrary, Nixon and colleagues’ (2002) and other studies that utilize a life-course perspective include interviews in their analysis. The major difference often lies within analysis, such as in Maxwell and Maxwell’s (2000) article on the criminal careers of prostitutes. Whereas Sallmann used interview data to identify themes, Maxwell and Maxwell transformed their interview data into scales and scores which were analyzed statistically. CONCLUSION Using the example of the study of prostitution, the similarities between the deviant career and life-course criminology are clear. Generally, both approaches aim to study nonconven- tional behavior over the course of an individual’s life. More specifi cally, there are similari- ties between the various concepts: primary deviance and onset, deviant career and criminal trajectory, role exit and desistance. This begs the question, when there are so many similari- ties between the two, why has life-course criminology continued to thrive while the deviant career concept has not? It is because despite these similarities, each approach provides a unique way of understanding nonconventional behaviors via the explanation for change, agentic power, measure of successful exit, and methodology. Some scholars call for the rejuvenation of the concept of deviant careers by using quan- titative methods; others call for life-course criminology to tie itself to the deviant career by utilizing qualitative methods. However, we argue that the two are inherently different in their approaches, their methodologies, and the research they produce. The popularity of life- course criminology is indicative of the continued importance of studying nonconventional behavior over the course of the life, but revisiting this topic via the deviant career lens or utilizing both approaches adds to what can be discovered using a life-course criminology lens. Therefore, it is important that scholars continue to use both methods. This chapter has illuminated what each perspective can add to the study of prostitution over the course of an individual’s life. Both deviant careers and life-course criminology add to the study of prostitution in different ways and therefore both should be considered valuable tools for understanding nonconventional behavior over time. Revitalizing a deviant career approach will not only rejuvenate the fi eld of deviance, but it will also add to the extant criminological literature of the importance of process, identity, agency, and qualitative methodology when studying nonconventional behavior over the course of the life. CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS 1. How do scholars who study the deviant career examine the same issue differently than scholars who study life-course criminology? How are they the same? Why is this important? 2. If you were to study street prostitution, which approach would you choose? Why would you choose that approach, and what do you think you would fi nd? 3. What other deviant or criminal behaviors could you study using a life-course or deviant careers approach? Are there any behaviors you do not think would be applicable? REFERENCES Becker, H. 1963. Outsiders . New York: Macmillan. Dalla, R., Xia, Y., and Kennedy, H. 2003. “ ‘You Just Give Them What They Want and Pray They Don’t Kill You’: Street-Level Sex Workers’ Reports of Victimization, Personal Resources, and Coping Strategies.” Violence Against Women 9: 1367–1394. CONNECTIONS | 349 Erickson, P., Butters, J., McGillicuddy, P., and Hallgren, A. 2000. “Crack and Prostitution: Gender, Myths, and Experiences.” Journal of Drug Issues 30(4): 767–788. Goldstein, H. 1979. “Improving Policing: A Problem-Oriented Approach.” Crime & Delinquency 25(2): 236–258. James, J. 1976. “Motivations for Entrance into Prostitution.” Pp. 177–205 in The Female Offender , edited by L. Crites. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Koken, J. 2012. “Independent Female Escort’s Strategies for Coping with Sex Work Related Stigma.” Sexuality and Culture 16(3): 209. Longa, Lyda. 2012, September 4. “An Ex-Prostitute’s Story: ‘I’ve Done it All for Money.’ ” The Daytona Beach News-Journal . Retrieved on September 20, 2012, http://www.news-journalonline.com/article/20120904/NEWS/ 309039990/1025?p=all&tc=pgall. Mansson, S. A. and Hedin, U. C. 1999. “Breaking the Matthew Effect—On Women Leaving Prostitution.” Interna- tional Journal of Social Welfare 8: 67–77. Maxwell, S. and Maxwell, C. 2000. “Examining the ‘Criminal Careers’ of Prostitutes Within the Nexus of Drug Use, Drug Selling, and Other Illicit Activities.” Criminology 38(3): 787–810. Moffi tt, T. E. 1993. “Adolescence-Limited and Life-Course-Persistent Antisocial Behavior: A Developmental Tax- onomy.” Psychological Review 100: 674–701. Nadon, S. M., Koverola, C., and Schludermann, E. H. 1998. “Antecedents to Prostitution: Childhood Victimiza- tion.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 13: 206–221. Nixon, K., Tutty, L., Downe, P., Gorkoff, K., and Ursel, J. 2002. “The Everyday Occurrence: Violence in the Lives of Girls Exploited Through Prostitution.” Violence Against Women 8: 1016–1043. Oselin, S. S. 2010. “Weighing the Consequences of a Deviant Career: Factors Leading to an Exit from Prostitution.” Sociological Perspectives 53(4): 527–550. Potterat, J. J., Rothenberg, R. B., Muth, S. Q., Darrow, W. W., and Phillips-Plummer, L. 1998. “Pathways to Prosti- tution: The Chronology of Sexual and Drug Milestones.” Journal of Sex Research 35: 333–340. Sallmann, J. 2010. “Living With Stigma: Women’s Experiences of Prostitution and Substance Use.” Journal of Women and Social Work 25(2): 146–159. Sampson, R. J. and Laub, J. H. 1992. “Crime and Deviance in the Life Course.” Annual Review of Sociology 18: 63–84. Silbert, M. H. and Pines, A. M. 1982. “Victimization of Street Prostitutes.” Victimology: An International Journal 7: 122–133. Snow, D. and Anderson, L. 1993. Down on Their Luck: A Study of Homeless Street People . Berkeley: University of California Press. Woolston, H. B. 1969. Prostitution in the United States: Prior to the Entrance of the United States Into the World War. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith. (Originally published in 1921) http://www.news-journalonline.com/article/20120904/NEWS/309039990/1025?p=all&tc=pgall http://www.news-journalonline.com/article/20120904/NEWS/309039990/1025?p=all&tc=pgall This page intentionally left blank SECTION 8 Moral Panics and Risk Society This page intentionally left blank Introduction Tammy L. Anderson Section 8 reviews the classic term moral panic and the more modern idea of risk society in readings by Cohen, Goode and Ben-Yehuda, Ungar, and Kavanaugh and Maratea. Both moral panics and risk society are focused on how we come to know and care about certain types of social threats (i.e., problematic or deviant behaviors, events, conditions). The term moral panic is a classic in deviance studies. It is widely referenced in academic research and society today. When we pair it against the more modern idea of risk society, we may gain a greater understanding of how social anxieties emanate and take control of our lives in the short- or long-term. Connecting the two concepts also forces us to consider which social threats might trouble us more and why: (1) those featuring moral wrongdoings or (2) those originating in nature or from human innovations that appear morally neutral (i.e., “amoral”). Moral Panic. The reading by Cohen (1980) in this section defi nes the classic deviance idea of moral panic as an intense media-based reaction to a pressing issue in society that is believed to threaten society. Moral panics usually focus on behaviors or conditions among people and defi ne deviance as moral issues that demand our attention. Cohen (1980) identifi ed two opposing parties involved in them. The fi rst group was “moral entrepreneurs,” who created such panics, using media outlets, when they feared society or its values and traditions were being compromised. Blinded by their ideology, they lead moral campaigns to get others to agree with their cause and justify certain responses to perceived threats. Moral entrepre- neurs targeted a second very important group: folk devils. Folk devils were those believed (e.g., deviants) to be responsible for the problem at hand. From Cohen (1980) we learn that various youth cultural groups—such as the mods and rockers—have been cast as folk devils by the mass media, police, public offi cials, and others for engaging in delinquent acts or “mob violence” believed to threaten British society. Since we are constantly bombarded with messages about social doom, how do we know when a threat is real or an overblown moral panic? The reading by Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994) attempts to answer this question by describing fi ve criteria of moral panics. First is a sense of concern about a phenomena, behavior, or condition. A second criteria is hostility about those (e.g., folk devils) who are involved or believed to be responsible for it. Next is a shared agreement or consensus in society about the concern and hostility. A fourth com- ponent is that the fear or concern about the problem is much greater that the actual threat. Finally, moral panics erupt and spread quickly. | TAMMY L. ANDERSON354 Risk Society. Since Cohen’s classic work, the usefulness of the moral panic concept has been challenged. The Ungar (2001) reading in this section introduces us to what may be a better way to understand social threats in society. The term risk society focuses on events, condi- tions, and phenomena that are unpredictable, unlimited in scope, and not detectable by our physical senses. They have complex causes attributable to human decision-making. Modern societies, Ungar (2001) notes, are exposed to high consequence and technological risks such as pollution, pandemics, crime, and terrorism. Such risks are possible but quite improbable. Yet, concern about them preoccupies us. In fact, our daily lives are often organized around the constant threat of such risks and catastrophes. Societies must, therefore, rely on creden- tialed experts to alert us to the presence of and management strategies for these risks. Connections Essay. So what are the differences between the moral panic and risk society ideas, and how and why do they matter? The Kavanaugh and Maratea reading in this sec- tion answers this question with two modern-day examples: the methamphetamine epidemic and viral pandemics (bird fl u). Methamphetamine is a highly addictive illicit drug. It is a cen- tral nervous system stimulant that is typically swallowed, snorted, injected, or smoked. The 2011 NSDUH (SAMHSA 2012) reported that 4.6% of Americans had used methamphet- amine in their lifetimes. Researchers (Nicosia et al. 2009) at Rand Corporation have esti- mated that methamphetamine’s economic costs approximated about 23.4 billion in 2005. Current levels remain higher than those on which Rand’s 2005 reports was based, indicating that today’s costs could be much higher. Meth addicts commit a lot of crime to fund their addictions, and meth producers engage in ruthless tactics to sell their products (DEA 2011). Avian fl u, more commonly known as bird fl u, is a type of infl uenza attached to birds. It is highly contagious and has been reported around the globe over the course of time (WHO 2013). While human death from past bird and animal fl u epidemics have been consider- able (WHO 2013), recent scares have produced much less damage. For example, between 2003 and 2013, the World Health Organization (WHO 2013) notes there were 628 reported cases of bird fl u worldwide and 374 deaths. Yet, the U.S. government recently announced it has allocated $25 billion to fund medical countermeasures to the disease. The monies were dispersed to major U.S. pharmaceutical and biomedical companies to produce the vaccine (Keller 2012). Both of these social threats promise to levy heavy costs on the American public, as well as other nations across the globe. What is the role of government and the average taxpayer in addressing them? Who is responsible? Do the answers differ between them? If so, why? The answers to these questions may depend, in part, on whether we view them as social and moral problems or public health risks. This is because a key distinction between the methamphetamine epidemic and bird fl u is morality . . . or is it? People might be supportive of paying higher taxes and having the government combat bird fl u because it’s diffi cult to identity a villain to blame for it. Such benevolence may be harder to muster for the meth problem since dealers, users, and addicts are behaving in deviant and criminal ways, causing problems for others. In their connections reading, Kavanaugh and Maratea argue that the moral distinction between methamphetamine addiction (often conceived as a moral panic) and viral pandemics (an example of risk in modern society) is not as clear as you would think. They state: The case studies that we have presented teach us that amoral risk and moral values are essential, interconnected parts of contemporary campaigns about deviance and broader social scares. Each, INTRODUCTION | 355 in a manner of speaking, breathes life into the other: the presence of risk produces the need to make moral judgments and individual or collective morality allows us to understand (or defi ne) risk. As you read the readings by Cohen, Goode and Ben-Yehuda, Ungar, and Kavanaugh and Maratea, you will learn how to recognize moral panics and social risks and their potential infl uence on our daily lives. Use your critical thinking skills to evaluate which social threats are more troubling and why. While we predict morality will play a role in your determina- tions, we also expect it will be challenging for you to spot it in the many social anxieties that crop up now and in the future. REFERENCES Cohen, S. 1980. Folk Devils and Moral Panics . New York: St Martin’s Press. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). 2011. Drugs of Abuse . 2nd ed. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. Keller, John. 2012. “U.S. Government Takes Threat of Bird Flu Pandemic Seriously; Spends $25 Billion for Medi- cal Countermeasures.” Military and Aerospace Electronics , September. Retrieved May 13, 2013 http://www. militaryaerospace.com/blogs/aerospace-defense-blog/2012/09/u-s-government-takes-threat-of-bird- fl u-pandemic- seriously-spends-25-billion-for-medical- counterm.html. Nicosia, Nancy, Pacula, Rosalie L. Kilmer, Beau, Lundberg, Russell, and Chiesa, James. 2009. The Economic Cost of Methamphetamine Use in the United States, 2005 . Rockville, MD: Rand Corporation. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). (2012). Results from the 2011 National Sur- vey on Drug Use and Health: National Findings (Offi ce of Applied Studies, NSDUH Series H-36, HHS Publication No. SMA 09-4434). Rockville, MD: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Center for Behaviorial Health Statistics and Quality. World Health Organization (WHO). 2013, August 29. Cumulative number of confi rmed human cases for avian infl u- enza A(H5N1) reported to WHO, 2003–2013. Quarterly report. Retrieved September 17, 2013, http://www.who. int/infl uenza/human_animal_interface/ H5N1_cumulative_table_archives/en/index.html. http://www.militaryaerospace.com/blogs/aerospace-defense-blog/2012/09/u-s-government-takes-threat-of-bird-flu-pandemic-seriously-spends-25-billion-for-medical-counterm.html http://www.who.int/influenza/human_animal_interface/H5N1_cumulative_table_archives/en/index.html http://www.militaryaerospace.com/blogs/aerospace-defense-blog/2012/09/u-s-government-takes-threat-of-bird-flu-pandemic-seriously-spends-25-billion-for-medical-counterm.html http://www.militaryaerospace.com/blogs/aerospace-defense-blog/2012/09/u-s-government-takes-threat-of-bird-flu-pandemic-seriously-spends-25-billion-for-medical-counterm.html http://www.who.int/influenza/human_animal_interface/H5N1_cumulative_table_archives/en/index.html Deviance and Moral Panics Stanley Cohen Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A con- dition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defi ned as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is pre- sented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accred- ited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible. Sometimes the object of the panic is quite novel, and at other times it is something which has been in existence long enough but suddenly appears in the limelight. Sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten, except in folklore and col- lective memory; at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such changes as those in legal and social policy or even in the way the soci- ety conceives itself. One of the most recurrent types of moral panic in Britain since the war has been associ- ated with the emergence of various forms of youth culture (originally almost exclusively working class but often recently middle- class or student based) whose behaviour is deviant or delinquent. To a greater or lesser degree, these cultures have been associated with violence. The teddy boys, the mods and rockers, the Hells Angels, the skinheads and the hippies have all been phenomena of this kind. There have been parallel reactions to the drug problem, student militancy, politi- cal demonstrations, football hooliganism, vandalism of various kinds and crime and violence in general. But groups such as the teddy boys and the mods and rockers have been distinctive in being identifi ed not just in terms of particular events (such as demon- strations) or particular disapproved forms of behaviour (such as drug-taking or violence) but as distinguishable social types. In the gal- lery of types that society erects to show its members which roles should be avoided and which should be emulated, these groups have occupied a constant position as folk devils: visible reminders of what we should not be. The identities of such social types are pub- lic property and these particular adolescent groups have symbolized—both in what they were and how they were reacted to—much of the social change which has taken place in Britain over the last twenty years. I want to use a detailed case study of the mods and rockers phenomenon—which cov- ered most of the 1960s—to illustrate some of the more intrinsic features in the emergence of such collective episodes of juvenile devi- ance and the moral panics they both gen- erate and rely upon for their growth. The mods and rockers are one of the many sets of fi gures through which the sixties in Britain will be remembered. A decade is not just a chronological span but a period measured by DEVIANCE AND MORAL PANICS | 357 its association with particular fads, fashions, crazes, styles or—in a less ephemeral way—a certain spirit or kulturgeist . A term such as the twenties is enough to evoke the cul- tural shape of that period, and although we are too close to the sixties for such explicit understandings to emerge already, this is not for want of trying from our instant cultural historians. In the cultural snap albums of the decade which have already been collected, 1 the mods and rockers stand alongside the Profumo affair, the Great Train Robbery, the Krays, the Richardsons, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Bishop of Woolwich, Pri- vate Eye , David Frost, Carnaby Street, The Moors murders, the emergence of Powel- lism, the Rhodesian affair as the types and scenes of the sixties. At the beginning of the decade, the term modernist referred simply to a style of dress; the term rocker was hardly known outside the small groups which identifi ed themselves this way. Five years later, a newspaper editor was to refer to the mods and rockers inci- dents as ‘without parallel in English history’ and troop reinforcements were rumoured to have been sent to quell possible wide- spread disturbances. Now, another fi ve years later, these groups have all but disappeared from the public consciousness, remaining only in collective memory as folk devils of the past, to whom current horrors can be compared. (The rise and fall of the mods and rockers contained all the elements from which one might generalize about folk devils and moral panics. And unlike the previous decade which had only produced the teddy boys, these years witnessed rapid oscillation from one such devil to another: the mod, the rocker, the greaser, the student militant, the drug fi end, the vandal, the soccer hooligan, the hippy, the skinhead.) Neither moral panics nor social types have received much systematic attention in sociology. In the case of moral panics, the two most relevant frameworks come from the sociology of law and social problems and the sociology of collective behaviour. Sociologists such as Becker 2 and Gusfi eld 3 have taken the cases of the Marijuana Tax Act and the Prohibition laws respectively to show how public concern about a particu- lar condition is generated, a ‘symbolic cru- sade’ mounted, which with publicity and the actions of certain interest groups, results in what Becker calls moral enterprise : ‘the cre- ation of a new fragment of the moral con- stitution of society’. 4 Elsewhere 5 Becker uses the same analysis to deal with the evolution of social problems as a whole. The fi eld of collective behaviour provides another rel- evant orientation to the study of moral pan- ics. There are detailed accounts of cases of mass hysteria, delusion and panics, and also a body of studies on how societies cope with the sudden threat or disorder caused by physical disasters. (The study of social types can also be located in the fi eld of collective behaviour, not so much though in such ‘extreme’ forms as riots or crowds but in the general orienta- tion to this fi eld by the symbolic interaction- ists such as Blumer and Turner. 6 ) In this line of theory, explicit attention has been paid to social types by Klapp, 7 but although he con- siders how such types as the hero, the villain and the fool serve as role models for a soci- ety, his main concern seems to be in classify- ing the various subtypes within these groups (for example, the renegade, the parasite, the corrupter, as villain roles) and listing names of those persons Americans see as exempli- fying these roles. He does not consider how such typing occurs in the fi rst place, and he is preoccupied with showing his approval for the processes by which social consensus is facilitated by identifying with the hero types and hating the villain types. The major contribution to the study of the social typing process itself comes from the interactionist or transactional approach to deviance. The focus here is on how society labels rule-breakers as belonging to certain deviant groups and how, once the person | STANLEY COHEN358 is thus typecast, his acts are interpreted in terms of the status to which he has been assigned. It is to this body of theory that we must turn for our major orientation to the study of both moral panics and social types. THE TRANSACTIONAL APPROACH TO DEVIANCE The sociological study of crime, delinquency, drug-taking, mental illness and other forms of socially deviant or problematic behaviour has, in the last decade, undergone a radical reorientation. This reorientation is part of what might be called the sceptical revolution in criminology and the sociology of devi- ance. 8 The older tradition was canonical in the sense that it saw the concepts it worked with as authoritative, standard, accepted, given and unquestionable. The new tradi- tion is sceptical in the sense that when it sees terms like deviant , it asks, Deviant to whom? or, Deviant from what?; when told that something is a social problem, it asks, Prob- lematic to whom?; when certain conditions or behaviour are described as dysfunctional, embarrassing, threatening or dangerous, it asks, Says who? and, Why? In other words, these concepts and descriptions are not assumed to have a taken-for-granted status. The empirical existence of forms of behav- iour labelled as deviant and the fact that persons might consciously and intentionally decide to be deviant should not lead us to assume that deviance is the intrinsic property of an act nor a quality possessed by an actor. Becker’s formulation on the transactional nature of deviance has now been quoted ver- batim so often that it has virtually acquired its own canonical status: Deviance is created by society. I do not mean this in the way that it is ordinarily understood, in which the causes of deviance are located in the social situation of the deviant or in ‘social factors’ which prompt his action. I mean, rather, that social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance and by applying those rules to par- ticular persons and labelling them as outsiders. From this point of view, deviance is not a qual- ity of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender’. The devi- ant is one to whom the label has successfully been applied; deviant behaviour is behaviour that people so label. 9 What this means is that the student of deviance must question and not take for granted the labelling by society or certain powerful groups in society of certain behav- iour as deviant or problematic. The transac- tionalists’ importance has been not simply to restate the sociological truism that the judgement of deviance is ultimately one that is relative to a particular group but in try- ing to spell out the implication of this for research and theory. They have suggested that in addition to the stock set of behav- ioural questions which the public asks about deviance and which the researcher obligingly tries to answer (Why did they do it? What sort of people are they? How do we stop them doing it again?) there are at least three defi nitional questions: Why does a particu- lar rule, the infraction of which constitutes deviance, exist at all? What are the processes and procedures involved in identifying some- one as a deviant and applying the rule to him? What are the effects and consequences of this application, both for society and the individual? Sceptical theorists have been misinter- preted as going only so far as putting these defi nitional questions and moreover as implying that the behavioural questions are unimportant. While it is true that they have pointed to the dead ends which the behav- ioural questions have reached (Do we really know what distinguishes a deviant from a nondeviant?), what they say has positive implications for studying these questions as well. Thus, they see deviance in terms of a DEVIANCE AND MORAL PANICS | 359 process of becoming—movements of doubt, commitment, sidetracking, guilt—rather than the possession of fi xed traits and charac- teristics. This is true even for those forms of deviance usually seen to be most ‘locked in’ the person: ‘No one,’ as Laing says, ‘has schizophrenia like having a cold.’ 10 The meaning and interpretation which the devi- ant gives to his own acts are seen as cru- cial and so is the fact that these actions are often similar to socially approved forms of behaviour. 11 The transactional perspective does not imply that innocent persons are arbitrarily selected to play deviant roles or that harm- less conditions are wilfully infl ated into social problems. Nor does it imply that a person labelled as deviant has to accept this identity: being caught and publicly labelled is just one crucial contingency which may stabilize a deviant career and sustain it over time. Much of the work of these writers has been concerned with the problematic nature of societal response to deviance and the way such responses affect the behaviour. This may be studied at a face-to-face level (for example, What effect does it have on a pupil to be told by his teacher that he is a ‘yob who should never be at a decent school like this’?) or at a broader societal level (for example, How is the ‘drug problem’ actually created and shaped by particular social and legal policies?). The most unequivocal attempt to under- stand the nature and effect of the societal reaction to deviance is to be found in the writings of Lemert. 12 He makes an impor- tant distinction, for example, between pri- mary and secondary deviation. Primary deviation—which may arise from a variety of causes—refers to behaviour which, although it may be troublesome to the individual, does not produce symbolic reorganization at the level of self-conception. Secondary devia- tion occurs when the individual employs his deviance, or a role based upon it, as a means of defence, attack or adjustment to the problems created by the societal reaction to it. The societal reaction is thus conceived as the ‘effective’ rather than ‘original’ cause of deviance: deviance becomes signifi cant when it is subjectively shaped into an active role which becomes the basis for assigning social status. Primary deviation has only marginal implications for social status and self-conception as long as it remains symp- tomatic, situational, rationalized or in some way ‘normalized’ as an acceptable and nor- mal variation. Lemert was very much aware that the transition from primary to secondary devia- tion was a complicated process. Why the societal reaction occurs and what form it takes are dependent on factors such as the amount and visibility of the deviance, while the effect of the reaction is dependent on numerous contingencies and is itself only one contingency in the development of a deviant career. Thus the link between the reaction and the individual’s incorporation of this into his self-identity is by no means inevitable; the deviant label, in other words, does not always ‘take’. The individual might be able to ignore or rationalize the label or only pretend to comply. This type of face- to-face sequence, though, is just one part of the picture: more important are the symbolic and unintended consequences of social con- trol as a whole. Deviance in a sense emerges and is stabilized as an artefact of social con- trol; because of this, Lemert can state that ‘older sociology tended to rest heavily upon the idea that deviance leads to social control. I have come to believe that the reverse idea, i.e. social control leads to deviance, is equally tenable and the potentially richer premise for studying deviance in modern society’. 13 It is partly towards showing the tenability and richness of this premise. My emphasis though, is more on the logically prior task of analysing the nature of a particular set of reactions rather than demonstrating con- clusively what their effects might have been. How were the mods and rockers identifi ed, | STANLEY COHEN360 labelled and controlled? What stages or pro- cesses did this reaction go through? Why did the reaction take its particular forms? What—to use Lemert’s words again—were the ‘mythologies, stigma, stereotypes, pat- terns of exploitation, accommodation, segre- gation and methods of control (which) spring up and crystallize in the interaction between the deviants and the rest of society’? 14 There are many strategies—not mutually incompatible—for studying such reactions. One might take a sample of public opin- ion and survey its attitudes to the particu- lar form of deviance in question. One might record reactions in a face-to-face context, for example, how persons respond to what they see as homosexual advances. 15 One might study the operations and beliefs of particu- lar control agencies such as the police or the courts. Or, drawing on all these sources, one might construct an ethnography and history of reactions to a particular condition or form of behaviour. This is particularly suitable for forms of deviance or problems seen as new, sensational or in some other way particu- larly threatening. Thus ‘crime waves’ in sev- enteenth century Massachusetts, 16 marijuana smoking in America during the 1930s, 17 the teddy boy phenomenon in Britain during the 1950s 18 and drug-taking in the Notting Hill area of London during the 1960s 19 have all been studied in this way. These reactions were all associated with some form of moral panic, and it is in the tradition of studies such as these that the mods and rockers will be considered. Before introducing this partic- ular case, however, I want to justify concen- trating on one especially important carrier and producer of moral panics; namely, the mass media. DEVIANCE AND THE MASS MEDIA A crucial dimension for understanding the reaction to deviance both by the public as a whole and by agents of social control is the nature of the information that is received about the behaviour in question. Each society possesses a set of ideas about what causes deviation (Is it due, say, to sickness or to wilful perversity?) and a set of images of who constitutes the typical deviant (Is he an innocent lad being led astray, or is he a psychopathic thug?), and these conceptions shape what is done about the behaviour. In industrial societies, the body of information from which such ideas are built is invariably received at second hand. That is, it arrives already processed by the mass media, and this means that the information has been subject to alternative defi nitions of what constitutes ‘news’ and how it should be gathered and presented. The information is further structured by the various commercial and political constraints in which newspa- pers, radio and television operate. The student of moral enterprise cannot but pay particular attention to the role of the mass media in defi ning and shaping social problems. The media have long operated as agents of moral indignation in their own right: even if they are not self-consciously engaged in crusading or muckraking, their very reporting of certain ‘facts’ can be suf- fi cient to generate concern, anxiety, indigna- tion or panic. When such feelings coincide with a perception that particular values need to be protected, the preconditions for new rule creation or social problem defi nition are present. Of course, the outcome might not be as defi nite as the actual creation of new rules or the more rigid enforcement of existing ones. What might result is the sort of symbolic process which Gusfi eld describes in his conception of ‘moral passage’: there is a change in the public designation of devi- ance. 20 In his example, the problem drinker changes from ‘repentant’ to ‘enemy’ to ‘sick’. Something like the opposite might be hap- pening in the public designation of produc- ers and consumers of pornography: they have changed from isolated, pathetic—if not sick—creatures in grubby macks to groups of ruthless exploiters out to undermine the nation’s morals. DEVIANCE AND MORAL PANICS | 361 Less concretely, the media might leave behind a diffuse feeling of anxiety about the situation: ‘something should be done about it’; ‘where will it end?’; or ‘this sort of thing can’t go on forever’. Such vague feelings are crucial in laying the ground for further enter- prise, and Young has shown how, in the case of drug-taking, the media play on the norma- tive concerns of the public and by thrusting certain moral directives into the universe of discourse can create social problems sud- denly and dramatically. 21 This potential is consciously exploited by those whom Becker calls ‘moral entrepreneurs’ to aid them in their attempt to win public support. The mass media, in fact, devote a great deal of space to deviance: sensational crimes, scandals, bizarre happenings and strange goings on. The more dramatic confronta- tions between deviance and control in man- hunts, trials and punishments are recurring objects of attention. As Erikson notes, ‘A considerable portion of what we call “news” is devoted to reports about deviant behav- iour and its consequences.’ 22 This is not just for entertainment or to fulfi l some psycho- logical need for either identifi cation or vicar- ious punishment. Such ‘news’ as Erikson and others have argued, is a main source of information about the normative contours of a society. It informs us about right and wrong, about the boundaries beyond which one should not venture and about the shapes that the devil can assume. The gallery of folk types—heroes and saints, as well as fools, villains and devils—is publicized not just in oral tradition and face-to-face contact but to much larger audiences and with much greater dramatic resources. Much of this study will be devoted to understanding the role of the mass media in creating moral panics and folk devils. A potentially useful link between these two notions—and one that places central stress on the mass media—is the process of devia- tion amplifi cation as described by Wilkins. 23 The key variable in this attempt to under- stand how the societal reaction may in fact increase rather than decrease or keep in check the amount of deviance is the nature of the information about deviance. As I pointed out earlier, this information characteristi- cally is not received at fi rst hand; it tends to be processed in such a form that the action or actors concerned are pictured in a highly stereotypical way. We react to an episode of, say, sexual deviance, drug-taking or vio- lence in terms of our information about that particular class of phenomenon (How typi- cal is it?), our tolerance level for that type of behaviour and our direct experience— which in a segregated urban society is often nil. Wilkins describes—in highly mechanistic language derived from cybernetic theory—a typical reaction sequence which might take place at this point, one which has a spiralling or snowballing effect. An initial act of deviance or normative diversity (for example, in dress) is defi ned as being worthy of attention and is responded to punitively. The deviant or group of devi- ants is segregated or isolated and this oper- ates to alienate them from conventional society. They perceive themselves as more deviant, group themselves with others in a similar position, and this leads to more devi- ance. This, in turn, exposes the group to further punitive sanctions and other force- ful action by the conformists—and the sys- tem starts going round again. There is no assumption in this model that amplifi cation has to occur: in the same way—as I pointed out earlier—that there is no automatic tran- sition from primary to secondary deviation or to the incorporation of deviant labels. The system or the actor can and does react in quite opposite directions. What one is merely drawing attention to is a set of sequential typifi cations: under X conditions, A will be followed by A1, A2, etc. All these links have to be explained—as Wilkins does not do—in terms of other generalizations. For example, it is more likely that if the deviant group is vulnerable and its actions highly visible, it will be forced to take on its identities from structurally and ideologically more powerful | STANLEY COHEN362 groups. Such generalizations and an attempt to specify various specialized modes of amplifi cation or alternatives to the process have been spelt out by Young 24 in the case of drug-taking. I intend using this model here simply as one viable way in which the ‘social control leads to deviation’ chain can be con- ceptualized and also because of its particu- lar emphasis upon the ‘information about deviance’ variable and its dependence on the mass media. NOTES 1. For example, Christopher Booker, The Neophili- acs: A Study of the Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties (London: Collins, 1969); David Bailey and Francis Wyndham, A Box of Pin-Ups (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1965); Bernard Levin, The Pendulum Years (Lon- don: Jonathan Cape, 1970); and (in a different way) Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (London: Pala- din, 1970). 2. Howard S. Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Soci- ology of Deviance (New York: Free Press, 1963), Chaps 7 and 8. 3. Joseph Gusfi eld, Symbolic Crusade: Status Poli- tics and the American Temperance Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1963). 4. Becker, op. cit. p. 145. 5. Howard S. Becker (Ed.), Social Problems: A Mod- ern Approach (New York: John Wiley, 1966). 6. See Herbert Blumer, ‘Collective Behavior,’ in J.B. Gittler (Ed.), Review of Sociology (New York: Wiley, 1957); Ralph H. Turner, ‘Collective Behaviour,’ in R.E.L. Farris (Ed.), Handbook of Modern Sociol- ogy (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964); and Ralph H. Turner and Lewis M. Killian, Collective Behavior (Englewood Cliffs, NJ; Prentice-Hall, 1957). 7. Orrin E. Klapp, Heroes, Villains and Fools: The Changing American Character (Englewood Cliffs, NJ; Prentice-Hall, 1962). 8. The skeptical revolution can only be understood as part of a broader reaction in the social sciences as a whole against the dominant models, images and methodology of positivism. It is obviously beyond my scope to deal here with this connection. For an account of the peculiar shape positivism took in the study of crime and deviance and of the possi- bilities of transcending its paradoxes, the work of David Matza is invaluable: Delinquency and Drift (New York: Wiley, 1964) and Becoming Deviant (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969). 9. Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance , op. cit. p. 9. 10. R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 34. 11. A fuller account of these and other implications of the skeptical position is given in my Introduc- tion and Postscript to Stanley Cohen (Ed.), Images of Deviance (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971). Some examples of work infl uenced by this tradition can be found in that volume but more directly in Rubington and Weinberg’s excellent collection of interactionist writings: Earl Rub- ington and Martin S. Weinberg (Eds), Deviance: The Interactionist Perspective (New York: Collier- Macmillan, 1968). 12. Edwin M. Lemert, Social Pathology: A Systematic Approach to the Study of Sociopathic Behaviour (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951) and Human Deviance, Social Problems and Social Control (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967.) 13. Lemert, Social Pathology, op. cit. 14. Ibid. p. 55. 15. See John I. Kitsuse, ‘Societal Reaction to Devi- ant Behaviour: Problems of Theory and Method,’ Social Problems 9 (Winter 1962), pp. 247–56. 16. Kai T. Erikson, Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: John Wiley, 1966). 17. Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance , op. cit. Chaps 7 and 8. 18. Paul Rock and Stanley Cohen, ‘The Teddy Boy,’ in V. Bogdanor and R. Skidelsky (Eds), The Age of Affl uence: 1951–1964 (London: Macmillan, 1970). 19. Jock Young, ‘The Role of the Police as Amplifi ers of Deviancy, Negotiators of Reality and Transla- tors of Fantasy: Some Aspects of our Present Sys- tem of Drug Control as seen in Notting Hill,’ in Cohen, op., cit. 20. Joseph Gusfi eld, ‘Moral Passage: The Symbolic Process in Public Designations of Deviance,’ Social Problems 15 (Fall 1967), pp. 175–88. 21. Young, op. cit. and The Drug Takers: The Social Meaning of Drug-Taking (London: Paladin, 1971). 22. Erikson, op. cit. p. 12. 23. Leslie T. Wilkins, Social Deviance: Social Policy, Action and Research (London: Tavistock, 1964), Chap. 4. I have made a preliminary attempt to apply this model to the mods and rockers in ‘Mods, Rockers and the Rest: Community Reaction to Juvenile Delinquency,’ Howard Journal of Penol- ogy and Crime Prevention XII (1967), pp. 121–30. 24. Young, The Drug Takers , op. cit. Moral Panics Culture, Politics, and Social Construction Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda INTRODUCTION On the continent of Europe, roughly between 1400 and 1650, hundreds of thousands of people—perhaps as many as half a mil- lion, up to 85% of whom were women— were judged to have “consorted with the devil” and were put to death. Much of Europe, especially France, Switzerland, and Germany, was in turmoil with suspicion, accusations, trials, and the punishment of supposed evildoers. A kind of fever—a craze or panic—concerning witchcraft and accusa- tions of witchcraft swept over the land. Once an accusation was made, there was little the accused could do to protect herself. Children, women, and “entire families were sent to the stake. . . . Entire villages were extermi- nated. . . . Germany was covered with stakes, where witches were burning alive.” Said one inquisitor, “I wish [the witches] had but one body, so that we could bum them all at once, in one fi re!” (Ben-Yehuda 1985: 36, 37). In 1893, a charismatic religious mys- tic led a group of faithful followers into a remote mountain valley in the Brazilian state of Bahia and founded the community of Canudos; within two years, the settle- ment became the second largest city in the state. Canudos was a millennial cult whose adherents believed that the existing order would be overturned with the dawning of a new day. Landowners, the Catholic Church, and political elites resolved to crush the movement. Three military assaults against the settlement were repulsed by tenacious defenders. Finally, in October, 1897, Canu- dos was encircled by 8,000 troops, serving under three generals and Brazil’s Minister of War, and was bombarded into submis- sion by heavy artillery. Thousands were killed; the survivors numbered only in the hundreds. Soldiers smashed the skulls of children against trees; the wounded were drawn and quartered, hacked to pieces limb by limb. All 5,000 houses in the settlement were “smashed, leveled and burned. The army eradicated the remaining traces of the holy city as if it had housed the devil incar- nate” (Levine 1992: 190). Throughout the campaign, news of Canudos fl ooded the Bra- zilian press; a sense of “public panic” was created. Accounts appeared daily, “almost always on the front page.” More than a dozen major newspapers sent war corre- spondents to the front and “ran daily col- umns reporting events.” “Something about Canudos provoked anxiety, which would be soothed only by evidence that Canudos had been destroyed” (Levine 1992: 24). These historical episodes represent explo- sions of fear and concern at a particular time and place about a specifi c perceived threat. In each case, a specifi c agent was widely felt to be responsible for the threat; in each case, a sober assessment of the evidence concern- ing the nature of the supposed threat forces the observer to the conclusion that the fear | ERICH GOODE AND NACHMAN BEN-YEHUDA364 and concern were, in all likelihood, exag- gerated or misplaced. Sociologists refer to such episodes as moral panics. They arise as a consequence of specifi c social forces and dynamics. They arise because, as with all sociological phenomena, threats are cultur- ally and politically constructed, a product of the human imagination. THE MORAL PANICS CONCEPT While certain institutions and behaviors may exist before they are conceptualized and named, these processes permit them to be observed and analyzed. Seemingly irrational mass behavior was certainly noticed in the collective behavior literature as far back as Charles Mackay and Gustave LeBon, but the concept of moral panics as an analytically distinct rather than analogous social form made its appearance only in the 1960s. On a cold, wet Easter Sunday, 1964, in Clacton, a seaside resort community on Eng- land’s southern coast, what would normally be regarded as a minor disturbance among young people broke out on the street. Several scuffl es and brief rock-throwing incidents took place; motorbikes and motorscooters roared up and down the street; some win- dows in a dance hall were smashed; several beach huts were damaged; a starter’s pistol was fi red in the air. The police, unaccus- tomed to such rowdiness, arrested nearly 100 youths on charges ranging from “abu- sive behavior” to resisting arrest. While not exactly raw material for a major story on youth violence, the seaside disturbances nonetheless touched off what can only be described as an orgy of sensa- tionalism in the British media. On Mon- day, the day following these events, every national newspaper (with the exception of the staid London Times) ran a lead story on the Clacton disturbances. “Day of Ter- ror by Scooter Groups,” screamed the Daily Telegraph ; “Youngsters Beat Up Town,” claimed the Daily Express ; the Daily Mirror chimed in, “Wild Ones Invade Seaside.” On Tuesday, press coverage was much the same. Editorials on the subject of youth violence began to appear. The Home Secretary was urged to take fi rm action to deal with the problem. Articles began to appear featur- ing interviews with mods and rockers, the two youth factions current in Britain at the time, who were involved in the scuffl es and the vandalism. Theories were articulated in the media, attempting to explain what was referred to as mob violence. Accounts of police and court actions were reported; local residents were interviewed concerning the subject, their views widely publicized. The story was deemed so important that much of the press around the world covered the inci- dents. Youth fi ghts and vandalism at resorts continued to be a major theme in the British press for some three years. Each time a dis- turbance broke out, the same exaggerated, sensationalistic stories were repeated. The overheated reaction of the police, the media, the public, politicians, and, in time, action groups and protosocial movement organizations caught the attention of Stan- ley Cohen. To Cohen, the major issue was the “fundamentally inappropriate” reaction by key social actors in key sectors of the society to relatively minor events. The press, especially, had created a horror story prac- tically out of whole cloth. The seriousness of events were exaggerated and distorted— in terms of the number of young people involved, the nature of the violence com- mitted, the amount of damage infl icted, and their impact on the community and the soci- ety as a whole. Obviously false stories were repeated as true; unconfi rmed rumors were taken as fresh evidence of further atrocities. Once the atrocities were believed to have taken place, a process of sensitization was set in motion, whereby extremely minor distur- bances became the focus of press and police attention, captured in a headline at the time: “Seaside Resorts Prepare for the Hooligans’ Invasion.” And often, Cohen argued, the sensitization process generated an escalation MORAL PANICS | 365 in the disturbances; a minor incident became a more substantial one through overzealous enforcement. Cohen launched the term moral panic to characterize the reactions of the media, the police, the public, politicians, and action groups to the youthful disturbances. Said Cohen, in a moral panic a condition, episode, person or group of per- sons emerges to become defi ned as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is pre- sented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accred- ited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or . . . resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible. Sometimes the subject of the panic is quite novel and at other times it is something which has been in existence long enough, but suddenly appears in the limelight. Sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten, except in folklore and collective memory; at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such changes as those in legal and social policy or even in the way society conceives itself. (Cohen 1972: 9) In a moral panic, the reactions of the media, law enforcement, politicians, action groups, and the general public are out of proportion to the real and present danger a given threat poses to the society. In response to this exag- gerated concern, “folk devils” are created, deviant stereotypes identifying the enemy, the source of the threat, selfi sh, evil wrong- doers who are responsible for the trouble. The fear and heightened concern are exag- gerated; that is, are above and beyond what a sober empirical assessment of its concrete danger would sustain. Thus, they are prob- lematic, a phenomenon in need of an expla- nation; they are caused by certain social and political conditions that must be identifi ed, understood, and explicated. To Cohen, in a moral panic, sensitization occurs. Sensitization is the process whereby harm, wrongness, or deviance is attributed to the behavior, condition, or phenomenon that is routinely ignored when the same consequences are caused by or attributed to more conventional conditions. The “cue effect” of the condition or behavior is much greater during the moral panic; supposed effects are noticed and linked to the offend- ing agents that, in ordinary times for ordi- nary behavior, would have disappeared in the routines and hubbub of everyday life. In addition, the police “escalate” their law enforcement efforts, “diffuse” them from precinct to precinct, and “innovate” new methods of social control (1972: 86–91); they operate under the “widening-the-net” principle (1972: 94). If all social fears and concerns entailed reactions to a specifi c, clearly identifi able, and appropriate or commensurate threat, the magnitude of which can be objectively assessed and readily agreed-upon, such reac- tions would require no explanation. On the other hand, if, as Cohen argues, the reaction is out of proportion to the threat, we are led to ask why it arises. Why is there a moral panic over this supposed threat but not that, potentially even more damaging, one? Why does this cast of characters become incensed by the threat the behavior supposedly poses but not that cast of characters? Why a moral panic at this time but not earlier and not later? What role do interests play in the moral panic? What does the moral panic tell us about how society is constituted, how it works, how it changes over time? Cohen’s concept introduces the student of society to a wide range of questions and potential explorations. MORAL PANICS: DEFINITION AND CRITERIA What characterizes a moral panic? How do we know when a moral panic has taken hold in a society at a specifi c time? How may we operationalize the concept? The moral panic | ERICH GOODE AND NACHMAN BEN-YEHUDA366 is defi ned by at least fi ve crucial elements or criteria. Concern. First. as we saw, there must be a heightened level of concern over the behav- ior (or supposed behavior) of a certain group or category and the consequences that that behavior presumably causes for the rest of the society. As with social problems, this concern is manifested or measureable in concrete ways, through, for example, public opinion polls, media attention, proposed leg- islation, action groups, or social movement activity. Hostility . Second, there must be an increa - sed level of hostility toward the category of people seen as engaging in the threat- ening behavior. Members are collectively designated as the enemy of respectable, law-abiding society; their behavior is seen as harmful or threatening to the values, interests, way of life, possibly the very exis- tence, of the society, or a sizeable segment of that society. These deviants are seen as responsible for the threat. A dichotomiza- tion between “them” and “us” takes place, and this includes stereotyping—generating “folk devils” or villains on the one hand and folk heroes on the other in this moral- ity play of evil versus good (Cohen 1972: 11–12). Consensus . Third, there must be a certain minimal measure of agreement in the soci- ety as a whole or in designated segments of the society that the threat is real, serious, and caused by the wrongdoing of group members and their behavior. This senti- ment must be fairly widespread, although the proportion of the population who feels this way need not even make up a major- ity. Differently put, moral panics come in different sizes—some gripping only certain social categories, groups, or segments; oth- ers causing great concern in the majority. Some discussions (for instance, Zatz 1987) do not posit widespread public concern as an essential defi ning element of the moral panic, while others (Hall et al 1978) make the assumption that public concern is little more than an expression or epiphenom- enon of elite interests. It is necessary to remind ourselves, however, that many elite- generated campaigns do not capture the public imagination and never become wide- spread moral panics—witness the “family values” theme on which Republican candi- date George Bush initially based his cam- paign in the 1992 American presidential race, which had little resonance for most voters. In addition, the general public, or segments of the public, have interests of their own and often become intensely con- cerned with threats that elites would prefer be ignored, such as nuclear contamination (Perrow 1984: 324–28, Erikson 1990) and Satanism (Richardson et al 1991, Jenkins & Meier-Katkin 1992, Victor 1993). Public concern cannot be swept under the rug as an irrelevant criterion. Still, in arguing that a measure of consensus is necessary to defi ne a moral panic, we do not mean to imply that panic seizes everyone or even a majority of the members of a society at a given time. Even during moral panics, public defi nitions are fought over, and some of them win out among one or another sector of the society, while others do not. Disproportionality . Fourth, there is the im- plicit assumption in the use of the term moral panic that the concern is out of pro- portion to the nature of the threat, that it is, in fact, considerably greater than that which a sober empirical evaluation could support; in the moral panic, “objective molehills have been made into subjective mountains” (Jones et al 1989: 4). In moral panics, generating and disseminating numbers is important (Best 1990: 45–64)—addicts, deaths, dol- lars, crimes, victims, injuries, illnesses, total cost—and most of the fi gures cited by moral panic claims-makers are wildly exaggerated. MORAL PANICS | 367 The criterion of disproportionality is not without its critics (Waddington 1986). How do we know that the attention accorded a given issue or phenomenon is disproportional to the concrete or objec- tive threat it poses? Here are four indica- tors or criteria. First, if the fi gures that are cited to mea- sure the scope of the problem are grossly exaggerated, we may say that the criterion of disproportionality has been met (Ben- Yehuda 1986, 1990: 97–134, Best 1990: 45–64). Second, if the threat that is feared is, by all available evidence, nonexistent, we may say that the criterion of dispropor- tionality has been met (Richardson et al 1991, Jenkins & Meier-Katkin 1992, Vic- tor 1993). Third, if the attention paid to a specifi c condition is vastly greater than that paid to another, and the threat or damage caused by the fi rst is no greater than, or is less than, the second, the criterion of dispro- portionality may be said to have been met (Goode 1993: 42–57). And fourth, if the attention paid to a given condition at one point in time is vastly greater than that paid to it during a previous or later time with- out any corresponding increase in objective seriousness, then, once again, the criterion of disproportionality may be said to have been met (Ben-Yehuda 1986, 1990: 97–134, Goode 1993: 48–53). Volatility . And fi fth, moral panics are vola- tile: they erupt fairly suddenly (although they may lie latent for long periods of time and may reappear from time to time), and, nearly as suddenly, they subside. As we’ll see, some moral panics may become rou- tinized or institutionalized, while other moral panics vanish—seemingly—without so much as a trace; the legal, cultural, moral, and social fabric of the society after the panic is essentially no different from the way it was before. But whether it has a long-term impact or not, the degree of fear, hostility, and concern generated during a moral panic tends to be fairly limited tem- porally; the fever pitch that characterizes a society or segments of it during the course of the moral panic is not sustainable over a long stretch of time. To describe moral panics as volatile and relatively short-lived does not imply that they do not have structural or historical antecedents. The specifi c issue that generates a particular moral panic may have done so in the past, perhaps even in the not-so-distant past. In fact, moral panics that are sustained over long periods of time are almost certainly conceptual groupings of a series of more or less discrete, more or less localized, more or less short-term panics. Likewise, describing a given concern as volatile does not mean that moral panics do not, or cannot, leave a cultural and institutional legacy. Indeed, elements of panics may become institutional- ized; during panics, organizations and insti- tutions may be established at one point in time that remain in place and help stimulate incipient concerns later on, at the appropri- ate time. CONCLUSIONS Can we draw any conclusions about the origins of moral panics aside from the trite, unsatisfying, and almost tautologically true platitude that different theories apply best to different moral panics or different aspects of a given moral panic? Almost certainly some latent fear or stress must preexist in the gen- eral public, or segments of the public, for a widespread panic to “take off.” Once again, our argument goes beyond the claim that different models are helpful in explaining different moral panics. It is that the grassroots provides fuel or raw mate- rial for a moral panic, while organizational activists’ issues of morality provide the con- tent of moral panic, and interests provide the timing (Ben-Yehuda 1986). While the elite engineered model does not seem to | ERICH GOODE AND NACHMAN BEN-YEHUDA368 work for most moral panics, the grassroots model enables us to see what fears and con- cerns are made use of, and the interest group model enables us to see how this raw mate- rial is mobilized and intensifi ed. By itself, the grassroots model is naive; by itself, the interest group model is cynical and empty. Together, the two help illuminate the moral panic; interest groups co-opt and make use of grassroots morality and ideology. No moral panic is complete without an exami- nation of all societal levels, from elites to the grassroots, and the full spectrum from ideol- ogy and morality at one end to crass status and material interests at the other. EPILOGUE: MORAL PANICS, DEMISE, AND INSTITUTIONALIZATION Although the rise of moral panics has received some attention, their demise has been virtu- ally neglected. The question of the demise of moral panics is linked intimately with the issue of their impact: What impact do moral panics have? Do moral panics promote sub- stantial, long-term social change? Or is their impact much like that of fads, which fl are up, are popular for a time, and vanish with- out a legacy or, seemingly, a trace? The excitement stirred up during a moral panic is strikingly similar to the charisma possessed by certain leaders. This excite- ment, like charisma, is volatile and unstable. The feelings that are generated during its period of infl uence tend to be intense, pas- sionate. But they do not last. How to ensure that the willingness of individuals gripped by this temporary fervor to follow certain rules or pursue certain enemies continues over time? How to translate the vision stim- ulated during the moral panic into day-by- day, year-by-year normative and institutional policy? How to continue the aims and goals of moral entrepreneurs, action and interest groups, leaders, and much of the public, in “doing something” about the threat that seems to be posed during the moral panic, after the emotional fervor of that panic has died down? What we are suggesting is that, as with charismatic leaders, some moral pan- ics are, almost unwittingly, particularly suc- cessful in routinizing the demands for action that are generated during these relatively brief episodes of collective excitement. Do moral panics have an impact on the society in which they take place by generat- ing formal organizations and institutions; do they, in other words, leave an institu- tional legacy in the form of laws, agencies, groups, movements, and so on? If so, what is the nature of that legacy? Do moral panics transform the informal normative structure of a society? If so, what is the nature of that transformation? Some panics seem to leave relatively lit- tle institutional legacy. The furor generated by the mods and rockers in England in the 1960s resulted in no long-term institutional legacy; no new laws were passed (although some were proposed), and the two germinal social movement organizations that emerged in its wake quickly evaporated when the excitement died down. In contrast, other panics result in laws and other legislation, social movement orga- nizations, action groups, lobbies, normative and behavioral transformations, organiza- tions, government agencies, and so on. For example, the periodic drug panics that have washed over American society for a century continue to deposit institutional sediment in their wake. President Richard Nixon’s mini–drug panic of the early 1970s hugely expanded the federal drug budget, placed the drug war on a fi rm institutional footing, and created several federal agencies empow- ered to deal with drug abuse in one way or another. The drug panic of the mid- to late 1980s left a substantial institutional legacy in the form of two packages of federal legis- lation, passed in 1986 and 1988, a substan- tially larger federal budget, dozens of private social movement organizations, and public sensitization to the drug issue. In this way, not only are successive moral panics built on MORAL PANICS | 369 earlier ones, but even in quieter, nonpanic periods, the institutional legacy that moral panics leave attempts to regulate the behav- ior that is deemed harmful, unacceptable, criminal, or deviant. The earliest, nineteenth century, drug panics defi ned drug abuse as deviant and, eventually, criminal; in this sense, they generated social change. The later drug panics, in contrast, reaffi rmed the devi- ant and criminal status of drug abuse after a period of drift toward normalization, and thus they prevented social change. Even seemingly inconsequential panics leave behind some sort of legacy; even those that produce no institutional, organizational, or formal legacy are likely to have had some impact in the informal or attitudinal realm. With the eruption of a given moral panic, the battle lines are redrawn, moral universes are reaffi rmed, deviants are paraded before upright citizens and denounced, and soci- ety’s boundaries are solidifi ed. In Durkheim- ian terms, society’s collective conscience has been strengthened. The message of the moral panic is clear: this is behavior we will not tol- erate. Even seemingly transitory panics are not “wasted”: they draw more or less pre- cise moral boundaries. Panics emphasize the contrast between the condition or behavior that is denounced and the correctness of the behavior or position of the righteous folk engaged in the denunciation. The satanic ritual abuse scare, for example, reaffi rms the moral correctness of the fundamentalist Christian way of life. The mods and rockers scare of 1964 to 1967 prepared the way for a later (early 1970s) moral panic in Britain over juvenile delinquency, street crime, and mugging (Hall et al 1978). The Canudos massacre reminded Brazilians that they were citizens of a modern, progressive, industrial- izing, and culturally unifi ed nation. In short, panics are not like fads, trivial in nature and inconsequential in their impact. Even those panics that seem to end without institutional impact often leave normative or informal traces that prepare us for later panics or other events. Some, for example, leave cultural residue in the form of folklore (Best 1990: 131–50, Turner 1993). A close examination of the impact of panics forces us to take a more long-range view of things, to see panics as long-term social process rather than as separate, discrete, time-bound episodes. Moral panics are a crucial element in the fabric of social change. 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S. 1987. “Chicano Youth Gangs and Crime: The Creation of a Moral Panic.” Contemp. Crises 11: 129–58. Moral Panic Versus the Risk Society The Implications of the Changing Sites of Social Anxiety Sheldon Ungar Moral panic has enjoyed a good run in the sociology of deviance, where it acquired a special affi nity with youth-related issues. This reading suggests that the sociological domain carved out by moral panic is most fruitfully understood as the study of the sites and conventions of social anxiety and fear. Researchers select particular crises to investigate and thereby ignore others. But societies change, as do the phenom- ena associated with outbreaks of public concern or alarm. As new crises accumu- late and become more visible, they are likely to fi nd their way on to the research agenda. This reading examines new sites of social anxiety that have emerged alongside moral panics. These are best captured by Beck’s (1992) concept of a ‘risk society’. The reading, then, compares the elements and conditions of moral panic with those of the ‘ political potential of catastrophes ’ bred in a risk society (Beck 1992: 24; ital- ics in original). The aim of the comparison is threefold: (1) to establish the position of risk society threats alongside more con- ventional moral panics; (2) to examine the conceptual shifts that accompany the new types of threats; and (3) to outline the changing research agenda, including the identifi cation of gaps characteristic of moral panic research. THE IDEA OF MORAL PANIC Consider Cohen’s Classic Defi nition Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or groups of persons emerges to become defi ned as a threat to societal val- ues and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops politicians and other right- thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved (or more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible. (Cohen 1972: 9) Unfortunately, this defi nition is cited so fre- quently that readers are apt to skip it! Care- ful perusal of the text reveals that it allows for but does not necessitate most of the pre- sumptions and concepts that have accrued to the study of moral panic. Consider the concept of folk devil, which is typically iden- tifi ed with the evil doings of an individual or group of individuals. Cohen’s defi nition, however, encompasses not only ‘person or groups of persons’ but also ‘condition’ and ‘episode’. The latter, as in the case of the elite panic over swine fl u in the United States, do not readily fall under the folk devil rubric. | SHELDON UNGAR372 Similarly, nothing in this text necessitates the idea of disproportionality, although the exaggeration of the threat has been a key concern of moral panic researchers (e.g., Jen- kins 1998, 1999) and of social construction- ists generally (Ungar 1998a). Since most of the ostensibly critical ele- ments of moral panic are not stipulated by defi nition, they apparently low from the (more contingent) procedures and details of Cohen’s classic study. In this context, it is probably a sterile exercise to ask what moral panic is ‘really about’ (cf. Hunt 1997). Instead, the aim here is to open space for the consideration of other social anxieties that do not quite it the moral panic paradigm. Then these new anxieties will be used to refl ect on the nature and limits of the moral panic research. SOCIAL ANXIETY IN THE RISK SOCIETY Starting from the mid-1980s on in particular, new social anxieties in advanced industrial societies have built up around nuclear, chem- ical, environmental, biological, and medi- cal issues (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994a: 131–134; Hanmer 1987; Rothman and Lich- ter 1987; Ungar 1990, 1991, 1992a, 1992b, 1995, 1998a, 1998b). Pertinent examples of these anxieties include the threat of nuclear winter, Three Mile Island, breast implants, various forms of reproductive technol- ogy and biotechnology, the ozone hole, the ‘greenhouse summer of 1988’, the Exxon Valdez, Ebola Zaire, and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE). These new risks have steadily gained greater prominence and cre- ated their own issue-attention cycles. For example, 1986 brought, just one year after the surprise discovery of the ozone crater, Chernobyl, the Challenger accident, and toxic pollution of the Rhine River follow- ing a chemical fi re in Basel, Switzerland. Not surprisingly, ecological concerns rose to the top of the public agenda by the late 1980s (Dunlap and Scarce 1991). Beck (1992, 1995) subsumes these new sites of social anxiety under the concept of a risk society. While risks are an inevi- table consequence of industrialization, Beck claims that the ‘side effects’ produced by late modernization are a new development. As compared to the recent past (and especially prior to the Second World War), these risks have novel impacts that are: (1) very com- plex in terms of causation; (2) unpredictable and latent; (3) not limited by time, space, or social class (i.e., globalized); (4) not detect- able by our physical senses; and (5) are the result of human decisions (cf. Ali 1999). Essentially, the economic gains following from the application of science and technol- ogy are increasingly being overshadowed by the unintended production and distribu- tion of ‘bads’. These have gone from being unrecognized, to latent, to globalized, as new types of technology and processes of produc- tion, new chemicals, drugs, and so on, and new scales of activity combine to accentuate the risks. According to Beck (1992: 24; italics in original), ‘In smaller or larger increments— a smog alarm, a toxic spill, etc.—what thus emerges in risk society is the political poten- tial of catastrophes . . . Risk society is a cata- strophic society. ’ The catastrophic potential of the risk society gives rise to a refl exive orientation, whereby new technologies are subject to increasing scientifi c scrutiny and public criticism. But despite the greater pub- lic involvement and accountability implied by ‘refl exive modernization’ (Beck, Giddens, and Lash 1994), side effects remain for the most part unpredictable and incalculable. They are akin to normal accidents, where what has been scientifi cally ruled out (as either impossible or extremely improbable) predictably occurs (Perrow 1984). With new technologies such as genetic engineer- ing, the scientifi c procedures for monitoring risks and protecting the public shift from the MORAL PANIC VERSUS THE RISK SOCIETY | 373 security of the laboratory to the real world. As society is rendered into a social labora- tory, accidents not only come as a surprise but also can provide a crash course in insti- tutional failings. As this reading is being revised, Canadians are being inundated with news of an E. coli outbreak in Walkerton, Ontario (population = 4,800), that has killed seven people and left 2,300 ill. 1 It provides a good example of a risk society accident discussed by Beck. E. coli O157:H7 is thought to be a new pathogen linked not only to water but to ‘hamburger disease’ (it may be caused by the overuse of antibiotics in animal feed). The fi rst sus- pected E. coli death was on May 15. The public was warned on May 21. The source of the E. coli contamination in Walkerton remains unknown. As the media, environ- mental groups, and opposing political parties forage for information, a host of incriminat- ing institutional failures have emerged and all parties are seeking to avoid carrying the ‘hot potato’. Signifi cant questions (in simplifi ed form) are as follow: (1) Why did it take so long for town authorities to inform the populace of the risk?; (2) Why didn’t the laboratory hired to test drinking water alert medical offi cials? (The pathogen was detected about fi ve days prior to the outbreak; apparently there is no legal duty to do so.); (3) Did the closing of all Ministry of the Environment water-testing labs and their privatization in 1996 contrib- ute to the problem?; and (4) Did downsizing of the Ministry of the Environment (about a 40 per cent decrease in budget and 30 per cent in staff) contribute to the outbreak? With a range of additional questions, four inquiries have been established by the police, the coroner’s offi ce, the Ministry of the Environment, and an independent public hearing (the Provincial Government initially repudiated the latter, but bowed to pub- lic pressures). 2 Several class-action lawsuits have also been launched. There have been numerous reports of bacterial and pesticide contamination in other towns, several of which have been ordered to boil their water. Questions are also being raised about long- term effects, since E. coli O157:H7 can cause permanent kidney damage, especially in chil- dren. Walkerton’s tourist industry has been devastated (with confl icting claims over who should bear the costs), and there is a perva- sive sense in commentary from rural areas that one can never trust the water again. COEXISTING ANXIETIES? How will the rise of such risk society issues affect the occurrence and development of moral panics? A diffi culty in addressing this question is a lack of agreement about what is happening with moral panics. McRobbie and Thornton (1995) argue that panics are harder to constitute than they once were. Citing the failed effort to construct a moral panic around single mothers in Britain, they suggest that the proliferation of mass media and the attendant capacity of folk devils to fi ght back (they are ‘less marginalized than they once were’) have sharply curtailed the potential for moral panics. In contrast, Thompson (1998: 2) refers to the ‘increasing rapidity in the succession of moral panics’ and ‘the all-pervasive quality of panics that distinguish the current era’. These contradic- tory claims can be seen in practice in North America. While successful US moral panics have been directed against single mothers and illegal immigrants, efforts to construct panics around these issues engendered strong resistance in Canada (cf. Eastland 1995). Fear of crime remains high and seems to be immune to data indicating that crime rates have been falling throughout the 1990s. If fear of crime in particular suggests that panics are not about to be displaced by risk society threats, it may be better to speak of a complementary relationship between the two types of anxieties. Thus Hollway and Jefferson (1997: 258) suggest that fear | SHELDON UNGAR374 of crime and risk of victimization must be considered in light of Beck’s argument that risk is ‘pervasive in late modernity’. They argue that fear of crime is a particularly apt discourse within the modernist quest for order since the risks it signifi es, unlike other late modern risks, are knowable, decisionable, (actionable), and potentially controllable. In an age of uncer- tainty, discourses that appear to promise a resolution to ambivalence by producing identi- fi able victims and blameable villains are likely to fi gure prominently in the State’s ceaseless attempts to impose social order. (1997: 265; italics in original) In other words, fear of crime may be a rela- tively reassuring site for displacing the more uncertain and uncontrollable anxieties of a risk society. Jenkins’s (1999: 8–9) study of designer drugs locates a substantive realm where there are elements of convergence between the two types of social anxiety. What he calls ‘synthetic panics’ are linked to new technolo- gies and human ingenuity scientists cast as Dr. Frankenstein, a loss of control, and the creation of ‘forbidden knowledge’—all com- mon elements of risk society issues. The lat- ter has also brought a refl exive orientation whereby victims challenge authorities and fi ght back. Since McRobbie and Thorn- ton (1995) observe a similar resistance by folk devils in moral panic, it appears that relationships between authorities and their publics are becoming more open and less manipulative regardless of the type of social anxiety involved. COMPARING THE OLD AND THE NEW To compare the two types of social anxi- ety, this reading draws on analyses of moral panic because it is a more seasoned concept whose antecedence has allowed time for the systematic formulation of criteria. The most systematic (if at times plodding) historical and theoretical account of moral panic is provided by Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994a, 1994b). They list ‘fi ve crucial elements or criteria’ of moral panic: (1) concern; (2) hos- tility; (3) consensus; (4) disproportionality; and (5) volatility. The ensuing comparison is guided by their fi ve crucial elements, though the organization of the discussion departs from theirs. The present analysis focuses on the con- ceptual shifts that accompany emerging risk society threats and the changing research agenda implied by them. Conceptually, moral panic is linked to a social construction- ist perspective. The main issues addressed in this research concern the exaggeration of the actual threat and the use of panics to engi- neer social consensus and control. With risk society accidents being highly unpredictable and uncontrollable, the social constructionist concern with exaggeration is largely under- mined as an analytic strategy. The roulette dynamics of risk society accidents are also at variance with the model of social control and folk devils used in moral panic research. Instead of authorities and other institutional actors using social anxieties to impose moral order, they can fi nd themselves as carriers of ‘hot potatoes’. Methodologically, the risk society points to an array of new questions and throws into relief some faulty research assumptions and procedures found in moral panic studies. CONCLUSION The present analysis uses the developments associated with a risk society to throw into relief some blinkers surrounding the moral panic–deviance nexus. For all its pitfalls, one cannot wish away the reality that many sociologists want a concept like moral panic as a tool to debunk particular social claims or reactions. Taking a critical posture is not inherently unscientifi c. Rather, it depends on whether or not observers have suffi ciently rigorous evidence to support the contention MORAL PANIC VERSUS THE RISK SOCIETY | 375 that particular reactions are patently unwar- ranted. For most issues, the requisite evidence has been lacking, and hence sociological pronouncements have not been particularly authoritative. Social anxieties raise the basic issue of safety. Moral panics, along with earlier industrial risks, were largely contained in a discourse of safety. Moral deviants could be identifi ed (there were ‘tests’ for witchcraft, with an embedded ambiguity that always rendered it possible to ‘fi nd’ deviants). The deviants were then, at least theoretically, sub- ject to social control. Indeed, even if social reactions were more symbolic than practical, they could still serve to affi rm moral bound- aries. And the latter could be effectuated regardless of whether the claims exaggerated the nature of the threat or not. A safety discourse faces rupture in the risk society. Invisible contaminants, intractable scientifi c uncertainties, unpredictable system effects, the almost tragic calls for ‘science- on- demand’ at the height of an accident, the prying open of standard operating proce- dures, efforts to pass off the hot potato, and potential latency effects that hinder closure of the threat—these all suggest that planning and premarket testing have been replaced by postmarket coping, as things are wont to go boom in the night. Hindsight notwithstanding, it can be pre- sumed that British authorities had no idea that announcing a tentative link between BSE and 10 possible cases of CJD would touch off a marauding storm. As previously noted, the public wants unambiguous answers pertaining to risk and safety, especially for phenomena that are involuntarily imposed on them. A safety model that boils down to the postmarket coping with accidents is not readily sold to a public whose demands for a yes/no risk evaluation hardly countenances a cost–benefi t analysis. With this case and the accumulation of other comparable manufactured risks, the idea that institutions connote safety is severely challenged. According to Beck (1995: 128), The political dynamism of the ecological issue is not a function of the advancing devastation of nature; rather it arises from the facts that, on the one hand, institutions claim to provide control and security falls short and, on the other hand, in the same way, devastation is normalized and legalized. The gap between a safety discourse and the emergent discursive formations and practices built around postmarket efforts to cope with emergencies opens up key questions for soci- ology. These include issues of trust, exper- tise and authority, the fallibility of science, the nature of (once hidden) institutional practices, the threat of immobility and, ulti- mately, the affi rmation of social order. NOTES 1. This summary is based on a careful reading of Toronto newspapers and weekly magazines. It only paints the broad strokes; the detailed ordering of events and miscues remain to be sorted out. 2. The crisis has been so volatile that the Progressive Conservative government in Ontario has back- tracked on several issues and adopted an uncharac- teristically apologetic and conciliatory tone. 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The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture and Deviance at NASA, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Waddington, P.A.J. 1986. ‘Mugging as a Moral Panic: A Question of Proportion’, British Journal of Sociol- ogy 37(2): 245–59. Connections [A]moral Panics and Risk in Contemporary Drug and Viral Pandemic Claims Philip R. Kavanaugh and R. J. Maratea During a 2011 segment on the Today Show , host Matt Lauer gloomily reported, “We live in an age where people jump on a plane and go around the world in one day, and along that route they can spread something like [a deadly virus] to countless people.” Lauer was not discussing the circumstances surrounding an actual viral outbreak, but rather the movie Contagion , which depicts the deadly consequences of a fi ctional worldwide pandemic. Lauer noted that the nature of our globalized society complicates “the logistics of the spread of a virus” and sought the opinion of the fi lm’s star, Matt Damon, to understand how to protect people without causing unnecessary panic: “That’s the quandary that a lot of these people are in, is how do we disseminate this information in a way that creates the least amount of panic, because the panic can be the most dangerous thing.” The media, Damon suggested, “have to resist the temptation to sell the panic because that could actually be putting gasoline on the fi re” (NBC 2011). The menacing specter presented on the Today Show could have been in response to a whole host of social fears that refl ect the inherent risk to living in modern society. From escalators that unexpectedly stop to exotic pets who pose a disease threat “that could rival a terrorist attack” (Associated Press 2006), we are constantly bombarded with tales of unavoidable dangers, ready to strike us down at the most inopportune moments. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we have become conditioned to fear our surroundings for reasons both real and imagined: oftentimes, these shared fears produce collective sentiments that something must to done to correct all of the problems that surround us before they destroy the moral fabric of society. Perhaps you can think of some examples when our shared fears have prompted policymakers to legislate corrective action about some form of deviance: getting tough on crime, declaring war on drugs and terrorism, and requiring sex offenders to be identifi ed on a registry list all refl ect attempts to reinforce communal values by eradicating or controlling deviant threats. Sociologists have adopted the term moral panic to describe the unifi ed feelings of out- rage directed at a person, group, or event believed to represent a threat to the prevailing cultural values of a society. The concept was originally used by Stanley Cohen in the 1970s to analyze and critique British media reports that sensationalized a series of public brawls between mods and rockers—two rival youth subcultures of lower-middle and working-class origins—by suggesting these “youth gone bad” refl ected a decay in family values and young persons’ alienation from mainstream culture (Cohen 1972). Cohen’s key point was that the news media play a key role in constructing and defi ning deviance, and this infl uences public perceptions about what deviant conditions ought to concern us the most. Moreover, media- driven campaigns about deviance often cultivate feelings of fear and moral outrage about CONNECTIONS | 379 a perceived problem that may not represent an objective threat to the public’s welfare. In making this argument, Cohen stressed that the societal reactions are just as, if not more, important to understanding deviance than the threat itself. So why address such a seminal deviance concept in this chapter? On one hand, moral pan- ics still exist in a fashion similar to when they were fi rst defi ned. Consider that we continue to debate the morality of folk devils like controversial musician Marilyn Manson just as decades ago when parents feared that Elvis Presley’s swiveling hips would send their daughters into uncontrolled sexual frenzy. On the other hand, morality is not necessarily the defi ning theme in contemporary panics. Sociologists often speak in more neutral terms of claims-makers (Spector and Kitsuse 1977), and the rhetoric about troubling conditions formerly the sub- ject of moral outrage has shifted toward concerns about individual and public health. The problem of illegal drug use, for example, has been culturally rebranded to emphasize HIV/ AIDS and other disease risks resulting from injection or biochemical addiction rather than concerns about moral corruption and hedonism. Considering such developments naturally begs the question as to whether the moral panic concept, as traditionally theorized, is in need of modifi cation to refl ect developments in the areas of health, risk, and medicalization? This is the chief question we answer in this reading. Our analysis proceeds by means of two case studies. First we examine a new drug scare—that of crystal methamphetamine. Second, we look at claims made about the H5N1 bird fl u virus and the possibility of a global pandemic. We conclude by discussing the useful- ness of the moral panic in understanding defi nitions of deviance and collective threats in the modern era. MORAL PANICS AND SOCIAL THREAT Imagine you are waiting in line to see the latest big budget Hollywood blockbuster and you see demonstrators picketing for the fi lm to be boycotted because it glorifi es violent behavior and drug use. Before you know it, the nightly news is reporting on these protests and journal- ists are asking whether the movie will have a harmful affect on society by encouraging kids to engage in deviance. You may soon fi nd that we are smack in the middle of a moral panic that was started by activists, referred to as moral crusaders (Becker 1963), who defi ned the fi lm as being morally improper and in confl ict societal values and were successful in having those claims disseminated by the media. But in addition to moral crusaders, moral panics also require the presence of a “folk-devil”; that is, some clearly identifi able group that can be blamed for the threat (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994). In Cohen’s study, the mods and rock- ers were the folk devil. For our example, it is the Hollywood fi lm industry, which produces movies that extol drug use, violence, and a whole host of other illicit behaviors. Two other elements that characterize moral panics are sensationalism (Cohen 1972) and disproportionality (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994). Sensationalism refers to outlandish or exaggerated statements, while disproportionality focuses on the gap between that actual harm caused by a social threat and the concern it generates among the public, the media, and policymakers. To better understand these concepts, consider all of the news reports that pop up every October about the dangers of trick-or-treating. As the story goes, countless children each year fall victim to candy that has been poisoned or tainted with razor blades. In real- ity, the dangers of contaminated Halloween candy are nothing more than an urban legend, revisited each year in news reports, which stoke parents’ fears by embellishing the actual fact | PHILIP R. KAVANAUGH AND R. J. MARATEA380 that only two children have ever died from tainted Halloween candy—both killed purposely by relatives (Best and Horiuchi 1985). Over time, sociologists became less interested in the moral concern about some folk devil or deviant group that embodied the threat and more attentive to the irrational and panicked nature of the public reaction. This led British sociologist Stuart Waiton to coin the term amoral panics , which refers to public scares that originate from a diverse range of perspec- tives but are not necessarily “moral” in their origins (Waiton 2008). Increasingly, experts , particularly those working in the fi elds of medicine and science, play a key role in generating public concern and defi ning what is deviant. So, in thinking about contemporary panics, it is important to consider the way deviant behaviors and other troubling conditions are scien- tized or medicalized. SCIENCE, RISK, AND CONTEMPORARY PANICS As claims about deviant threats have become increasingly dependent on medical and scientifi c expertise, they are also increasingly cloaked in the rhetoric of “risk” and place ever-greater emphases on individual health and safety. According to sociologist Ulrich Beck (1992), we are now living in a “risk society” that refl ects contemporary concerns about the numer- ous hazards that have emerged since industrialization but have only become evident fairly recently, as scientifi c evidence has accumulated more rapidly. As these dangers become more complex in modern societies, we are forced to rely on medical and scientifi c expertise to inform us about all of the harms that besiege us in everyday life. Perhaps you have noticed the litany of warnings from experts and other claims-makers that litter our Internet Web pages, periodicals, and news broadcasts. Reports on the dangers of drug use, human traffi cking, immigration, terrorism, and a host of other deviant behav- iors are readily accessible and neatly packaged for our consumption. Notions of risk compel audiences to pay attention because they cultivate fear and are presented to us with a veneer of objectivity. After all, these claims emanate from credentialed professionals. The informa- tion we receive, however, whether from traditional news sources, the Internet, or elsewhere, is often oversimplifi ed, and complex issues are reduced into catchy, easily understandable sound bites. While the moral panic and risk society concepts both focus on the role of the mass media in disseminating claims of harm, the risk society emphasizes “new sites of social anxiety” (Ungar 2001: 273), such as environmental, chemical, and technological threats. What emerges in the risk society is the potential for catastrophes (Ungar 2001). Whether moral panics are in decline or on the rise, we should take the time to think about how the moral panic and risk society concepts are similar and different. Cohen (2002) sug- gests that the development of the modern risk society forces us to think about moral panics in new ways. The following case studies attempt to do just that. By looking at two modern social scares, we can see elements of both the moral panic and the risk society at work. Case 1: Crystal Methamphetamine Use 1 Recently, a panic has emerged over the supposed rise of the abuse of crystal methamphet- amine (also known as “meth”), a drug that is synthesized from inexpensive over-the-counter ingredients and household chemicals. Panic surrounding meth emerged in the aftermath of CONNECTIONS | 381 the war on crack in the late 1990s and has similarly been referred to as an epidemic that is sweeping the nation. Meth use was regularly reported by news agencies as spreading to pre- viously unaffected parts of the country, impacting new and vulnerable populations such as housewives and children, prompting a panic over the perceived growth in use. The following account from New York senator Chuck Schumer is illustrative: Twenty years ago, crack was headed east across the U.S. like a Mack Truck out of control, and it slammed New York hard because we didn’t see the warning signs. Well, the headlights are glaring off in the distance again, this time with meth. We are still paying the price of missing the warning signs back then, and if we don’t remember our history we will be doomed to repeat it, because crys- tal meth could become the new crack. (U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration 2004) Claims of this nature were repeatedly disseminated by mass media over the next three years, culminating in Newsweek christening meth “America’s Most Dangerous Drug” in 2007, emphasizing its threat to mainstream society: “Relatively cheap compared with other hard drugs, the highly addictive stimulant is hooking more and more people across the socioeco- nomic spectrum: soccer moms in Illinois, computer geeks in Silicon Valley, factory workers in Georgia, gay professionals in New York . . . Anytown, U.S.A. can be turned into a meth den almost overnight” (Jefferson 2005). Of course, no empirical research suggests that rates of meth use were particularly high; in fact, data indicate the use rates were far lower than virtu- ally all other illegal drugs during this time (King 2006). Indeed, fears of meth use appeared to be disproportionate to the actual harm it produced, rendering it a classic example of a moral panic. However, several other aspects of meth use and manufacture helped make it a compelling media storyline. First, the production and use of meth has been repeatedly linked to health and environmental problems (National Drug Control Strategy 2006). Most of the reports that reference physical health problems associated with meth discuss consequences such as psychosis, delusions and hallucinations, and brain damage. Although meth can cause users to become violent, reports have been less likely to reference violent folk devils than media reports surrounding crack (Cobbina 2008). With meth, both media and offi cial reports were more likely to emphasize the neurological and physical health consequences, particularly in regard to the effects of use on personal appearance. This suggests that the framing of the meth panic also shares characteristics of the risk society, using scientized claims about health to stoke public fears. Sheldon Ungar (2001) notes that while moral panics are constituted by a small number of mostly familiar threats and deviant groups, the risk society is characterized by a large num- ber of new and unfamiliar threats. In this vein, one such widely reported and novel claim regarding meth use and the physical deterioration of one’s health is related to a phenomenon colloquially referred to as “meth mouth.” Quite distinct from the oral damage done by other drugs, sugar and smoking, methamphetamine seems to be taking a unique, and horrifi c, toll inside its users’ mouths. In short stretches of time, sometimes just months, a perfectly healthy set of teeth can turn a grayish-brown, twist and begin to fall out, and take on a peculiar texture less like that of hard enamel and more like that of a piece of ripened fruit. (Davey 2005) Here we can see a descriptive scientifi c claim about the risks associated with meth use that does not appear disproportionate nor identifi es a folk devil—two identifi ed components of a | PHILIP R. KAVANAUGH AND R. J. MARATEA382 moral panic. However, if we look more closely, this particular health risk was given a catchy name (meth mouth) and offered compelling—if not disgusting—visual imagery that taps into existing cultural fears surrounding “white trash” (Murakawa 2011). News reports and antimeth campaigns rarely elaborated on the complex science behind meth mouth, nor did they refer to competing claims from scientists who found no evidence that smoking meth can cause such damage—certainly not in a matter of months. In this example it is apparent how scientifi c claims characteristic of the risk society converge with the sensationalism that characterizes moral panics in framing this aspect of the meth problem. As the meth panic reached its apex between 2004 and 2007, the content of claims increas- ingly shifted toward scientized tales about individual health, community, and environmental risks. This change in how the panic was framed refl ected a movement away from overstated moral claims about meth use sweeping the nation and toward appeals to scientifi c knowledge that emphasized how meth addiction might progress physically and produces environmental harm. For example, the drugs–crime link (and in particular the drugs–violence link) received signifi cantly less coverage in the popular press, replaced by narratives about the ravages wrought on the body from use, as well as the harmful effects on wildlife and local com- munities: “Meth labs can cause health problems including respiratory illness, skin and eye irritation, headaches, burns, nausea, and dizziness (Butte County Meth Strike Force 2011). While the content of claims having shifted to emphasize environmental and health dan- gers is emblematic of the risk society, the environmental and health aspects of the meth scare was not simply about informing audiences of potential chemical hazards, it also spawned compelling human-interest stories on the immoral consequences of meth production. The following excerpt creates a new class of victims through inherently moral claims about the harm befallen on homeowners and the elderly: The spacious home where the newlywed Rhonda and Jason Holt began their family in 2005 was plagued by mysterious illnesses . . . It was not until February, more than fi ve years after they moved in, that the couple discovered their house . . . was contaminated with high levels of methamphet- amine left by the previous occupant . . . Similar cases are playing out in several states, drawing attention to the problem of meth contamination, which can permeate drywall, carpets, insulation and air ducts, causing respiratory ailments and other health problems. (Dewan and Brown 2009) While we refer to this trend as a shift toward amorality in how the meth panic was framed, it does not mean that issues of morality ceased to be a part of how the issue was covered by news organizations. It is fair to assume that audiences could easily interpret tales of home- owners and the elderly being victimized by the complications of meth manufacture as being fundamentally moral in nature. Rather, the point is that the morality in these panics can intersect with, or even be replaced by amoral claims based on scientifi c knowledge about risk. Indeed, there is still a strong moral component present in many contemporary claims (i.e., a woman charged with murder for breast-feeding while using meth [McKinley 2011]). However, when compared to drug panics in prior decades, particularly the claims driving the crack-cocaine panic in the 1990s, those surrounding meth have been increasingly defi ned by themes of health and environmental consequence. While campaigns about the dangers of meth retain some of the classic elements of a moral panic, amoral claims increased as the meth problem became more familiar. This not only infused novel fears about the dangers of meth into media reports but allowed scientifi c experts to articulate previously unknown harms about meth that helped extend the panic’s lifespan, thus allowing deviance to be defi ned in a number of different ways. CONNECTIONS | 383 Case 2: Avian Infl uenza 2 By examining how fears over methamphetamine use were framed as fundamentally moral in nature, we can better understand how modern panics can become scientized over time and come to be viewed in terms of the risk society. Similarly, those panics initially characterized as scientifi c in nature often develop deeply moral storylines that further dramatize those issues. To better understand this process, it is useful to explore how a seemingly innocuous outbreak of bird fl u in 2003 sparked worldwide fears of a deadly epidemic. The avian infl uenza (H5N1) panic dominated news headlines between 2003 and 2007 and generated considerable public concern that the deadly virus would cause millions of deaths. In retrospect, we know that the much-publicized virus never emerged as a legitimate health risk in the United States and only caused a small number of deaths worldwide: the World Health Organization confi rmed only 217 H5N1-related fatalities worldwide between 2003 and 2007—none of which occurred in the United States (WHO 2008). By contract, auto- erotic asphyxiation—the practice of self-strangulation to achieve sexual arousal—results in 205 to 1,000 deaths a year in the United States alone (Uva 1995). Given such a low death toll, bird fl u might appear as unlikely candidate to cause a widespread social panic. However, it became defi ned as a health risk largely on the basis of proactive fear rooted in the belief that a global outbreak was inevitable. Given that so much about bird fl u was unknown besides the claim that it would cause devastating harm at some point in the future, scientifi c expertise was important to publiciz- ing the potential risk. Health experts were often quoted in news reports and became impor- tant sources of information that defi ned the H5N1 problem for the public. Being that bird fl u was a “ratings winner,” reporters hoping not to be scooped often presented claims made by experts about the dangers of bird fl u as fact without fully explaining either the complex science of virus mutation—a virus becomes particularly dangerous to human health when it transforms into a strain that is easily transmissible between people—or the arguments made by scientists who were skeptical of H5N1 fears. As news reports continued to speculate on the spread of the H5N1 virus and its seem- ingly inevitable emergence in the United States, public health experts claimed, “It would be irresponsible not to prepare for a worst-case situation” (Bradsher and Altman 2004). This doomsday scenario became a prevalent theme in news reports: Several scientists have made predictions on how many people could die in a fl u pandemic, and esti- mates have ranged from less than 2 million to more than 100 million . . . “One of those numbers will turn out to be right,” Thompson said. “We’re not going to know how lethal the next pandemic is going to be until the pandemic happens.” (Associated Press 2005) In fact, some scientifi c experts claimed that avian infl uenza could be more dangerous than AIDS because “it is easier to transmit and much more contagious” (Associated Press 2006; National Public Radio 2005a), while others suggested that a pandemic would be over a thou- sand times worse than Hurricane Katrina (National Public Radio 2005b). With new reports increasingly focusing on worst-case scenarios, there emerged a shift in media coverage away from simplifi ed narratives about the risk of the H5N1 virus and its spread. In their place appeared moral tales about who should be saved, who must be sacri- fi ced, and how to most effectively vaccinate global populations in the event of a widespread H5N1 outbreak. For example, experts suggested that hospitals would be overrun and that patients with a lower chance of survival might simply be allowed to die (Knox 2006). Such | PHILIP R. KAVANAUGH AND R. J. MARATEA384 extreme measures were presented as perfectly reasonable options to minimize fatalities and slow the spread of the disease. The (King County, WA) medical examiner’s offi ce is planning for as many as 1,000 deaths a day— more than 10 times the usual rate. Crematoriums and embalmers couldn’t handle that load. The county’s even planning a Web site to advise families on how to ice down a corpse until mortuary workers could collect it. (Knox 2006a) All of this not only exacerbated fears but also infused elements of morality into the panic. Expecting people to store and maintain the corpses of their loved ones not only placed a moral obligation on the uninfected but also heightened the need to develop a vaccine that would provide immunity to as many people as possible. Many health experts, however, noted that the H5N1 virus was not only resistant to existing vaccines but that the logistics of developing an entirely new vaccine and producing suffi cient quantities to inoculate enough persons to slow its spread would be diffi cult, if not impossible (Bradsher and Altman 2004). Compounding these logistical problems, drug companies demanded that the government guarantee sales of the vaccine to ensure profi t if a global outbreak failed to emerge. Additionally, they required federal immunity should any vaccine cause unexpected side effects. This issue of corporate protection was particularly rooted in moral judgments, as many experts believed that clinical trials would have to be rushed through, or abandoned altogether, should the vaccine be immediately needed. Health experts further noted it was unclear how decisions would be made on who would receive medicines; over 5 billion people were projected to go untreated worldwide (National Public Radio 2005c). These were the most intensely moral moments of the bird fl u scare and exemplify how the thrust of the coverage moved away from scientized risk and toward morality and panic. Some speculated that a reasonable approach would be to let infected older Americans die so that a greater number of young people could be saved. Others suggested that wealthier Americans would be best positioned to receive vaccinations, leaving the rest to either fend for themselves or rely on alternative treatments that might provide only limited protection against H5N1 infection. Although the dramatic value of bird fl u had begun to diminish after nearly four years of media attention, more broadly, the shifting nature of claims—from scientifi c knowledge and toward moral tales about life and death—helped sustain the panic’s lifespan by injecting emotion and fear that resonated with audiences into what proved to be a nonexistent threat. As with the meth panic, the H5N1 bird fl u scare shows us that a fl uidity exists between amoral and moral claims and that in the risk society, rapid dissemination of scientifi c claims can incite panics that are ripe with moral overtones. CONCLUSION In this chapter we examined the continued relevance of the moral panic in explaining an increasingly wide array of amoral social threats. The case studies that we have presented teach us that amoral risk and moral values are essential, interconnected parts of contempo- rary campaigns about deviance and broader social scares. Each, in a manner of speaking, breathes life into the other: the presence of risk produces the need to make moral judgments, and individual or collective morality allows us to understand (or defi ne) risk. CONNECTIONS | 385 Whereas the moral panic concept was initially used to understand overwrought and value- laden reactions to deviance, particularly fears over youth gone bad (Cohen 1972), its appli- cation expanded with refi nements by Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994). These scholars placed greater emphasis on criteria such as disproportionality, while subsequently (if inadvertently) de-emphasizing the morality of the panic and the folk devils responsible—criteria initially mandated in Cohen’s defi nition (1972). However, in doing so, Goode and Ben-Yehuda moved away from the moral panic concept toward the idea of the risk society (Beck 1992)—which emphasizes that media-driven scares increasingly refl ect concerns about biological, chemical, environmental, and medical issues (Ungar 2001). In advanced industrial societies such as the United States, the causes of social harm are progressively more complex, unpredictable, and globalized. Unlike the moral panic, which poses a perceived threat to prevailing social values, the risk society cultivates “the potential of catastrophes” (Beck 1992: 24). As claims of harm in the risk society are characterized by an intense degree of scientifi c uncertainty, it is diffi cult to establish whether they are, in fact, disproportionate. Given such divergences, the question remains whether the reality of our contemporary risk society has diminished the theoretical relevance of the moral panic. If you have ever watched a television newscast or perused news online, then you have already been exposed to moral panics. Media reports are chock-full of tales of urban street crime, violent video games and music, a hypersexualized culture, and school shootings. Each of these relate to perceived moral failures in society. Still, the meth and avian infl uenza scares show that modern panics extend beyond moral boundaries and increasingly refl ect “amoral” concerns. Environmental, scientifi c, and health hazards such as bird fl u do not reside in the exclusive domain of the risk society, just as the meth panic was not framed in purely moral terms. As Hier (2008: 174) notes, “Contemporary moralization fi nds expression in hybrid confi gurations of risk and harm.” We therefore argue that it is important to extend our understanding of what constitutes a traditionally moral panic. The two case studies presented here demonstrate that the moral component of social panics can wax and wane as various parties invoke both moral and amoral rhetoric. These narratives are often mutually reinforcing rather than competing, keeping the interest of both journalists and the public by infusing panics with new storylines that keep them fresh. We therefore suggest that the moral panic and risk society perspectives inform one another and should be regarded as complementary. For any classic concept to remain relevant, it must evolve to refl ect new theoretical developments. We hope this reading illustrates how the moral panic and risk society perspectives can be used together in under- standing a wide array of media-driven campaigns about deviance and other social threats. CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS 1. Think about the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001, and the ensuing Patriot Act, establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, and the declared “war on terror.” Are such post-9/11 developments refl ective of the risk society, or can they be regarded as evidence of a moral panic over terrorism? Are both perspectives applicable? 2. Stanley Cohen theorizes that moral panics could not materialize without mass media coverage that exaggerates the nature and extent of a perceived deviant threat. Is it pos- sible for news coverage to “manufacture” panic about the risks of a nonexistent threat? Using an example like rap music or violent video games, explain how media reporting can defi ne deviance without any actual evidence of social harm. | PHILIP R. KAVANAUGH AND R. J. MARATEA386 3. Stanley Cohen’s concept of the “folk devil” typically identifi es some group of persons as responsible for some morally reprehensible behavior and as a threat to moral values. In the modern risk society, many of the supposedly threatening conditions that qualify as moral panics—at least according to disproportionality criterion—lack the folk devil element. For instance, the H5N1 scare discussed in this reading or the large oil spills in Alaska (1989), the Gulf of Mexico (2010), and Arkansas/Utah (2013), which have harmed both the natural environment and human health. Ungar (2001) notes that in the risk society, threats generate greater diffusion of blame—across governments and corporations, for example. Has Cohen’s folk devil concept outlived its usefulness, or can institutions be regarded as the new folk devils in the risk society? NOTES 1. The research sample for this case study consists of 175 New York Times articles published between 2004 and 2011 and several related publications accessible via the New York Times Web site. 2. The research sample for this case study consists of 193 articles related to H5N1 bird fl u published on the New York Times , Fox News , and National Public Radio Web sites, with the heaviest concentration of coverage com- ing between 2005 and 2006. REFERENCES Associated Press. 2005. “U.N.: Potential for Flu Deaths Enormous.” Fox News , September 30. Retrieved Apr. 17, 2008 (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,170886,00.html). Associated Press. 2006 (March 6). “WHO: Bird Flu Poses Bigger Challenge than AIDS.” Fox News . Retrieved April 14, 2008, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,186974,00.html. Beck, Ulrich. 1992. The Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Becker, Howard S. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance . New York: Free Press. Best, Joel and Horiuchi, Gerald T. 1985. “The Razor Blade in the Apple: The Social Construction of Urban Leg- ends.” Social Problems 32: 488–99. Bradsher, Keith and Altman, Lawrence K. 2004 (September 30). “Experts Confront Hurdles in Containing Bird Flu.” New York Times . Retrieved March 18, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/30/international/asia/30fl u.html. Butte County Meth Strike Force. 2011. “Meth: An Environmental Hazard: Part 1 of 3.” Retrieved August 15, 2011, http://www.2stopmeth.org/events/84.shtml. Cobbina, Jennifer E. 2008. “Race and Class Differences in Print Media Portrayals of Crack Cocaine and Metham- phetamine.” Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 15: 145–167. Cohen, Stanley. 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers . Oxford: M. Robertson. Cohen, Stanley. 2002. Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 3rd edition . London: Routledge. Davey, Monica. 2005 (January 11). “Grisly Effect of One Drug: ‘Meth Mouth.’ ” New York Times . Retrieved Sep- tember 4, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/11/national/11meth.html. Dewan, Shaila and Brown, Robbie. 2009 (July 13). “Illnesses Affl ict Homes With a Criminal Past.” New York Times, 1, 16. Goode, Erich and Ben-Yehuda, Nachman. 1994. “Moral Panics: Culture, Politics, and Social Construction.” Annual Review of Sociology 20: 149–171. Heir, Sean P. 2008. “Thinking Beyond Moral Panic: Risk, Responsibility, and the Politics of Moralization.” Theo- retical Criminology 12: 173–190. Jefferson, David J. 2005 (August 8). “The Meth Epidemic: Inside America’s New Drug Crisis.” Newsweek , 1–8. King, Ryan S. 2006. The Next Big Thing? Methamphetamine in the United States . Washington, DC: Sentencing Project. Knox, Richard. 2006 (January 5). “Seattle at Forefront of Planning for Flu Pandemic.” National Public Radio. Retrieved April 24, 2008, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5128474. McKinley, Jesse. 2011 (August 4). “Woman Is Accused of Murder After Breast-Fed Son Is Found to Have Meth in His System.” New York Times , A12. Murakawa, Naomi. 2011. “Toothless: The Methamphetamine “Epidemic,” “Meth Mouth,” and the Racial Con- struction of Drug Scares.” DuBois Review 8: 219–228. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,170886,00.html http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,186974,00.html http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/30/international/asia/30flu.html http://www.2stopmeth.org/events/84.shtml http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/11/national/11meth.html http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5128474 CONNECTIONS | 387 National Drug Control Strategy. 2006. Synthetic Drug Control Strategy: A Focus on Methamphetamine and Pre- scription Drug Abuse . Washington, DC: Offi ce of National Drug Control Policy. National Public Radio. 2005a (October 14). “How Would the U.S. Respond to a Flu Pandemic?” National Public Radio . Retrieved April 25, 2008, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4958956. National Public Radio. 2005b (October 20). “Ira Flatow on Science: International Avian Flu Panic.” National Pub- lic Radio. Retrieved April 25, 2008, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4967122. National Public Radio. 2005c (November 4). “Considering Alternatives to Traditional Vaccines.” National Public Radio. Retrieved April 24, 2008, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4989790. NBC. 2011 (September 7). “Catch It in Theaters: Matt Damon Stars in ‘Contagion’.” Today Show . Spector, Malcolm and Kitsuse, John I. 1977. Constructing Social Problems . Menlo Park, CA: Cummings. Ungar, Sheldon. 2001. “Moral Panic versus the Risk Society: The Implications of the Changing Sites of Social Anxi- ety.” British Journal of Sociology 52: 271–291. United States Drug Enforcement Administration. 2004. “Schumer: New Data Shows Westchester Becoming Vulner- able to Crystal Meth: Must Clamp Down Before Drug Becomes the New Crack.” DEA News Release . Retrieved May 28, 2010, http://www.justice.gov/dea/pubs/states/newsrel/nyc080504.html. Uva, Jane L. 1995. “Review: Autoerotic Asphyxiation in the United States.” Journal of Forensic Sciences 40: 574–581. Waiton, Stuart. 2008. The Politics of Antisocial Behaviour: Amoral Panics. London: Routledge. World Health Organization. 2008. “Cumulative Number of Confi rmed Cases of Avian Infl uenza (H5N1) Reported to WHO.” WHO, Geneva, Switzerland. Retrieved April 13, 2008, http://www.who.int/csr/disease/avian_infl u enza/country/cases_table_2008_04_08/en/index.html. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4958956 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4967122 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4989790 http://www.justice.gov/dea/pubs/states/newsrel/nyc080504.html http://www.who.int/csr/disease/avian_influenza/country/cases_table_2008_04_08/en/index.html http://www.who.int/csr/disease/avian_influenza/country/cases_table_2008_04_08/en/index.html This page intentionally left blank SECTION 9 Critical Criminology, Culture of Control, Mass Incarceration This page intentionally left blank Introduction Tammy L. Anderson On June 25, 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles, arguing that such laws were a violation of the Eighth Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment. Nationwide, there are about 2,500 people serving life-without-parole sentences for crimes they committed as teenagers (Segura 2012). Such mandatory minimum laws appeared toward the end of the 20th century as the country shifted to a more punitive era in crime control—or to a “culture of control” (Garland 2001)—from an earlier (1960s and 1970s) one grounded in reform and rehabilitation. The punitive shift relies on a just desserts or retribution model as generalized crime policy in the United States. It represents what Simon (2007)—a reading included in this section—calls “governance through crime,” or the daily effects we encounter from a society obsessed with surveillance, security, and punitive penal practices. This culture of control, which governs through crime and mass incarcerates thousands of young people daily, is the new focus of critical criminology and the subject of Section 9. Critical criminology is a school of thought concerned with how the distribution of power and wealth in society impacts the occurrence and control of crime. It maintains that the crimi- nal justice system is sometimes used by politicians, law-makers, and the wealthy—what we might call the ruling class—to subordinate those with much less power and resources. Criti- cal criminology is based in Marxist theory, which maintains that society is fundamentally a place of confl ict among unequal groups. Whereas early critical criminologists like Quinney (1974) and Spitzer (1975) focused on how the economic privileges of capitalists led to unequal crime control of the poor, today’s scholars are concerned with the power of the state or government agencies and actors to cre- ate policies that levy a disproportionate blow to the lower classes in the name of increased security and protection. Section 9 features readings by Simon (2007) and Rios (2006) that discuss the contemporary state policy–focused critical criminology ideas with delinquency, crime, and deviance. The classic reading by Platt (1977) provides important historical con- text to the creation of the juvenile court system in our society, which originated to “save” juveniles from the harsh realities of the sorts of punitive crime control policies we see in full force in our society today. How did we come full circle then? As Platt (1977) points out, the 20th-century juvenile court was created to reverse the severe treatment of young offenders in the 19th century. Yet, this more humane juvenile justice system was rendered inadequate in responding to youth crime, specifi cally violent crime, shortly thereafter. By the end of the 20th century, teenagers—especially poor minorities— were being governed through crime (Simon 2007) | TAMMY L. ANDERSON392 and subjected to a “youth control complex” (Rios 2006) not only on the streets of America but in the very safe places that were charged with helping to protect and shape them: schools. Today, the media saturates us with disturbing stories and commentary about chaos, vio- lence, and mayhem on school grounds. News reports convey a “governance through crime” narrative by portraying schools as hot spots for crime and advocating increased security, surveillance, and control on campus grounds. Recently, the National Rifl e Association called for armed guards on all school grounds to prevent future Newtown, Connecticut, gun vio- lence by troubled teens, such as Adam Lanza. Yet, offi cial data collected by the Centers for Disease Control shows not only that such mass violence is rare in our society but that even smaller-scale victimizations are rare at schools. For example, 17 school-age children were killed on school grounds between 2009 and 2010 (CDC 2012), representing only 2% of all youth homicide in society. The same report fi nds that 12% of 9-to-12 graders were in a physical fi ght, and 5.4% carried a weapon (usually a pocket knife) to school during the same time period. Did such acts of youth violence intimidate faculty and students, making them feel insecure and unsafe? Not really. According to the CDC (2012), 7% of teachers reported being threatened while on the job, and 6% of students claimed they didn’t go to school because they unsafe there. The connections reading by Aaron Kupchik explains the policy approaches to control- ling juvenile deviance and crime over time and highlights their recent punitive expansion to school grounds through what he calls “the school-to-prison pipeline.” 1 Kupchik defi nes this as a “merging of informal (school punishment) and formal (arrest) social control . . . that causes youth to have criminal records and miss educational time, and increases the odds that they drop out of school.” While we might think the school-to-prison pipeline is reserved for the students who get involved in fi ghts or who bring weapons to school, Kupchik notes it can ensnare any student for minor acts, including Salecia Johnson, a six-year-old black girl who was handcuffed and arrested for having a temper tantrum at school. Sixteen-year-old Kiera Wilmot, also African American, was recently sent through the school-to-prison pipeline as well, for setting off a minor explosion as part of a chemistry experiment at her Florida high school. Bowen (2013) reports: After the explosion Wilmot was taken into custody by a school resources offi cer and charged with possession/discharge of a weapon on school grounds and discharging a destructive device. She will be tried as an adult. She was then taken to a juvenile assessment center. She was also expelled from school and will be forced to complete her diploma through an expulsion program. Responses like these to juvenile misbehavior not only illustrate the criminalization of youth in our society today but also how real the culture of control and governing through crime approaches concepts are in our lives today, just as today’s critical criminologists pro- claim. Perhaps the most interesting thing, then, about the Supreme Court decision described above is that it reverted back to the reform ideology of the original juvenile court to strike down the harsh life-without-parole sentence for teens. Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the majority opinion: Such mandatory penalties, by their nature, preclude a sentencer from taking account of an offender’s age and the wealth of characteristics and circumstances attendant to it” and that “under these schemes, every juvenile will receive the same sentence as every other—the 17-year-old and the 14-year-old, the shooter and the accomplice, the child from a stable household and the child from a chaotic and abusive one. (Schworm and Ellement 2012) INTRODUCTION | 393 Does the elimination of such sentencing policies for youth, then, levy a blow to the culture of control idea? Will it reverse the mass incarceration trend Rios and others mention? More interestingly, will the Supreme Court’s decision mark a return to the reform era of the past, the sort that Platt describes in his essay? Such questions point to the circular nature of soci- ety’s classifi cation and control of deviance and lend value to the pairing of old and new ideas about and approaches to deviance that are featured in this book. NOTE 1. See also Aaron Kupchik’s (2010) recent book Homeroom Security (New York University Press) for an explana- tion of the school-to-prison pipeline. REFERENCES Bowen, Sesali. 2013 (May 13). “The Effects of Unchecked Criminalization: Teen Charged with Felony for Science Experiment.” Retrieved June 1, 2013, http://feministing.com/2013/05/01/the-effects-of- unchecked-criminalization-teen-charged-with-felony-for-science-experiment. CDC 2012. Fact Sheet: Understanding School Violence . Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control. Retrieved May 31, 2013, http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/ youthviolence/schoolviolence/data_stats.html. Garland, David. 2001. The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society . Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press. Platt, Anthony M. 1977. The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Quinney, Richard. 1974. The Social Reality of Crime . Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Rios, Victor. 2006. “The Hyper-Criminalization of Black and Latino Male Youth in the Era of Mass Incarceration” Souls 8: 40–54. Schworm, Peter and Ellement, John R. 2012 (June 26). Justices Rule Out Mandatory Life Sentences for Juveniles, Boston Globe, Retrieved April 21, 2013, http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2012/06/26/ high_court_strikes_down_mandatory_sentences_of_life_without_parole_for_juveniles/. Segura, Liliana. 2012 (May 9). “Throwaway People: Teens Sent to Die in Prison Will Get a Second Chance,” The Nation . Retrieved April 19, 2013, http://www.thenation.com/article/167812/throwaway-people-teens-sent- die-prison-will-get-second-chance#. Simon, Jonathan. 2007. “Reforming Education Through Crime.” Pp. 207–231 in Governing through Crime. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spitzer, Steven. 1975. “Toward a Marxian Theory of Deviance,” Social Problems , 22(5): 638–651. http://feministing.com/2013/05/01/the-effects-of-unchecked-criminalization-teen-charged-with-felony-for-science-experiment http://feministing.com/2013/05/01/the-effects-of-unchecked-criminalization-teen-charged-with-felony-for-science-experiment http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/youthviolence/schoolviolence/data_stats.html http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2012/06/26/high_court_strikes_down_mandatory_sentences_of_life_without_parole_for_juveniles/ http://www.thenation.com/article/167812/throwaway-people-teens-sent-die-prison-will-get-second-chance# http://www.thenation.com/article/167812/throwaway-people-teens-sent-die-prison-will-get-second-chance# http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2012/06/26/high_court_strikes_down_mandatory_sentences_of_life_without_parole_for_juveniles/ The Child Savers Chapter 5: The Child-Saving Movement in Illinois Anthony M. Platt DELINQUENT CHILDREN Special provisions for the protection and custody of “delinquent” children apart from adult offenders existed in the United States long before the enactment of the juvenile court in 1899. Nineteenth-century legal doc- trines and sentencing policies made allow- ances for the immaturity and disabilities of children. 1 When Illinois was admitted to the Union in 1817, a child under seven years was not considered responsible for a criminal act, though he could be whipped like a slave for refusing to obey his parents. 2 A revision of the state code in 1827 raised the age of crim- inal responsibility to ten, 3 and, four years later, children under eighteen were excluded by statute from the state penitentiary. Typical sanctions against children included corporal punishment, fi nes, and short jail sentences. 4 In 1833, the criminal code included for the fi rst time a provision that “persons under 18 shall not be punished by confi nement in the penitentiary for any offense except rob- bery, burglary, or arson: in all other cases where a penitentiary punishment is or shall be provided, such a person under the age of 18 shall be punished by imprisonment in the county jail for any term not exceeding 18 months at the discretion of the court.” 5 There was no further legislation pertaining to the treatment of juvenile offenders until 1867 when an act was passed providing for the establishment of the State Reform School at Pontiac for boys between the ages of eight and eighteen who lived outside Cook County. 6 A reform school (established in 1855) already existed in Chicago and was used for Cook County boys until 1871 when it was destroyed in the great fi re. An act of 1872 authorized the transfer of all boys who were serving any defi nite sentence in the Chi- cago Reform School to the State Reforma- tory. 7 The Pontiac reformatory was created for “the discipline, education, employment, and reformation of juvenile offenders and vagrants.” The 1867 act further provided that “all courts of competent jurisdiction are authorized to exercise their discretion in sending juvenile offenders to the county jails, in accordance with the laws made and provided, or in sending them to Reform School.” 8 The establishment of the State Reform School made unnecessary the use of the penitentiary for persons under eighteen who were convicted of robbery, burglary, or arson. Commitment to the county jail for these and other offenses was left to the discretion of the courts. The obvious impli- cation of this provision was that the county jails were to be used for minor offenders, the reform school being reserved for more dan- gerous delinquents. 9 The Reform School at Pontiac was in every sense a minor penitentiary. “The real pur- pose of the General Assembly,” commented the Illinois Board of Public Charities, “was to provide for the erection of a prison . . . THE CHILD SAVERS | 395 with a view to relieving the penitentiary and jails of the state from the various evils incident to overcrowding.” 10 This view was indirectly supported by the Illinois Supreme Court in a case involving the Chicago Reform School, which was administered by a board of guardians appointed by the city judiciary. The reformatory, at an approximate annual cost to the city of $35,000, was designed for boys between the ages of six and sixteen who had committed minor criminal offenses. Sen- tences were indeterminate and boys could be held in the institution, depending on their conduct and attitude, until they were twenty- one. Parents and guardians had the power to commit their children to the Reform School with the permission of the board of guardians and superintendent. 11 The courts could also commit children who were found to be “des- titute of proper parental care, or growing up in mendicancy, ignorance, idleness or vice.” On September 9, 1870, a mittimus was issued by the clerk of the Supreme Court of Cook County committing Daniel O’Connell to the Chicago Reform School. The boy’s father applied to the Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus and, in his decision, Mr. Justice Thornton held that the act in question was unconstitutional because the boy had been committed without benefi t of trial to what was really an “infant peni- tentiary” and “a necessary evil, the neigh- borhood of which decent people desire to avoid.” The judge also asked: Can the State, as parens patriae, exceed the power of the natural parent, except in punish- ing crime? These laws provide for the “safe keeping” of the child; they direct his “com- mitment” and only a “ticket of leave” or the uncontrolled discretion of a board of guard- ians, will permit the imprisoned boy to breathe the pure air of heaven outside his prison walls, and to feel the instincts of manhood by con- tact with the busy world. . . . The confi nement may be from one to fi fteen years, according to the age of the child. Executive clemency can- not open the prison doors for no offense has been committed. The writ of habeas corpus, a writ for the security of liberty, can afford no relief, for the sovereign power of the State as parens patriae has determined the impris- onment beyond recall. Such a restraint upon natural liberty is tyranny and oppression. If, without crime, without the conviction of an offense, the children of the State are thus to be confi ned for the “good of Society,” then Society had better be reduced to its original elements and free government acknowledged a failure. . . . The welfare and rights of the child are also to be considered. . . . Even criminals cannot be convicted and imprisoned without due process of law. 12 Child-saving organizations regarded the O’Connell case as an irresponsible decision designed to discredit and retard their efforts. The State Teachers’ Association wanted an institution to which parents and other “responsible” adults could commit children for indeterminate sentences. 13 The Board of Public Charities argued that the Reform School was in fact a “house of refuge” where juveniles were treated with “tender pity.” The Supreme Court decision, said Frederick Wines, “greatly injured the morale and utility of the institution” and “cast an irremediable blight upon the inmates.” Despite the protests of the child savers, the State Reform School act was revised in 1873 to incorporate the O’Connell decision and make it consistent with consti- tutional guarantees. The right to sentence during minority was taken from the courts as was the right to commit a child for want of proper parental care, mendicancy, ignorance, idleness, or vice. The right of guardianship was also revoked from the trustees. Instead, it was provided that any boy between the ages of ten and sixteen who was convicted of any crime which, if committed by an adult, would be punishable by imprisonment in the county jail or penitentiary, could be commit- ted to the Reform School for not less than one year or more than fi ve years. The courts were also given discretionary power to authorize jail sentences for minor offenses. | ANTHONY M. PLATT396 After land and money had been appro- priated, the State Reform School was fi nally opened in 1871 at Pontiac, about a hundred miles from Chicago. Dr. J. D. Scouller, who was formerly a physician and assistant super- intendent at the St. Louis Reform School, was appointed superintendent and imme- diately contracted with private industry for the cheap labor of inmates. Although the trustees of the reformatory were prevented by law from “leasing the labor” of inmates for more than six hours a day, a contract was made with a Chicago shoe fi rm for the labor of fi fty boys who were to be employed seven hours a day. A similar contract was made with Clark and Hill and Company for the manufacture of brushes. After these contracts were dissolved due to legal diffi - culties, many of the inmates were employed in cane-seating chairs for the Bloomington Manufacturing Company under the direc- tion of the offi cers of the school. Such was the main “educational” program in the new reformatory. In the fi rst four years after the opening of the institution, the legislature appropriated about $23,000, most of which was spent on developing land and farm stock rather than on improving living conditions. 14 On September 30, 1876, the State Reform School housed 180 boys. 15 Six years later, the School was seriously overcrowded with a population of about 250. “The insuffi ciency of room in the institution is such that the boys sleep in bunks touching each other. . . . The dining room, the school rooms, and chapel are all overcrowded.” 16 By 1888, the popu- lation had nearly doubled and, fi ve years later, it was further increased when a law was passed permitting any criminal court in the state to sentence to the Reform School— now offi cially known as the Illinois State Reformatory— any male criminal between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one who had been found guilty of a fi rst offense. The board of managers of the reformatory were correspondingly empowered to transfer to the penitentiary any “apparently incorrigible prisoner, whose presence in the reformatory appeared to be seriously detrimental to the well-being of the institution.” 17 Frederick Wines, secretary of the Illinois Board of Public Charities, was appointed a United States special commissioner to attend the International Penitentiary Congress held in Stockholm in 1878. He was greatly impressed with the congress’s recommenda- tions for the treatment of juvenile offenders and visited several reformatories in England, including Hardwicke Court Reformatory— “a fi ne illustration of the possible results of intelligence and devotion in reducing the vol- ume of crime. . . .” At other institutions, such as the Philanthropic Society’s Farm School in Surrey, he was pleased to fi nd the inmates “occupied in cultivating the fi elds with the spade—the use of the plough being prohib- ited in order that the boys may experience the healthy infl uence of personal contact with the soil.” Wines came back from Europe convinced that it was the task of child-saving organizations to remove reformatories from the jurisdiction of the criminal law: The object of reformatory institutions is well stated; it is not punishment for past offenses, but training for Future usefulness. . . . [T]he operation of the Illinois law is positively injuri- ous. It proceeds from a morbid sensibility on the subject of personal liberty, and from a false idea of the relation of the juvenile offender to society, as well as of the object sought in sending him to a reformatory. It destroys the potency of the agencies employed for his ref- ormation, by encouraging in his mind the hope that obstinate resistance to their infl uence, for a comparatively short period, will enable him to triumph over authority and to enter upon a life of vicious indulgence. Another wise sug- gestion in confl ict with the practice adopted in our state, is that to the utmost extent possible the placing of vicious children in families or in public institutions should take place without the intervention of a formal trial. The statutes of Illinois fail to recognize the fact that con- fi nement and control have a humane as well as a severe aspect nor do they distinguish between THE CHILD SAVERS | 397 confi nement for the protection of society and for the protection of the individual himself. This distinction was clearly perceived by the Congress and the application of the principle in Illinois is much to be desired. 18 By 1885, Illinois did not have a reformatory for delinquent girls and the boys’ reforma- tory was essentially a miniature prison, based on the “stern principle of retribution for offenses committed against the crimi- nal law.” 19 Wines was commissioned by the Board of Public Charities to investigate pri- vate and public facilities for delinquent chil- dren. In 1886, the board reported that the institutional facilities were inadequate in size and resources. They proposed that “delin- quents” should he managed according to the law of guardianship and that institutional care should be extended to “those children and others who swarm in the streets, gather about docks and wharves, and are almost sure to take up crime as a trade.” 20 Ideally, the child savers wanted to intervene in the lives of “predelinquent” children and main- tain control over them until they were immu- nized against “delinquency”: If the prevention of crime is more important than its punishment, and if such prevention can only be secured by rescuing children from crim- inal surroundings before the criminal character and habits become fi rmly established, then it is evident that the state reform school can not accomplish all that we desire, since it does not receive children at a suffi ciently early age, nor does it receive children who still occupy the debatable ground between criminality and innocence, who have not yet committed any criminal act, but who are in imminent danger at every moment of becoming criminals. 21 CHILDREN IN JAIL In 1869, the General Assembly of Illinois enacted legislation providing for the appoint- ment of a Board of State Commissioners of Public Charities. The Illinois board, the fourth such organization in the United States, was established “to consider new questions arising out of experience as to the best modes of treatment and improvement of the various classes of patients and inmates in our several benevolent institutions.” Governor Oglesby, in recommending the legislation, urged the public to never “lose sight of the . . . ever- present claims of the vast multitudes in our midst” who are “affl icted with the terrible diseases which deprive them of sight, hearing and of reason.” The board was composed of fi ve persons appointed by the governor to serve without salary for fi ve years. These commissioners hired Frederick Wines as secretary to guide policy as well as to handle administrative matters. Although the board was an inte- gral part of the charitable machinery of the state, it had almost no administrative powers and was limited in making inspections, sug- gestions, and recommendations. The main scope of the board’s work was directed to the regulation of private organizations and they were authorized and required to visit, at least twice a year, “all the charitable and correctional institutions of the State, except- ing prisons receiving state aid, and ascer- tain whether the moneys appropriated for their aid are or have been economically and judiciously expended. . . .” 22 In addition to these investigative powers, the commis- sioners were required to supervise the girls’ industrial schools (1879), boys’ training schools (1883), private associations receiv- ing children committed to them by the courts (1899), and agencies and institutions placing children in foster homes (1905). By the juve- nile court law of 1899, the board was also made responsible for approving the char- ters of associations desiring to supervise the care of dependent, neglected, or delinquent children. In the fi rst ten years of the board’s work, the commissioners launched a critical and carefully documented attack on the county and city jail system in Illinois. 23 In 1869, | ANTHONY M. PLATT398 agents of the board inspected seventy-eight jails where they found 511 persons, of whom 408 were awaiting trial. Ninety-eight chil- dren under the age of sixteen were discov- ered in forty of the jails. The Cook County jail, which had originally cost $120,000 to be built, consisted of thirty-two poorly venti- lated cells in the basement of the courthouse. On the day of inspection, there were 114 per- sons in the jail—107 were awaiting trial— and as many as 7 inmates were confi ned in one cell, deprived of fresh air, light, and basic comforts. “The jail is so dark,” reported the Board, “that it is necessary to keep the gas burning in the corridors both day and night. The cells are fi lthy and full of vermin.” The Board was especially concerned over the fact that fourteen children were found in the jail. “Here the insane are confi ned, awaiting trial and transportation to the almshouse or asy- lum. Here witnesses are detained who, per- haps have never seen a crime committed, but are too poor to give bail for their appearance in court.” The county jail was found to be based on a system of terror: “It is unjust and unlov- ing, it assumes that a certain amount of suf- fering will expiate a certain amount of guilt, it confi rms criminal tendencies instead of eliminating them, it is questionable whether it diminishes crime, and it is terribly expen- sive.” The board criticized the system for its lack of scientifi c classifi cation and inade- quate educational and labor programs. “The effect of this promiscuous herding together of old and young, innocent and guilty, con- victs, suspected persons and witnesses, male and female, is to make the county prison a school of vice. In such an atmosphere purity itself could not escape contamination.” 24 The county jails in Illinois were found to be “moral plague spots” and “dark, damp, and fetid” places where the inmates’ self- respect was brutalized and crushed. 25 “Such a policy makes great criminals out of little ones.” The commissioners radically pro- posed that “nothing but the overthrow of the system will ever put an end to the present abuses, for they cannot be corrected by indi- vidual effort, but are inherent in the system itself.” 26 The county jails were incapable of reforming “the children of thieves or prosti- tutes, of gamblers and drunkards” who are “exposed to a thousand corrupting infl u- ences” on the city streets. “The atmosphere which many of them breathe,” commented the board in 1872, is such that a future career of crime may be unerringly predicted for them. Shall we leave them to perish? And in perishing to prey upon society, to lead lives of violence, destructive alike to property and life? A thousand times, no. The state has a duty to perform towards its criminal popula- tion, no less sacred and obligatory than that which it owes to the simply unfortunate, and this duty rests upon the same double founda- tion of humanity and self-interest. 27 Despite the board’s efforts, there were few noticeable improvements in the county jail system. 28 An attempt to regulate the condi- tions under which minors were detained was made in 1874 by adding to the law regu- lating jail conditions a clause providing for the separation of minors from older offend- ers and those convicted of felonies. But this provision was a tokenistic and ineffectual remedy which could not be implemented in overcrowded and poorly constructed insti- tutions. 29 At a New York meeting of the National Prison Congress, in 1876, Frederick Wines indicted the Illinois county jail system as a “failure and a disgrace to the intelligence and humanity of the state. We know of no evil which so loudly calls for a remedy.” 30 Illinois was not the only state to have a jail system “antagonistic to the theory of reformation.” In Michigan, the statistics for 1873 revealed that 377 boys and 100 girls under eighteen years were given jail sentences. Ohio, in 1871, committed 182 boys and 29 girls to county jails, and Massachusetts had 2,029 minors in its jails during 1870; 231 of these children were under fi fteen years old. “One of the most painful features of this dreary THE CHILD SAVERS | 399 picture,” commented Wines, “is the large number of young people of both sexes, who are subjected to the contaminating infl uences of such a life.” 31 The commissioners’ fi fth report included a comprehensive survey of all the county jails in Illinois, and it found little improvement in jail conditions. 32 In a moral sense, the atmosphere of the jail is stilling to every better impulse and aspiration; it is profane, obscene, ribald; . . . it is defi ant, reckless, bitter. . . . It is the state—the General Assembly—which is to blame for relinquish- ing its own duty into the hands of boards of county supervisors, who can no more grapple successfully with the criminal class than they can bail out Lake Michigan with a sieve. 33 During the 1880s, penal reformers in Illi- nois shifted their interest from the general physical condition of jails to the effect that these conditions had on particular groups, especially children. Frederick Wines’s visit to England caused him to think about the reformatory system as a means of rescuing children from jails, where they were con- taminated by contact with older offenders. The Board of Public Charities slowly gave up the idea of “overthrowing the system” and instead concentrated on improving jail con- ditions for children who needed special care and attention. Children were regularly detained in the Cook County jail and the Chicago House of Correction, both before and after their trial. Their presence in such places was to be “deplored,” but it was the “fault of our laws” rather than the institutions them- selves. 34 Sunday school and other elemen- tary teaching was occasionally provided by philanthropic individuals and organizations but this proved to be a superfi cial diver- sion. 35 Adelaide Groves, a Chicago socialite, informed the editor of a local newspaper that she visited “the boy’s ward of the county jail, on Sunday afternoon usually, carrying with me books and writing material, stamps and pencils.” She objected to the fact that “groups of idle boys and girls, teaching each other wickedness and sin, were permitted to roam at will through their town. . . . Shall we not, as a Christian city and people, stretch out a helping hand to the boys in the jail and bridewell?” 36 Adelaide Groves suggested that Chicago needed special institutions—detention homes for before trial and reformatories for after trial—to replace the boys wards in the county jail and bridewell. 37 The existing reformatory at Pontiac was considered inap- propriate because it was not a place of deten- tion and it only housed children who had been convicted of a criminal offense. “Let a ‘Detention Manual School,’ with locks, and bolts, and bars, and keys, be provided by Cook County,” wrote Mrs. Groves, “so that these boys who have broken the laws in a greater or less degree may not be driven to still greater crime and degradation. . . .” 38 In 1890, the Board of Public Charities found on the day of inspection nine children under sixteen in Cook County jail and forty- fi ve children in the Chicago House of Cor- rection. “What a shame,” they commented, “to place these little boys in such a school of vice.” 39 Adelaide Groves, in conjunction with the Chicago Woman’s Club, was suc- cessful in establishing a regular day school in the county jail and a movement was begun to separate children from adults in the House of Correction. Two years later, jail conditions had not improved and the Board of Public Charities observed that “one-half of the boys committed for fi rst offenses, under seventeen years, may be saved if they were sent to a reform school, taught to work and educated while there, and when their term is served the stigma of ‘jail-bird’ will not forever stick to them as it does now.” 40 In summary, the Board of Public Charities found little public or political support for its efforts to reform conditions in county and city jails. The board’s policies were largely determined by its secretary, Frederick Wines, | ANTHONY M. PLATT400 who continued his father’s work and intro- duced Illinois to the concepts of preventive penology. When the board turned its inter- est to the problems raised by the detention of children in jails, it found allies in other child-saving organizations and a potential base from which successful reforms might be achieved. CHILDREN OF THE STATE Despite the failure to correct abuses in the industrial schools and to reform the county jail system, there was a general consensus of opinion among state welfare experts and pri- vate child-saving organizations that children should not be processed through the criminal courts or incarcerated with older offenders. In 1891, Timothy Hurley, president of the Catholic-controlled Visitation and Aid Soci- ety, was instrumental in introducing into the legislature a bill to authorize corporations “to manage, care and provide for children who may be abandoned, neglected, destitute or subjected to perverted training.” The bill proposed that the county courts be empow- ered to commit to private child-saving orga- nizations any dependent or neglected child or any child “being trained or allowed to be trained in vice and crime.” 41 This bill failed to become law as its constitutionality was questionable, and it failed to win the support of non-Catholic organizations. The child-saving movement gained momen - tum in 1893, a year for great activity and agitation by state and private organiza- tions. The Chicago Woman’s Club worked to establish an effi cient school in the city jail and to secure a central police station that could be used exclusively for women and children. 42 The sociologist Charles Hender- son, who later supported the juvenile court movement, was teaching courses in crimi- nology and child welfare at the University of Chicago. 43 The annual congresses of both the National Conference of Charities and Correction and the National Prison Asso- ciation were held in Chicago in June; many Illinois representatives were present, notably Lucy Flower and Frederick Wines, who held executive positions. In the same year that John P. Altgeld was elected governor of Illinois, Julia Lathrop was appointed to the Board of Public Chari- ties, and Florence Kelly was appointed chief factory inspector of Illinois. Both women were considered experts on the problem of dependent children, and their appointment to positions of prestige gave the child-saving movement political power and helped to overcome factional disputes among sectar- ian organizations. 44 The presence of national reformers in Chicago and the efforts of Julia Lathrop were no doubt also responsible for the establishment of a state reformatory for delinquent girls in 1893. 45 Governor Altgeld had a considerable infl uence on the child-saving movement. His political career, which was cut short by his pardoning the Haymarket “anarchists,” was notable for its special interest in the welfare of minority groups, especially women, chil- dren, and criminals. He appointed women to political positions on the grounds that they were not as susceptible to bribery and corruption as men. He regarded children as innocent preys for industrial exploitation and criminals as persons in need of guidance rather than repression. The penitentiaries, reformatories, and jails, said Altgeld, were fi lled with “erring fellow-beings,” whereas the “real” criminals were the industrialists and corrupt offi cials who were politically immune to criminal prosecution: 46 No government was ever overthrown by the poor, and we have nothing to fear from that source. It is the greedy and powerful that pull down the pillars of the state. Greed, corruption and pharisaism are today sapping the founda- tions of government. It is the criminal rich and their hangers-on who are the real anarchists of our time. They rely on fraud and brute force. They use government as a convenience and THE CHILD SAVERS | 401 make justice the handmaid of wrong. We are developing a kind of carbonated patriotism which seems to derive its most sparkling quali- ties from respectable boodleism. Our country has great vitality, but these conditions must be arrested or else we are lost. Only those nations grow great which correct abuses, make reform, and listen to the voice of the struggling masses. 47 Altgeld did not take a mere amateur interest in penology, for he was the author of a thought- ful pamphlet concerning Our Penal Machin- ery and Its Victims (published in 1884). It is a pamphlet in the true sense—a humanistic indictment of a “formal, iron-bound, and superfi cial” system rather than a scholarly treatise. Altgeld was horrifi ed by conditions in penitentiaries and “lock-ups,” by the over- crowded jails fi lled with unconvicted petty criminals, and by the economic injustices of sentencing practices. “Only recently have we begun to recognize the fact,” wrote Altgeld, “that every man is to a great extent what his heredity and early environment have made him, and that the law of cause and effect applies here as well as in nature.” He agreed with Enoch Wines that “human justice is a clumsy machine, and often deserves the pun- ishment which it indicts.” Adults and chil- dren alike are degraded, not improved, by harsh punishments. Does clubbing a man reform him? Does brutal treatment elevate his thoughts? Does hand- cuffi ng him fi ll him with good resolves? Stop right here, and for a moment imagine yourself forced to submit to being handcuffed, and see what kind of feelings will be aroused in you. Submission to that one act of degradation pre- pares many a young man for a career of crime. It destroys the self-respect of others, and makes them the easy victim of crime. Unlike most of the child savers, Altgeld was not afraid to acknowledge the economic inequalities behind the criminal law and its administration. He was not a sentimentalist when it came to the economic facts of life. The system, he wrote, “applies the crush- ing process to those who are already down; while the crafty criminal—especially if he be rich—is gently dealt with. . . .” What Altgeld was intimating was that the whole machinery of the criminal law was politically designed to intimidate and control the poor. Even the wealthy whores—“the petted children of sin [who] live in gilded palaces and dress in silks and satins”—were immune to prosecution. Altgeld was one of the fi rst Illinois reform- ers to recommend the use of “probationary parole” and the indeterminate sentence, and he enthusiastically welcomed Enoch Wines’s plan for establishing reformatories for young offenders. 48 By 1893, the presence of hundreds of children in the jails was the central griev- ance of child-saving organizations. The Chicago Woman’s Club became involved in jail reforms through the work of Adelaide Groves, who was made an honorary mem- ber of the club for her philanthropic services. Mrs. Groves found the boys’ wards of the jails to be “training schools” in crime, inhab- ited by “unkempt” and “vicious” children who would “soon be men, ripe for the peni- tentiary.” 49 Discipline, hard work, silence, and segregation from adults were the answer to the problem. “We need a building and a yard,” she wrote in one of her many letters to the press, “strongly constructed with a high wall, for these boys are great ‘skippers.’ ” 50 Chicago’s eleven “police” courts typically handled children’s cases and punished them with fi nes that were “laid out” in the House of Correction at the rate of fi fty cents a day. In the fi rst six months of 1899, 332 boys under the age of sixteen were sent to the city jail, usually on charges of disorderly conduct which included everything from burglary to “fl ipping trains” and playing ball on the streets. 51 In 1893, the Chicago Board of Educa- tion was persuaded to take over the super- vision of boys under seventeen years who were committed to the city prison. The | ANTHONY M. PLATT402 city council later authorized the Board of Education to use money from the “school fund” to equip and operate a manual train- ing school within the city prison. In 1897, the school was renamed after John Worthy, a commissioner of the prison, who encour- aged and provided funds for the building of separate dormitories for delinquent boys. 52 The interest of educational authorities in the city prison was prompted by the fact that a high percentage of the inmate popula- tion was committed for truancy. By laws of 1883 and 1889, children between the ages of seven and fourteen were compelled to attend a public school for at least sixteen weeks in the year. Truant offi cers were authorized to “arrest children of school-going age, who habitually haunt public places, and have no lawful occupation, and also truant children who absent themselves from school with- out leave. . . .” 53 Although children under fourteen were prohibited by law from being employed, the truant offi cers or “attendance agents” were usually unable or unwilling to enforce this provision. In the second report of the Illinois factory inspectors in 1894, Florence Kelly reported that the job of rescu- ing children “from nicotine poisoning, from the miasma of the stock yards, and from the horrible conditions of the sweat shops” was frustrated by the lack of cooperation from the Board of Education. She complained that “unruly children are expelled from school to suit the convenience of teachers.” 54 The John Worthy School consequently became a glorifi ed warehouse for school troublemakers who could not escape—as most boys did—the truant offi cers and fac- tory inspectors. The school’s superintendent, Robert Smith, was quite candid about the fact that he had to deal with “mischievous and incorrigible boys who will not go to school when they ought, and whose behavior is so bad when there that the teachers are only too glad to be rid of their presence in the class- room and wish they had stayed away.” 55 At the Illinois Conference of Charities in 1898, Smith complained that his institution could not possibly reform a diverse group of offend- ers who were herded together in miserable surroundings for only brief period of time: 56 Under present conditions I do not wish to shoulder the responsibility of giving out to the citizens of Chicago that we have a place where mischievous and incorrigible boys are con- trolled and educated on the line of useful citi- zenship, when it is false. . . . The John Worthy School in its present condition is nothing more nor less than a school for crime, and until the city council of Chicago takes steps to isolate the boys from adult criminals, the evil will not be remedied. Smith told the conference that the John Worthy School processed an annual aver- age of 1,300 boys, of which over a quarter were truants. The average sentence in the institution was twenty-nine days. “I would infi nitely rather see my boy a truant,” said Smith, “than run such a risk as having him imprisoned in the John Worthy School under present conditions.” 57 The concern for separate facilities for children was evident also in the juvenile court movement. According to the records of the Chicago Woman’s Club, Mrs. Perry Smith recommended in 1891 the creation of a “juvenile court” so that children “might be saved from contamination of associa- tion with older criminals. Other infl uential members of the club prevailed upon judge Richard Tuthill to hold a separate court for children on Saturday mornings. The club assigned a representative to this special court who acted in the capacity of probation offi - cer and adviser to the judge.” 58 By 1892, the New York courts were also hearing chil- dren’s cases separately. 59 The child savers recruited new members to their cause and sponsored fact-fi nding expe- ditions to other states. Lucy Flower, 60 a for- mer president of the Chicago Woman’s Club, visited Massachusetts to learn about their probation system; Jane Addams and Julia THE CHILD SAVERS | 403 Lathrop attended the National Conference of Charities and Correction held in Toronto in 1897; and Hastings Hart, secretary of the Children’s Home and Aid Society, was a del- egate to the congress of the National Prison Association, where he recommended that dependent and delinquent children “be taken out of the slums and placed in clean homes, physically and morally, and put alone where they will not come into contact with their former associates.” 61 The child-saving movement was further legitimized by the Board of Public Charities, which, under the infl uence of Julia Lathrop, Ephraim Banning, and Frederick Wines, renewed its recommendation that the “gen- eral assembly should make some provision for the care of the destitute, neglected and dependent children of the State.” The board warned that “every child allowed to grow up in ignorance and vice, and so to become a pauper or a criminal, is liable to become in turn the progenitor of generations of criminals.” What was needed, said the com- missioners in their biennial report, was a massive effort to “rescue every child in the State exposed to destruction through neglect or abuse.” 62 Julia Lathrop, whose father was a lawyer, and Lucy Flower, who was married to one, realized that child-welfare reforms could only be accomplished with the support of politi- cal and professional organizations. “This is a legal matter,” Julia Lathrop is supposed to have said. “It must not go to the legislature as a woman’s measure; we must get the Bar Association to handle it.” 63 Ephraim Banning, who served with Julia Lathrop on the Board of Public Charities, introduced the following resolution at the annual meeting of the Chi- cago Bar Association in October 1898: WHEREAS, The State of Illinois and the City of Chicago, are lamentably defi cient in proper care for delinquent children, accused or con- victed of violation of law, lacking many of those reformatory institutions which exist in other progressive states of the union; and WHEREAS, Children accused of crime are kept in the common jails and police stations, and children convicted of misdemeanors are sen- tenced to the bridewell, where they are kept in immediate association with drunkards, vaga- bonds and thieves; and WHEREAS, The judges having charge of the trial of children are in our courts so overburdened with other work as to make it diffi cult to give due attention to the cases of children, particularly those of the dependent and neglected classes; and WHEREAS, The State of Illinois makes no provision for the care of most of the children dependent upon the public for support, other than the public almshouses—unlike many neighboring states which have long ago passed laws prohibiting the keeping of children in public almshouses: Resolved, That the president of this associa- tion appoint a committee of fi ve of its mem- bers to investigate existing conditions relative to delinquent and dependent children, and to cooperate with committees of other organiza- tions in formulating and securing such legisla- tion as may be necessary to cure existing evils and bring the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago up to the standard of the leading states and cities of the Union. 64 The president of the bar association, George Follansbee, appointed a committee consist- ing of Ephraim Banning, Harvey Hurd, Edwin Burritt Smith, John W. Eia, and Mer- ritt Starr, who cooperated with child-saving organizations to engineer a juvenile court bill through the legislature. One month after the resolution of the Chi- cago Bar Association, the Illinois Conference of Charities devoted most of its program to child-saving issues. 65 The juvenile court plan was endorsed by a number of speakers, including B. M. Chipperfi eld, president of the State’s Attorneys Association, who called for state supervision of delinquents. Major R. W. McClaughry, warden of Joliet State Peniten- tiary, stressed the importance of removing children from the jails. “You cannot take a boy of tender years,” he said, “and lock him up with thieves, drunkards and half-crazy | ANTHONY M. PLATT404 men of all classes and nationalities without teaching him lessons in crime.” This criti- cism was echoed by the superintendent of the John Worthy School, who recommended that delinquents be remanded to educational authorities after their trial in “juvenile court, presided over by a careful and most pains- taking judge, empowered to commit them for longer terms than the present law per- mits. . . .” Frederick Wines best expressed the mood of the conference in his closing speech: We make criminals out of children who are not criminals by treating them as if they were crimi- nals. That ought to be stopped. What we should have, in our system of criminal jurisprudence, is an entirely separate systems of courts for children, in large cities, who commit offenses which would be criminal in adults. We ought to have a “children’s court” in Chicago, and we ought to have a “children’s judge,” who should attend to no other business. We want some place of detention for those children other than a prison. . . . No child ought to be tried unless he has a friend in court to look after his real interests. There should be someone there who has the confi dence of the judge, and who can say to the court, “Will you allow me to make an investigation of this case? Will you allow me to make a suggestion to the court?” The conference ended on a note of optimism and unity. “If we could only act together dur- ing one session of the Legislature,” said Julia Lathrop, “we could much improve the leg- islation of Illinois.” Reverend Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Chipperfi eld, Wines, and George Hob- son (a member of the Board of Supervisors of Vermilion County) were appointed to a com- mittee for the purpose of cooperating with other child-saving organizations in drafting a juvenile court bill. Similarly, the Chicago Bar Association examined the legal ramifi cations of child-welfare legislation and asked judge Harvey Hurd of Cook County Circuit Court to prepare a bill for the legislature. Hurd in turn consulted Timothy Hurley, of the Cath- olic Visitation and Aid Society, and Hast- ings Hart, of the Children’s Home and Aid Society. On December 10, 1898, Judge Hurd called a meeting in his offi ce; attending were Lucy Flower, Julia Lathrop, Timothy Hur- ley, Hastings Hart, state representative John C. Newcomer, superintendent A. G. Lane of the public schools system, county jailor John L. Whitman, Carl Kelsey of the Children’s Home and Aid Society, and Frank Soule, a businessman with philanthropic interests. Hurd was elected chairman and Hart secre- tary of this informal committee. 66 The juvenile court bill, drafted by Judge Hurd in consultation with the bar asso- ciation, Hurley and Hart were fi nally intro- duced by John Newcomer in the House of Representatives on February 7, 1889, and by Selon Case in the Senate on February 15. In March, a hearing was held before the judiciary committee of both houses sit- ting together in a joint session. To this hear- ing the Chicago Bar Association sent Hurd, Ephraim Banning, and Edwin Smith; other interests were represented by Judge Orrin Carter, Hurley, and Thomas MacMillan. The constitutionality of the bill was defended by the legal spokesmen, while the representa- tives of child-saving organizations stressed its humanitarian implications. The juvenile court bill was passed without much delay or diffi culty in the Senate but, “owing to repeated delays, it was not put on its pas- sage in the House until the last day of the ses- sion and not fi nally voted on until late in the afternoon of that day.” At this point, the bar association committee approached Governor Tanner and Speaker Sherman, “explaining the objects of the bill and securing their sup- port and cooperation.” Without their help, the bill would probably have failed to be passed. 67 On April 14, both houses of the leg- islature passed “an act to regulate the treat- ment and control of dependent, neglected and delinquent children.” 68 SUMMARY The juvenile court act of 1899 culminated nearly thirty years of reform efforts by THE CHILD SAVERS | 405 child-saving organizations in Illinois. Its suc- cess was due in large measure to the fact that it was widely sponsored and in turn satisfi ed diverse interest groups: 1. Sectarian organizations supported the act because juvenile court judges were required to sentence children to institutions in accor- dance with their religious preference. 2. The industrial school legislation was not repealed by the act and industrial schools retained the power to release their wards or place them in foster homes without the court’s consent. 3. The Board of Public Charities regarded the juvenile court act as a confi rmation of basic principles of preventive penology— comprehensive governmental control over “delinquent” youth, segregation of delin- quents from adult offenders, access to “predelinquent” youth, indeterminate sen - tencing, and minimal judicial formality. 4. Administrators of reformatories welcomed the act as a means of facilitating the com- mitment and release of “delinquents” in a manner consistent with the require- ments of the “new penology.” The juvenile court was not, as some writ- ers have suggested, a “radical reform” 69 but rather a politically compromised reform which consolidated existing practices. Con- servative in origins, the act was passed with the help of infl uential members of the judi- ciary, the Chicago Bar Association, elite civic and feminist groups, state and private child- saving organizations, and politicians inter- ested in “nonpolitical” causes. Three themes in the juvenile court movement further refl ect its conservatism and middle-class bias: 1. “Delinquents” were depicted as needing fi rm control and restraint if their reform was to be successful. The child savers were not indulgent sentimentalists; they recommended increased imprisonment as a means of removing delinquents from corrupting infl uences. Thus, it did not seem inconsistent to the president of the Illinois Humane Society that he should support the juvenile court for young offenders and corporal punishment and the whipping post for older offenders. 70 It is inaccurate to regard the child savers as liberal reformers and their opponents as staunch conservatives, for the author- itarian impulse was implicit in the child- saving movement. 2. Although the child savers affi rmed the value of the home and family as the basic institutions of American society, they facilitated the removal of children from “a home which fails to fulfi ll its proper function.” The child savers set such high standards of family propriety that almost any parent could be accused of not fulfi ll- ing his “proper function.” In effect, only lower-class families were evaluated as to their competence, whereas the propri- ety of middle-class families was exempt from investigation and recrimination. 3. The blurring of distinctions between “dependent” and “delinquent” children and the corresponding elimination of due process for juveniles served to make a social fact out of the norm of adolescent depen- dence. “Every child is dependent,” held the Board of Public Charities. “Dependence is a child’s natural condition.” It was one task of the child savers to punish prema- ture independence in children and restrict youthful autonomy. Proponents of con- stitutional protections for children were rebuked for impeding the “systematic and adequate effort for the salvation of all the children who are in need of savior.” 71 NOTES 1. Please consult the original (1977) printing of The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency by the University of Chicago Press for complete note information. See Appendix, pp. 183–202. 2. This subject is cursorily treated by Andrew A. Bruce, “One Hundred Years of Criminological Development in Illinois,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 24 (1933): 11–49. For a more | ANTHONY M. PLATT406 general analysis, see Wiley B. Sanders, “Some Early Beginnings of the Children’s Court Move- ment in England,” National Probation Associa- tion Yearbook 39 (1945): 58–70. See also Leslie A. Cranston, Early Criminal Codes of Illinois and their Relation to the Common Law of England . 3. “An infant under the age of 10 years shall not be found guilty of any crime or misdemeanor” (Revised Laws of Illinois, 1827, sect. 4). 4. Revised Laws of Illinois, 1827, sects. 29, 46, 47, 48, 50. See also, Helen Rankin Jeter, The Chicago Juvenile Court , pp. 1–2. 5. Revised Laws of Illinois, 1833, sect. 158. 6. Ibid. , 1867, sect. 16. 7. Ibid. , 1872, sects. 1, 2, 3. 8. Ibid. , 1867, sect. 16. 9. This point is suggested by Elizabeth Francis Hirsh, A Study of the Chicago and Cook County School for Boys , pp. 3–13, and by Evelyn Harrier Ran- dall, The St. Charles School for Delinquent Boys , pp. 2–13. 10. First Biennial Report of the Board of State Com- missioners of Public Charities of the State of Illi- nois (hereafter BRPC1 ), p. 72 (Springfi eld: Illinois Journal Printing Offi ce, 1871). 11. Ibid. , p. 167. 12. People v. Turner , 55 Ill. 280 (1870). 13. BRPC4 , p.149 (Springfi eld, Illinois: D. W. Lusk, 1877). 14. Ibid. , pp. 152–56. 15. BRPC10 , p. 10 (Springfi eld: Springfi eld Printing Company, 1888). 16. BRPC7 , p. 92 (Springfi eld: H. W. Rokker, 1883). Two years later, it was reported that “the boys sleep in double-deck bunks, one over the other, placed close to each other, side by side and end to end, with passages at the ends to enable them to crawl into bed. The dining room barely con- tains room enough for them to eat standing—not enough for them to sit down at their meals. From every point of view, sanitary as well as disciplinary, this arrangement is in the highest degree injurious and discreditable to a great and wealthy State” (BRPC8, p. 64 [Springfi eld: H. W. Rokker, 1885]). 17. Hirsh, Study of School for Boys , p. 5. 18. BRPC5 , pp. 273–99 (Springfi eld: Weber, Magie and Co., 1879). 19. BRPC9 , p. 52 (Springfi eld: T. W. Kokker, 1887). 20. Ibid. , pp. 52–84. 21. BRPC6 , p. 104 (Springfi eld: H. W. Rokker, 1880). 22. BRPC1 , pp. 2–3, 7. For a lengthy discussion of the Board’s powers, see Johnson, Public Policy and Privale Charities , pp. 52f. 23. “Mere suspicion of crime places the accused under ban, and deprives him of all rights, except to those of an enemy. The conversion of a criminal into an honest man seems to be looked upon as so hopeless an undertaking as to be unworthy of even an effort. He is treated as an outlaw, a foe to mankind, an Ishmaelite, whose hand is against every man, and every man’s hand against him. . . . A man who becomes a criminal . . . does not cease to be a man. As a man, he has rights, which, as men, we are bound to respect. We have no more right to infringe upon his rights, than he has to infringe upon ours. We may demand restitution. We may use all wise and lawful means to cure him of his weakness and criminal tendencies. But to outlaw him, to cut him off as an unworthy mem- ber, is like amputating a sore fi nger, without fi rst endeavoring to heal the sore. Injustice to the crim- inal is an injury to society” ( BRPC1 , pp. 126–27). 24. Ibid. , pp. 175–84. 25. BRPC6 , p. 117. 26. BRPC1 , p. 187. 27. BRPC2 , pp. 197–38 (Springfi eld: State Journal Steam Print, 1873). 28. BRPC3 , p. 51 (Springfi eld: State Journal Steam Print, 1875). 29. Randall, The St. Charles School , p. 5. 30. BRPC4 , p. 81. “Thus society, by its own want of foresight, its indifference, its indolent self-indulgence and toleration of evils which it would cost more effort to obviate than society is willing to make, actu- ally trains offenders, stimulates and qualifi es them to become great criminals. In effect, crime is not pun- ished at all, nor is any intelligent attempt made to reform the offender, so long as the crime assumes the form of a mere misdemeanor. Not until it reaches the stage of actual felony does society make any earnest attempt to grapple with the evil” ( ibid. , p. 187 ) . 31. Ibid. , pp. 186–87. 32. Although twenty-fi ve new jails were built in six years from 1870 to 1876, the board complained that many of them merely perpetuated the old evils. “If we had been consulted with reference to some of these jails, we could have saved some of the counties from serious mistakes and unneces- sary expense. The building of so many new jails is, in one aspect of the question, to be regretted, for the reason that the amount of money spent in their erection, during ten years past, aggregat- ing, as it does, three-quarters of a million dollars, might have been applied to better effect in the construction of district prisons, built by the state itself” ( BRPC5 , p. 180). 33. Ibid. , p. 176. 34. BRPC7 , p. 307. 35. “The so-called school room is furnished with three long benches, one table, a chair and a stool. These benches are so crowded that the boys who are attempting to write upon slates strike their elbows THE CHILD SAVERS | 407 into their next neighbor, who vigorously resists, therefore the writing lesson is not a success. The books are from the attics of our friends and embrace much ancient literature. . . . Fortunately the sing- ing books are alike, and that lesson is received and rendered with the vigor of boys; they beat the time with their feet and heads. . . . Miss Wright makes this her strong lesson, explaining the meaning of the gospel words, and letting them select the hymns to be sung” (letter from Adelaide Groves to Chi- cago Inter Ocean , November 12, 1884). 36. Chicago Inter Ocean , June 6, 1884. 37. Ibid . 38. Chicago Tribune , November 6, 1 888. 39. BRPC11 , p. 194 (Springfi eld: H. W. Rokker, 1890). 40. BRPC12 , p. 196 (Springfi eld: H. W. Rokker, 1893). 41. Timothy D. Hurley, Origin of the Illinois Juvenile Court Law , pp. 139–40. 42. Henriette Greenbaum Frank and Amalie Hofer Jerome, Annals of the Chicago Woman’s Club for the First Forty Years of Its Organization, 1876– 1976 , p. 125f. 43. For an interesting survey of the teaching of soci- ology and criminology in American universities, see Daniel Fulcomer, “Instruction in Sociology in Institutions of Learning,” Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction , pp. 67–85 (1894). 44. “Up to that time, visitation of State and County institutions had been largely perfunctory . . . and limited in the main to the State Institutions. Miss Lathrop determined to visit and see for herself and in the course of the work she went to every jail and poor house in the State, even in the most out-of-the-way localities. She was shocked at the conditions she found, young children shut up with the most depraved adults and being trained in crime instead of being kept away from it. She determined not to rest until some remedy for the these conditions was found” (Hurley, Origin of the Illinois Juvenile Court Law , pp. 17–18). 45. Revised Laws of Illinois, 1893, pp. 119–23. 46. Proceedings of the Annual Congress of the National Prison Association , pp. 13–19 (Chicago: 1893). For an analysis of Altgeld’s political career, see Ray Ginger, Altgeld’s America: The Lincoln Ideal Versus Changing Realities . 47. Biennial message to the legislature by Governor Altgeld in the Journal of the House of Representa- tives of Illinois (1897). 48. John P. Altgeld, Our Penal Machinery and Its Vic- tims , pp. 20 , 24 , 34–37, 41–42. 49. Chicago Inter Ocean , June 6, 1884. 50. Ibid. , December 1884. Actual date is not known but a copy of the letter is available at the Chicago Historical Society. 51. Sophonisba P. Breckenridge and Edith Abbott, The Delinquent Child and the Home , pp. 1–2 (New York: Survey Associates Inc., 1916). 52. Robert M. Smith, “Boys in City Prison,” Proceed- ings of the Illinois Conference of Charities (1898), in BRPC15 , pp. 331–35 (Springfi eld: Phillips Brothers, 1899). 53. Revised Laws of Illinois, 1883, pp. 131–32: “An Act to Secure to all Children the Benefi t of an Elementary Education.” Revised Laws of Illinois, 1889, p. 237: “An Act Concerning the Education of Children.” 54. Second Annual Report of the Factory Inspectors of Illinois (1894). 55. Smith, “Boys in City Prison,” p. 331. 56. “For the lack of proper sleeping quarters, where they could be properly confi ned and isolated from the old and hardened criminals, these boys pass their time harming themselves and injuring the commu- nity by careers of vice, diversifi ed by occasional short terms in the county jail or house of correc- tion” (Smith, “Boys in City Prison,” pp. 328–37). 57. Ibid . 58. “The work of this noble organization was ini- tial, persistent and effective. Well do I remember how many years ago, when it became my turn to hold the Criminal Court, I fi rst visited the jail and found the cells of the old jail fi lled with boys, some of them under what was then called the age of responsibility, ten years. I requested the State’s Attorney to have a calendar of all the boys’ cases made out for me, telling him that I wished to dispose of their cases before I began on the adults. . . . Mts. Lucy Flower, Mrs. Perry Smith and others . . . at once set to work to do what could be done to improve the situation. . . . The Club thereupon employed and paid for some two or three years a young lady who gave her service in behalf of the little children in the jail every day. No more loving and inspiring work was ever done by woman. . . . Then began the work of chang- ing the law of Illinois with respect to the care and treatment of all boys and girls under 17 years of age, who were found in a condition of delin- quency. In all the consultations and work done in the preparation of this law, which became the Juvenile Court Law of Illinois, the most humane and wisest law ever enacted in any state of the Union, the Woman’s Club took a most important and effective part. . . . The fi rst probation offi cer appointed by the Judge of the Juvenile Court was one of the remarkable women of Chicago, Mrs. Alzina P. Stevens, then residing at Hull-House. Mrs. Flower brought her to me and said that ‘this lady, you will fi nd, can be very helpful as a proba- tion offi cer, and we will see that she is paid for her | ANTHONY M. PLATT408 service,’ as there was no provision in the law for the payment of probation offi cers—not even one . . .” (Richard Tuthill, the fi rst juvenile court judge in Illinois, quoted by Frank and Jerome, Annals of the Chicago Woman’s Club , pp. 179–80). 59. Hurley, Origin of the Illinois Juvenile Court Law , p. 14. 60. For a portrait of this reformer, see Harriet S. Farwell, Lucy Louise Flower, 1837 – 1920; Her Contribution to Education and Child Welfare in Chicago . 61. Proceedings of the Annual Congress of the National Prison Association , p. 382 (Indianapolis, 1899). 62. BRPC15 , pp. 62–72. 63. Hurley, Origin of the Illinois Juvenile Court Law , p. 18. 64. I would like to thank the Chicago Bar Associa- tion for providing me with a copy of the original document. 65. Proceedings of the Illinois Conference of Chari- ties , pp. 310–37. 66. Hurley, Origin of the Illinois Juvenile Court Law , pp. 21–32. 67. Report of the Chicago Bar Association Juvenile Court Committee (October 28, 1899). A copy of the original document was provided by the Chicago Historical Society. Louise Bowen gives another, more dramatic, version of how the act was passed: “I happened to know at that time a noted Illinois politician; I asked him to my house and told him I wanted to get this law passed at once. The legislature was in session; he went to the telephone in my library, called up one of the bosses in the Senate and one in the House and said to each one, There is a bill, number so and so, which I want passed; see that it is done at once. One of the men whom he evidently called said, ‘What is there in it?’ and the reply was, ‘‘There is nothing in it, but a woman I know wants it passed.’ And it was passed, I thought with horror at the time, supposing it had been a bad bill, it would have been passed in exactly the same-way” ( Growing Up With a City , p.107). 68. Revised Laws of Illinois, 1899, pp. 131–37. 69. Rosenheim, Justice for the Child , p. 7. A similar inference is made by Herbert H. Lou, Juvenile Courts in the United States , pp. 1–31, and Board of Commissioners of Cook County, Illinois, Juve- nile Court of Cook County: Fiftieth Anniversary Report (1949). 70. New York Evening Journal , May 17, 1899. 71. BRPC15 , pp. 62–72. The Hypercriminalization of Black and Latino Male Youth in the Era of Mass Incarceration Victor M. Rios In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating. (Foucault, 1995, 303) CARCERALIZATION AS A YOUTH OF COLOR PHENOMENON In the era of mass incarceration, Black and Latino youth face a coming of age crisis determined by criminalization and carcer- alization. The majority of Black and Latino inmates are youth; almost three-quarters of all Black and Latino jail and prison inmates in the United States are between the ages of 20 and 39. 1 As of 2003 12% of all Black males in their 20s were in prison or jail; almost 4% of Latinos and only 1.5% of whites in their 20s were incarcerated (Har- rison, 2003). One in three African American youth ages 20 to 29 are incarcerated or on probation or parole (Harrison, 2003). While Latino youth do not match the outrageous incarceration rates that Black youth contend with, they too are dispropor- tionately confi ned, especially in areas with large Latino populations. For example, as of 2002, in California, Latino youth repre- sented 36% of the state’s youth population; however, they made up close to 60% of the state’s juvenile detainees (Villaruel & Walker, 2002); Black youth made up roughly 7.8% of the state’s population, yet they comprised almost 30% of juvenile detainees (Males & Macallair, 2000). In Black and Latino communities, mass incarceration has become a youth phe- nomenon. In California, youth of color are 2.5 times more likely than white kids to be tried as adults and 8.3 times more likely to be incarcerated by adult courts. Ninety-fi ve percent of all juveniles sent to adult court are youth of color. In Los Angeles a stunning 91% of all cases in the adult criminal court involve youth (Males & Macallair, 2000). Recent punitive expansion and the mate- rial effects of mass incarceration have come to affect some of the youngest populations in Black and Latino communities. The tra- jectory of this reading is to account for the social effects of mass incarceration and crim- inalization on young males of color, those populations most affected by these systems that generate and exacerbate social misery. These young adult deviants do not become deviants on their 18th birthday, rather they are systematically constructed as criminals and face the wrath of the penal state and criminalization as early as 8 years of age (see for example Ferguson, 2000). Scholars have argued that in the contemporary histori- cal bloc punishment and carceralization are at the center of racial inequality and social misery (Castells, 1997; Davis, 2003; Parenti, 2000; Wacquant, 2002). Expanding on this argument, this reading will demonstrate that spillover from the ever-expanding power | VICTOR M. RIOS410 and punitiveness of criminal justice policies and practices affect every member of poor racialized communities in multiple ways, especially urban youth of color. Some schol- ars have begun to analyze this structure of punishment that extends its tentacles beyond the offender and systematically damages the transgressors family, friends, and community. Scholars have termed this spillover effect the “collateral consequences of mass imprison- ment” (Chesney-Lind & Mauer, 2004). These scholars have argued that punishment not only affects the confi ned individual but rather expands itself to family members and the inmate’s community. Building on this argu- ment I demonstrate how the punitive expan- sion of the state has created a new system of social relations that stigmatize and criminal- ize poor youth of color at an everyday level. Mass imprisonment and the cultural, political, and economic arrangements that accompany it have had a devastating social impact on young male adolescents in the inner city, specifi cally Black and Latino male youth. Furthermore, the lives of Black and Latino youth who are labeled “deviant” are enforced by institutional entities that treat them as serious criminal threats ready to commit savage acts of violence even if they have only been arrested for drug posses- sion or status offenses. This collateral con- sequence of mass imprisonment has brought about a network of criminalization, sur- veillance, and punishment that serves as a main socializing and control agent for Black and Latino youth who have been labeled “deviant.” THE RESEARCH CONTEXT: STUDYING CRIMINALIZED EXPERIENCES The reading is based on 40 in-depth, semi- structured “ethnographic interviews” (Spradley, 1979) I conducted in Oakland, San Francisco, and Berkeley, California, with Black and Latino youth ages 14 to 18. Each of these cit- ies has unique social, cultural, economic, and political landscapes. However, they are part of a larger metropolis—the San Francisco Bay Area—where extreme racial disparities in family incomes, disproportionate incar- ceration rates by race, and major disparities in educational, housing, transportation, and employment between communities of color and white communities exist. For example, as of 2002 in Alameda County (where Oak- land and Berkeley are located), non-Hispanic whites held higher-paying, higher-skill jobs, and they held 68% of all executive, adminis- trative, and managerial positions. Minorities represented 42% of Alameda County’s work force but made up 60% of service-sector jobs. 2 The Bay Area has the highest general unemployment rate in the state, 8%, with people of color making up the bulk of those who are unemployed. 3 This number repre- sents the general adult population. Some community workers and probation offi cers I have talked to estimate the unemployment rate for young males of color between ages 18 and 30 to be over 30%. In each city, I grounded myself in a spe- cifi c community setting where Black and Latino youth were mutually accessible. In the past 20 years all 3 cities’ traditionally Black communities have seen a huge increase in Latino populations therefore transforming them into Black and Latino communities. In Berkeley and San Francisco I conducted research based at youth development com- munity centers (Berkeley Youth Alternatives and Real Alternatives Project). In Oakland I conducted research based out of a youth-led organization that focused on political mobi- lization in the community (OLLIN). I asked youth development workers, youth leaders, and teachers to help identify and recruit “criminalized” youth. 4 After recruiting a fi rst round of youth I asked them to connect me with youth who had a prior arrest. This allowed me to interview youth from simi- lar environments with similar experiences THE HYPERCRIMINALIZATION OF BLACK AND LATINO MALE YOUTH IN THE ERA | 411 in order to compare differences in personal attitudes, experiences, and ethnicity. After recruiting the youth I followed them to their schools, homes, juvenile court appearances, and leisure spaces. Half of the youth I interviewed was Black (20) while the other half was Latino (20). I wanted to contrast and compare the expe- riences of both racialized groups. Were their experiences different even though they lived and grew up in similar environments? If the youth I observed and interviewed, Black or Latino, lived in the same neighborhoods and attended the same schools, were they crimi- nalized in similar ways? Did they commit similar crimes? Did they have the same atti- tudes about the criminal justice system? I recruited a control group of 10 youth who had never been arrested but lived in the same area and associated with the juve- niles who had been arrested. Although these youth were “at-risk” and often participated in negative behaviors, they were consid- ered to be “good kids” by their peers. This control group would show the difference in criminalization between those arrested and those who had not been arrested but had been identifi ed in the community as risks. Six (out of 30) of the arrested youth were arrested between the ages of 12 and 14; 17 were arrested at age 15; and 7 had been arrested between the ages of 16 and 17. For most (28 out of 30), all arrests happened for nonviolent acts such as vandalism, petty theft, and burglary. Out of the snowball sam- ple of youth that I recruited only 2 arrests had taken place for violent crimes against other youth. A limitation to this study was that I did not recruit many violent offenders. However, the sample seems representative of juvenile delinquency in the inner city: most youth are arrested for nonviolent offenses but are managed as a serious criminal risk despite their status. Of the 2 violent offenders that I studied, Tyrone had stabbed another youth and Jose had hit another youth in the head with a baseball bat. Their initial arrests and experiences were similar to the youth who had not committed acts of violence. The violent youth were arrested multiple times for nonviolent offenses prior to their fi rst violent offense. Both Tyrone and Jose ended up incarcerated for long periods of time after I conducted my interviews with them. Jose would later get arrested for shooting another youth in the leg. As of the fall of 2005 he was on trial facing 5 to 20 years in prison. Tyrone ended up arrested for assaulting a police offi - cer. He was sentenced to 14 months at the county jail. For the 28 youth who were arrested for nonviolent crimes, their experiences with the justice system were similar: they went to juvenile hall from 1 to 60 days; they were released on a monitoring device and/or on probation; and they were given specifi c con- ditions of probation—to go directly from school to home, not to associate with their former peers, and not to hang out on the streets. Ten of them ended up with a monitor- ing device shackled to their ankle that would beep and alert the probation department if the youth wandered away from their home. GOVERNED AS CRIMINALS If social structures are visible and identifi - able through the everyday “common sense” expressions and interactions that individuals in society have with one another (Garfi nkel, 1967), then, the “youth control complex” became visible to me as I interviewed and observed my subjects in their everyday inter- actions and conversations about criminaliza- tion. However, beyond simply examining my subjects as agents whose behavioral patterns I could observe in order to understand larger social structures, I took seriously the experi- ence and thinking that youth brought to the table. Taking the voice of youth seriously allowed me to conduct my research “from the ground up.” From this perspective, I fol- lowed the logic and structure of the social | VICTOR M. RIOS412 worlds they inhabited. This approach led me to understand how the interactions that youth had with individuals who criminalized them were used to make sense of their social world. The fi ndings show that youth not only felt the direct effects of incarceration and police repression, but they also experience what Jonathan Simon (1997) calls “governance through crime.” That is, the everyday impact that citizens experience from encounters with a society obsessed with surveillance, security, and punitive penal practices. For Simon, in a society that over the past 30 years has increased its prison population over 5-fold and that continues to generate draconian punitive sentencing, it is not only the crimi- nal that suffers from the hyperpunitiveness but also the everyday law-abiding citizen. He argues that in today’s society, politicians have heavily “governed through crime.” For Simon, crime has become the central tool for governing the everyday citizen, even if they have never committed crime. Crime and punishment have been prioritized in the United States to infl uence the actions of the everyday citizen. It is not that the United States has a crisis of crime in its inner cities but rather it is a crisis of “governance,” both in the public and private sphere. This crisis of governance stems not from an increase in crime but from the failure of traditional institutions of governance like the welfare state, labor market, and the education sys- tem and from the states inability to provide social and economic security (Simon, 1997). The youth in this study are youth that have been affected by the decline of the wel- fare state and the expansion of the criminal justice system. As the youth attempted to deal with this social dislocation—this dis- orientation, where they could not expect any help or support from the government, where the government had become an abu- sive step-parent fi gure, beating its children, throwing them in a room with no windows nor doors—they began to lose hope in the government and in themselves. The youth felt that on an everyday level, their lives were being defi ned and controlled through dis- courses and practices of crime and policies related to crime even when they were not committing crime. As I continued to inter- view and observe them I realized that even if they did not want to commit crime, be seen as delinquent, or act like “thugs,” they were already rendered as suspects by many in the community. Because of this, they developed identities that they often wished they could renounce. They began to resist, and as they resisted they began to embrace their own criminalization. GROWING UP A CRIMINAL Jose Jose is a 17-year-old, gang-involved youth from Berkeley that I have worked with since he was 13. He has been in and out of trouble since 6th grade and has been to juvenile hall 4 times. From an early age Jose has experienced policing and surveillance from both criminal justice and noncriminal justice institutions. Over time, Jose has come to understand this combined effect of being criminalized from multiple directions as a single system out to dehumanize him. He explains, Man, it’s like everyday teachers gotta’ sweat me, police gotta pocket check me, mom’s gotta’ trip on me, and my P.O.’s gotta stress me. . . . It’s like having a zookeeper watching us at all times. We walk home and we see them [probation offi cers and police], we shoot some hoops and we see them, we take a shit at school, and we see them. . . . 5 Jose is describing an all too common phe- nomenon where penal practices, traditionally carried on by probation and police offi cers, have entered other social and private spaces including recreation (community centers), schools, and even the family. THE HYPERCRIMINALIZATION OF BLACK AND LATINO MALE YOUTH IN THE ERA | 413 Jose comes from a poor, single-mother household. He has a vivid memory of devi- ance he saw committed around him and that he committed as early as age 9. He remem- bers seeing fi ghts on the way from school to home at least once a week. When asked how many crimes, of all types, he remembers see- ing on a daily basis, he responds: Shit! I can’t even count. Crime, I see it every day, all day. It’s like if you try to hide from it, it will fi nd you anyway . . . 6 Jose remembers his fi rst act of deviance: The fi rst time I was in third grade. I had set the bathroom garbage can on fi re. We ran away, and they caught us and handcuffed us. . . . I was just trying to do something funny. Police came and arrested me and my friends. They only had a pair of handcuffs and they handcuffed me and my friend together. This is the fi rst time I got arrested. I also fl unked that year. 7 Jose and 26 out of 30 previously arrested youth I interviewed report that teachers at school have direct contact with the school offi cer and his probation offi cer. After school, when Jose attends the local youth develop- ment community center to participate in leisure activities, he meets with his proba- tion offi cer who is also stationed at the com- munity center. His mother is forced to deal with the probation offi cer since he maintains direct contact with her and begins to infl u- ence the way she parents. Jose explains: My moms started trippin’ on me like never before, you feel me? She started telling me to not wear baggy pants and to stop talking the way I did. I asked her who told her these things since she never tripped before and she told me that my probation offi cer had told her to tell me this stuff. . . . I got mad and I left and went to kick it at BYA [the community center]. When I got there my PO was there hanging out. I was mad at him so I left. I went to the park and the police were there trying to fuck with me too. 8 For Jose and most of the other youth, their experience of being watched, managed, and treated as a criminal began at a young age and became exacerbated after their fi rst offense, in most cases a misdemeanor. Their minor transgression had branded them with a seal that would make their one-time crimi- nal act into a permanent criminal identity. For example, a few weeks after his fi rst arrest for carrying a $10 bag of marijuana, Jose began to realize that everyone in the com- munity knew about his arrest and probation. Beginning at home and ending at the local community program, adults now treated him differently. Jose began to feel watched, police began to randomly stop and search him, his teachers would threaten him with calling his probation offi cer if he disobeyed at school, and his mother constantly reminded him that he would end up in jail if he misbehaved. After their fi rst offense, most of the youth in the study were labeled and treated as criminals not only by police, courts, and probation but also by teachers, community centers, and even parents. The permanent “criminal” signifi er began when the youth was assigned a probation offi cer. The offi cer served the role of informing the entire com- munity that the youth had permutated into a risk. He was now to be monitored and con- trolled by an authority fi gure assigned by the state: the probation offi cer. PROBATION The probation offi cer served the purpose of punishing the youth by branding him a criminal in front of the rest of the com- munity and marking his territory in all set- tings in which the youth was a participant. Community centers made offi ce space avail- able for probation offi cers to manage youth from a closer location to their home. Parents were constantly interacting with and often being chastised and infl uenced by probation offi cers. Teachers had direct contact with | VICTOR M. RIOS414 probation offi cers to inform them when the youth had misbehaved. At the end of their initial arrest, all youth were given some sort of surveillance pro- gram. Most youth (24 out of 30) received a probation offi cer that they had to meet with once a week to once a month; the rest were given probation without a formal relation- ship. The meetings would often take place at neighborhood community centers located near the youth’s homes. Out of 24 youth that had a probation offi cer, 18 of them met with them at local community centers or at school. The 18 youth that met with proba- tion offi cers in their local community demon- strated a feeling that others perceived them differently than those youth who checked in with probation offi cers at the county proba- tion offi ce. Youth spoke of feeling humili- ated because everyone in the community knew that they were on probation. They felt like “criminals” even if they were trying to improve their lives. However, probation did keep a lot of the youth from committing fur- ther crime. From the perspective of juvenile proba- tion and many of the school authorities, the point of the probation offi cer being pres- ent at community centers and schools was to make sure that the youth who were on probation followed all the rules and did not commit another crime. For the most part, this goal seemed to work well with the youth that I interviewed; however, after the youth were released from probation, their chances of being rearrested increased drastically. The youth believed that one of the biggest changes they faced after being released was the overwhelming presence of their proba- tion offi cers. Youth went from having little direct supervision and control for most of their lives to having a disruptive control force in their lives waiting for them to, as one of the youth put it, “fuck up.” In being present in all aspects of the youths’ lives, probation offi cers could potentially have a positive impact in the youth’s rehabilitation and reintegration into society. Often, the youth did follow the strict orders of the pro- bation offi cer but only in the direct presence of the offi cer. In the accounts of the youth, at fi rst probation offi cers helped them “stay in line” but later would become hindrances in their recovery. The probation offi cer served as a direct threat and locus of control for the youth only while the youth maintained direct contact with him or her. As soon as youth were taken off their intensive probation program like Electronic Monitoring, weekly meetings, and home arrest, they began to commit acts that fur- ther criminalized them and often led to a sec- ond arrest. Youth often expressed that being contained, monitored, and threatened for so long to function normally made them unable to control themselves and operate normally in society when the direct authoritative treat- ment was removed. Youth were being taught to live normally in society under forceful supervision and sanctions from the state. When the absolute force was removed, so was the positive behavior of the youth. Ronny Ronny’s day-to-day experience provides a deeper insight to processes of hypercrimi- nalization experienced by youth. Ronny is a 16-year-old African American male from Berkeley, California. He is currently on pro- bation and is mandated to attend an “anger management” program at Berkeley Youth Alternatives for defying his probation offi - cer. For school he is attending Independent Study, a program where students complete courses at their own pace without attend- ing class. On a typical day, Ronny wakes up at about 10:00 or 11:00 A.M. and walks to Berkeley High School, arriving there at lunch time. Since Berkeley High School is an open campus, students fi ll up the local shops and restaurants in the main avenue, Shat- tuck. During 11:45 and 12:45 P.M., swarms of youth travel the streets surrounding the THE HYPERCRIMINALIZATION OF BLACK AND LATINO MALE YOUTH IN THE ERA | 415 school. For Ronny, this is a time to catch up with friends and foes as they walk from the school to the street. Ronny usually hangs out at a corner near the main avenue and waits for his friends to meet him there. When they arrive he either stands there with them or catches up on events that have occurred in school or the community. If Ronny sees one of his many rivals, he confronts them and sometimes engages in them in a fi st fi ght. It is during this time of day that Ronny is very likely to get arrested. Twice he has been booked by police during the lunch hour for fi ghting. After the lunch hour adventure at Berke- ley High School, Ronny walks to the Inde- pendent Study Offi ce where he turns in work and receives a new packet. Sometimes Ronny goes to this offi ce even if he has not done any work to turn in or does not have an appointment for that day. He explains that he is usually bored by the afternoon and wants a place to hang out. He fi gures that the teachers might take him in and help him with his assignments; however, most of the time the teachers are not there or are busy with other youth. Ronny walks toward BYA (the community center) and waits out- side of the center until 3:30 P.M. when they open the doors to youth. There he plays basketball with friends and takes his anger management class; meets with his probation offi cer; or talks with a center staff or coun- selor about his progress. He reports that, like his teachers, the community center staff often report him to his probation offi cer if he misbehaves at the center. The center closes at 8:00 P.M. This is when Ronny walks to the park that sits adjacent to the community center. Often his friends meet there to play more basketball; smoke and drink; and talk about their lives until about 10:00 P.M. This is when most youth go home, but Ronny walks home, checks in with his grandmother, and walks out and sits on his front steps with a few friends who stay out late as well. Most of the time, Ronny’s evenings are fairly mun- dane. But occasionally it is after the end of the program that Ronny and friends fi ght with rivals; conduct drug deals; and/or break into cars. Two of Ronny’s arrests have taken place after 8:00 P.M. A few weeks after starting his probation program, Ronny began to realize that even his own family had begun to question his innocence. Ronny explains: My grandma keeps asking me about when I’m gonna’ get arrested again. She thinks just ‘cause I went in before, I will go in again . . . at school my teachers talk about calling the cop again to take me away . . . cop keeps check- ing up on me. He’s always at the park making sure I don’t get in trouble again . . . my P.O. [probation offi cer] is always knocking on my door trying to talk shit to me . . . even at BYA [the local youth development organization] the staff treat me like I’m a fuck up again . . . 9 Over time, Ronny and other youth I inter- viewed normalize being treated as criminals by most adult members in their community. They see it as an everyday way of life that they have to cope with and learn to navigate. Like Pierre Bourdieu’s Symbolic Violence (1992) where the subject internalizes and perpetuates his own oppression, the youth internalize their criminalization and respond by “acting bad.” Both resistance and expec- tations of negative encounters with school and justice authorities become normalized as routine features of the environments in which these youth live and navigate. In order for the state to succeed in criminalizing youth it has to make the youth believe that surveil- lance, brutality, crime, and criminalization is part of everyday life; it has to convince the subject that he indeed is a criminal or, in the words of the youth, a “thug.” In this way, the dominated group accepts as legitimate its own condition of domination (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). The “bad kids” internal- ize their criminalization as a normal part of their everyday lives; hence, youth who are | VICTOR M. RIOS416 criminalized react to criminalization through criminality. Ronny concludes: Shit don’t change. It doesn’t matter where I go, I’m seen as a criminal. I just say, if you are gonna treat me as a criminal than I’m gonna treat you like I am one you, feel me? I’m gonna make you shake so that you can say that there is a reason for calling me a criminal . . . I grew up knowing that I had to show these fools [adults who criminalize youth] that I wasn’t going to take their shit [sic] I started to act like a thug even if I wasn’t one . . . part of it was me trying to be hard, the other part was them treating me like a criminal. 10 At an early age Ronny developed an identity that made him act aggressively towards other youth. He talks about being forced to learn to interact with peers by “acting hard” around them. When I asked him what he remem- bered most about growing up around peers who were involved in delinquent behavior, he said that he had to pretend to be bad in order to get respect, even if he did not want to be bad. Ronny was, as Elijah Anderson (1994) has explained, learning to “code switch.” In order to survive the order of the streets and, as I explain, in order to resist the order of hypercriminalization, Ronny was acting “bad” even if deep inside he simply wanted to do good. The youth have developed strat- egies of survival in order to cope with the violence of the state and other institutions that criminalize and punish them. However, as Paul Willis (1977) has demonstrated, in resisting their oppression, working- class youth often dig themselves deeper into a hole, perpetuating their subordinate status in society. This was the case with the youth in this study. Jr. This theme continued to play out with many of the youth I interviewed. The youth knew they wanted to improve their lives and fol- low their probation program; however, they were often infl uenced in other directions. Jr., a 15-year-old Latino from San Fran- cisco, asked his probation offi cer for guid- ance when he came to the conclusion that he wanted to change this negative behavior and follow his instinct: I just wanted to start doing better so I told my probation offi cer to help me. He said that it’s easy I had to stay away from all those crazy kids I hung around with. He also told me that if I got caught with them I would go back to jail. He told me to tell them that I would go to jail if I talked to them but they didn’t believe me . . . he told me, “It’s common sense,” but he’s not the one that has to walk on the street. 11 Besides facing pressure from peers, the youth had to contend with the pressure of adults who were cynical about their ability to do well. Youth often reported that instead of fi nding ways to support them through reha- bilitation and academic and community support, adults from various institutions in the community managed the youth as risks rather than creating a support program. Jr. reported that teachers at his school had direct contact with the school offi cer and his probation offi cer. When Jr. got in trouble in the classroom his teacher fi lled out a card from the school’s police offi cer. The police offi cer would check in with the teacher every afternoon, and if Jr. had a mark on his card the offi cer would come and make threats, handcuff him, and/or throw him in the back seat of the police car for long periods of time in front of his peers at the school. The con- stant surveillance and threats imposed by the police offi cer at his school made him feel that he was “doing time” in jail while at school. For Jr., school was like jail in the sense that the minute he stepped into it he was under strict supervision and faced the threat of severe punishment with every move he made. After school Jr. would walk to the local community center to “hang out” and meet with his probation offi cer who was stationed at the community center. Jr. would walk into THE HYPERCRIMINALIZATION OF BLACK AND LATINO MALE YOUTH IN THE ERA | 417 the center, greet the staff, check out a basket- ball, and play with some of his friends. At 7:00 P.M. he would drop the ball and walk a few offi ces past the gym to meet with his probation offi cer. His probation offi cer was stationed at the community center due to a grant that the community center received from the county juvenile justice department. The purpose of the grant was to provide services at the community center to juve- nile delinquents. The condition was that the center was to provide a probation offi cer an offi ce space to meet with clients. The result was a combining of social services with state surveillance in one location. As the study went on I realized that the punitive arm of the state, the criminal justice enterprise, had percolated itself into traditionally nurtur- ing institutions like the family and the com- munity center. This created a contradiction since the philosophy and practice of these 2 very different institutions have tradition- ally diverged: the criminal justice system, while at times attempting to reform, is pri- marily concerned with managing crime and imposing sanctions on transgressors; the community center, a social service institu- tion, is concerned with providing emotional, physical, and academic support to its clients, unconditionally, with the intention of devel- oping individuals into healthy, independent, and responsible citizens. What happens then when the punishing arm of the state imposes itself physically and procedurally onto nur- turing institutions? When the punitive arm of the state crosses into traditionally nurturing institutions, delinquent kids become labeled and treated as criminals not only by police, courts, and probation but also by teachers, community centers, and even parents. This is a problem when the latter institutions are meant to make productive citizens out of youth, not to ren- der them as criminals risking that the youth internalize this criminalization and become ticking time bombs. Stanley Cohen (1972) calls this process “deviance amplifi cation,” where parents participate in labeling their kids as criminals and in the process end up alienating themselves from their children. In his classic study, Cohen (1972) illustrates how youth can fall into a spiral of deviance when, as an act of resistance to authority fi g- ures (i.e., police), they commit more and more intense acts of deviance. Rather than break away from hypercriminalization, Black and Latino youth are unfortunately conforming and internalizing their oppression. How- ever, beyond Bourdieu’s pessimistic sym- bolic violence, the youth also demonstrate their ability to change their own internal- ized oppression. While the youth often inter- nalize and naturalize their criminalization, they often do it as a form of resistance, as a strategy to defy the very same process of crim- inalization. They embrace the label of “thug” or criminal in order to navigate their social world. However, once given opportunities to embrace a less violent and more nurturing environment they abandon the negative atti- tude fairly quickly. For example, when I took the youth I interviewed to community events and college functions to provide them expo- sure to positive settings, their “presentation of self” (Goffman, 1959) became positive; they began to express their desire to be change their lives; they expressed their hopes and dreams and began to ask, as Ronny put it, “How can I change my life? I mean I know I got a lotta’ shit going on but I been through the worse already. How can I make it better?” 12 HYPERCRIMINALIZATION AS SOCIAL DISPLACEMENT From a young age, poor urban Black and Latino male youth face stigmatizing and punitive interactions in various set- tings in their communities. As often well- intentioned probation offi cers, teachers, community center workers, and police offi - cers attempt to grapple with the deviance and | VICTOR M. RIOS418 risks that youth have, they adopt ideas and practices that further render young males of color suspicious and criminal. This in turn contributes to youth committing more deviance and crime. While most adults in the community attempt to support youth they have little programmatic or fi nancial resources to provide deviant youth success- ful alternatives that might allow them to reform. However, reform and rehabilitation programs have continued to decline and instead, at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, the pub- lic and politicians continue to call for puni- tive policies that treat juveniles as adults. In a time when crime control seems to calm anxiety in the public, a punitive carceral system of managing the poor has developed (see, for example, Castells, 1997; Parenti, 2000; Wacquant, 2001). This system is inexpensive, easy to implement, and at fi rst appearance successful— it is a system of all- encompassing criminalization that manages youth as criminal risks in order to calm adult anxieties in the community. Nonvio- lent youth offenders, the majority of deviant youth, are criminalized and managed as if they were serious criminal risks. In the era of mass incarceration solidar- ity in society has formed around the notion that young adults who commit small acts of deviance will inevitably return and commit a severe maybe even violent act. This leads many community members including teach- ers, youth development workers, and pro- bation offi cers to treat all deviant youth as criminal suspects. Even some parents have demonstrated this ideology. A mother of a 16-year-old Latino youth I interviewed explained her perspective: Right now they are getting him [her son] for whatever little thing like marijuana and for stealing at the store but one day they are going to get him for robbing or shooting someone. This child is out of control . . . I think they need to incarcerate him for some time . . . until he learns to be good. 13 Even those adults in the community who are well-meaning seem to, often unintentionally, align themselves with racist ideologues and politicians who continue to systematically call for containment and “incapacitation” of youth of color. William Bennett and John J. Dilulio are prime examples of infl uential ideo- logues who have generated mass hysteria and infl uenced punitive juvenile justice policies having a detrimental impact on youth of color. In the mid-1990s John J. Dilulio, a fellow at the right-wing conservative think tank, The Manhattan Institute (later becoming president George W. Bush’s director of faith- based initiatives), coined the term the “super- predator,” claiming that poor, urban youth of color were an emerging violent and criminal risk to society and that serious punitive poli- cies had to be created to “deter” and “inca- pacitate” them at as early an age as possible: Try as we might, there is ultimately very little that we can do to alter the early life- experiences that make some boys criminally “at risk.” Neither can we do much to reha- bilitate them once they have crossed the prison gates. Let us, therefore, do what we can to deter them by means of strict criminal sanc- tions, and, where deterrence fails, to incapaci- tate them. Let the government Leviathan lock them up and, when prudence dictates, throw away the key. (Dilulio, 1996: 3) William Bennett, former education secretary under Ronald Reagan and former director of Drug Control Policy under George Bush Sr., helped Dilulio develop and disseminate the “superpredator” thesis leading to puni- tive juvenile justice reform throughout the nation. Together they wrote Body Count : Moral Poverty . . . and How to Win Amer- ica’s War Against Crime and Drugs (1996), a book that extended their argument for increased punitive measures against crime; in particular, juvenile crime. As if infl uencing a punitive shift in the juvenile justice system and a national rac- ist hate for youth of color in the late 1990s was not enough, Bennett continues to attack THE HYPERCRIMINALIZATION OF BLACK AND LATINO MALE YOUTH IN THE ERA | 419 and degrade Black youth. On September 28, 2005, he made the following statement: But I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down . . . [this is] an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. (Caufi eld, 2005) While this grotesque and genocidal ideology may seem extreme to some, youth of color are used to being treated by many through these assumptions. Moreover, the fi ndings in this study suggest that this racist ideology is not only embedded in the mind of some infl uential white males but also in the every- day perceptions of everyday people respon- sible for the everyday well-being of children of color. That William Bennett has managed to infl uence punitive criminal justice policy and state-imposed racial violence unto com- munities of color is disturbing; that policy makers, the public, and the criminal justice system apply Bennett’s thinking to action is even more disturbing. However, the most disheartening fi nding in this study is that those institutions traditionally responsible for protecting and nurturing children and youth—the school, the community centers, and the family—have begun to construct and treat deviant youth as criminal threats, mimicking the punitive grip of the crimi- nal justice system. It seems that one of the most brutal yet unexamined collateral conse- quences of punitive criminal justice policies and mass imprisonment is that of the non- criminal justice institution being penetrated and infl uenced by the detrimental effects of the criminal justice system. Youth of color are hypercriminalized because they encoun- ter criminalization in all the settings they navigate. While most of the adults in the commu- nity care about the youth they interact with, most are uncritical of how their epistemol- ogy shapes the way in which they treat and criminalize the youth they are attempting to support. I observed mothers asking their kids when they would be arrested again, teachers calling police offi cers to report spit ball incidents, and community center staff actively collaborating with probation departments. It was not only the fi eld of the de jure policing and surveillance that affected these youth but also the fi eld of de facto criminalization at school, home, and community centers that impacted them at an everyday level. As the penal state expands to control and manage poor racialized bodies, a new unin- tended system of interconnected institutions has formed to brand, further degradate, and contain youth of color. This youth control complex, as an ecology of interlinked institu- tional arrangements that manages and con- trols the everyday lives of inner city youth of color, has taken a devastating grip on the lives of many male youth of color in the inner city. Youth experience and explain this massive structure that surrounds them as a unifi ed and uniform criminalizing system whether in school, at home, or on the street. If we are to support poor youth of color in the era of mass incarceration and the decline of the welfare state, adult allies should be critical of their interactions with criminalized youth. Otherwise, we may be perpetuating the very force we are attempting to dismantle—the hypercriminalization of our youth. NOTES 1. As of 2003 out of a total of 832,400 incarcerated Black males 577, 300 were 20 to 39 years old. For “Hispanics” 270,600 out of a total of 363,900 were 20 to 39 years old (Harrison, 2003). 2. Association of Bay Area Governments, http://www. abag.ca.gov. 3. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, http:// www.frbsf.org. 4. In the community youth who have been arrested or who have been labeled deviant or criminal by police, schools, or other adults are referred to as criminal- ized youth. I use the term in the same manner. 5. Personal Interview, Jose Ramirez [pseudonym], April 2004. 6. Personal Interview, Jose Ramirez [pseudonym], April 2004. http://www.abag.ca.gov http://www.frbsf.org http://www.frbsf.org http://www.abag.ca.gov | VICTOR M. RIOS420 7. Personal Interview, Jose Ramirez [pseudonym], April 2004. 8. Personal Interview, Jose Ramirez [pseudonym], May 2004. 9. Personal Interview, Ronny Thompson [pseud- onym], February 2004. 10. Personal Interview, James [pseudonym], October, 2003. 11. Personal Interview, Jr. Diaz [pseudonym], Novem- ber 2003. 12. Personal Interview, Ronny Thompson [pseud- onym], January 2004. 13. Refugio Munoz, Personal Interview, translated by author, October 2003. REFERENCES Anderson, E. 1994. Code of the Streets : Decency , Vio- lence , and the Moral Life of the Inner City . New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ———. 1990 . Streetwise : Race , Class , and Change in an Urban Community . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Becker, Howard S. 1957. Modern Sociological Theory in Continuity and Change. New York: Dryden Press. ———. 1963. Outsiders : Studies in the Sociology of Deviance . New York: Free Press. ———. 1964. ed. The Other Side : Perspectives on Devi- ance . New York: Free Press. Bennett, W., Dilulio, J., and Walters, J. 1996. Body Count : Moral Poverty . . . and How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs . New York: Simon & Schuster. Bourdieu, P., and Wacquant, L. 1992. An Invitation to Refl exive Sociology . Chicago: Chicago University Press. Caulfi eld, M. 2005. “White House Condemns Bennett’s Remarks.” Boston Globe , September 30, www. b o s t o n . c o m / n e w s / n a t i o n / a r t i c l e s / 2 0 0 5 / 0 9 / 3 0 / bennett_black_abortions_would_lower_crime/. Castells, M. 1997. The Information Age : Economy , Society and Culture . Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Chesney-Lind, M., and Mauer, M. 2004. Invisible Punishment : The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment. New York: New Press. Cohen, S. 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics . London: Macgibbon & Kee. Davis, A. Y. 2003. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press. Dilulio, J. J. 1996. “Help Wanted: Economists, Crime and Public Policy.” Journal of Economic Perspectives , 10(1), 3–24. Du Bois, W.E.B. 1899. “A Negro Schoolmaster in The New South.” Atlantic Monthly , January, 99–104. Ferguson, A. 2000. Bad Boys : Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Foucault, M. 1995. Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison . New York: Random House. ———. 1988. “The Dangerous Individual.” In Michel Foucault : Politics , Philosophy , Culture : Interviews and Other Writings 1977 – 1984 , edited by L. D. Kritzman. New York: Routledge, pp. 125–151. ———. 1980. “Prison Talk.” In Power/Knowledge : Selected Interviews and Other Writings , 1972 – 77 , edited by C. Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 10–15. Garland, D. 2001. Mass Imprisonment : Social Causes & Consequences . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Garfi nkel, H. 1956. “Conditions of Successful Degra- dation Ceremonies.” American Journal of Sociology , 61, 420–24. ———. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology . Engle- wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Geertz, C. 1998. “The World in Pieces.” Focaal , 32, 91–117. Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life . Garden City, NJ: Doubleday. Males, M., and Macallair, D. 2000. The Color of Jus- tice : An Analysis of Juvenile Adult Court Transfers in California. Washington, D.C.: Youth Law Center, Building Blocks for Youth. http://www.buildingblocks foryouth.org/colorofjustice/cojpr.html Paige, Harrison. 2003. Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2003 . Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Offi ce of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin, May 2004. Retrieved June 10, 2005, http:// www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/pjim03 . Parenti, C. 2000. Lockdown in America : Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis . London: Verso. Simon, J. 1997. “Governing Through Crime.” In The Crime Conundrum: Essays on Criminal Justice , edited by Lawrence Friedman and George Fisher. Boulder, CO: Westview. Spradley, James P. 1979. The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Taylor, D. 1990. Learning Denied. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Turk, A. 1966. “Confl ict and Criminality.” American Sociological Review , 31, 338–352. Villaruel, F., and Walker, N. 2002 . ¿Dónde Está la Justicia? A Call to Action on Behalf of Latino and Latino Youth in the U.S. Justice System . Washington, D.C.: Youth Law Center, Building Blocks for Youth, Research, July. Retrieved May 19, 2005, http://www.buildingblocks foryouth.org/Latino_rpt/pr_english.html. Vigil, J. D. 2002. Street Cultures in the Mega-City . Aus- tin: University of Texas Press. Wacquant, L. 2004. “Decivilizing and Demonising: Remaking the Black American Ghetto.” In The Soci- ology of Norbert Elias , edited by Steven Loyal and Stephen Quilley. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 95–121. ———. 2002. “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration.” New Left Review , 13, 41–60. ———. 2001. “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh.” In Mass Imprisonment : http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005/09/30/bennett_black_abortions_would_lower_crime/ http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005/09/30/bennett_black_abortions_would_lower_crime/ http://www.buildingblocksforyouth.org/colorofjustice/cojpr.html http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/pjim03 http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/pjim03 http://www.buildingblocksforyouth.org/Latino_rpt/pr_english.html http://www.buildingblocksforyouth.org/colorofjustice/cojpr.html http://www.buildingblocksforyouth.org/Latino_rpt/pr_english.html http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005/09/30/bennett_black_abortions_would_lower_crime/ THE HYPERCRIMINALIZATION OF BLACK AND LATINO MALE YOUTH IN THE ERA | 421 Social Causes and Consequences , edited by D. Gar- land. London: Sage. Wacquant, L. J. D., and Wilson, W. J. 1989. “Poverty, Joblessness, and the Social Transformation of the Inner City.” In Welfare Policy for the 1990s , edited by P. H. Cottingham and D. T. Ellwood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Willis, P. 1977. Learning to Labor : How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs . New York: Columbia University Press. Wilson, W. J. 1980. The Declining Signifi cance of Race : Blacks and Changing American Institutions . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged : The Inner City , the Underclass , and Public Policy . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1996. When Work Disappears : The World of the New Urban Poor . New York: Vintage Books. Yetman, N. R. 2000. Voices From Slavery . New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Governing through Crime Safe Schools: Reforming Education through Crime Jonathan Simon GOVERNING CRIME IN SCHOOLS Crimes, including crimes of violence, are a real part of the American school experience at the turn of the twenty-fi rst century and not only in the poorest communities. Since the mid-1990s, crime in schools has become the subject of almost frantic data collec- tion. Numbers, like the 3 million school crimes per year cited by President Bush, bounce from Web page to magazine article to speech. In response to federal mandates, states have begun their own process of data collection. According to recent federal statis- tics, 56 percent of public high schools in the nation reported at least one criminal incident to police in the 1996–1997 academic year, and 21 percent reported at least one serious violent crime in that period. In more than 10 percent of all public high schools, there was at least one physical attack or fi ght involving a weapon, and in 8 percent there was at least one rape or sexual assault (Sheley 2000, 37). Schools with serious incidents of vio- lence have increasingly become high-security environments. Anthropologist John Devine describes a decade of ethnography at one such high school in New York in his book, Maximum Security (1996). Devine’s ethno- graphic “cover” was running a tutorial pro- gram in which graduate students at New York University did both research and tutoring in academically needy public schools. Consis- tent with our genealogy, the older teachers interviewed by Devine could not remember any regular security guards in the school before 1968 or 1969, when some schools began to post a guard near the main entrance in response to volatile demonstrations over teacher strikes and decentralization. 1 By the late 1980s, the security response had become a dominant presence for both staff and design, “as space is rearranged to accom- modate metal detectors and the auxiliary technologies they spawn” (Devine 1996, 76). New York employed 3,200 uniformed school safety offi cers at the time of Devine’s obser- vations, constituting the ninth largest police department in the United States until it was integrated into the New York City Police Department by Mayor Giuliani. When vari- ous assistant principals and “deans” are fac- tored in, the security apparatus that Devine observed amounted to 110 people in one school that had a teaching staff of 150 (78). Entrance to school required passing by a guard-supervised computer that read the stu- dent’s ID and kept a time log of entrances and exits (80). Devine consciously resisted being drawn into the debate about objective crime trends, the various metrics of violence in schools and how much it differs from years past, metrics that are themselves the products of govern- ing through crime. He situated his account against both liberal critics of school policy, who saw school crime as a complete cha- rade to justify oppressive administration of GOVERNING THROUGH CRIME | 423 a failed educational program, and the con- servative view that school violence dem- onstrated either the ultimately corrupting process of liberal secular education or that public schools were too chaotic to be saved. More relevant to the experience of students and staff was the very real possibility of guns being introduced into confl icts at school. Of the 41 schools with the greatest violence problems in the system, several of which fell into his tutorial program, Devine reports a total of 129 “gun incidents” in a year (23). 2 With an average of three gun incidents a year happening in each of these schools, it would be reasonable for every student, teacher, and staff person in the school to consider gun violence a real possibility to be taken into account in the management of everyday life. One result of the prevalence of violence and the importance of responding to it is that teachers have increasingly been withdrawn from the fi eld of norm enforcement in favor of the professional security staff. 3 The corridors, the site of most signifi cant social behavior in high school, are wholly the space of security personnel. The classrooms remain the sanc- tum of the teachers, but the security personnel are even called into classrooms when behavior becomes disruptive. Indeed, Devine (1996, 27) fi nds that security guards have become critical sources of normative guidance for students. Despite the vastness of the technosecurity apparatus—surveillance, metal detectors, drug tests, and locker searches—the remark- able fact is how much that apparatus over- looks and how often it fails to function. This is not a system bent on discovering every vio- lation but rather one that ignores violations that do not reach a suffi ciently dangerous level. “Meticulous observation of detail has given way to a willful determination not to see misbehavior and even outright crime.” 4 A central node in today’s inner city schools—competing with the classroom and the playground as spaces of education and self-fashioning—are the spaces given over to in-school detentions that informants in Ann Ferguson’s (2000) study of Chicago schools called “the punishing room.” In the Punishing Room, school identities and reputations are constituted, negotiated, challenged, confi rmed for African American youth in a process of categorization, reward and punishment, humiliation, and banish- ment. Children passing through the system are marked and categorized as they encoun- ter state laws, school rules, tests and exams, psychological remedies, screening commit- tees, penalties and punishments, rewards and praise. Identities that are worthy, hardwork- ing, devious, or dangerous are proffered, assumed, or rejected. (40–41) These in-school detentions are considered necessary to maintain an educational atmo- sphere in the classroom and a better alterna- tive than suspension, but they are producing something similar to what criminologists once called “prisonization” (Clemmer 1940), a powerful normative pull of peer culture that undermines the institution’s goals. At the level of whole school systems, many of these inner-city schools themselves have become larger instantiations of punishing rooms, identifi ed by students and parents as places of disorder and risk. New York’s highly hierarchical and largely merit-based system of high schools means that, for students living in the poorest sections, the only way to avoid the neighborhood high school is through competitive admission to one of the city’s well-known magnet programs (Devine 1996). Crime plays a crucial motivating role in this dynamic. Students are exhorted to compete for the elite special-admission high schools and even the broad middle tier of education- ally oriented magnet schools not simply for what admission would do for their college admissions prospects and future earnings but quite specifi cally to avoid the chaos and vio- lence of the large neighborhood high schools that are the catchall for those left behind. Crime, and especially gun violence, has touched an astoundingly wide variety of | JONATHAN SIMON424 American high schools. In the 1996–1997 school year, for example, 10 percent of public schools nationwide reported at least one seri- ous violent crime (Riley & Reno 1998, 11). A recent study found that “nearly all U.S. public schools are using a variety of delin- quency prevention programs and disciplinary practices” (NIJ 2004, ii). When a problem for 10 percent becomes a paradigm for all, it is the mark of the hold of crime over our contempo- rary political imagination. Most violent crime is concentrated in sociologically identifi able communities, especially urban minority neigh- borhoods with high rates of unemployment and poverty. Thus out of every 1,000 teachers, nearly 40 in urban schools in 1996–1997 were (nonfatal) crime victims, in contrast with 20 in suburban schools and 22 in rural schools. The framing of the danger as a national prob- lem facing schools everywhere is an essentially political act that has consequences for schools environmentally, physically, pedagogically, and in terms of governance. As in the earlier era of reforming schools for racial equality, the federal government has played a crucial role in making crime a national problem for schools, and crime pre- vention a national agenda for school reform, using incentives and sanctions to spread it across state and local systems. David Kirp (1982) described the implementation of desegregation as creating a standard opera- tional meaning of equality: Policy aspires to uniformity. Policy is proposed for the country as if equality had an unvarying meaning from place to place, and in terms of fi xed goals, as if there existed an ideal end state. Such remedies as extensive busing, vouchers, special “magnet” schools, or metropolitan- wide districts are proffered with little atten- tion to context; each is advanced as if it were a panacea for all the ills of racism. (xx) In both desegregation and the war on crime, court cases and legislation have played a signifi cant role in constructing a national problem and national solutions to making schools work. For racial equality, the signal year was 1965, when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act invested billions of federal dollars in poor schools provided they complied with desegregation orders. 5 For safe schools, the pivotal legislation was the Safe Schools Act of 1994. A closer look at parts of the Safe Schools Act and the federal and state policies that have followed it identifi es several main mechanisms through which crime is made a central problem of school governance. MAKING CRIME VISIBLE The Safe Schools Act operates far beyond the simple application of money to a local problem; rather, it requires changes in the way knowledge fl ows and decisions are made within schools. Although many of these provisions refl ect the very best social science–informed policy thinking about crime and youth populations, they also represent the triumph of crime over other agendas for remaining schools. The creation of new pathways for knowledge to circulate within the school, and new rationalities of decision-making, are likely to keep schools locked into the dynamic of crime and secu- rity for a long time to come. To qualify for federal money under the Safe Schools Act, schools must fi rst dem- onstrate that they have a “serious problem with school crime, violence, and student dis- cipline” (Eckland 1999, 312). This requires schools to develop their own data collection systems for crime, and to assess what kinds of incidents to count, an exercise that school administrators have every incentive to make as expansive as possible. The law calls into existence a whole series of information streams about crime in schools that assures that whatever else hap- pens, knowledge about crime is going to be brought to the attention of school offi cials, teachers, and parents. This helps assure that one thing almost everyone interested in schools will know about particular schools, GOVERNING THROUGH CRIME | 425 along with the ubiquitous test scores, is information, potentially a lot of information, about the crime scene there. Parents looking for ways to assure themselves they are doing their duty to their children will have this information available. Higher public educa- tion offi cials looking for metrics to evaluate principals will have this information avail- able. While seemingly innocuous, the estab- lishment of such information fl ows assures a priority for crime in contexts where people are looking for ways to differentiate between competing alternatives (employees, schools, housing complexes, etc.). BUILDING A CRIME CONSTITUENCY IN THE COMMUNITY The Safe Schools Act also makes clear that schools must build community support for a security program. For example, selection criteria governing funding explicitly favors repeat awards for schools that can turn out the highest levels of participation by parents and community residents for funded proj- ects and activities focused on school crime and safety. At the other end of the process, schools that receive funding must mount a signifi cant campaign to make the public aware of both the crime problem and the progress being made to solve it. Both these features may be laudatory efforts to assure that federal funds fl ow to programs that receive at least tacit public approval through participation. The result is to build—within the heart of local school districts, one of the oldest institutions of American democracy— enduring structures of intervention, knowl- edge production, and consent formation, all designed in response to crime. HARDENING SCHOOL DISCIPLINE A prime target of the 1994 law was the exist- ing disciplinary apparatus within schools. An earlier generation had insisted that schools, without normalizing deviance, protect young people from criminalization and exclusion. In the early 1990s most schools remained highly protective of students, avoiding sanc- tions like suspension or expulsion that would genuinely disadvantage their educational prospects, generally distinguishing school discipline from that meted out by the police and court system. At this time, however, such policies became the target of a critique that has since been the cutting edge of governing through crime reform in many institutions. Informal and highly discretionary disciplin- ary systems are perceived as having deni- grated victims, failed to correct offenders, and betrayed the public interest in stamping out crime before it becomes dangerous to the general community. This critique is built into the qualify- ing provisions of the Safe Schools Act. To qualify for federal funds under the act, the school district must already have written policies detailing (a) its internal procedures, (b) clear conditions under which exclusion will be imposed, and (c) close cooperation with police and juvenile justice agencies. The requirement that schools formalize their dis- ciplinary policies is a crucial step in intensi- fying the fl ow of information from schools about the disciplinary violations now being constituted as quasi-crimes. At the harder end, violations that would constitute acts of juvenile delinquency under the prevailing legal code must be reported. At the softer end, the accumulation of statistics on inci- dents will become the raw material for the evaluation studies that the act mandates as the follow-up to any successful application for funding. NATIONALIZING SCHOOL CRIME EXPERTISE The school must also have put together a crime-fi ghting strategy. In practice, this means turning to one of a growing num- ber of technologies and forms of expertise | JONATHAN SIMON426 that have been nationally “accredited.” The school must present a plan for drawing on a range of these resources and a specifi c set of goals that the school hopes to achieve with them. These goals become critical in the audit side of the federal grant process. Future funding is contingent on measurable progress in implementing a plan (not neces- sarily in achieving true declines in crime). Schools that receive federal money must put in place comprehensive school safety plans that address long-term reductions in violence and discipline problems. Encouraged, but not required, is the formation of elaborate emergency plans to respond to school crises, such as the shooting incidents that sparked the law. The law also channels the expendi- ture of funds into certain preapproved activi- ties that include a host of branded programs whose mission in fact is to reinforce the link between crime and schools by defi ning rou- tine school activities such as going to school or being at school as occurring in “safe zones” or in “drug- and weapon-free school zones.” For example, section 5965 of the act provides a list of appropriate uses for funds. A local educational agency shall use grants funds for one or more of the following activities. . . . (11) Supporting “safe zones of passage” . . . through such measures as “Drug and Weapon Free School Zones” (12) Counseling programs for victims and witnesses of school violence (13) Acquiring and installing metal detectors and hiring security personnel. 6 State responses have varied widely. Many states have enacted their own versions of the Safe School Act to create any authority in the school districts that is necessary to be eligible for federal funds. 7 Like the federal version, these state-level Safe School Acts commit the state to the proposition that school violence is the most important problem facing Ameri- can education and that a security response is the only one possible. The laws typically require school districts to commence the forms of data collection and administrative reform necessary to meet the federal require- ments. Some have adopted statewide zero- tolerance policies; others allow districts to do so or to defi ne the incidents serious enough to trigger expulsion. Using fear of crime as an overarching rationale, all of them tighten the net of control around students’ move- ment in and out of schools. The changes mandated by the Safe Schools Act involve the creation of fundamentally new pathways of knowledge and power within the school community. These path- ways are likely to change the educational experience and the status of students, teach- ers, and administrators in ways that will endure even when the specifi c conditions that called them into being have disappeared. Placing a powerful premium on defi ning an act as one involving school crime or safety alters almost everyone’s incentives. School administrators who hope to attract substan- tial federal and state money will fi nd the crime banner the most productive one available. To be sure, for many schools this incentive will be counterbalanced by their becoming fur- ther associated with crime. Administrators are mandated to collect statistics on criminal incidents, and these statistics will ultimately be used to hold them accountable. To sur- vive, administrators must map the sources of these numbers at the capillary level within the spaces they control, using their exist- ing power to shape teaching and learning to better fi t desirable states of data. Teach- ers and others with front-line responsibility for managing students will fi nd themselves facing many of these new mandates and with less ability to reshape the work of oth- ers. They will also fi nd that one of the few “buttons” that they can push that will both generate administrative attention and garner resources is the one labeled “crime.” Par- ents or students who want something done will also fi nd it most advantageous to defi ne their children or themselves as victims and others as perpetrators of crimes or discipline GOVERNING THROUGH CRIME | 427 violations. It is little wonder that a recent national survey of public schools reported that public school faculty assessment of a principal’s leadership ability is “associated with a high level of prevention activity” (read as crime-focused curriculum, security measures, crime data collection efforts, and so on) (NIJ 2004, 5). One important dimension of this is the eradication of barriers between the juvenile justice and school systems. During the last decade, as youth crime in general has come in for more legislative attention, states have enacted laws giving criminal justice offi - cials greater access to school-based infor- mation and administrative systems. Until the Safe Schools Act, however, schools had few incentives to cooperate. Now coopera- tion will be part and parcel of reconfi guring schools around crime. Juvenile probation offi cers and police will fi nd themselves val- ued partners in forming strategic alliances that are viewed favorably by federal funding guidelines. 8 The diminished expectations of privacy accorded to students in primary and secondary education by the U.S. Supreme Court means that these law enforcement personnel will have every incentive to make the school their preferred hunting ground for suspects. 9 CONCLUSION I began by contrasting the infl uence of crime on schools today to the infl uence of the civil rights project and the objective of overcom- ing a history of racial discrimination through education. In both cases, a subject not directly related to education has become an external framework for reforming schools. In both cases, the federal government has tied its considerable resources and com- mand over public attention to the issue. In both cases, state and local school authorities have changed the way they plan and operate schools to fi t the new urgency. Nineteenth-century public school build- ings often resembled prisons and asylums because all three drew on a common tech- nology of power for improving the “per- formance” of their inmates (Foucault 1977). If schools today are again coming to seem more and more like prisons, it is not because of a renewed faith in the capac- ity of disciplinary methods. Indeed, prisons and schools increasingly deny their capac- ity to do much more than sort and ware- house people. What they share instead is the institutional imperative that crime is simultaneously the most important prob- lem they have to deal with and a reality whose “existence”—as defi ned by the fed- erally imposed edict of ever-expanding data collection—is precisely what allows these institutions to maintain and expand them- selves in perpetuity. NOTES 1. These strikes and decentralization were very much part of the post–civil rights struggle in New York City, around the issues of racial equality and schools. See Podair 2002. 2. It is interesting that this number comes from data collected by the teachers union. 3. Ronald Stephens of the National School Safety Center was quoted in a newspaper story on school police as describing “the modern school offi cer” as “more akin to an educator than a guard” (quoted in M. Wilson 2004). 4. Malcom Feeley and I have suggested that this aban- donment of individualized normalization in favor of managing high-risk populations en masse is a broad feature of contemporary penality (Feeley & Simon 1992, 1994; Simon & Feeley 1995). 5. For a discussion of the law’s impact, see Rosenberg 1991, 47. 6. 20 U.S.C.A. Sect. 5965. 7. For example, Missouri’s Safe Schools Act, enacted in 1996: Revised Statutes of Missouri Sections 160 et seq. 8. 20 U.S.C.A. Sect. 5963 (b) (1): “In awarding grants under this subchapter, the Secretary shall give pri- ority to . . . the formation of partnerships among the local educational agency . . . [and a local law enforcement agency.” 9. See, for example, New Jersey v. T.L.O., 469 U.S. 325 (1985). | JONATHAN SIMON428 REFERENCES Clemmer, Donald. 1940. The Prison Community . Bos- ton: Christopher Publishing House. Devine, John. 1996 . Maximum Security: The Culture of Violence in Inner-City Schools . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eckland, T. Nikki. 1999. “The Safe Schools Act: Legal and ADR Responses to Violence in Schools,” Urban Lawyer 31 (spring): 309–328. Ferguson, Ann Arnett. 2000 . Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity . Ann Arbor: Uni- versity of Michigan Press. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison . New York: Pantheon. Kirp, David L. 1982. Just Schools: The Idea of Racial Equality in American Education . Berkeley: University of California Press. National Institute of Justice (NIJ). 2004. “Toward Safe and Orderly Schools—The National Study of Delin- quency Prevention in Schools.” Retrieved Septem- ber 17, 2013, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffi les1/nij/205 005 . Riley, Richard W. and Reno, Janet. 1998. Annual Report on School Safety 1998 . Washington, DC: US Depart- ment of Education. Sheley, Joseph F. 2000. “Controlling Violence: What Schools Are Doing, Preventing School Violence.” NIJ Research Forum , Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, 37. https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/205005 https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/205005 Connections The Social Control of Youth Across Institutional Spheres Aaron Kupchik Most theories of deviance have begun as explanations for why youth are often deviant. This is because children and teenagers are more likely than adults to participate in deviant and criminal acts, for many reasons: they have fewer responsibilities to protect, they are imma- ture and less able to see future consequences of their actions, they are experimenting with different identities and behavior styles (i.e., fi nding out what kind of person they wish to be), and so on. Youth tend to be very impulsive and to make mistakes, often harmful ones. For example, while I was doing research for a book several years ago I observed juvenile courts and criminal courts that prosecuted youth (Kupchik 2006). I was struck by how often I saw children being prosecuted for a similar offense: typically, two or more youth would order food to be delivered to their home, hide outside and wait for the delivery person, and then attack the delivery person, taking his or her money and the food. I kept thinking, “how fool- ish!”, since the offenders would be luring the victim to their home address. But when they are in court, these youth talk about how they didn’t really think about it, they just “did it.” In this reading I describe different ways of thinking about how society responds to youth crime and deviance, with particular focus on three important readings by Anthony Platt, Victor M. Rios, and Jonathan Simon. Responses to youth deviance include both informal and formal social control. Informal social control includes topics such as how parents punish their children or how social groups enforce social rules and norms (think, for example, about the way children learn what music, clothes, sexual partners, and expressions they “should” like). Formal control includes the ways that schools, police, courts, and other state agencies supervise and punish youth caught breaking rules or laws. The social control of youth is par- ticularly important because of the belief that children are still works in progress who have the ability to change. As a result, the control of youth is often intended to teach them and help shape them into the kinds of adults society wants them to be. The study of the social control of youth tells us a great deal about how social norms and values and has always been central to the study of deviance. The three readings in this section illustrate different perspectives on the social control of juveniles. The excerpted reading by Anthony Platt, part of his classic book, The Child Savers (2009), discusses the creation of the fi rst juvenile court in Chicago in 1899. Platt argues that the court was created to punish poor and immigrant youth, while coaching these children to act like middle-class youth. More recent attempts to understand the social control of youth have focused instead on contemporary problems and issues that have arisen as a result of broad social changes, such as changes in the economy (e.g., what is known as “postindustrialism”) and high rates of incarceration. The two other readings, by Victor M. Rios and Jonathan | AARON KUPCHIK430 Simon, are good examples. These studies look at ways that control of youth now occurs outside of the formal justice system—for example, in public schools—and how marginal- ized youth are stigmatized and punished in a way that is shaped by the contemporary labor market. THE JUVENILE COURT AND SOCIAL CONTROL OF YOUTH The fi rst American juvenile court was created in Chicago, Illinois, in 1899. This court repre- sented a substantial change, since prior to this time juveniles were prosecuted and punished alongside adults. Moreover, instead of just creating a court where juveniles’ cases would be heard, the legal reformers behind the court created an entirely new method for dealing with juveniles in the legal system. To understand the fi rst juvenile court, one needs a bit of background into the thinking about children and delinquency from the 1890s. Several important factors infl uenced this thinking, including developing ideas about the vulnerability of children, the growth of cities, massive immigration to the United States (especially to urban areas), and the dominance of the factory as an employer in these areas. On the one hand, urbanization, immigration, and the proliferation of factories meant increasing numbers of poor, often immigrant youth were left to fend for themselves in dangerous city streets, as their parents worked long hours, and they no longer lived in rural areas with extended family and neighbors who would watch over them. On the other hand, new ideas about childhood held that children were innocent, fragile creatures who are very different than adults in many ways and who should be pro- tected from the sins and dangers of adult life. The creation of the juvenile court was a direct response to these two sets of concerns. The court’s offi cial goals were to protect and nurture youth by responding to each and every child who came before the court, doing whatever was necessary to help that particular child. According to the court, a child’s needs were often more important than his or her offenses. In fact, children often appeared before the court because they were neglected or poor, not because they committed crimes. The court’s responses to these youth varied considerably, since they were based on each child’s situation rather than his or her behavior. Critical Views of the Juvenile Court’s Motives In his book The Child Savers , Anthony Platt raised several critical issues regarding the court’s motives and how it worked. He pointed out that the court was funded by prominent busi- nesspeople in Chicago and was primarily the result of lobbying from several wealthy white women who sought to do good deeds by helping poor children. Though their rhetoric sug- gested that they were dedicated public servants who only wanted to help unfortunate youth, Platt argued that their real goal was to teach poor and immigrant youth (and their families) middle-class norms. He saw their ties to businesses, and the fi nancial help given to the court from corporate elites, as evidence that the court sought to produce trained laborers—young adults who could speak English, would show up for work on time, and would take directions without questioning them—rather than free-thinking citizens. Platt also criticized the court’s focus on children’s needs rather than their offenses. The result, he argued, was class-based social control, since the court responded to poverty with CONNECTIONS | 431 punishment. A juvenile who went hungry, for example, might be “cared for” by the court through incarceration, since in a juvenile reform school (essentially a juvenile prison) the state could provide three meals a day. The juvenile court reformers promised to target youth in need and offer them state help; Platt argued that state “help” amounted to punishment, and as a result youth were punished for their poverty. Others echoed Platt’s criticism and offered additional evidence that the court focused on poor youth and punished them for their poverty (e.g., Shelden and Osborne 1989). The juvenile court did not simply punish delinquent youth unfairly; it also created entire categories of delinquency. With the creation of the court, new categories of behaviors which had previously only been considered deviant now led to arrest and prosecution. These behav- iors include “status offenses,” which are crimes based only on one’s age, such as underage drinking, smoking, or curfew violations, as well as incorrigibility or being wayward , terms used to describe disobedient or poor youth. One study (Chesney-Lind 1973), for example, found that gynecological exams were ordered routinely for cases of female juveniles in Hono- lulu’s juvenile court, regardless of the offense, in an attempt to determine if the girls were sexually active. The claimed intent of such a practice is to best understand the life of each individual child and be able to respond to harmful behaviors (such as sexual activity). But the result is that behavior which had previously been only deviant (but legal) became defi ned as crime and that this happens in a way that enforces mainstream social norms. CRITICAL VIEWS OF THE COURT’S OPERATIONS Another problem with the juvenile court concerns how decisions are made about juvenile defendants. Robert Emerson’s book Judging Delinquents (1969) offers perhaps the best illus- tration of how court decisions are made; two aspects of how juvenile courts work are par- ticularly relevant here. One is that juvenile court staff sort juveniles into three categories: normal, hard-core, and disturbed. Normal juveniles are run-of-the-mill youth who make bad decisions, commit youthful transgressions, and are likely to improve their behavior as they mature. Hard-core youth are those who are committed to a delinquent lifestyle or so far into their delinquent behavior that they are unlikely to improve. Disturbed youth are those who face mental illness or some psychopathology that causes them to be a continuing threat to society. These assessments are made in varying ways, based on the offense for which a child is arrested, their interactions with court staff, and their social backgrounds. A second insight is that the assessments of juveniles and the court’s responses to them are shaped by interorganizational political relationships. That is, the relationships between the court staff and other agencies, such as juvenile correctional facilities, the probation department, and child welfare, can profoundly shape how the court responds to individual youth. Each of these insights continues on an important theme stressed by Platt: that the social control of youth is a socially constructed, context-dependent response to perceived deviance. Rather than acting in a formally rational way—where punishments are legally prescribed, consistently enforced, and made in response only to criminal behaviors—the juvenile justice system is subjective, inconsistent, and responds to perceptions of a youth’s character. At the same time, one might reasonably respond to these critical views of juvenile justice by asking what other options are available. Is the problem that juvenile courts seek to help youth who are judged as in danger (or a danger to others) using whatever solution seems best able to | AARON KUPCHIK432 help that youth? Or is the problem that courts do so in ways that worsen racial, class, and gender inequality? THE INFLUENCE OF CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL PROBLEMS ON THE CONTROL OF YOUTH Recent perspectives on the control of youth have built on and extended this foundation of ideas by considering how contemporary juvenile justice practices increase inequality, how widespread ideas about childhood and dangerousness shape punishment of youth, and how the control of youth relates to broader social problems. The work of Simon, Rios, and others continue the critical work of Platt and Emerson to understand the process and consequences of controlling youth deviance in contemporary society. CONTROL OF YOUTH IN AN ERA OF MASS INCARCERATION As I describe above, the way society punishes children is unique from the punishment of adults; an entire juvenile justice system was created based on the idea that children are dif- ferent, and more vulnerable, than adults and that they require different interventions for different reasons. At the same time, however, the punishment of children is part of the broad landscape of crime control and is shaped by trends in how society punishes deviance and criminal offenders, generally. Over the past several decades, this landscape of crime control has changed tremendously; we are now in an era of what is commonly called “mass incarcer- ation,” marked by punitive justice and record-setting prison populations, despite decreases in actual crime (Garland 2001). Justice systems have become more punitive in an effort to sympathize with victims and respond to public fears and insecurities, a process that socio- legal scholar Jonathan Simon (2007) calls “governing through crime.” These trends shape the way that society punishes children, but not equally. Increasing punitiveness in the juvenile justice system has been disproportionately enforced on socially and economically disadvantaged youth. Instead of all youth feeling the impact of increasing punitiveness, it has been targeted at “other people’s children” (Feld 1999), or children who are poor and racial/ethnic minorities. Indeed, minority youth are far more likely than white youth to be arrested and punished, despite very similar rates of self-reported crime and drug use (see Arya and Augarten 2008). When white youth are arrested, judgments over them tend to be much more forgiving. For example, Bridges and Steen (1998) found that when proba- tion offi cers assessed youth in order to inform judges’ sentencing decisions, they described white juvenile defendants as suffering from external problems for which they did not bear full blame, such as drug/alcohol addiction and parental abuse; Black youth, on the other hand, were described as having internal problems, meaning that they were just “bad kids” who deserved full blame. Much like what Platt found, it seems clear that poor and minority youth are targeted for punishment within a contemporary, more punitive environment. Another important issue is what ideas motivate the punishment of youth in the contem- porary juvenile justice system. Again, this topic is a direct extension of Platt’s early thinking about the juvenile court’s supposed goal of treatment and rehabilitation. We can see substan- tial movement away from this initial goal, as juvenile justice systems across the country have CONNECTIONS | 433 changed their mission statements to de-emphasize treatment or rehabilitation and explicitly emphasize punishment (Feld 1999). Another important recent trend has been the massive increases in youth being prosecuted in adult criminal court, rather than juvenile court. This process is called juvenile transfer, or waiver, and works differently across states. Sometimes judges decide which particular youth are beyond the capacity of the juvenile court to deal with, but more often a prosecutor decides this and directly fi les the case in criminal court, or a state’s law establishes categories of offenders (by age and offense) that are automatically transferred. Since the late 1970s, states across the United States have revised their transfer laws to facilitate, and in many cases require, the transfer of greater numbers of juveniles. One aspect of transfer to criminal court that is particularly interesting is that it contradicts the initial juvenile court’s premise of the difference between children and adults, for some youth at least. Transferring a juvenile to the adult court is not simply about punishment, since states could instead pass legislation to increase punishments in juvenile court. It’s also a symbolic declaration that certain juveniles are “adult-like” or are such serious offenders that they do not deserve the juvenile identity. In my book Judging Juveniles (Kupchik 2006), I look at how this relabeling from juvenile to adult plays out in courts. Borrowing from Emerson’s work on the way that youth are categorized in juvenile court, I studied the ways that criminal court staff (judges, defense attorneys, and prosecutors) consider the youthfulness of transferred juveniles: essentially, whether they thought of them and judged them as children or adults. I found that for most transferred youth, the punishment phase of criminal court processing looked a lot like a juve- nile court in several ways. Judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys did their best to treat most transferred youth as juveniles, not as adults, in a way that contradicts much of what transfer laws intend. Court staff still viewed most transferred youth as children who made mistakes and have a chance to mature and improve their behavior, despite the fact that they have been legally redefi ned as adults. Control of Youth in an Era of Postindustrialism Another important social change since the pioneering work of Emerson and Platt that has affected the control of youth is the collapse of the industrial job market. The United States is now in a stage known as postindustrialism (e.g., Wilson 1987), meaning that factories and factory jobs have largely disappeared, especially in cities—instead, available jobs are more likely to require specialized training or skills, or customer service abilities. There are now far fewer blue-collar jobs in urban areas than were available in prior generations, which has contributed to urban unemployment and poverty. In his work on the initial juvenile court, Platt argued that the court existed in part to train youth for future roles as factory workers. But what happens when there are no more factories in urban areas? Youth who grow up in poor urban areas face dismal educational prospects and little opportunity to compete in the current economy. Though some rise above these challenges, many experience perpetual unemployment or underemployment. The preceding reading, “The Hypercriminalization of Black and Latino Male Youth in the Era of Mass Incarceration,” by Victor M. Rios, considers this puzzle. Rios studies the expe- riences of Latino and African American adolescents in California to understand how they are treated by police, by teachers, by parents, and in their communities. He fi nds that these | AARON KUPCHIK434 youth clearly see their limited career opportunities and struggle against this challenge to obtain an education and employment. But most are simply unable to fi nd jobs or to succeed in school. Rios fi nds that instead of being given a fair chance to prove themselves and pos- sibly succeed, “most of the youth in the study were labeled and treated as criminals not only by police, courts, and probation but also by teachers, community centers, and even parents.” Moreover, there is little help available to them in the form of welfare provisions or other state assistance. The result of this situation is a deep investment by the state in the policing and incarcera- tion of youth. Unlike Platt’s description of the early juvenile court, which sought to uplift and rehabilitate youth, Rios argues that the state seeks only to punish the Black and Latino male youth he studied. These youth are viewed as risks or threats to be managed and removed from society, not as wayward or unfortunate youth who need to be saved. His analysis shows how the social control of youth looks different in the contemporary era, given a new set of labor, fi nancial, and other social contexts. And yet many core elements of Platt’s and Emerson’s arguments still hold true, as youth are judged subjectively based on their perceived characters in a system that reinforces class and racial/ethnic inequality. Social Control in Schools Recent research also considers the social control of youth in schools. The preceding reading by Jonathan Simon, “Safe Schools: Reforming Education through Crime,” from his book Governing through Crime , describes how the broader context of policing and punishment in society that he calls “governing through crime” can be seen in schools as well. It is common now for contemporary public schools to have surveillance cameras, zero-tolerance policies, random sweeps with drug-sniffi ng dogs, and full-time police offi cers on campus. These shifts in control of youth in schools are the result of broad social anxieties and fears. In contrast to previous eras, in which Americans felt more connections to each other and more confi dence in government to help them solve their problems, citizens now feel a great deal of fear, dis- trust, and lack of social support. Politicians respond by reinforcing citizens’ fears of victim- ization and using crime-control rhetoric to justify legislation on a host of issues—in this case, school policy. Concerns about issues such as students’ academic achievement translate into promises of increased school security. Schools have always performed social control of youth, but the past few decades have brought about big changes in how schools control youth, with a shift toward increased punishment and invasive security. Despite the fact that schools are safer now than in past decades, with continually decreasing levels of violence and other crimes, schools have ramped up their security, increased their use of punishments such as suspension, enhanced their links to police departments and juvenile courts, and become more authoritarian. Simon shows how “governing through crime” has resulted in schools joining with other criminal justice system partners, consistent with Rios’s argument that the policing and punishment of youth occurs across social institutions. One element of this new school social control is that students now are commonly arrested for relatively minor misbehaviors. Studies of urban schools with large police presence fi nd that students often are arrested for offenses such as insubordination or disorderly conduct, which commonly means that they simply didn’t listen to (or that they spoke back to) an adult (e.g., Nolan 2012). In other words, behaviors like fi ghting and mouthing off, which used to be frowned upon but tolerated as typical youthful deviance, are now subject to arrest in many schools (Kupchik 2010). This merging of informal (school punishment) and formal CONNECTIONS | 435 (arrest) social control is a new development in schools that causes youth to have criminal records and miss educational time, and increases the odds that they drop out of school. Con- sider, for example, Salecia Johnson, a six-year-old kindergarten student in Georgia who was handcuffed, put in a squad car, and arrested at school for having a temper tantrum in April 2012 (see Campbell 2012). In the current school climate, the use of handcuffs and formal arrest seem to be an appropriate response to a diffi cult child acting out; it is hard to imagine this happening in the past, instead of a teacher or principal handling the child. Consistent with Platt’s analysis of the initial juvenile court, contemporary school disci- pline and security results in the unequal use of punishment, such as suspensions. Several studies have now led to the same conclusion: that racial/ethnic minority youth are dispro- portionately punished in school. Some studies fi nd that this is true even when one takes into account their actual rates of misbehavior, fi nding that they are singled out for punishment at a higher rate than white students (e.g. Skiba et al. 2000). School staff are more likely to view youth of color as having a negative attitude or being hostile, compared to white youth, and the result is that they receive more punitive responses from schools. In Homeroom Security (Kupchik 2010), I study contemporary school discipline and secu- rity and fi nd that there are several negative consequences to the punitive social control found in public schools today. One is that it increases inequality, since students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely than others to be punished and miss educational time, and as a result they are set even further behind. This conclusion mirrors Platt’s, but also follows sociological theory on the effects of how and what we teach students in school. Bour- dieu and Passeron (1990), for example, describe how schools reward students not necessarily for being smarter or working harder but for demonstrating middle-class behaviors. This fur- thers inequality, because middle-class youth are seen as high-achieving and lower-class youth as low-achieving based only on behaviors (e.g., styles of dress, how they talk, what music they like, etc.) that have little or nothing to do with academics. Another problem with school discipline is that because school rules are now so rigid and so central to how schools operate, school staff pay attention only to the rules and lose sight of students’ actual problems, which are usually the reasons why students misbehave. For example, in my research I spoke to many teachers, most of whom told me that students tend to act up in class because they don’t understand the material being taught. What do these teachers do in response? They kick the students out of class, meaning that the students miss more class time and fall further behind, ensuring that the problem causing the misbehavior grows worse. Just like Rios and Simon both argue, the social control of youth wins out over attempts to improve the lives of youth through social supports. Ironically, these practices might actually make schools less safe. Research shows clearly that schools with more inclusive social climates are safer; these are schools where students feel valued, listened to, and part of the school community, and as a result they value the school and refrain from negative behaviors within it. But I fi nd that policing and punish- ment in schools unravels these elements of schools by alienating students, making them feel unwanted and not listened to, which may actually increase the rates of misbehavior they would otherwise show. CONCLUSION As the preceding readings demonstrate, perspectives on the social control of youth tend to be critical. Although society views children as deserving care, support, and forgiveness, | AARON KUPCHIK436 our systems of punishment tend to bypass these views in favor of punishment, particularly for racial/ethnic minority and poor youth. Platt articulates how such punitive treatment for youth instead of care and support was part and parcel of the nation’s fi rst juvenile court, while Simon and Rios continue this argument by showing its relevance in contemporary society, through punishment in schools and in communities. As Rios illustrates, racial/ethnic minority youth today face a “youth control complex” that presumes they are criminals and treats them as such rather than offering them the social, emotional, and educational supports that might help them. These perspectives on the social control of youth are important because the way that we guide, teach, and punish youth sheds light on dominant social norms. How society responds to youth deviance tells us what society fears. As these readings argue, society fears youth themselves, particularly youth of color, more than it fears the problems these youth face. Regardless of poverty, histories of abuse, immaturity, and social challenges that are not their fault, today’s children are arrested at school, transferred to criminal court, and punished more severely than youth of prior generations. Since we know that these practices produce more bad outcomes than good outcomes, their popularity suggests that we are more inter- ested in punishment than in helping deviant youth. As Simon shows, this focus on pun- ishment for youth illustrates a broader trend of “governing through crime” that is also responsible for rising prison populations. In other words, the fact that we punish youth this way despite all we know about the immaturity of children, their propensity for deviance, and our desire to help and protect them, speaks volumes about punitive social control in contemporary society. The themes discussed here, including the ways that punishment is based on subjective perceptions and increases inequality among youth, raise many questions to which we have no answers. Perhaps most importantly, if such problems arise out of attempts to help youth, then is it possible to use the justice system to help children? If so, how do we do so in such a way that protects youth while punishing misbehavior appropriately? CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS 1. How did the initial juvenile court refl ect social inequality? How are the inequalities expe- rienced by delinquents today similar or different from those in the past? 2. How can society properly punish juvenile delinquents while still trying to care for and rehabilitate them? 3. Should schools use police offi cers to implement security? Why or why not? REFERENCES Arya, Neelum and Augarten, Ian. 2008. Critical Condition: African-American Youth in the Justice System . Wash- ington, DC: Campaign for Youth Justice. Bourdieu, Pierre and Passeron, Jean-Claude. 1990. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture . 2nd ed. Thou- sand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Bridges, George S. and Steen, Sara. 1998. “Racial Disparities in Offi cial Assessments of Juvenile Offenders: Attribu- tional Stereotypes as Mediating Mechanism.” American Sociological Review 63: 554–570. Campbell, Antoinette. 2012 (April 17). “Police Handcuff 6-Year-Old Student in Georgia.” CNN.com. Retrieved April 10, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/17/justice/georgia-student-handcuffed. Chesney-Lind, Meda. 1973. “Judicial Enforcement of the Female Sex Role.” Issues in Criminology 8: 51–70. Emerson, Robert M. 1969. Judging Delinquents: Context and Process in Juvenile Court . Chicago: Aldine Publishing. Feld, Barry C. 1999. Bad Kids: Race and the Transformation of the Juvenile Court . New York: Oxford University Press. http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/17/justice/georgia-student-handcuffed http://CNN.com CONNECTIONS | 437 Garland, David. 2001. The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society . Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press. Kupchik, Aaron. 2006. Judging Juveniles: Prosecuting Adolescents in Adult and Juvenile Courts . New York: New York University Press. Kupchik, Aaron. 2010. Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear . New York: New York University Press. Nolan, Kathleen. 2012. Police in the Hallways: Discipline in an Urban High School . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shelden, Randall G. and Osborne, Lynn T. 1989. “ ‘For Their Own Good’: Class Interests and the Child Saving Movement in Memphis, Tennessee, 1900–1917.” Criminology 27: 747–767. Simon, Jonathan. 2007. Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear . New York: Oxford University Press. Skiba, Russell J., Michael, Robert S., Nardo, Abra Carroll, and Peterson, Reece. 2000. The Color of Discipline: Sources of Racial and Gender Disproportionality in School Punishment . Indiana Education Policy Center, Report SRS1. Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. This page intentionally left blank SECTION 10 Q ueer Theory, Communities, and Citizenship This page intentionally left blank Introduction Tammy L. Anderson Sixty-two-year-old Emily Greene lives in Pagoda, a lesbian community in rural Alabama. Pagoda, like many other women’s communities, disallows males or any female relatives (including chil- dren) who aren’t lesbians. Dining out, hiring laborers to work on their homes, and listening to music are all woman-centered endeavors in this lesbian-feminist place. In 2009, the New York Times estimated there were about 100 such settlements in the United States populated by women mostly over the age of 50 (Kershaw 2009). Yet, there is concern among Greene and other members that such communities are dying and won’t be around much longer. Why? Younger lesbians don’t see a need for them, since society has progressed in accepting homosexuals and affording them rights older lesbians like Emily didn’t enjoy. Today’s lesbians don’t see the “we” versus “them” world that Greene’s neighbor Rand Hall does. Hall explains: Outside the gate, it’s still a man’s world and women are not safe, period. It’s just that simple . . . I don’t have curtains, so I don’t have to worry about someone watching me dress or undress. (quoted in Kershaw 2009: 1) In Section 3, we introduced you to the idea that deviance could be understood from a neighborhood or community level, one with physical or symbolic and cultural boundaries. By shifting from an exclusive focus on individuals to a more structural one concerned with neigh- borhood effects, social disorganization, and collective effi cacy, we gained an appreciation of how environments can shape deviance and our understanding of it. Section 10 builds on these ideas by focusing on citizenship—equal rights and privileges— within communities. Readings by Kitsuse (1980) and Taylor (2011) describe how communities are used by society’s outcasts or marginals—for example, gays and lesbians—to retain unique cultural customs, lifestyles, “in-group” membership, and solidarity while also calling for the recognition, respect, rights, and privileges heterosexuals have enjoyed over time. Kitsuse and Taylor teach us about the outwardly political efforts of oppressed groups to attain these goals, while Ghaziani (2010) reports on a new trend within the gays community that breaks with this more “queer-centered” tradition. In his reading, “There Goes the Gayborhood,” Ghaziani notes the decline in separate gay neighborhoods and communities is due to several factors that have made gays and lesbians more likely to integrate with their heterosexual friends and neighbors rather than confi ning themselves to gay-friendly environments and activities. This is the trend Greene and Hall worry will eventually eliminate lesbian communities like Pagoda. | TAMMY L. ANDERSON442 In the past, homosexuals were viewed as suffering psychiatric problems and making devi- ant lifestyles choices, which earned them stigma (Davis 2011). Today, gays are more accepted in our society, especially when they conform to heterosexual norms (e.g., parenting and monogamy) and abandon unconventional ways. While this “new normal” 1 may increase the acceptance of homosexuality in society, it may also levy new social controls that are protested by other homosexuals. In her reading, Taylor notes this is one type of consequence from outsiders’ quests for citizenship; assimilating to society’s dominant culture means all too often sacrifi cing one’s distinctively queer self. In the physical space between the rural south and urban gayborhoods or the cyber reality of television and internet communities, there are many examples of how outcasts respond to dilemmas about community and citizenship. Ghaziani writes about gays and lesbians’ efforts to abandon queer culture and integrate with heterosexual society via monogamy, marriage, and parenting. Kitsuse (1980), on the other hand, articulates a more politically resistant approach, maintaining that gays and lesbians are but one group of deviants who use legiti- mate political channels to “come out all over” or challenge conventional viewpoints of their conduct to gain citizenship. Yet, quests for citizenship are not always so binary, formal, and clear. They can, as Taylor notes, be quite murky, less political, and rather informal. They can take the form of maintain- ing a separate lifestyle as described above with lesbian communities. Moreover, citizenship quests of all kinds can be complicated by just who constitutes a member of the in-group and out-group. Consider the bugchasers and gift-givers Swan and Monico write about in their connec- tions reading. Bugchasers are a group of gay men who engage in risky sex with gift-givers 2 to contract the HIV virus. As Swan and Monico note, they are a subculture of a larger commu- nity of “men who have sex with men” (MSM) who value something entirely different: safe sex in private. So, when we are tempted to classify homosexuals as a singular group who are either assimilating to heterosexual culture or claiming their queer-centric ways, what we fi nd instead is diversity within the pool of outcasts and multiple layers by which to consider how deviance and normality are defi ned and negotiated in society. Most of us, heterosexuals and homosexuals alike, probably can’t comprehend why anyone would want to voluntarily contract the HIV virus. As a subculture of a larger marginalized community (LGBT individuals), bugchasers seek a freedom to engage in any sexual activity they desire without having to take precautions to avoid HIV and other STDs that both their heterosexual and fellow homosexual citizens expect. In other words, if you already have the virus, you won’t have to wear condoms like everyone else and deny yourself pleasurable, exotic sex. You would be free to live—and have sex as you please—without worrying about the pressures of society. A young barebacker from the Swan and Monico reading explains: I guess it’s payback, you know. After spending years, our cocks wrapped in plastic marching to the “Safe Sex” rhythm. That didn’t work. It was doomed from the start. We’re human beings . . . men. (quoted in Dean 2009: 54) The lessons we can take from Section 10’s readings and the themes of community and citizenship are many. So-called deviants are not simply people who we can stigmatize, shame, shun, and silence as so many deviance scholars theorized in the past. They are people who seek the same things we all do: civility, equality, recognition, respect, dignity, and solidarity. INTRODUCTION | 443 They will take multiple paths to achieve those goals, including resisting and challenging dom- inant institutions through the political acts (like the antibullying efforts) Taylor describes, assimilating to mainstream culture and lifestyle as Ghaziani notes, or simply embarking on alternative lifestyles in more private communities that coexist within society’s mainstream, like the lesbians of Pagoda or the bugchasers in Swan and Monico’s essay. For sure, the fi eld of deviance must—as Section 3 indicated—attend to how deviance is defi ned and managed through both real and symbolic neighborhoods and communities. We must acknowledge, also, that norms and deviance vary by social context and across social groups. While an overarching community and dominating group is ever present, there will also be many subcultures and communities that a wide variety of people will be engaged in and committed to. In these contexts, we will probably fi nd behaviors, traits, and conditions that both offend and excite or benefi t and cost us. They will be things the sociology of devi- ance hasn’t much considered, but we are hoping that by reading this text, you will. NOTES 1. Please see the recent NBC television show by the same name at http://www.nbc.com/the-new-normal/. Retrieved May 15, 2013. 2. Gay men who have HIV and are willing to infect a consenting sexual partner. REFERENCES Dean, T. 2009. Unlimited Intimacy: Refl ections on the Subculture of Barebacking . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ghaziani, Amin. 2010. “There Goes the Gayborhood?” Contexts 9(4): 64–66. Kershaw, Sarah. 2009 (January 30). “My Sister’s Keeper.” New York Times . Retrieved June 13, 2013, http://www. nytimes.com/2009/02/01/fashion/01womyn.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. Kitsuse, John I. 1980. “Coming Out All Over: Deviants and the Politics of Social Problems.” Social Problems 28(1): 1–12. Taylor, Yvette. 2011. “Queer Presences and Absences: Citizenship, Community, Diversity–or Death.” Feminist Theory 12(3): 335–341. http://www.nbc.com/the-new-normal/ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/fashion/01womyn.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/fashion/01womyn.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 Coming Out All Over: Deviants and the Politics of Social Problems John I. Kitsuse Having presented this reading to the meetings of the Society in Boston last August (1979), I dutifully circulated copies of it among my colleagues for their comments. I should have known. Not that they were unresponsive; they were very responsive. “You go too far; you don’t go far enough. How about this, and how about that, and how about cutting whole pages of the statement?” What to do? Just set it aside, give it time, let it season. So I fi led those responses away with the reading, hoping that by juxtaposi- tion and by osmotic process they might inter- act symbolically and give new clarity, if not felicity, to the line of argument I had hoped to develop in the address. Alas, time has not performed this miracle, and I am faced with the problem of how to prepare this reading for publication. The problem has led me to wonder what exactly the publication of a presidential address is supposed to represent. Is it a record of what was presented to the membership of the Soci- ety on a certain day and hour, or, as I asked one of my colleagues, is that presentation to be considered a run-it-up-the-fl agpole exer- cise which, fi nding the fl ag tattered and torn when it is brought down, should be patched together for more formal display? The ques- tion was perhaps rhetorical, and a colleague, good friend that he is, suggested that I “tin- ker with it as little as your sense of intellec- tual fastidiousness will permit. . . . Let it live as a lecture, a controlled outburst of thought, and leave details for the ragpickers to scrap at.” Whereupon, he of course stepped for- ward to be among the fi rst of the ragpickers. Well, fair enough. Why not let it fl y (as in the fl ag) and respond to as many of his and others’ comments as I can in a “postword.” This seems such a reasonable solution that I suspect that there is something wrong with it, but I am ready to seize it as a perquisite of the offi ce. Still, it seems from some of the responses to the paper that a few introductory com- ments may be helpful to sharpen the line of argument that I want to develop. The ques- tions that organized my thoughts for the reading were concerned with how we sociol- ogists of deviance and social problems have conceptualized the problem of deviance. In referring to the “coming out process,” I am less interested in the ways various stigma- tized groups have engaged in the politics of social and legal “entitlement” than I am in how those activities might be conceived from the interactionist perspective on devi- ance. I am interested, then, in examining the interactionist conception of the social and moral situation of deviants in order to identify some theoretical issues articulating the study of deviance with the sociology of social problems. My use of the term coming out may require further clarifi cation. Although the term is commonly used in conjunction with closets, I will be less concerned with the conditions COMING OUT ALL OVER: DEVIANTS AND THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS | 445 of secrecy, visibility and disclosure than with the issue of the social affi rmation of self. Coming out as an act of self-affi rmation is not limited to the matter of the visibility of the stigmatizing condition that Goffman took as the basis for the distinction between the “dis- credited” and the “discreditable.” A person who has lived in shame and embarrassment with a disfi guring facial scar, a woman who has silently suffered demeaning treatment at the hands of overbearing male colleagues, of a black who has been socially and psycho- logically imprisoned by racial stereotypes may struggle with the issues surrounding the process of coming out no less than those who bear the less visible “blemishes of individual character” (Goffman, 1963) such as mental disorder, drug addiction, unemployment or illegitimate birth. Finally, a prefatory comment on the term deviant , which in a paradoxical way is both too inclusive and too exclusive. In his book Social Pathology , Edwin Lemert (1951) com- menting on the defi nition of deviance, wryly reports on an exercise he conducted using the social problems texts of the day (the 1940s) to estimate the numbers of different types of “pathological deviants” enumerated in them. He found 104,000,000 out of a U.S. population in 1935 of 127,250,000. Every- one is deviant to someone, but such a stan- dard clearly blunts the concept. On the other hand, there are some among us who hold to the view that, sociologically speaking, a deviant is one who is defi ned and treated as deviant by others, a defi nition which may err on the side of excluding from consideration people in social categories that are not con- ventionally labeled or treated as deviant but who nevertheless share the social psycho- logical, social and political situation of those who meet the requirements of the labeling defi nition. I have in mind members of racial, ethnic and sex categories. Erving Goffman (1963), commenting critically on the term deviant (and suggest- ing that, like victims of iatrogenic disorders, deviants are creations of social scientists who then study them), introduced the concept of “tribal stigma,” related to “race, nation, and religion, these being stigma that can be transmitted through lineages and equally contaminate all members of a family” (1963: 4). While he explicitly includes racial and ethnic attributes among tribal stigmas, sex does not qualify even though “a stigma . . . is really a special kind of relationship between attribute and stereotype” (1963: 4). It seems clear to me, however, that the ambivalences and confl icts that women in the late 1970s are experiencing in their confrontations with self and others regarding their social and cultural situation reveal how much in common they have with those convention- ally identifi ed as deviants. If, as a technical matter, women do not qualify as bearers of tribal stigmas, perhaps we can add “genetic stigma” to Goffman’s three types of stigma, to provide not only for genetic determination of sex characteristics but also of body type, eye and hair color, left-handedness and other characteristics that in other times and places have been, and in some future place and time may be , burdened with stigma. * * * There is little in the pre-’60s literature of either the sociology of deviance or of social problems that anticipates the variety and scale or organization that has marked the appearance of deviants into the politics of protest. Given our sociological conceptions of the effects of societal reactions on devi- ants, who would have thought that prosti- tutes would lobby the halls of legislative bodies to denounce “your tired old ethics”; or that mental patients would organize to demand discharge from institutions that provide only custody but not treatment; or that paraplegics would be able to leave the mark of their political clout on so many street corners across the nation; or that mar- ijuana would be openly used at “puff-in” demonstrations on the steps of government | JOHN I. KITSUSE446 buildings; or that American Nazis would claim the right to parade down the streets of the predominantly Jewish community of Skokie, Illinois; or that the chief of police of San Francisco would sponsor a program of recruiting gay men and women for posi- tions on the force? Who would have thought such events could occur, and how have our theoretical conceptions of deviance defl ected us from anticipating their appearance? The meaning of the title “Coming Out All Over” may now be more evident. I want to argue that individuals who have been cultur- ally defi ned and categorized, stigmatized, morally degraded and socially segregated by institutionally sanctioned exclusions engage in the politics of producing social problems when they declare their presence openly and without apology to claim the rights of citizenship. In such a view, deviants do not constitute social problems so much as they are, in the language of the ’70s, into social problems (Spector and Kitsuse, 1978). They have come out to challenge conventional conceptions and judgments of their conduct, to question “expert” assessments of their disabilities, “handicaps” and devaluation of their capabilities, to reject the diagnosis of their various conditions and the attendant prescriptions for corrective treatment, and to publicly demand their rights to equal access to institutional resources. Through such activities deviants have become some of the most active and visible practitioners of the arts of social problems in the ’70s. Building on and elaborating the strategies and tactics of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the ’60s, groups ranging from prison inmates to Gray Panthers have moved into the fore- front of social action to provide new forms and styles in the politics of social problems. As observers of these political events, we sociologists of deviance and social problems have had to share the embarrassment of our colleagues who were astonished by the phenomenal appearance and vigorous devel- opment of the black civil rights movement during the ’60s. The political activities of deviant groups have clearly been modeled on and shaped by the successes and failures of the civil rights movement. It is not surprising therefore that there should be an underlying similarity between the sociological concep- tions of racial and deviant phenomena, and more generally of dominant–minority group relations. These conceptions, however, may have blinded us to the potentials and pos- sibilities of political activism among stigma- tized and socially disadvantaged groups. In particular, the sociology of deviance has implicitly incorporated the conventional assimilationist conception of dominant– minority group relations from earlier for- mulations of the “race relations cycle.” The experience of waves of immigrant groups struggling to make their way up into the comforts of the American middle class was formally conceptualized as a process of dis- crimination, segregation and exclusion, then acculturation and social mobility, and fi nally the progressive assimilation of each succeed- ing generation into the dominant society. Similarly, the process of the social differen- tiation of deviants has been characterized from the perspective of those who stigmatize them as depraved, immoral, socially contam- inated and resistant to rehabilitative efforts. Confronted by such imputations, deviants, like immigrants, have been conceived to suf- fer the indignities of moralistic patronization as well as punitive acts of discrimination. In this portrait, evidence of expressed resent- ment and occasional displays of defi ance against such treatment has tended to be lost in a gloss that postulates an internalization of stigma and furtive, defensive withdrawal into deviant lives. Thus, our theorizing about deviant/other relations has been shaped by a perspective that formulates “the problem” as a product of ignorance and prejudice, and “the solu- tion” as a process of amelioration through gradual extension of understanding and acceptance by the society at large. In this COMING OUT ALL OVER: DEVIANTS AND THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS | 447 formulation, the inequities of power between individual and society are underlined to give moral force to the characterization of devi- ant as “underdog.” And it is consistent with this depiction of the deviant as underdog to locate the sources of politics and social change in programs of amelioration, cham- pioned by liberals activated by a moral and rational indignation. This process of ame- lioration, however, like the classic contact between Western and non-Western societies, implicitly assumes an asymmetrical exchange in which the characteristics that differentiate deviants from others are fi nally subordinated to the interests of social assimilation. An important source of this formulation of the social differentiation of deviants may be found in Lemert’s early theoretical state- ment. Twenty-fi ve years after the publication of Social Pathology (1951), it continues to reward rereading for the provocative insights and direction it offers for theoretical and empirical development. What distinguished Lemert’s statement was that it presented a dynamic formulation of the social construc- tion of deviants from the societal perspec- tive as well as of the formation of deviant identities from the perspective of the puta- tive deviant. I have elsewhere discussed some of the ambiguities contained in his formula- tion (Kitsuse, 1972), but I want here to call particular attention to the framework within which Lemert placed the deviants’ confron- tation with the “societal reactions” toward them. He conceived of this confrontation as a process of “symbolic interaction” in which the deviant might or might not become a “secondary deviant” contingent on “how much deviation he [sic] engages in, by the degree of its visibility, by the particular exposure to the societal reaction, and by the nature and strength of the societal reaction” (Lemert, 1951: 23). Although the provision for such contin- gent factors emphasized the dynamic char- acter of the interaction between deviants and those who respond to them, the “societal reactions” set the terms of that interaction. Lemert states: The deviations remain primary deviations or symptomatic and situational [i.e., they are not symbolized as indications of secondary deviation] as long as they are rationalized or otherwise dealt with as functions of a socially acceptable role. (1951: 75) The rationalizations and socially acceptable roles in question are, of course, resources that deviants are able to mobilize as social- ized members of the same community that organizes the societal reactions against them. Thus, while Lemert’s formulation provides for the possibility of reducing the deviant’s inner confl icts about his or her aberrant behavior, this possibility is conditioned by the deviant’s “reactions to the reactions of oth- ers.” In short, the deviant’s conception of self is conceived to be constrained by the moral- ity of those who defi ne and stigmatize him or her. Similarly, Goffman’s infl uential formu- lation of the process of stigmatization pos- tulates a moral order shared by those who impose stigmas and those on whom they are imposed, a consensus that lends signifi cance to the possibilities of being discredited. As Goffman notes at the outset of his treatise on stigma, “a language of relationships, not attributes” is needed such that those who stig- matize and those who are stigmatized inter- act within a common universe of meanings. Thus, the stigmatized in Goffman’s analysis are painfully aware of their degraded status in the eyes of others, and they are character- ized as burdened with the ceaseless manage- ment of the confl icts and ambiguities of their “spoiled identities.” Visible or invisible to others with respect to the various conditions that make them vulnerable to stigmatization, this conception of the situation of deviants renders them prisoners of their own accep- tance and enforcement of the morality that the language of relationship expresses. | JOHN I. KITSUSE448 A more recent statement of the societal reaction theme in the sociology of deviance may be found in David Matza’s depiction of an omnipotent and omnipresent “Levia- than” that monitors the corrective project of deterring “the possibility of innocent affi lia- tion with guilty activity” (1969: 149). In this extraordinary and often lyrical description and analysis of the process of “becoming deviant,” deviants are relentlessly pursued and bedeviled by the pervasive effects of legal and moral censure. In Matza’s formu- lation, the signifi cant fact of the situation of deviants is “the moral transformation of activity” through the ban that burdens them with guilt (1969: 146). In characterizing the formulations of Lemert, Goffman and Matza in this man- ner, I do not mean to say that they miscon- ceive the situation of deviants. Indeed, that an individual who is publicly ridiculed, for example, as a transvestite, or dropped by friends as a drunk, or patronized as a crip- ple, or rejected by others as a dwarf—that such an individual might simply ignore or dismiss those reactions would seem extraor- dinary if not impossible. In fact, the use of these examples to pose the theoretical issue is likely to persuade us that our theorists have depicted the situation of the deviant quite correctly. That individuals confronted with the circumstances in my examples should be able to “shine it on,” to let it be, would presuppose on the one hand a psychological armory invulnerable to ordinary communi- cations of censure and on the other a free and easy access to alternate social worlds providing a wide range of moral perspectives and social opportunities. These are certainly not presuppositions that it would be reason- able to posit in the great majority of cases that I want to consider here as deviance. The homogeneity of social norms implicit in the concept of societal reaction, however, has led, I think, to an oversocialized concep- tion of deviants in their transformation from primary to secondary deviation. Confronted with defi nitions of their acts as deviant, the transformation process is conceived to take several forms. Individuals may steadfastly defi ne the acts in question as unintended, fortuitous and due to a lapse of control or consciousness and thus reject imputations of deviance (“I must have been crazy,” “I was bombed out of my mind”); or they may employ counterdefi nitions to neutralize the societal reactions to their acts (“This is no different from the way they rip us off every- day”); or they may respond to the societal reactions by symbolically reacting “to their own behavior aberrations and fi x them in their social-psychological patterns” (Lemert, 1951: 75): that is, accept themselves as devi- ants. These alternative “reactions to the reac- tions of others” do not, however, account for, nor do they provide an understanding of, the phenomenal number of self-proclaimed deviant groups that have visibly and vocally entered the politics of the ’70s. If “becoming deviant” in fact entails a confrontation with an omnipresent nega- tive societal reaction and the construction and acceptance of a stigmatized self, what are the sources of the dramatic assertive- ness with which deviant groups have rejected and denounced the accommodative adjust- ments that Lemert, Goffman and Matza have described? How does the conception of deviants who live lives of quiet desperation square with the political activities of deviant groups that are daily reported in the media? * * * In the twenty-fi ve years since it appeared to challenge the prevailing functional theory of deviance, the interactionist view is now acknowledged, particularly by its critics, to have become the dominant paradigm in the sociology of deviance. The major line of crit- icism over those years has been to reject the interactionist defi nition of deviance as tau- tological and banal, its methodology as sub- jectivistic and soft, and its major proposition that social control activities produce deviance COMING OUT ALL OVER: DEVIANTS AND THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS | 449 rather than the reverse, as contrary to ordi- nary experience and evidence. Although this line of criticism persists among the positiv- ists in the fi eld, after years of exchange and debate, most interactionists have set it aside as an unproductive disagreement in the phi- losophy of social science. There has, however, been another line of criticism directed against the interactionist view that has not been seriously engaged nor satisfactorily answered. This criticism has been stated most clearly by Alvin Gouldner (1968) as an issue in the practice of value-free social science and subsequently echoed by others as representative of a “radical” per- spective on deviance (Davis, 1975). Unfor- tunately, the language in which the criticisms have been expressed has been burdened with a rhetoric and, in the case of Gouldner’s cri- tique, ad hominem attacks, leading many interactionists to dismiss them as political rather than scientifi c critiques. However, the issues Gouldner raised more than ten years ago may provide the basis for our examination of the “over-socialized” conception of the deviant that has devel- oped from the distinctively interactionist conception of societal reaction and its social psychological analog, secondary deviation. Citing Howard Becker as representative of the interactionist view, Gouldner commented critically on the theoretical and methodolog- ical implications of conceiving of deviants as subordinates and underdogs within the society. Asserting that such a characteriza- tion is “inherent in the very conception of the processes by which deviance is conceived as being generated,” he said: The underdog is largely seen from the stand- point of the diffi culties that are encountered when the society’s caretakers attempt to cope with the deviance that has been produced in him by the society. Becker’s school of deviance thus views the underdog as someone who is being managed, not as someone who suffers or fi ghts back. Here that deviant is sly but not defi ant; he is tricky but not courageous; sheets but does not accuse; he “makes out” without making a scene. . . . It is in some part for this reason that the kind of research that are under- taken from this standpoint tend to exclude a concern with political deviance in which men do actively fi ght back on behalf of their val- ues and interests. We thus fi nd relatively few studies of people involved in the civil rights struggle or in the peace movement. (Gouldner, 1968: 107) Now if “deviant as underdog” is inherent in the interactionist conception of the deviance producing process, it is no less true that the inequities of power that make deviants the pawns of politics are central to that concep- tion. In Gouldner’s wide-ranging critique, the signifi cance of politics in Becker’s formulation of the process by which deviance is created is obscured by a thesis that links the interac- tionist view of deviance with a misplaced sen- timentality. Gouldner has much to say about the liberal sociologist’s identifi cation with the underdog—with “man-on-his-back,” rather than with “man-fi ghting-back”—and how this identifi cation is an expression of a more fundamental, self-interested alignment with the establishment. There is, however, noth- ing in his analysis to suggest how the deviant might get off his back to generate the poli- tics of deviance that the interactionists have tended to ignore if not exclude altogether. Indeed, in one of the very few references that Gouldner makes to the “underdog’s” view of reality, his comments reveal that the deviant is on his back: There is a hidden anomaly in any recom- mendation to look upon the world from the standpoint of underdogs. The anomaly is this: to a surprising degree, underdogs see them- selves from the standpoint of respectable soci- ety; Negroes, in fact, often call one another ‘niggers.’ Thus, if we did not study under- dogs from ‘their own’ standpoint we would, inevitably, be adopting the standpoint of the dominant culture. It is precisely insofar as the deviant and subordinate do accept a role as passive victims rather than as rebels against | JOHN I. KITSUSE450 circumstances, that they do view themselves from the standpoint of the dominant culture. (1968: 107) The use of such epithets among minorities in reference to each other can, of course, refl ect an ironic consciousness of self and society. Gouldner’s observation, however, may sug- gest that, whatever our political sympathies, as sociologists we share the knowledge of how invasive societal defi nitions are in their negative effects on the self-conceptions of minorities. The ideology of social patholo- gists that Mills (1943) described and ana- lyzed more than thirty years ago may linger still in our attribution to deviants of a vul- nerability and subordination to the moral authority of what is commonly characterized as white, middle-class, protestant culture and society. Even when we take the naturalistic view recommended by Matza and assume the “appreciative attitude,” there may be a certain WASP-like wonder, and a titillation of vicarious identifi cation in our efforts to conceive of difference as “merely” variant, and systematic deviation as “alternative life- style” that we should consider without prej- udice and in their own terms. Alas, our aspirations and training may have exacted the price of the same insidi- ous socialization to societal strictures that we attribute to deviants. It is not a matter of “whose side we are on” as much as it is that our “appreciation” and sympathies may fi nally be constrained by a middle-class sen- sibility that limits our ability to assume that classic anthropological stance toward our subjects in which “nothing human is alien.” So we may wonder, fi nally, how those ado- lescent males and tearoom habitués man- age to sustain a defi nition of themselves as normal “straight” males; how can those people make “working the welfare system” a career that provides them with an invisible means of support; how can spouses collude in acts of violence against their infant chil- dren; how can urban youth professionalize the victimization of aged pensioners to rob them of their monthly allowance; how is it possible for men and women to abandon family and home to establish themselves in new and unencumbered lives? The question persists below the surface of our professional neutrality: how is it possible for people to engage in such activities without feeling the inhibiting constraints of self and societal cen- sure on their actions? If in the past, the sociological image of deviants has depicted them as oversocialized to the societal reactions toward them, these emergent forms of deviance that have become staple items of our daily media fare suggest the inadequacy of such a characterization. The activities of middle-class born and bred street people, brazenly confronting the dis- approval of “respectables” with an insouci- antly applied touch for money, may lead us to question the attributions of self-confl ict and subterfuge that have been imputed to alcoholics, prostitutes and welfare recipients, as well as to upwardly mobile, assimilationst blacks, Jews and other minorities. In returning to this connection between deviance and minority groups, it is appro- priate to acknowledge once again how sys- tematically Lemert attempted to examine the implications of his theory. In a discussion specifying the subject matter of his theory, he makes the following comment in a footnote: We have raised the question in graduate semi- nars as to whether our theory is applicable to the study of minority or ethnic groups. Gener- ally this question has to be left unanswered. While ethnic groups are often comparable to the type of deviant groups in which we are interested, it is also true that in some cases their large size and occasional positions of consider- able power in local areas mean that they differ signifi cantly from the deviant groups we shall be studying. (1951: 24) Although Lemert, writing in 1950, certainly should not be burdened with having failed to anticipate the size and organized power of COMING OUT ALL OVER: DEVIANTS AND THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS | 451 deviant groups in the ’70s (e.g., the gay and lesbian populations in San Francisco or the paraplegic groups across the nation), he is less than persuasive in arguing for the exclu- sion of minority and ethnic groups on those theoretical grounds. Indeed, the anomaly of this exclusion is underlined by numerous ref- erences to immigrant groups, religious sects and American Indians in his discussion of the differentiation of deviant populations. It is more likely that he excluded them as a conse- quence of the essentially social-psychological focus of his theory on the social differentia- tion of isolated individuals rather than group members. The conventional view of racial and eth- nic groups is that their members are socially differentiated on the basis of group rather than individual characteristics. Thus, their experience of differentiation is seen as a group experience, unlike the deviant who is conceived to experience the defi ning censure of society as an individual, personal crisis of negative identity unmediated by subcultural rationalizations or supports. Affi liation and participation in deviant social organizations are considered secondary and contingent possibilities, providing group contexts for the systematization and confi rmation of their status as deviants. In effect, deviant social organizations are analogs of the individual’s symbolization of self as secondary deviant. They are collective reactions that organize patterns of responses to the problems posed by societal reactions to deviance, just as the individual’s reactions to the negative reactions of others lead to the ultimate acceptance of a deviant social role and efforts to systematically organize a life based on that role. This, then, is the image of the passive “man-on-his-back,” seemingly incapable of resisting or opposing the inexorable process of attributions of abnormality and inad- equacy, stigmatized as morally defective, progressively excluded and subordinated as deviant, and driven to seek comfort and support in the shelter of deviant subcultures. From the perspective of the late ’70s this image of the deviant may border on cari- cature, but it is an image that, radical crit- ics notwithstanding, applied only too well to the situation of homosexuals, unmarried mothers, ex–mental patients, the physically handicapped and others in the period before the ’60s. This oversocialized conception of the deviant, however, has led us to expect the social differentiation of secondary deviants turned inward to segregated if not clos- eted lives within subcultural communities, nervously engaged in the “management of spoiled identities” in their daily encounters with “normals.” A closer examination of these accom- modations, free of such a conception of the situation of deviance, might reveal the heavy psychological and social costs exacted by the tacit acceptance of societal defi nitions of deviants—and beneath the surface acqui- escence, a residue of resentment and anger toward those who deny them the common rights of citizenship. Secondary deviation may rationalize shame and guilt and thus neutralize them as daily concerns, but the alienation of self, created by the artifi ce and guile practiced to avoid the indignities and penalties of disclosure, may be experienced as a gratuitous and fi nally unsupportable imposition of tumble and pain. Since devi- ants themselves may have learned to accept the dynamics of their behavior and the pen- alties of their various conditions as beyond choice or control, their vulnerability to arbi- trary acts of discrimination, to demeaning treatment, to the derisive taunts of the small- est child as well as the most arrogant police offi cer, may feed a highly volatile reservoir of outrage and anger. This outrage and anger, galvanized by the political ferment of the late ’60s, is perhaps most clearly symbolized by the explosion of violence in what has become known as the “Stonewall Rebellion” of 1969 (Humphreys, 1972). In that event, now commemorated | JOHN I. KITSUSE452 in gay communities throughout the country as the beginning of their “liberation move- ment,” a police action in a Greenwich Village gay bar became the occasion for an unex- pectedly violent response from the patrons within, soon joined by gays and others in the surrounding area. The rebellion dramati- cally challenged the prevailing conception of this deviant population as the prototypi- cally vulnerable and helpless victim of public and private harassment and sanctions. Con- demned and persecuted throughout history in law, religious doctrine and social conven- tion, male homosexuals have borne the brunt of a degrading stereotype that depicts them as effeminate, frivolous, passive, physically weak, emotionally unstable, morally per- verted and a threat to men and boys alike. This characterization of the situation of homosexuals was implicit in the sociologi- cal literature before the ’60s, giving no hint of the potential volatility of their apparent accommodation to their deviant status. Spectacular as it was as a rousing display of the rage of the oppressed, the “Stonewall Rebellion” is even more signifi cant for its effect on the transformation of the imagery of the homosexual for self and society. For participants as well as for the audience, the rage that gays directed against the police fun- damentally altered conventional stereotypes. It provided the basis for actively opposing societal conceptions of what gays are, why they are what they are, and what , if anything, should be done about it. If “homosexuals” fi t the image of the deviant on-his-back, “gays” exemplify what might be termed “the new deviants”—fat people, little people, ugly people, old people and a growing number of others—who have called into question the very concept of “deviant,” not by denying what they are but by affi rming and claiming it as a valued identity deserving of the rights accorded any member of the society. Deviants are coming out all over, not in acts of confession but rather to profess and advocate the lives they live and the values that those lives express. In cities and suburbs, singly and together, among male and female groups, married and unmarried, people who have suppressed and muffl ed central aspects of their lives in guilt, shame and embar- rassment are coming out to challenge the legitimacy of social, legal and scientifi c con- ceptions of their “affl ictions,” preferences and values. The new deviants are critically examining their accommodations to social tolerance that have been the bases of their carefully managed marginal lives, accommo- dations that daily tax their nerve and energy. Quentin Crisp, the “naked civil servant” (Hanson, 1976), with his fl amboyant display of gaiety, pays the cost of such accommoda- tion no less than Katherine Butler Hatha- way, author of The Little Locksmith (1943), who nurtured and sustained a refl ective life beneath the unobtrusive and self-effacing manner of the physically deformed. As the title of a recent documentary fi lm declares, “The Word is Out” (Mariposa Film Group, 1978), not only about homosexuals who are the subjects of the fi lm but about paraplegics, fat people, the blind, the victims of rape and a growing number of “disval- ued” people; and the word is that they reject the costs of accommodation as unjust, gra- tuitous and unacceptable. The gays march- ing down the streets of cities large and small, the handicapped on public transportation systems, religious cult groups in air termi- nals, “women against rape” in police sta- tions, and others clearly demonstrate that the new deviants are not celebrating the sweet Aquarian call to let the sunshine in. Rather they are invoking, pressing and push- ing the democratic ideology, claiming all the rights, privileges and protections for per- sonal freedoms and equal access to institu- tional resources. They do not shrink from the hostile responses of those they confront, and they do not ask tolerance for who and what they are and do but demand recogni- tion of the moral and legal bases of their claims. They give no quarter, though they COMING OUT ALL OVER: DEVIANTS AND THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS | 453 may demand much more to redress the ineq- uities of the past. Their political stance is direct and clearly expresses the confi dence of civil rights activism: why should we accom- modate; why shouldn’t we demand; what do they want from us? And in pressing their claims, the new deviants have attempted, often successfully, to shift the negative identities of deviance to those who have imposed identities on them. In some quarters—one might suggest aca- demia as an example—charges such as rac- ist, sexist, ageist or weightist, not to mention pig, prude and philistine, have assumed suf- fi cient force as epithets to drive the accused into the closets vacated by those who accuse them. Indeed, the politics of deviance is so fl uid and volatile that it is becoming diffi cult to tell who is in and who is out of the closets. Although it remains to be seen whether or not the activities of the new deviants have fundamentally altered their political as well as cultural situation in an enduring way, it is important to note the theoretical issues that those activities present. Our theoreti- cal formulations of the social or the social psychological situation of deviants do not provide an adequate framework for the investigation of the developing politics of deviance. If secondary deviation is instituted when deviants “react symbolically to their own behavior aberrations and fi x them in their socio- psychological patterns” (Lemert, 1951: 75), then we might propose the con- cept of “tertiary deviation” to refer to the deviant’s confrontation, assessment and rejection of the negative identity imbedded in secondary deviation and the transformation of that identity into a positive and viable self- conception. As an extension of the natural history of deviant lives outlined by Lemert, the concept of tertiary deviance would direct us to investigate questions of how it is possible for the stigmatized, ridiculed and despised to confront their own complicity in the maintenance of their degraded status, to recover and accept the suppressed anger and rage as their own, to transform shame into guilt, guilt into moral indignation, and vic- tim into activist. Such questions suggest the importance of shifting our analytic focus from the defi ni- tions of deviance imposed by societal reac- tions to counterdefi nitions of those reactions by deviants as ignorant, hypocritical, elit- ist and even morally reprehensible. Lynn Osborne (1974) has provided the beginnings of such an analysis in a provocative essay, titled “Beyond Stigma Theory,” on the life and art of arch criminal/homosexual/author Jean Genet who, in accepting the deviant identity imposed on him, intensifi ed his mortifi cation as an outcast and thus trans- formed his situation of deviant in society. Osborne states that Genet, in this process of transformation, (a) became a wielder instead of a victim of the force of defi nition; (b) gave moral coherence to his behavior by constructing a value system which resolves the contradictions inherent in the values of the “Good Society”; (c) overcame his guilt; and (d) became a part of society in a typically perverse way: “Everybody’s evil— the only difference is that I openly admit it.” (Osborne, 1974: 82) Osborne proposes Genet’s transcendence of his deviant identity as a model for the analy- sis of the deviant as actor in contrast to devi- ant as reactor to societal defi nitions of what he or she is and does. Although this analytic model specifi es several crucial elements of identity transformation, its general utility is limited by the singularity and extremity of Genet’s vision of life as an act of opposition to conventional social realities. The twenty- six gay men and women who talk about their lives in “The Word is Out” provide a good representation of the range of issues and con- fl icts with which deviants struggle in fi nding their individual ways to public disclosure. Two or three of them recognizably refl ect Genet’s political and philosophic stance, but for the majority of those interviewed in | JOHN I. KITSUSE454 this remarkable documentary fi lm, it is dif- fi cult to conceive that Genet’s individual and single-minded project of confronting soci- ety with its own corruption could provide a model for the analysis of their identity trans- formations. Listening to their refl ections on the confusions, confl icts and ambiguities that have shaped their lives, it is clear that less of them broke out as acts of defi ance, while others were helped, coaxed and even dragged out of their closets. Indeed, it is truly remarkable that, speaking so directly and publicly into the camera’s eye, they are able to refl ect on the ambivalence that colors their consent to this form of public disclosure— a consent they have given in the knowledge of their past, present and future vulnerabil- ity to police harassment, witch hunts, occu- pational discrimination and the pain of the betrayal and rejection of family and friends. Perhaps a more serious limitation of what Osborne calls “Geneticism” as a model of identity transformation is that the outcome defi nes but does not move beyond the affi r- mation of the existential condition of the deviant as outsider. Genet lives his life as a clarifi cation of this condition and embraces it as a way of being in society. But tertiary deviants do not come out to assume the role of social critic—they come out to claim the right to go in and stay in just like every- body else. In taking this stance, they dif- fer not only from Genet but also from the accommodations through which secondary deviants have lived in society. Whereas the tertiary deviant might say, “Here I am, warts and all; these warts have nothing to do with my right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the secondary deviant’s message is more nearly, “Here I am with these wants, but I’ve done all I can to keep them respect- ably under control and out of public view.” As for Genet, his statement might be, “Here are my warts; look at them and think about how they fascinate you! Va t’en! ” In using the metaphor of warts, I do not mean to trivialize the genuine struggle and anguish that the display of stigmata repre- sents, but it appropriately underlines the versatility with which even the most minor difference of physiognomy, accident of birth, manner of speech, postural habit, esthetic preference, personal preoccupation, interac- tional style, tic and quirk may become insti- tutionally amplifi ed and fashioned into moral and characterological defects. Whatever the changes that may remain from the politics of deviance in the ’70s, deviants and the institutional practices they have confronted will no longer be innocent of the relativism of self and society. Society’s “problem” may likewise amplify the troubles they share to identify society as “the problem.” From a theoretical point of view, then, we face the issue of incorporating this new level of devi- ant/other interaction into our formulations of deviance and social problems. REFERENCES Becker, Howard S. 1963 Outsiders . Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Davis, Nanette J. 1975 Sociological Construction of Deviance: Perspectives and Issues in Field . Dubuque, IA: W. C. Brown. De Costa, Lou and Phil Bronstein (Producers) 1979 “S and M: One Foot Out of the Closet.” (Phil Bronstein, reporter.) San Francisco: KQED News Department. Gouldner, Alvin W. 1968 “The Sociologist as Partisan.” The American Sociologist (May): 103–116. Goffman, Erving 1963 Stigma: Notes on the Manage- ment of Spoiled Identity . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pren- tice Hall. Hanson, Barry (Producer) 1976 “The Naked Civil Servant.” (Jack Gold, director.) London: Thames Television. Hathaway, Katherine B. 1943 The Little Locksmith . New York: Coward, McCann. Humphreys, Laud 1972 Out of the Closets . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Kitsuse, John 1972 “Deviance, Deviant Behavior, Devi- ants: Some Conceptual Problems.” Pp. 233–243 in W. J. Filstead (ed.), The Production of Deviance . Chi- cago: Markham. Lemert, Edwin M. 1951 Social Pathology. A Systematic Approach to the Theory of Sociopathic Behavior . New York: McGraw-Hill. Mariposa Film Group (Producers) 1978 “The Word Is Out.” (Peter Adair el al., directors.) New York: WNET. COMING OUT ALL OVER: DEVIANTS AND THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS | 455 Mills, C. Wright 1943 “The Professional Ideology of Social Pathologists.” American Journal of Sociology 49: 165–180. New York Times 1980 “Letter to the Editor.” June 5: A22. Osborne, Lynn 1974 “Beyond Stigma Theory: A Liter- ary Approach.” Issues in Criminology 9: 71–90. Rains, Prudence 1975 “Imputations of Deviance: A Ret- rospective Essay on the Labeling Perspective.” Social Problems 23: 1–11. Spector, Malcolm and John I. Kitsuse 1978 Construct- ing Social Problems . Menlo Park, CA: Cummings. Walzer, Michael 1979 “Nervous Liberals.” New York Review of Books 26 (Oct. 11): 5–9. There Goes the Gayborhood? Amin Ghaziani Lesbian and gay residential patterns are shifting today. A recent fl urry of media reports captures popular anxieties that urban enclaves long considered “gay neigh- borhoods”—places with a visible clustering of gay residents and tourists; gay and gay- friendly commercial establishments; and gay community symbols such as the rainbow fl ag—are disappearing as more straights move in and fewer gays express interest in residing in or relocating to them. The Chi- cago Tribune measured the pulse of these changes in two 2007 features, “Culture Clash: Boystown Shifting as More Families Move In” and “Gay Neighborhoods Worry About Losing Their Distinct Identity.” And in an eye-catching companion piece, one of Chicago’s free daily papers, the Red- Eye , ran a cover story playfully titled “There Goes the Gayborhood.” A provocative pho- tograph of one of the rainbow-colored pylons that adorn North Halsted Street and desig- nate it as the city’s main gay artery accom- panied the piece—but the colors were fading and bleeding. The story reported, “With more families moving in and longtime resi- dents moving out, some say Boys-town [the informal moniker of Chicago’s gayborhood] is losing its gay fl avor . . . Some residents and activists welcome the gay migration, saying it’s a sign of greater equality, while others say Boys-town is losing its identity.” The social forces contributing to this gay outmigration (and replacement by straights) stretch beyond the Windy City. San Diego’s Hillcrest, Houston’s Montrose, Atlanta’s Midtown, Miami’s South Beach, D.C.’s Dupont Circle, Boston’s South End—each is an example of a traditional American gay neighborhood, and each seems to be on a list of endangered urban species. It’s quixotic to think that gay neighbor- hoods have always been around and will never change. Neighborhoods and the cities that surround them are organic, continu- ously evolving places. But neither should we sing a requiem for the death and life of great gay villages, as some media reports presage. Thinking within this binary box isn’t socio- logically productive. We might instead ask why gay neighborhoods initially formed, and what factors explain the changes we’re witnessing now. With these questions as our guide, we can use media attention to under- stand the relationship between sexuality, residential choice, and urban forms. World War II was pivotal in the formation of gay territories. Many men and women were dishonorably discharged from the mili- tary for their homosexuality, and rather than return home disgraced, they remained in port cities such as San Francisco. According to the U.S. Census, from 1950 to 1960 the number of single-person households in San Francisco doubled and accounted for 38 per- cent of the city’s total residential units. Dur- ing this time, bars helped create dense gay networks that made gays more visible and, THERE GOES THE GAYBORHOOD? | 457 over time, inspired them to assert a right to gather in public places. A lot has changed since then. Gay life in the United States is now so open that it may be moving “beyond the closet,” says soci- ologist Steven Seidman, despite a persistent privileging of heterosexuality by the state, societal institutions, and popular culture. This mere possibility prompted British jour- nalist Paul Burston to coin the term “post- gay” in 1994 as an observation and critique of gay culture and politics. The term found an American audience four years later when Out magazine editor James Collard argued in the New York Times , “We should no lon- ger defi ne ourselves solely in terms of our sexuality—even if our opponents do. Postgay isn’t ‘un-gay.’ It’s about taking a critical look at gay life and no longer thinking solely in terms of struggle.” In a separate Newsweek feature, Collard elaborated: “First for pro- tection and later with understandable pride, gays have come to colonize whole neighbor- hoods, like West Hollywood in L.A. and Chelsea in New York City. It seems to me that the new Jerusalem gay people have been striving for all these years won’t be found in a gay-only ghetto, but in a world where we are free, equal, and safe to live our lives.” The way Americans understand sexual- ity affects people’s location patterns (why they choose to live where they do) and urban forms (why neighborhoods look and feel the way they do). The closet era (think pre–World War II) gave rise to discrete locales where individuals with same-sex desires could fi nd each other. The coming out era (World War II to 1997, but especially after the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York), in contrast, witnessed the development of formal urban gay enclaves like the Castro. And fi nally, the postgay era (1998 to today) impacts these gay neighborhoods by potentially unravel- ing them and rendering them “passé,”as the New York Times characterized them in October 2007. The Advocate remarked that same year, “As the country opens its arms to openly gay and lesbian people, the places we call home have grown beyond urban gay ghettos. The Advocate welcomes you to this new American landscape.” When the maga- zine polled its readers, asking if they’d “pre- fer to live in an integrated neighborhood rather than a distinct gay ghetto,” 69 percent said yes. One year later in an Advocate article titled “Where the Gays Are,” UCLA demographer Gary J. Gates reported that, according to the 2000 U.S. Census, “Same-sex couples live virtually everywhere in the country,” and their numbers are “increasing in some of the most conservative parts of the coun- try.” Gates’s research shows that “same-sex unmarried partners”—the only category the Census included in 2000 to count lesbians and gay men and one that clearly ignores sin- gle people—were present in 99.3 percent of all U.S. counties. Why do postgay gays tend to think outside the gayborhood box? We have to look at the factors driving the transition to today’s putatively postgay era, notably the role of assimilation or the social process of absorbing people (in this case, les- bian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people) into mainstream society. The assimilation of American gays has generated feelings of acceptance, integration, and safety, which is reversing an earlier propensity of lesbians and gay men to concentrate in discrete urban enclaves. This new sociopsychological pro- fi le works in two ways. First, assimilation contributes to an overextension of the gay residential imagination. As Don Romesburg, cochairman of the GLBT Historical Society of Northern California, told the Washing- ton Post in 2007, “What I’ve heard from some people is, ‘We don’t need the Castro anymore because essentially San Francisco is our Castro.’ ” The pattern persists in smaller cities, too. Consider Northampton, Massa- chusetts: “There are gay enclaves, but there’s no place I know where the gay population is so integrated into the community,” said Julie Pokela, a local business owner and former | AMIN GHAZIANI458 head of the Chamber of Commerce. Some people have dubbed her entire city “Lesbi- anville, USA.” Although very different, San Francisco and Northampton both show how assimila- tion has broadened the spatial positioning of homosexuality from the specifi c streets of a gay enclave to an entire city itself. But here we encounter a contradiction: if an entire city is a gay village, then no particular neigh- borhood is uniquely so. San Francisco-as- our-Castro looks and feels different from the Castro as a discrete gay urban entity. Thus, assimilation may expand a gay person’s hori- zon of residential possibilities, but it also shrinks the situating of homosexuality in urban space. Second, assimilation motivates some gays to think of their sexuality as indistinguish- able from straights, and this compels them to select residences outside of traditional gay villages. As an example, a 2004 New York Times story interviewed a lesbian couple that had relocated to a New Jersey suburb. Neither woman considered herself “any sort of activist,” and both wanted “a suburban family life that is almost boringly normal.” But why not relocate to a place like Asbury Park with its visible concentration of gay res- idents? “We’re specifi cally not moving into gay neighborhoods here. Within the state of New Jersey, we feel comfortable living anywhere,” said one woman. Her partner added, “Here, we’re just part of a neighbor- hood. We weren’t the gay girls next door; we were just neighbors. We were able to blend in, which is what you want to do, rather than have the scarlet letter on our heads.” It seems that postgay residential choice comes with a desire to deemphasize the differences between gay and straight. “There is a por- tion of our community that wants to be sepa- ratist, to have a queer culture, but most of us want to be treated like everyone is,” Dick Dadey, executive director of Empire State Pride Agenda told the Times in 1994. “We want to be the neighbors next door, not the lesbian or gay couple next door.” Figure 39.1 Gay and Lesbian Couples in the United States 1.02–5.15% of all coupled households 0.77–1.02% 0.47–0.77% THERE GOES THE GAYBORHOOD? | 459 Straights are on board, too. A 2010 Gal- lup poll found that, for the fi rst time in his- tory, the percentage of Americans who fi nd gay and lesbian relations morally acceptable crossed the symbolic fi fty-percent thresh- old. In fact, many straight women who live in gayborhoods say they feel safer in them. But why would straight men move there? Sociologist Michael Kimmel told New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow that “men have gotten increasingly comfortable with the presence of, and relative equality of, ‘the other.’ ” If they respond to gay identity dis- closure today with, “Gay? Whatever, Dude” (as Blow titled his piece), then a gay neigh- borhood is hardly out-of-bounds. Cross- ing the symbolic moral threshold, along with the preference structure of many sin- gle straight women, has resulted in a ratio of single heterosexual women to men that makes gayborhoods especially attractive to the latter—minus all the baggage that comes with homophobia. So, what should we make of media cries like “There goes the gayborhood”? The tran- sition to a postgay era is generating a par- ticular attitude and corresponding behavior: gays are deselecting traditional gay neighbor- hoods and straights are selecting them as a place of residence. Assimilation is expanding the gay urban imagination and residential repertoire at the same time that it’s erasing the identifi able location of gays in place. This postgay effect manifests in big cities and small towns alike. Gays in both places seek neigh- borhoods that are demographically diverse and where their sexual orientation adds to an already lively mix. But recall that 31 percent of Advocate readers still preferred to live in “a distinct gay ghetto.” The postgay trend, in other words, is uneven and incomplete— and there is no compelling reason to believe that it signals the defi nitive end of American gayborhoods, as some media reports predict. A sociological approach shows that it’s not a zero-sum game. Queer Presences and Absences: Citizenship, Community, Diversity—or Death Yvette Taylor Recent policies in the US and UK context— such as the Civil Partnership Act (2004) and the repeal of US military policy ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’—have been conceptualised as key moments of coming forward, whereby LGBT citizens have gained new public vis- ibility and viable presence within a human rights framework. Yet the success of ‘the world we have won’ (Weeks, 2007) within these new presences often works to recreate a dominant ‘we’, as a classed and racialised construction, neglecting the intersectional dimensions of sexual citizenship (Taylor, 2010). Indeed, in celebrating new queer pres- ences, the absence of ‘others’ must also be considered: queer and feminist literatures on the politics of grief, loss and mourning have shown the ways that some lives are already lost to public/activist/institutional concern, representing an outsider status beyond com- munity and citizenship (Taylor et al., 2010). Such debates and their complex implica- tions came to the fore around the recent sui- cide of student Tyler Clementi at a US campus following a suspected act of homophobia. Rather than locating homophobia solely within the site discussed, or on the bodies of the young people accused, this reading hopes to make broader resonances in relation to both institutional and activist responses to the event, which I address as key moments of sexual citizenship-making. I argue that the creation of broader publics, as called upon by different actors in the demand for citizenship, community and diversity, can be seen as con- tradictory, relying upon and recreating pri- vacy as the proper concern and place of civil engagements. This is witnessed in responses to different queer deaths and the affective relations—from ‘hate’ to ‘love’—which are generated interpersonally and institution- ally in pinpointing blame, in moving for- wards and in securing rights, as a moment of loss and possible gain. I ask which lives are already lost to public concern, to commu- nity activism and institutional apprehension, questions which I suggest are signifi cant to the disjunctures in diversity rhetorics and realities often enacted in community claims for citizenship. I arrived at Rutgers University in early September 2010 ready to research US sexual citizenship, hoping to situate this against earlier work on UK citizenship and the inter- sections between sexuality and class in same- sex parental rights (Taylor, 2009a). This sense of identifi cation and community in what is the most diverse US public university according to publicity (‘Jersey Roots, Global Reach’) made me ponder on the advantages and disadvantages of such a strong version of sameness and difference. The rhetorical appeal of ‘internationalisation’ and ‘diver- sity’ and the reality of elitism and exclusion (Taylor, 2009b, 2011) within higher edu- cation has been widely commented upon, where institutions produce guidelines on ‘dealing with’ diversity (frequently invoking QUEER PRESENCES AND ABSENCES: CITIZENSHIP, COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY—OR DEATH | 461 legal compulsion, employment worth and cultural variety). Yet many have pointed to the structuring of education as it solidi- fi es, rather than challenges, social divisions, reinforcing a classed and racialised version of ‘community’. The signifi cance of this to sexual citizenship, always played out within a broad landscape of inequality, community and diversity, became all too apparent in the suicide of a fi rst-year Rutgers student, Tyler Clementi, who jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge on 23 Septem- ber 2010. Clementi’s death came soon after two fellow students allegedly fi lmed him having sex with another man. In the offi - cial response that followed, it was asserted via an email from the university president that Rutgers is ‘extraordinarily proud of its diversity and the respect its members have for one another’. A two-year project ‘focus- ing attention on civility in the context of one of the most culturally and racially diverse research universities in the nation’ was high- lighted as a recommitment to ‘the values of civility, dignity, compassion, and respect’ in shared, painful times (see Project Civility 1 at http://projectcivility.rutgers.edu/). I won- dered what and whose pain would be shared, owned, claimed and forgotten (Butler, 2004). In recalling this my point is not to hold this young person’s life and death up as the shattering point of community: in the imme- diate days that followed, the media presence on campus put a spotlight on all; from fel- low student residents to those researching LGBT issues. All were asked to convey what this meant, how to convey ‘Rutgers’ loss’ and what a suitable response would be— sometimes with a microphone emerging from nowhere to capture and quickly relay those thoughts across campus and country. Per- haps unsurprisingly many students began to resent such intrusion and the debate shifted from one of sexuality and LGBT rights to one of privacy for all Rutgers students. There was also an increasing tone of resentment against campaigning groups organising die-in events (which performed more urgent and dramatic protests than ‘sit-ins’), speak-outs and silent vigils: couldn’t ‘they’ just go away now and let things get back to normal, understood as a ‘cosy diversity’ where all had suffered and all were now included, of course (Ahmed, 2009). Responses were both highly visible— recirculated again through the very technolo- gies (cell phones, web cams) blamed as the bad objects of ‘today’s youth’—and yet invis- ible, as homophobia was misplaced in being situated entirely at Rutgers. This pinpoint- ing removed responses from a historical, social perspective more able to account for homophobia and heterosexism. Most prob- lematically, homophobia was seen to reside wholly in the bodies of the two young people accused of fi lming Clementi: two 18-year-old students of colour, who then became the tar- gets of racist abuse (Haritaworn, 2010, dis- cusses a similar racialisation between ‘queer lovers’ and ‘hateful others’). Blame and praise circulate at these moments of com- munity (re)building, as our points of success, shame, loss and gain. At a speak-out event I listened with disbelief at others’ disbelief: why didn’t these ‘minority’ young people simply know better? By being ‘minority’ they were dually tasked with a nondiscriminatory stance towards all issues, as well as being the embodiment of institutional diversity. Formal institutionalisation and retraction of rights intersects with (in)formal struc- tures of participation, including campaign- ing groups, differently effecting material and subjective claims-making (Taylor, 2007, 2009a). Within days of Clementi’s death, Garden State Equality, a state-wide New Jersey LGBT advocacy group, demanded the accused students be prosecuted for hate crimes and given the ‘maximum possible sen- tence’. Campus Pride, a US nationwide group for LGBT college students, also pressed Rut- gers for the pair’s immediate expulsion with little mention of an investigation or disciplin- ary hearing. Online endorsements circulated as over 18,000 people signed up to press for http://projectcivility.rutgers.edu/ | YVETTE TAYLOR462 manslaughter charges. Signatories called for the accused to ‘return to their countries’, ascribing homophobia to other countries and cultures thus exempting US society for its deeply ingrained heterosexism: this posi- tioning occurred despite both accused stu- dents being American citizens from the New Jersey area. Under the banner of ‘Justice Not Ven- geance’, a newly formed LGBT group ‘Queer- ing the Air’ decried the rhetoric of blame and shame as a foil for anti-Asian racism. The centrality of ‘Justice Not Vengeance’ as deployed by this activist group nonetheless slipped in recentring a (certain) student as in need of recognition and resources. The main focus of this group was to attain gender- neutral housing for LGBT students at Rut- gers, where members’ unique needs and diversity were to be recognised as part of the institution’s commitment to ‘diversity’, which was seen to have failed in the (gendered) allocation of rooms in university dormitories rather than as chosen by students. Diver- sity was strategically deployed by this queer group in claiming ‘Our Rutgers, Our Future’ where space and protection were demanded to secure their privacy by virtue of being ‘diverse’ and in need: the Clementi suicide was seen partly as an outcome of failed pri- vacy and lack of housing choices. I attended various meetings and was shaken to hear real infringements of privacy and reports of sexual assault as a fairly common occurrence on US campuses (see Gonzales et al., 2005). Problematically I heard how these assaults could be publicised, capitalised upon, put to use in this new ‘window of opportunity’ in demanding institutional responsiveness and securing privacy. This moves public concern and activism back into the private realm as a supposedly protected—though breached— space; it displaces the danger and differences already in place in leading ‘private’ lives and encourages an individualistic response (as residents) as opposed to an intersectional one more able to grasp the tensions between broad ‘publics’ and limited ‘privates’. In other words, grief gets rearticulated and reduced as a loss of personal privacy, even property, devoid of a broader recognition of who is already included and excluded from constructions of citizenship, residency and community. The group, formed with per- haps the best of intentions and pragmatic objectives, ended up being pitted against other groups as more pragmatic and out- come driven and, as an outsider, a visiting queer academic, I felt confused where my affi liations should be assigned. Those who attended other events—including the Proj- ect Civility meetings which were somewhat problematically tasked with ‘restoring com- munity’—were made to feel somewhat sus- pect and not really that queer. My presence was directly queried as my own confusions were expressed (I was asked if I was from the media, being unrecognisable to these inside-outsiders). My own quick criticism cannot necessarily convey political and ethi- cal complexities but in both institutional and activist responses the detachment between culpability and capability was stark, rein- scribing a binary between those who were to blame (the accused students, the institution) and those in need of saving (LGBT students with unique and diverse needs, institutional reputations). Much campaigning has now occurred inside and outside of Rutgers. The ‘It Gets Better’ campaign started by openly gay col- umnist Dan Savage was initially posted on YouTube and has now launched its own website (see http://www.itgets-better.org/). On the website there is an opening pledge: ‘THE PLEDGE: Everyone deserves to be respected for who they are. I pledge to spread this message to my friends, family and neighbors. I’ll speak up against hate and intolerance whenever I see it, at school and at work. I’ll provide hope for lesbian, gay, bi, trans and other bullied teens by letting them know that ‘‘It Gets Better.’’’ YouTube clips have been archived on this site, given the http://www.itgets-better.org/ QUEER PRESENCES AND ABSENCES: CITIZENSHIP, COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY—OR DEATH | 463 enormity of responses, providing an insight for queer youth into what the future might hold for them (see Vitellone, 2008, for a cri- tique of such logics): ‘Many LGBT youth can’t picture what their lives might be like as openly gay adults. . . . So let’s show them what our lives are like, let’s show them what the future may hold in store for them’ (http:// www.itgetsbetter.org/). Celebrities and ordi- nary ‘survivors’ are invited to talk about troubled childhoods and developed, success- ful adulthoods as indicating full ‘recovery’, where bullies by contrast are positioned as ‘losers’, ‘weak’, ‘less worthy’ and ‘inferior’. Vice President Joe Biden reassures, ‘There’s not a single thing about you that’s not nor- mal, good or decent’, urging us to contribute and make ‘us’ feel better about ‘our country’. Even US president Barack Obama has added his own tale of survival and overcoming of hardships to the voices which echo ‘It Gets Better’ as an incentive for young queer youth to hold on, keep going and never kill them- selves. The youth of tomorrow are imbued with a regenerative futurity, a multicultural ‘diverse’ inclusivity, but this is denied to those ‘already lost’ to public concern and ‘our’ communities—as homophobic others who should be expelled from institutions and nations. Such sexual stories, circulating via ‘It Gets Better’, can function to regenerate as well as disrupt communities, shaping new public repertoires around which communi- ties mobilise (Plummer, 1995) and reveal- ing ‘intricate interconnections of class, race, nationality, gender—and sexuality’ (Weeks et al., 2001: 196). Many clips from queer people dissent from the happy message of upward mobility and movement to a queer city, emphasising that some don’t ‘get out’ to be out (Taylor, 2007). And others too, it seems, function as the sticky repository for the ‘lack’ of tolerance, affl uence and becom- ing. We are asked to lament the deaths of some—those young people who could have ‘been something’—yet in this economy of grief (Butler, 2004) others are already lost, serving only to remind us what we are not (homophobic) or what we are now (diverse). Much discrimination, and even much death, is passed over in these moments, when we remember young white victims, such as Tyler Clementi and Matthew Shepard, whose death in 1998 inspired the opening of The Matthew Shepard Foundation as a forum to ‘embrace diversity’. I am not suggesting that we should forget the grief here, but rather we should remember to situate these horrifi c incidents alongside the endless forgetting of the loss of young Black lives, such as Sakia Gunn, a 15-year-old African American les- bian who was murdered in an economically deprived Black neighbourhood of Newark, New Jersey, in 2003. Articulations and realisations of sexual citizenship need to go beyond the patch- work map of legislative rights pursued by the good campaigner in celebrating our moves forward, our diverse potentiali- ties, or in mourning our injuries. The sex- ual skirmishes which have featured in, for example, recent Proposition 8 2 and US mili- tary ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ debates suggest a wider, differential mapping of same-sex rights beyond middle-class universities. In the US context the 1,049 protections and benefi ts extended to married couples under federal law are commonly cited as a reason for same-sex marriage and, notably, as a way to secure futures and ‘protect’ children. But throughout differential state-by-state negotiations there has been a disconnect— or a series of them—where members of eth- nic groups (African Americans and Latinos have been cited) are positioned as homo- phobic and in favour of reduced LGBT rights. This (mis)positions all LGBT people as white: it also implies that discrimination based on sexual identity is read as differ- ent and separate from racial discrimination and that sides must be chosen. In contrast, Kandaswamy (2008) argues that US lesbian and gay activists’ pursuit of benefi ts, accrued http://www.itgetsbetter.org/ http://www.itgetsbetter.org/ | YVETTE TAYLOR464 through same-sex marriage, should be bet- ter understood as part of the struggles—and differential benefi ts—within a racially strati- fi ed welfare state. Queering citizenship, then, must mean more than citizenship for queers and must be situated within persistent inter- sections of race, class and sexuality on and off campus. In queering the place and prac- tice of diversity as individual, institutional and activist responses, it is crucial to theorise the constructions, places and possibilities of advantage as well as disadvantage. The risk in leaving privileged lives unproblematised is that these are understood as fi tting, standard and chosen; as the trajectories of agentic and capable subjects able to take full advantage of citizenship while being injured by others’ lack, failure and culpability. Efforts to negotiate between hateful oth- ers and loving words or actions are not always so straightforward. In spouting hate- ful, hurtful rhetoric Clint McCance, a school board member in Arkansas, commented on Facebook that ‘they want me to wear purple because fi ve queers killed themselves. The only way im wearin it for them is if they all commit suicide’ [ sic ]. Now mobilised, the ‘It Gets Better’ campaign successfully and very visibly challenged this with an online peti- tion (accumulating 100,000 signatures) forc- ing McCance to resign the next day in a live CNN news broadcast. A Queer Rising event hosted a love-in at Times Square on 15 Octo- ber to call ‘attention to the power of love’: we are not scary, the email invite declared; we are not ‘threatening’ or ‘shameful’ ‘and HATE speech is a DIRECT CAUSE of suicide and violence within our community.’ Love was articulated as cure, with couples joining hands: singles were welcomed and encour- aged (‘We will be pairing-up single strangers to hold hands!’). This loving coupledom may itself be a fundamental part of—and problem for—campaigning groups reinforcing nor- mative polarisations around ‘love’ and ‘hate’. In relocating sexual citizenships away from such intimacies and injuries as self-evident truths, there is a need to explore further the way we are called upon to mobilise the values of ‘civility, dignity, compassion, respect’, as well as the spaces and sentiments of privacy, intimacy and care in often very conservative ways. In celebrating and lamenting queer presences, other lives are rendered absent and beyond the concern of publics/activists/ institutions. Thus, there are injustices associ- ated with visibility and invisibility (Adkins, 2000) where the coming forward for some may recreate a dominant visible ‘we’, able to lay claims to sexual citizenship while effacing broader structural positionalities in terms of race and class. We are all implicated in the doing of diversity, community and inequal- ity, rather than being at the centre—or margins—of diversity by virtue of our identi- ties. The Tyler Clementi case reveals the links between queer politics, sexual citizenship and diversity paradigms, where certain lives and deaths are already lost to public grieving and calls for institutional and activist inclu- sion: we would do well to attend to these losses as we seek citizenship gains. NOTES 1. Project Civility is a series of events and seminars which promise to reduce ‘hostile encounters’ and increase ‘thoughtful communication’ as part of ‘campus culture’. A blood donation campaign was also part of these ‘community efforts’—indicating a very embodied return to larger communities, some- what problematic in the context of gay men still being banned from donating blood in the United States. 2. Proposition 8 was a California ballot proposition passed in November 2008. In 2010 the US district judge ruled that the ban on gay and lesbian mar- riage violated the right to equal protection under the US Constitution. REFERENCES Adkins, Lisa (2000) ‘Mobile Desires: Aesthetics, Sexu- ality and the ‘‘Lesbian’’ at Work’. Sexualities 3(2): 201–218. Ahmed, Sara (2009) ‘Embodying Diversity: Problems and Paradoxes for Black Feminists’. Race Ethnicity and Education 12(1): 41–52. QUEER PRESENCES AND ABSENCES: CITIZENSHIP, COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY—OR DEATH | 465 Butler, Judith (2004) Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso. Gonzales, Alberto R., Regina B. Schofi eld and Glenn R. Schmitt (2005) Offi ce of Sexual Assault on Campus. National Institute of Justice. Available at www.ojp. usdoj.gov/nij (accessed November 2010). Haritaworn, Jin (2010) ‘Queer Lovers and Hateful Oth- ers: Political and Cultural Economies of Sexuality, Race and Gender in Gentrifying Berlin’. Keynote at Reinstating Transgression: Emerging Political Econo- mies of Queer Space 17–18 April. Kandaswamy, Priya (2008) ‘State Austerity and the Racial Politics of Same-Sex Marriage in the US’. Sexu- alities 11(6): 706–725. Plummer, Kenneth (1995) Telling Sexual Stories. Lon- don: Routledge. Taylor, Yvette (2007) Working Class Lesbian Life: Classed Outsiders. New York: Palgrave. Taylor, Yvette (2009a) Lesbian and Gay Parenting: Securing Social and Educational Capital. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Taylor, Yvette (2009b) ‘Facts, Fictions, Identity Constric- tions: Sexuality, Gender and Class in Higher Educa- tion’. Lesbian & Gay Psychology Review 10(1): 38–41. Taylor, Yvette (2010) ‘Stories to Tell? Refl exive (Dis) engagements and (De)legitimized Selves’. Qualitative Inquiry 16(8): 633–641. Taylor, Yvette, Sally Hines and Mark Casey (eds) (2010) Theorizing Intersectionality and Sexuality. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, Yvette (2011) ‘ Accessions: Researching, Design- ing Higher Education’. Gender and Education 23(6): 777–782. Vitellone, Nicole (2008) Object Matters: Condoms, Adolescence and Time. Manchester: Manchester Uni- versity Press. Weeks, Jeffrey (2007) The World We Have Won. New York: Routledge. Weeks, Jeffrey, Brian Heaphy and Catherine Donovan (2001) Same Sex Intimacies: Families of Choice and other Life Experiments. New York: Routledge. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij Connections: HIV and Bugchasers across Queer Collectives Holly Swan and Laura Monico INTRODUCTION 30 y.o. HIV Neg Boy looking for HIV POZ men who want to initiate me into the POZ life . . . prefer thin guys (thinner the better) and if you have AIDS you go to the front of the line. Never had a guy with AIDS . . . I have a real fetish for getting the gift and spreading it after I fi rst get it The above quotes are personal ads from an online website for gay men (Graydon 2007: 282–284). What makes them unusual, and a bit shocking, is the express desire to become infected with the human immunodefi ciency virus (HIV) or to infect others with it. Indeed, in both popular and scholarly literature, a contemporary phenomenon has been described where a group of men who have sex with men (MSM) actively seek to become infected with HIV, or “bugchase.” with their counterparts, known as “gift givers” (MSM who actively seek to transmit HIV to others). The fi rst two quotes are from bugchasers; the third is from a gift giver. Questions that sociologists who study deviance have asked is: How can we make sense of this phenomenon? And, what are the social factors involved in the emergence of this group of individuals? To address these questions, we will use three concepts that were introduced in the preced- ing readings in this section: citizenship, community, and marginality. By connecting these concepts together, we will be able to make sociological sense of bugchasing as a deviant collective. CITIZENSHIP, COMMUNITY, AND MARGINALITY In “Queer Presences and Absences: Citizenship, Community, Diversity—or Death” (this sec- tion of this edition), Taylor discusses the issue of marginality. Specifi cally, she talks about boundaries between “us” and “them,” the “offender” or the “offended,” and what is required for belonging in each group. Often, as Taylor points out, these boundaries are fuzzy. In an effort to clarify them, people who “belong” to one group enhance their own bounds of citizenship by defi ning (sometimes aggressively) the boundaries of the “other” group. This kind of sorting, however, often creates a sense of marginality or alienation among members of both groups. While Taylor presents the negative consequences of marginalization, Kitsuse discusses a different perspective in “Coming Out All Over: Deviants and the Politics of Social Problems.” CONNECTIONS: HIV AND BUGCHASERS ACROSS QUEER COLLECTIVES | 467 In this address, Kitsuse argues that deviant individuals can embrace the marginalization that they experience from “normal” individuals and use it as a requirement for citizenship in a new, albeit deviant, community. This marginality becomes a sense of pride for the community because members are empowered by their involvement therein rather than feeling marginal- ized and alienated as Taylor describes. Finally, in “There Goes the Gayborhood?” Ghaziani illustrates the importance of context (in this case, urban neighborhoods) in providing spaces for people to confront these issues of citizenship, marginality, and perhaps assimilation—a group being fully absorbed into a wider society or culture. Until this point, our discussion of citizenship, community, and marginality has been very abstract. But using Ghaziani’s article, we can see these concepts at work in a concrete and tangible way. The context, or spaces, within which members of a community interact can help determine how groups will be sorted, the degree to which these groups will blend with one another, and the amount of cohesion and solidarity members will experience. Two additional concepts from the sociological study of deviant collectives are also helpful in understanding how the themes in this section apply to bugchasing: subculture and scene. Sociologists usually understand subcultures as a type of community that is distinguished from the larger society because of an alternative set of values and behavior patterns that are required for citizenship in that community. Members of a subculture tend to want to distance themselves from mainstream society and its normative social structure and do so by making a clear distinction between an “us” and “them.” Because of this distancing, subcultures tend to have very clear membership boundaries. Contrary to subcultures, boundaries of scenes are much more fl uid and individuals can choose when to become a part of them and when to leave. Because scenes do not have clear boundaries like subcultures, members of a scene often come from many different social, cul- tural, and economic backgrounds. Sociologists such as Straw (2004) and Anderson (2009) have demonstrated that there are three different ways for a scene to emerge: a shared location (e.g., Los Angeles), cultural genre (e.g., electronic dance music), or loosely defi ned activity (e.g., activism). Besides providing opportunities for citizenship and community, subcultures and scenes also offer protection against the marginality that can result from breaking away from the dominant cultural norms of society. Using these concepts, how can we make sense of the bugchasing phenomenon? What kind of community is it? How does it offer citizenship, solidarity, and integration to its members? Conversely, how does this quest for citizenship and community further alienate bugchasers and MSM who are living with HIV in society? The remainder of this reading will use bug- chasing to connect the concepts of citizenship, community, and marginality. We also draw on the sociological concepts of subcultures and scenes to make these connections. In essence, we demonstrate that bugchasers desire citizenship, freedom, community, integration, and solidarity rather than the marginality they have experienced in the larger community of bare- backing MSM. To achieve this, bugchasers and gift givers have embraced particular social scenes that have allowed the bugchasing subculture to emerge and thrive. CONCEPTUAL CONNECTIONS: THE CASE OF BUGCHASERS AND GIFT GIVERS Within the larger community of MSM there is a subset of men who engage in barebacking (the intentional participation in unprotected anal intercourse). As a subset of the larger MSM | HOLLY SWAN AND LAURA MONICO468 community, barebackers exist as a marginalized community of their own. To overcome their marginality within the larger MSM community, barebackers have developed a unique col- lective lifestyle, identity, and values to provide a sense of citizenship within their own com- munity. Specifi cally, barebackers value and connect with each other through the practice of unprotected anal intercourse (UAI). For barebackers, UAI represents exclusivity, defi ance, and unadulterated pleasure (Moskowitz and Roloff 2007). In this way, barebacking enables MSM to resist the overabundance of safe-sex messages in the larger gay community that began with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This stance and behavior deviates from the dominant cultural norms of protection from HIV and other STDs. Take for example this blog post from an HIV-positive barebacker: The need for seed. Once a natural part of queer culture has become a sleazy kink. We glorify it. We enjoy it. I guess it’s payback, you know. After spending years, our cocks wrapped in plastic march- ing to the “Safe Sex” rhythm. That didn’t work. It was doomed from the start. We’re human beings. Men. We’re not above nature, we ARE nature. (quoted in Dean 2009: 54) This quote illustrates the political purpose that UAI provides for barebackers. Barebacking reclaims unprotected sex in a community that values safe sex and provides a ticket to citizen- ship in the otherwise marginalized community of barebackers. In a recent post on www.thebody.com, a popular blog site for HIV/AIDS issues and con- cerns, Terry-Smith nicely summarized the sentiment that the marginalization of the MSM, and particularly the barebacking community, within the larger society has made these indi- viduals seek out a new community for citizenship, solidarity, and empowerment: A lot of [gay] people feel that society has treated them like crap and they feel liberated about being positive because they feel that HIV has shown them how to be stronger and to fi nd themselves as well. When someone feels like they are a part of a society so strongly, it hurts when that society shuns them. . .they will look to another community for that same sense of belonging. (2013) Thus, it is from this already marginalized community of barebackers that a further subset of individuals has broken off into an even more alienated community of bugchasers (Mos- kowitz and Roloff 2007; Dean 2009). Although bugchasers share the cultural values of bare- backers, they have broken from the parent culture of barebacking because of the reason that they engage in UAI. Whereas a primary motive for UAI among barebackers is to resist the dominant ideals of safe sex, the intent of bugchasers is seroconversion, or to contract the HIV virus. Consider this quote about bugchasing from a barebacking Web site as quoted in Dean (2009: 48): Who’s afraid of the big, bad bug? Not our little piggies. We’ll huff and we’ll puff and we’ll blow your Dick Down! Chase those bugs all over town like the horny toad you are. Get dangerous and seek out new perversions and fetishes. No matter what you promised, never pull out of Dodge. Breed, get seed and get on your knees to feed. Everybody needs protein, right? Moskowitz and Roloff (2007) and others have argued that bugchasers exist as a marginal- ized deviant community within the already marginalized community of barebacking among men who have sex with men. As mentioned, the bugchasing community necessarily requires its members to engage in unprotected anal intercourse. This community also values exclusivity, defi ance, unadulterated http://www.thebody.com CONNECTIONS: HIV AND BUGCHASERS ACROSS QUEER COLLECTIVES | 469 pleasure, and the eroticization of HIV and AIDS. A study by Graydon (2007) examined mes- sages on personal advertising Web sites and found that the language used when discussing bugchasing often referred to HIV as a “gift” (hence the name of the bugchaser counterpart, the gift giver). Through rejection of the safe sex messages of the larger MSM culture and by embracing HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, bugchasing subculture members use a “gift giving” discourse to exemplify the shared cultural value of performing UAI with the intention of getting HIV. Take these personal ads as evidence, quoted in Graydon (2007: 281–282): “I beg for the Gift only GiftGivers can share”; “Bareback Bottom Bugchaser Seek- ing Well Hung Gift Givers to share their gifts with me.” In other words, rather than viewing HIV infection as a marginalizing status, members of the bugchasing community embrace HIV as a “gift” that provides one citizenship to the HIV community. Each of the criteria discussed so far serves to strengthen the bonds of the group (us) and distinguish them from the larger parent culture (them). Following some of the arguments of Taylor, Graydon mentions that members of the bugchasing subculture further enhanced these us/them boundaries by using a “brotherhood” discourse. For example, one bugchaser posted, “Let’s get together and make me part of the brotherhood of the GiftedBareBackers. Please help me be a part of the family” (Graydon 2007). The use of this type of language reinforces the idea that bugchasers and gift givers are part of a unique group, a special group of barebackers that are different from the majority. This unique group that exists within the barebacking subculture is reinforced through their common backgrounds, lifestyle, values, and identities. The blogger Terry-Smith nicely sums up this point when he writes: The HIV community has been through a lot since HIV/AIDS had been discovered and named. Some people who are [HIV] negative view the community as one of acceptance, where one is able to be sexually free. Bug chasers, in my opinion, want to belong to a community and that need for belong- ing has somehow manifested itself as a need that’s targeted towards the HIV community. Basically some feel that being a part of the HIV community makes them a part of something special. (2013) BUGCHASING COMMUNITIES: THE IMPORTANCE OF SCENES The elements of scenes, outlined at the beginning of this chapter (i.e., geographic locations, diverse backgrounds, spaces of social and cultural activity, and blurry boundaries between members), provide an important context for understanding the spaces within which the bug- chasing subculture emerged and currently exists (like Ghaziani describes). The Internet, spe- cifi cally the virtual community of barebackers, has been critical as a space for the bugchasing subculture to emerge. In these spaces, advertisements can be posted for events happening within particular MSM scenes of certain geographic locations, such as San Francisco or New York, that may be more or less tolerant of the bugchasing subculture. For example, this advertisement for a birthday party was posted online: B[irth]day fuck fest at my hotel in SOMA [a San Francisco neighborhood] just off Harrison [Street]. I have a few neg[ative] bottoms lined up to take some Neg and Poz loads . . . This will be my 37th b[irth]day party and I want a gift to keep on giving. (Dean 2009) Online advertisements for barebacking parties, such as this one, will often indicate whether bugchasing and gift giving are acceptable at that party. Moreover, seeking sexual partners | HOLLY SWAN AND LAURA MONICO470 online allowed for the bugchasing subculture to emerge because even though participants in the virtual scene may be located in different geographic locations, they can interact in a shared virtual space on the Internet. The online scene is also an important context for strengthening the bonds among this community’s members. The shared background, lifestyle, and values among the members of the bugchasing subculture all contribute to a shared identity among these men. In particu- lar, these men identify as barebacking MSM, and as either a bugchaser or a gift giver (both bugchaser and gift giver are essential identities of the subculture). These identities are repre- sented and maintained on the Web site profi les of the subculture members. The following post borrowed from the Graydon’s 2007 study exemplifi es the use of Web site posting to both represent one’s own identity as well as to construct the other identities of the subculture, “Bareback Bottom Bugchaser Seeking Well Hung Gift Givers to share their gifts with me.” In this post, the subculture member is representing his own identity consis- tent with the subcultures values (a barebacker, bottom, bugchaser), and he is also helping to enforce the elements of the subculture by specifying that he is seeking someone with a gift giver identity. This post illuminates the subcultural value of unprotected anal intercourse for the sake of HIV infection and demonstrates how this value is maintained through the bugchasing and gift giving identities. In other words, while the primary purpose of the online communities is to offer a virtual space for individuals seeking this behavior to fi nd a partner to engage in the practice with, they also serve as a medium for creating and defi ning the norms of the subculture through interactions among the users. Members of the bugchasing subculture also tend to be active members of the party-n-play (PNP) scene, which encourages the mixing of drugs (both legal and illegal) with unprotected sex (Moskowitz and Roloff 2007). In PNP scenes, stimulant drugs (such as ecstasy and crystal methamphetamine) are combined with sexual enhancement drugs (such as Viagra) to release inhibitions and increase the appeal of UAI among members (i.e., barebackers and bugchasers). For example, one barebacker cited in Dean (2009: 86) noted, “The crystal [methamphetamine] took me where I could enact that fantasy.” Shared participation in the PNP social scene, as well as the social and political purpose of UAI among bugchasers, serves to strengthen the bonds of citizenship between the members of this subcultural community. CONCLUSION In this section, we have attempted to connect several concepts that sociologists have used to understand how individuals negotiate identities in meaningful groups when experiencing marginality elsewhere. These concepts include community, citizenship, and marginality. There can be an infi nite number of communities within a larger society that engage in group membership sorting, where individuals are placed within one group or outside another. Communities engage in this kind of sorting all of the time—it is a continuous social process. Ultimately when an “us” and “them” relationship emerges, individuals are inher- ently included into one group while simultaneously excluded from another. The criteria upon which individuals are included and excluded create the boundaries of the group. We call the inclusion of an individual into a group their citizenship. And in the same way a person is a citizen of a country, he or she can also be a citizen of a subculture or scene. For groups considered to be subcultures, these boundaries of citizenship are strong and clear-cut, often based on shared backgrounds, behaviors, and values. For groups considered to be a scene, CONNECTIONS: HIV AND BUGCHASERS ACROSS QUEER COLLECTIVES | 471 on the other hand, the boundaries of citizenship are fl uid, and individuals can choose to enter and exit the group whenever they please. The readings in this section help us to understand that being included or excluded from a group is neither inherently positive, nor inherently negative. Taylor contributed the con- cept of marginality to this discussion and explains that some people experience negative consequences of being excluded from a group and fi ght (sometimes aggressively) to make fuzzy boundaries more clear. But as Kitsuse teaches us, some people experience a positive consequence of exclusion by embracing their marginal status and using it as a boundary of citizenship to form a deviant community that gives them a sense of empowerment. We see these dual experiences in the Ghaziani article, where some members of the gay community embraced what the changing gayborhood could offer their community, whereas other mem- bers fought to maintain its purity. In this connections reading, we sought to demonstrate that bugchasers desire citizen- ship, freedom, community, integration, and solidarity rather than the marginality they have experienced in the larger community of barebacking MSM. Quotes from actual bugchasers helped to illustrate how members of this subculture embrace their marginal status and the ways in which they are empowered by their citizenship in a group that is excluded from the larger community of barebacking MSM. Bugchasers don’t simply use language to embrace their marginality. They also get involved in particular social scenes that helped the bugchasing subculture to emerge. Bugchasers used both the Internet and party-n-play scenes as tools to fi nd and include more bugchasing mem- bers, as well as strengthen the boundaries of citizenship that distinguish them as a group. While on the surface it would appear that bugchasers would experience negative conse- quences from being excluded from an already deviant community of barebacking MSM, these sociological concepts help us to understand that many of the members experience a positive consequence of their group membership that promotes a sense of both freedom and solidarity. CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS 1. Compared to subcultures, do scenes have more or less fl uid boundaries? How does the fl uidity of the boundary affect participation and membership in a subculture versus a scene? 2. Is the Internet a necessary resource for individuals to collectively engage in sexually devi- ant behaviors? Do you think bugchasing would have emerged as an identifi able activity without the availability of the Internet? 3. How can embracing a marginal status empower members of groups who have been excluded and stigmatized? What are the positive consequences of personally embracing a marginal status? REFERENCES Anderson, T. 2009. Rave Culture: The Alteration and Decline of a Philadelphia Music Scene. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Dean, T. 2009. Unlimited Intimacy: Refl ections on the Subculture of Barebacking . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ghaziani, A. 2010. “There Goes the Gayborhood?” Contexts 9(4): 64–66. Graydon, M. 2007. “Don’t Bother to Wrap It: Online Giftgiver and Bugchaser Newsgroups, the Social Impact of Gift Exchanges and the ‘Carnivalesque.’ ” Culture, Health, & Sexuality 9(3): 277–292. | HOLLY SWAN AND LAURA MONICO472 Kitsuse, J. I. 1980. “Coming Out all Over: Deviants and the Politics of Social Problems.” Social Problems , 28(1): 1–12. Moskowitz, D. A. and Roloff, M. E.. 2007. “The Existence of a Bug Chasing Subculture.” Culture, Health & Sexu- ality 9(4): 347–357. Straw, W. 2004. “Cultural Scenes.” Society and Leisure 27(2): 411–422. Taylor, Y. 2011. “Queer Presences and Absences: Citizenship, Community, Diversity—or Death.” Feminist Theory 12(3): 335–341. Terry-Smith, J. B. 2013. “Advice Column: Bug Chasers & Gift Givers.” Retrieved January 15, 2013, www.thebody. com/content/70270/advice-column-bug-chasers-gift-givers.html?ap=1100. http://www.thebody.com/content/70270/advice-column-bug-chasers-gift-givers.html?ap=1100 http://www.thebody.com/content/70270/advice-column-bug-chasers-gift-givers.html?ap=1100 SECTION 11 Critical Race Theory, Multiculturalism, and Identity This page intentionally left blank Introduction Tammy L. Anderson The increasing tendency towards seeing people in terms of one dominant “identity” (“this is your duty as an American”, “you must commit these acts as a Muslim”, or “as a Chinese you should give priority to this national engagement”) is not only an imposition of an external and arbitrary priority, but also the denial of an important liberty of a person who can decide on their respective loyalties to different groups (to all of which he or she belongs). (Sen 2009: xiv) The quote above by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen suggests, at one level, that multiculturalism is about race, ethnicity, identity, rights, and difference. At a deeper level, however, it may also have something to do with norms, social expectations, social control, and, therefore, devi- ance. Today, leaders of world’s wealthiest countries have declared multiculturalism dead or a danger to the very fabric of their societies (BBC News Europe 2010). They criticize it for producing greater segregation, isolation, and alienation of minority communities when it was intended to do the opposite. Some have argued that the quest for group-differentiated rights or accommodations has disallowed racial and ethnic minority groups to become “proper” Brits, Germans, Canadians, and Americans. For example, speaking Arabic, Farsi, or Spanish instead of English or German; using public funds to build Muslim temples and community centers instead of shoring up Christian organizations; allowing black American studies courses on col- lege campuses to meet U.S. history requirements; demanding Halal meat instead of Sara Lee’s “Ball Park” franks; and, perhaps, listening to Bhangra, Latin Fusion, or Homo Hop music instead of Top 40 or other commercial hits fosters segregation rather than the integration we need and desire. Have you noticed that this argument could also be about the conformity to social norms, objections to difference, and efforts to control deviance? Section 11 is about critical race theory, multiculturalism, identity, and the future of deviance. It includes readings by Cohen (2004), Viesca (2004), Jones (2009), and my connections reading on music scenes. The Cohen reading outlines a critical race theory of “intentional deviance,” where racial and ethnic minorities or “outsiders” balance preserving their cultural heritages while conforming to the white, middle-class mainstream. Cohen argues this balancing act is a daily task for the majority of black citizens. She is not writing about the small subset of “underclass” law- breakers (e.g., black, male gang members and criminals) that all too often “color” our views about minorities. The Jones reading gives us one case—22-year-old Kiara—to better under- stand the critical race theory viewpoint. By profi ling her, Jones shows us that race, gender, and class are ongoing performances that feature norm violation and consequences. Finally, | TAMMY L. ANDERSON476 Viesca (2004) writes about the more political response of Hispanics to both global and local forms of oppression and state control. Hispanics’ chosen avenue of resistance is music, spe- cifi cally Latin Fusion music scenes in Los Angeles. This is also where my connections reading on marginality, identity, and music scenes fi ts in. Together, these readings signify that in mul- ticultural identity work, “doing difference (Collins 1995) gets very close to “being deviant.” Multiculturalism is a term social scientists use to denote the moral and political claims of oppressed or marginal groups in society. Multicultural efforts seek recognition for cultural and religious difference and the fair participation of minority citizens in society (Kymlicka 1998). Thus, a central goal for the oppressed is to attain equal treatment for who they are, rather than being pressured to assimilate or settling for being tolerated by the majority. Crit- ics of multiculturalism believe it delivers, instead, even greater alienation and isolation of minorities and the oppressed and erodes the ties that ought to bind members of a society (Kymlicka 1996). At a basic level, then, multiculturalism is about integration and separation. So, are we promoting integration or segregation when defi ning something as deviant? Durkheim, Erikson, and Moynihan (discussed in Section 1) believe doing so promotes inte- gration, while symbolic interactionists (Sections 5 and 7) and confl ict theorists (Section 9) believe it leads to segregation and exploitation or oppression. A key distinction among them was whether society was a place of similarity and consensus or difference and confl ict. Fears about multiculturalism assume that embracing and making room for group differentiated customs and rights (Kymlicka 1998) is somehow bad and dysfunctional. Homogeneity or sameness is better for us, and assimilation and integration help us attain it. What multiculturalism reveals then is that the origins of deviance begin with difference, especially culturally based differences. Throughout time, the United States has demonstrated its preference for sameness despite claims of being a nation where individuals can chose their own paths to meet their own dreams. Sameness, not otherness or difference, is built into our norms, values, identities, and lifestyles. Penalties of all kinds—economic, social, formal, or informal— are levied for variation. One problem with sameness is that it is branded with the cultural characteristics of the usual privileged group: white, male, middle- class, heterosexual, young, and “healthy” or “able-bodied.” Consequently, assimilation— the kind Merkel and other worlds leaders desire—means adopting white, male, heterosexual, middle-class ways. This is why Kiara from the Jones article looks pretty for the pictures, while being her more authentic self (poor, street-smart, and African American) on the streets of her own neighborhood. The surest path to equality is through assimilation—that is, trading in one’s culture for that of the dominant group. Thus, equality is not necessarily a right of citizenship; it becomes some- thing people must earn by conforming to dominant culture’s customs, norms, ways, ideology, identities, styles, behaviors, and so on. It does not come from difference and deviation, and the authors of the readings in this section are well-aware of that. The sociology of deviance can inform this multicultural predicament and advance its place in sociology at the same time. If cultural sameness is society’s price tag for equality, then some groups will always have to pay more for citizenship. Refusals to pay it will result in increased supervision and control. The sociology of deviance must, therefore, attend to such price dif- ferentials among groups and the mechanisms of control used to sustain them. Sociologists and criminologists must also more broadly consider the benefi ts of difference and deviance. There are positive things about deviance and many come from groups we think of as marginal—that is, those from varied cultural heritages or backgrounds who lack power in society (minorities, homosexuals, females, gays, elderly, disabled). Music scenes are INTRODUCTION | 477 one place where we can see this play out. For example, the Viesca reading teaches us that performing and listening to Latin Fusion sounds amounts to a powerful form of resistance by Hispanics. It also provides a powerful countermessage to the pejorative labels, stigma, and discrimination young Hispanics encounter for being their authentic selves. Viesca (2004: 735) states: At the very moment when political and economic leaders scapegoated multilingual “mongrel” com- munities and cultures, music groups associated with the East L.A. scene challenged the cultural and political pretensions of white/Anglo culture. In the process, they exploited the contradiction between the nation’s political reliance on fi ctions of cultural homogeneity and the nation’s economic dependence on securing low-wage labor, markets, and raw materials from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. In my connection reading, I also note that music and its related cultural styles are benefi cial to those involved to help rectify cultural identity issues and marginality. The multicultural project has been much more about race and ethnic issues than it has been about gender, sexuality, class, disability, or age. In my connections reading, I point this out by showing that while music scenes have emerged to address issues of representation and recognition by race and ethnicity, they have been guilty of reproducing sexism, misogyny, heterosexism, and homophobia. Viesca (2004) notes the same pattern. The reading by Jones also calls attention to the diffi culties had by the oppressed in securing respect and equal treat- ment by overlapping identities, especially race, class, and gender. Herein lies another opportunity to learn about deviance. How do people conform to the overlapping and often contradictory norms associated with their intersecting identities of class, race, ethnicity, gender, age, and so on? What consequences do they bear from failing at some and not others? What sacrifi ces do they make? Given these observations, sociology professors and students must consider how the prin- ciples of multiculturalism are relevant to deviance now and in the future. We think you will fi nd some answers to the questions posed here from the readings in this section. Our atten- tion to them will not only aid the future study of deviance, but it may also enrich our lives in this ever-changing, diverse, global world. REFERENCES BBC News Europe. 2010 (October 17). “Merkel says German multicultural society has failed.” Retrieved June 12, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11559451. Cohen, C. J. 2004. “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics.” Du Bois Review 1(1): 27–45. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1995. “Symposium: On West and Fenstermaker’s ‘Doing Difference.’ ” Gender & Society 9: 491–494. Jones, Nikki. 2009. “‘I Was Aggressive for the Streets, Pretty for the Pictures’: Gender, Difference and the Inner-City Girl,” Gender & Society 23 (1): 89–93. Kymlicka, W. 1996. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sen, Amartya. 2009. The Idea of Justice . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Viesca, Victor Hugo. 2004. “The Battle of Los Angeles: The Cultural Politics of Chicana/o Music in the Greater Eastside,” American Quarterly 56(3): 719–739. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11559451 Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics Cathy J. Cohen This reading is motivated by a series of con- versations I have had and observations I have made about the study of Black politics, Afri- can American Studies, and the condition of African American communities. 1 At the heart of such concerns has been what I believe to be a fundamental contradiction between the cri- ses facing Black communities and the passive routinization of much of what passes for the academic study of Black people. As both the discipline of African American Studies and the subfi eld of Black politics become more enmeshed in the curriculum and structures of colleges and universities, research in these areas seems to mirror the increasing special- ization of disciplines and distancing between researcher and worldly experience that char- acterize the academy at this moment. It is the observation of disconnect between me and my colleagues and the communities from which many of us hail and purport to study that has motivated my interest in building a fi eld of inquiry others have labeled Black queer studies. 2 I must admit to being a skeptic of the transformative potential of anything we might label Black queer studies, especially as such efforts begin to resemble a recov- ery project of the lost tribe of Black gay exceptionals. It is, of course, a worthwhile undertaking to include as part of the canon of African American Studies, for exam- ple, those Black gay writers of the Harlem Renaissance or Black gay activists of the Civil Rights Movement who for too long have been hidden and silenced by those who would police the representation of such criti- cal periods and events. Furthermore, I, like other scholars concerned with the future of African American Studies believe that the full inclusion of gay, lesbian, and queer lives would not only open up new realms of research in African American Studies but should also lead to the reconsideration and reconceptualization of now standard narratives in the fi eld. For example, John D’Emilio, in his book Lost Prophet : The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (2003), not only rightly inserts Rustin into African American and American history, establishing him as an architect of the Civil Rights Movement, but also helps us to interrogate the concept of leader and the standards used to construct public leaders both in and outside of Black communities. Barbara Ransby, in her book Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Move- ment : A Radical Democratic Vision (2003), makes a similar intervention around the issues of gender, sex, and leadership. How- ever, in spite of the insights to be gained from a project of inclusion, the approach to queer- ing African American Studies that I advocate is one based in an expansive understanding of who and what is queer and is, therefore, rooted in ideas such as deviance and agency and not exception and inclusion. Queer theorists and queer activists since the 1980s, in an effort to challenge seemingly DEVIANCE AS RESISTANCE: A NEW RESEARCH AGENDA FOR THE STUDY OF BLACK POLITICS | 479 stable and normalizing categories of sexual- ity, introduced or reintroduced the analytic concept of queer. Individuals such as Judith Butler (1990), Eve Sedgwick (1990), Diana Fuss (1991), and Michael Warner (1993) produced what are now thought of as some of the grounding texts to the fi eld of “queer theory.” Working from a variety of post- modernist and poststructuralist theoretical perspectives, these scholars focused on iden- tifying and contesting the discursive and cul- tural markers found within both dominant and marginal identities and institutions that prescribe and reify “heterogendered” or nor- malized understandings and behavior. These theorists presented the academy with a dif- ferent conceptualization of sexuality, one which sought to replace socially named and presumably stable and natural categories of sexual expression with an understanding of the constructed and fl uid movement among and between forms of sexual behavior. Despite complicating our understanding of sexuality, heterosexism, and heteronorma- tivity, some queer theorists, and more queer activists, write and act in ways that unfortu- nately homogenize everything that is pub- licly identifi able as heterosexual and most things that are understood to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender or “queer” (Cohen 1997). Further diminishing the returns from this very important theoretical work has been the incredible silence in many of the writings by queer theorists on the subject of race, in particular the structural access to power that results from the designation of Whiteness in a relatively persistent racial order where White and Black root opposite poles of at least one dimension (Kim 2000). Disappointingly, left largely unexplored has been the role of race and one’s relationship to dominant power in constructing the range of public and private possibilities for such fundamental concepts/ behaviors as desire, pleasure, and sex. 3 So while we can talk of the heterosexual and the queer, these labels/categories tell us very little about the differences in the relative power of, for example, middle-class, White, gay men and poor, heterosexual, Black women and men. For me, this serious shortcoming in queer theory is not the end of my interest in or use for this fi eld of scholarship. Instead, in spite of noted absences in queer theory as it is cur- rently constituted, there are still important insights to be gained from this literature that will enhance the study of sex and race in many disciplines including African American Studies. 4 If, for example, we use the theoreti- cal insights into the construction and malle- ability of categories as well as the work of processes of normalization found in queer theory in tandem with the detailed under- standing of power, in particular as it is struc- tured around and through axes such as race, gender, and class found in African American Studies, we have the possibility of reconsti- tuting both African American Studies and queer theory with an eye toward recognizing and transforming how people live and the desperate conditions they too often face. A focus, for example, on poor, single, Black women with children, whose intimate relationships and sexual behavior are often portrayed as directly in confl ict with the nor- mative assumptions of heterosexism and the nuclear family, but who also often live under the constant surveillance of the state through regulatory agencies such as welfare offi ces, courts, jails, prisons, child protective ser- vices, and public housing authorities, might do much to advance the work of both those who locate themselves exclusively in African American Studies or queer theory. In contrast to many privileged gay, lesbian, and queer folks, poor, single, Black women with chil- dren, structurally unable to control an exclu- sive “ghetto” or area of a city where their dealings with the state are often chosen and from an empowered position, are reminded daily of their distance from the promise of full citizenship. Their lives are indicative of the intersection of marked identities and reg- ulatory processes, relative powerlessness and limited and contradictory agency. It is here | CATHY J. COHEN480 that Black queer studies must be rooted and a politics of deviance must begin. Thus, I continue to be interested in the possibility of constructing a fi eld of inves- tigation based in African American Studies and borrowing from queer theory and Black feminist analysis that is centered around the experiences of those who stand on the (out) side of state sanctioned, normalized White, middle- and upper-class male heterosexual- ity. I am talking about a paradigmatic shift in how scholars of Black politics and more broadly African American Studies think and write about those most vulnerable in Black communities—those thought to be morally wanting by both dominant society and other indigenous group members. The reifi cation of the nuclear family, the confor- mity to institutionally prescribed and infor- mally regulated gender roles and intimate sexual relations are but the tip of the nor- mative moral super structure they confront daily. Sadly, while the moral prescriptions of this normative structure pervade nearly every aspect of our lives and have been used con- sistently to marginalize African Americans further, little attention has been paid, at least in the social sciences, to how the normaliz- ing infl uences of the dominant society have been challenged, or at least countered, often by those most visible as its targets. Refl ect- ing Michel Foucault’s idea of simultaneous repressive and generative power, individuals with little power in society engage in counter normative behaviors, having babies before they are married, structuring their relation- ships differently from the traditional nuclear family, or rejecting heterosexuality com- pletely. These so-called deviants have cho- sen and acted differently, situating their lives in direct contrast to dominant normalized understandings of family, desire, and sex. It is these instances of deviant practice, result- ing from the limited agency of those most marginal in Black communities that are the heart of this work. Scholars, especially those interested in the evolving nature of Black politics, must take seriously the possibility that in the space cre- ated by deviant discourse and practice, espe- cially in Black communities, a new radical politics of deviance could emerge. It might take the shape of a radical politics of the per- sonal, embedded in more recognized Black counter publics, where the most marginal individuals in Black communities, with an eye on the state and other regulatory sys- tems, act with the limited agency available to them to secure small levels of autonomy in their lives. Ironically, through these attempts to fi nd autonomy, these individuals, with rel- atively little access to dominant power, not only counter or challenge the presiding nor- mative order with regard to family, sex, and desire but also create new or counter norma- tive frameworks by which to judge behavior. And while these choices are not necessar- ily made with explicitly political motives in mind, they do demonstrate that people will challenge established norms and rules and face negative consequences in pursuit of goals important to them, often basic human goals such as pleasure, desire, recognition, and respect. These visible choices and acts of defi ance challenge researchers to identify how we might leverage the process people use to choose deviance to choose political resistance as well. It just might be that after devoting so much of our energy to the unful- fi lled promise of access through respectabil- ity, a politics of deviance, with a focus on the transformative potential found in devi- ant practice, might be a more viable strategy for radically improving the lives and pos- sibilities of those most vulnerable in Black communities. Finally, it is important to remember, as theorists of stigma and deviance have written, that understandings of what is respectable and stigmatized or normal and deviant are constructed and relational. Erving Goffman (1963) in his book Stigma writes, “Society establishes the means of categorizing persons DEVIANCE AS RESISTANCE: A NEW RESEARCH AGENDA FOR THE STUDY OF BLACK POLITICS | 481 and the complement of attributes felt to be ordinary and natural for members of each of these categories. . . . We lean on these antici- pations that we have, transforming them into normative expectations, into righteously presented demands” (p. 2). Howard Becker (1973) in his study of the sociology of devi- ance continues along this line of reasoning and suggests that scholars be attuned to the distinction between rule-breaking behavior and the labeling of such behavior as deviant. He writes, “. . . deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a con- sequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender.’ The deviant is one to whom that label has successfully been applied; deviant behavior is behavior that people so label” (p. 9). 5 In the rest of this reading I will explore the feasibility of a politics of deviance in Black communities. I begin this investigation with a brief review of the major frameworks for studying Black politics. I then recount the ways deviance has been examined in some of the canonical texts in African American Studies. Finally, I detail how we might build an analytic model detailing the relationship between deviance, defi ance, and resistance. TWENTIETH-CENTURY OBSESSIONS: A BLACK POLITICS OF RESPECTABILITY, ELITES, AND PUBLIC OPINION A review of much of the recent scholarship exploring the politics of African Americans reveals at least three dominant analytic frameworks of study: mobilization, respect- ability, and public opinion. While each of these approaches to investigating Black poli- tics allows for the inclusion of those most vulnerable and seemingly “deviant” in Black communities, absent in each approach is a serious examination of the potential for poli- tics in the everyday decisions and actions of these individuals and groups. For example, possibly the most widely read form of analy- sis of Black politics has been scholarship documenting and analyzing the organized efforts, formal and informal movements, and less structured uprisings originating in Black communities, meant to alter hierarchies of power and resources based at least partially in racial distinctions (Horne 1995; Kelley 2002; Marable 1991; Morris 1984). Work ranging from an analysis of Black revolts under slavery to the nationalist efforts of leaders like Marcus Garvey to the election of Black politicians to the mass mobilization defi ning the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements are all part of this tradition. However, more often than not, such schol- arly analyses have sought to highlight those structured, coordinated, and seemingly pur- poseful acts assumed to comprise meaningful political struggle. Furthermore, these studies have at times been so consumed with the actions of leaders, usually male leaders, and well-established political organizations that they have ignored the everyday contests over space, dress, and autonomy that may per- vade the lives of average Black people. Most of this literature, even when presumably exploring the work of “everyday” people, looks to those clearly defi ned political spaces like churches, civil rights organizations, and unions to fi nd politics and political work, negating social spaces where most politics is lived (Harris-Lacewell 2004; Kelley 1994; Scott 1990). Of course, a politics of mobilization has not been the only lens through which Afri- can American politics has been explored and described. A second dominant frame- work used to understand Black politics has been that of respectability. In this approach respectability is used to categorize a pro- cess of policing, sanitizing, and hiding the nonconformist and some would argue devi- ant behavior of certain members of African Americans communities (Carby 1987; Gaines 1996; Higginbotham 1993). In this literature respectability is understood as a strategy | CATHY J. COHEN482 deployed primarily by the Black middle class but also by other individuals across the Black class strata to demonstrate their adherence to and upholding of the dominant norms of society. It is hoped and expected that such conformity will confer full citizenship status, bringing with it greater access, opportunities, and mobility. And while some recent scholar- ship has cast a critical eye on the exclusionary processes associated with a political strategy of respectability, it is important that we not trivialize or demean this vehicle to political advancement since for many African Ameri- cans it was not only a mechanism to lever- age dominant power but also a means to demonstrate the basic humanity and equal- ity of Black Americans (Carby 1987; Gaines 1996; Higginbotham 1993; McBride 1998). It is, however, important to underscore, as critics of respectability remind us, the rela- tive positioning necessary to prove that one is respectable and acceptable compared to other less fortunate “souls” who compro- mise the excluded. Historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (1993), in her examination of Black wom- en’s involvement and leadership in the Bap- tist church in the early twentieth century, describes the use of a politics of respectabil- ity to counter the dominant racist construc- tions of Blackness and gender. She writes, “While adherence to respectability enabled Black women to counter racist images and structures, their discursive contestation was not directed solely at White Americans; the black Baptist women condemned what they perceived to be negative practices and atti- tudes among their own people. Their assimi- lationist leanings led to their insistence upon Blacks’ conformity to the dominant society’s norms of manners and morals. Thus the dis- course of respectability disclosed class and status differentiation” (p. 187). Thus, another approach to studying the pol- itics of African Americans, an approach fi rst deployed by scholars in the humanities, has been an interrogation of the extra institutional, some might say, social and cultural actions of Black Americans. Through the framework of respectability the researcher is primarily con- cerned with the actions of those who would regulate, most often middle-class Black Amer- icans and working-class Blacks with middle- class aspirations. Again, lost in this analysis are the agency and actions of those under sur- veillance, those being policed, those engaged in disrespectable behavior. Missing from this understanding of Black politics is what Robin Kelley calls “a politics from below” (1994, p. 5). The third and fi nal approach to the study of Black politics I will mention briefl y is the overwhelming focus on the public opinion of Black Americans found in the social sci- ences today, especially in the fi eld of politi- cal science. Increasingly, as researchers in the social sciences became committed to the use of large N datasets to map out the political attitudes and behaviors of ordinary people, so too did scholars in the fi eld of Black politics demonstrate increasing expertise in the use of statistical analysis in conjunc- tion with newly developed datasets such as the National Black Election Study and the National Black Politics Study to explore the declared politics of Black respondents. The work of scholars such as Michael Dawson (2003, 1994), Larry Bobo (2000), Katherine Tate (1998), and many others has provided new insights into the ideological and behavioral dimensions of African Amer- ican politics in the late twentieth century. Unfortunately, while this literature often includes close analysis of differences in political attitudes and behavior based on class and in some cases sex and gender, the in-depth exploration of how such differences might be molded into a new politics for the twenty-fi rst century has largely been ignored. This scholarship tends to excel in identify- ing and explaining differences found among African Americans and between African Americans and other members of racial and ethnic groups, most often White Americans. DEVIANCE AS RESISTANCE: A NEW RESEARCH AGENDA FOR THE STUDY OF BLACK POLITICS | 483 Left for a later day has been any sustained discussion of how the differences identifi ed manifest themselves in the everyday lives and politics of Black people. Similarly, scholars of this orientation seem to shy away from more theoretical and normative discussions of what should be done to change the pat- terns of inequality, alienation, and anger evi- dent in their data. Thus, while all three of these approaches to analyzing politics and political work in Black communities have generated impor- tant insights, illuminating the multiple forms of resistance and ideas about politics found among Black Americans, there exists an inherent bias in each framework toward the recognition and study of a politics that is declared and traditionally organized. I am not suggesting that the political activity of poor, working-class, and marginal Black peo- ple has not made its way into our published accounts of Black politics. Instead, I contend that the politics of those most marginal in Black communities are usually discussed when they conform to traditional under- standings of what constitutes legitimate poli- tics, ranging from engagement with formal political institutions to the traditional, extra- systemic politics of riots, boycotts, and pro- tests, to the adherence to dominant norms and expectations regarding behavior. Again, missing is an examination of the possibility of oppositional politics rooted outside of traditional or formal political institutions and, instead, in the daily lived experiences of those most marginal in Black communities. Given these absences, those of us con- cerned with the lives and politics of Black people might do well to recalibrate our lens of examination toward those deemed “deviant” in Black communities, for here lies not only understudied populations but more impor- tantly groups engaging in behaviors that I believe hold the potential for new under- standings of how Black politics might once again become radically transformative for Black communities and the country at large. By transformative I am not arguing merely for better policies or a slight shift in the dis- tribution of wealth and power, important as these advances are. Instead, I am suggesting that through a focus on “deviant” practice we are witness to the power of those at the bottom, whose everyday life decisions chal- lenge, or at least counter, the basic normative assumptions of a society intent on protecting structural and social inequalities under the guise of some normal and natural order to life. However, not only do these individuals daily act in opposition to dominant norms, but they also contradict members of Black communities who are committed to mirror- ing perceived respectable behaviors and hier- archal structures. I am urging scholars to take a critical and respectful look at such behavior, instead of the instinctive reaction of rushing to pathol- ogize such acts. With careful investiga- tion we might begin to understand why the same people who daily “reject” formal and informal incentives for conformity, choos- ing instead alternative and oppositional lifestyles, are most often not engaged in the kind of mass mobilization that organizers and academics contend would signifi cantly improve their lived condition. It is time for a new generation of scholars to put forth a new analytic framework for the study of Black politics, that of deviance. This, of course, means hearing from and listening to those who many would silence and make invisible in Black communities, individuals like single, Black mothers, including those on welfare and/or teenagers; gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer members of Black communities; Black men on the “down-low” having at times risky sex with both men and women; and young Black men and women who are currently or have been incarcerated and who seem to engage uncrit- ically in unlawful behavior with knowl- edge of the growing consequences of such behavior. Only by listening to their voices, trying to understand their motivations, and | CATHY J. COHEN484 accurately centering their stories with all of its complexities in our work can we begin to understand and map the connection between deviant practice, defi ant behavior, and politi- cal resistance. PATHOLOGIZING BLACK DEVIANCE: AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES AND BEYOND I am not suggesting that the topic of deviance has not found its way into the work of those studying and commenting on Black com- munities. The observance of and fascination with those labeled deviant has long existed in the social sciences and in African American Studies. By now we have all become accus- tomed and well equipped at pointing out the constant pathologizing of Black communi- ties. The researchers of the Eugenics period, the Moynihan Report in 1965, work on the underclass, and the publishing of The Bell Curve (1996) have all been rightly incor- porated into our understanding and narra- tive about the continued marginalization and attack on Black people. Less familiar, however, may be the pathologizing, in par- ticular of the poor, women, lesbian, and gay, and young Black people, that is part of the multiple traditions, to borrow a phrase from Rogers Smith (1993), that comprise the fi eld of African American Studies. Beginning with W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro and extending through St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton’s Black Metropolis to more recent Black com- munity studies, like those authored by Elijah Anderson and William Julius Wilson, there has always been a tradition of pathologiz- ing the behaviors of the African American poor and working class, especially women. In defense of these authors and other similar texts, the fundamental objective of such stud- ies, I believe, is to describe the contours of Black communities and to mount a rigorous examination of the systemic discrimination experienced by these subjects. However, far too often, as the researcher works to dif- ferentiate the lived conditions of segments of Black communities, internalized norma- tive judgments about the proper and natural structure of family, intimate relationships, and forms of social interaction creep into the analysis and prescriptions about what must be done. It is here, under the guise of objectively studying Black communities that the assumed importance of the nuclear fam- ily, appropriate gender relations, and the effi ciency of the capitalist system imposes an understanding of difference that results in the pathologizing of all those who would choose differently on such fundamental and often assumed truths. The result can be the textual presentation of the Black poor and other Black “deviants” as not only suffer- ing from the systemic discrimination expe- rienced by all Black Americans but also as allowing cultural defi ciencies to lead one down a deviant path. It thus becomes the duty of an enlightened Black elite to rescue this wayward group of Blacks, modeling for them the appropriate modes of behavior; those that will lead to assimilation, accep- tances, and access. Briefl y, let me offer two examples of work in this mode. If we begin with Du Bois’s groundbreak- ing work in The Philadelphia Negro (1899), we fi nd an astonishing piece of research emblematic of the ideals of objective social science study but driven ever so forcefully with a mission of proving the respectabil- ity of the Negro race. With the help of his assistant Isable Eaton, Du Bois sets out to survey the conditions of the seventh ward of Philadelphia, mapping the lived condi- tion of Black Americans as no scholar had before him. By the end of his work, Du Bois had visited or talked with nearly 5,000 indi- viduals. Through his travels he observed the wide range of experience and lived condi- tion thought to make up the Black experi- ence. Throughout the book, Du Bois reminds the reader of the historical and continued DEVIANCE AS RESISTANCE: A NEW RESEARCH AGENDA FOR THE STUDY OF BLACK POLITICS | 485 discrimination that has shaped the lives of Black Americans. He does, however, also present what some have called the “ugly facts” of some Black communities includ- ing the high levels of crime, pauperism, and family disorganization. For Du Bois such behaviors could not be explained merely by discrimination and so it was incumbent on the author to offer what he believed to be a complex explanation for such occurrences, one that made visible discrimination, agency, and difference among the Negro classes. This complex or contradictory tone is apparent throughout the book as is evident in this dis- cussion of crime. It would, of course, be idle to assert that most of the Negro crime was caused by prejudice; the violent economic and social changes which the last fi fty years have brought to the Ameri- can Negro, the sad social history that preceded these changes, have all contributed to unsettle morals and pervert talents. Nevertheless it is certain that Negro prejudice in cities like Phila- delphia has been a vast factor in aiding and abetting all other causes which impel a half- developed race to recklessness and excess . . . Thus the class of Negroes which the preju- dices of the city have distinctly encouraged is that of the criminal, the lazy and the shiftless; for them the city teems with institutions and charities; for them there is succor and sympa- thy; for the educated and industrious young colored man who wants work and not plati- tudes, wages and not alms, just rewards and not sermons—for such colored men Philadel- phia apparently has no use. (pp. 351–352) It was in the end differences among Black Americans, in particular class differences among Black Americans, where Du Bois rooted his argument against grand racial theories of the inferiority of the Negro. How could a biological concept of race account for behavior and ability when such diversity in each attribute was evident in Philadel- phia’s seventh ward? Du Bois was especially intent on noting the variations in family structure as an indication of the profound differences among the multiple classes and characters of Black Americans. It was the absence of a strong nuclear family and its corresponding bourgeois sexual mores that aided systemic discrimination in destroying Black communities. Kevin Gaines (1996), in his writing on Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro , reiterates this point about the importance of family struc- ture to Du Bois’s understanding of the Black condition and the limits of Black progress. He writes, Bourgeois sexual morality provided Du Bois with a crucial means of articulating class dif- ferences among blacks, facilitating in his study a problematic linkage of poverty and immo- rality, and equating the disturbing presence of unmarried black women with promiscuity. He associated unemployment with idleness and sin, but his vision of lower-class status espe- cially faulted all signs of the absence of the patriarchal black family . . . Du Bois’s discussion of the weakness of the family stemmed from the uplift assumption of the home and family as signs of progress and security, and sources of strength. Indeed much commentary on urban poverty targeted the status of the family as the barometer of social health or pathology. (p. 166) While Du Bois’s unfl inching adherence to the assumption of the necessity and inher- ent preference of the nuclear family might be accepted as an indication of the times in which he was writing, we should be suspect of those writing today who continue to dem- onstrate uncritical allegiance to such assump- tions. Unfortunately, such is the case of most recent writing on poor Black urban commu- nities, especially those classifi ed under the title the “underclass.” Beginning largely in the 1960s, researchers began to categorize what they perceived as more severe indica- tors of destructive behaviors and characteris- tics found in poor urban communities. While scholars had always noted the escalated rates of out-of-wedlock and teenage births, crime, | CATHY J. COHEN486 welfare dependency, female-headed house- holds, joblessness, and drug use in poor urban communities compared to other geo- graphical areas, in the 1960s such behaviors were increasingly described as commonplace, persistent, and disproportionate, especially among a subpopulation of the urban poor deemed the “underclass.” As we might suspect, there are varied approaches to explaining these behaviors and exploring these communities in the lit- erature of the “underclass.” The point of this reading is not to survey the range of texts available. Instead, I want to examine briefl y one of the most structurally based interroga- tions of the idea of an underclass to see how patriarchal and gender norms limit the anal- ysis, prioritizing a move toward respectabil- ity in thinking about something as concrete as policy prescriptions. To that end, I believe a brief review of William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) will be helpful. Regarded by many in the academy and the Clinton administration as one of the most important scholars writing on the subject of the urban poor, Wilson seeks to provide a more rigorous and “balanced public dis- course on the problems of the ghetto under- class” (p. 19). Wilson centers his analysis on the structural changes faced by the Black urban poor, highlighting in particular the shift in available jobs for members of the Black urban poor from living-wage manufac- turing jobs to low-wage service employment. While job opportunities were shrinking for the urban poor, middle-class and working- class African Americans experienced eco- nomic access and, thus, allowed some Black Americans to exit the inner-city for neigh- borhoods with better schools, services, and security. This exit has meant greater social isolation for the urban poor, resulting in a concentration of all ill effects associated with poverty and sustained marginalization. While Wilson’s concern with the exit of the Black middle-class has been problematized by numerous scholars, with one of the most hard-hitting treatments being that penned by Adolph Reed (1990), for this reading I want to draw the reader’s attention to the normative assumptions of Wilson’s analysis and, more specifi cally, the prominent fram- ing of a politics of respectability in Wilson’s policy prescriptions to address the needs of the underclass. Continually in this work one is struck by the importance of the nuclear family structure and dominant gender rela- tionships for the author. For example, after detailing the increased probability of living in poverty for female-headed households, Wilson does not urge a policy intervention that would focus on raising the wages of women, including single women and teen- agers who are heads of households. Instead, Wilson locates the remedy for the poverty experienced by women and children in the reemergence of viable families, specifi cally expanding women’s marriageability pool of employed men. He writes, “The black delay in marriage and the lower rate of remarriage, each associated with high percentages of out- of-wedlock births and female-headed house- holds, can be directly tied to the employment status of black males. Indeed, black women, especially young black women, are confront- ing a shrinking pool of ‘marriageable’ (that is economically stable) men” (p. 145). The Truly Disadvantaged , in the tradi- tion of The Philadelphia Negro , is a well- researched and often insightful work into the structural and demographic changes con- fronting poor, Black communities. And while Wilson does not offer explicit normative judgments about the inherent defi ciencies of poor Black people that other “under- class” scholars promote, he does question many of the assumed standards of respect- ability thought to be shared among enlight- ened and appropriate people, independent of race or class. For example, never in the text does Wilson fundamentally question the importance of, nor does he raise the pos- sible negative consequences of, the dominant and imposed nuclear family structure. Never DEVIANCE AS RESISTANCE: A NEW RESEARCH AGENDA FOR THE STUDY OF BLACK POLITICS | 487 does he openly worry about the impact of strict gender relations on the lived experi- ence of young Black males—no doubt some of them gay—at the center of his analysis. Moreover, never does he attempt to explore the creativity, adaptability, and transforma- tive possibilities that exists in the alternative family, intimate, and social relationships and behaviors, which are thought to distinguish the underclass. He never explores what Ted Gordon calls the “cultural range” of Black communities where “there appears a reper- toire of practices and meanings which, when seen in relation to the dominant culture, extends from resistant to accommodative” (1997, p. 40). For example, is it possible that the social- ization of young boys to believe that they have not fulfi lled their manly obligations unless they are able to provide for their families means that young men who have no access to the low-skilled, high-wage jobs of past years and thus no legal means of “providing” for their children, partners, and other family members decide to engage in dangerous and illegal activity to meet or appear to meet such norms? Furthermore, is it possible that traditional narratives of masculinity encourage men who are struc- turally unable to meet such ideas to detach from any engaged role with their children and partners? Similarly, is it possible that the shared care-taking strategies of young, single women with children, where both family and friends aid in the “raising” of children— often because their help is required in light of limited resources—could help us bet- ter understand and appreciate the benefi ts to be gained from communal practices in child-rearing? I am not suggesting that norms of mas- culinity explain all of the counter normative behavior with regard to family structure that Wilson outlines in his book. I do believe, however, that we must examine such ideas, norms, and processes of socialization as both part of the cause and possible “solution” to these phenomena. In the same way that scholars develop and advocate new economic programs they believe will create living- wage jobs for both men and women who are under- and unemployed, so too must we explore and put forth new ways of defi ning and teaching what it is to be a contributing and healthy man or woman in this society and in Black communities. Structural interven- tions, while critically important, will never provide suffi cient solutions to normative and structurally constituted crises. Clearly Du Bois and Wilson do not repre- sent the breadth of approaches and the body of literature that has developed on the Black poor. They do, however, represent the gen- eral complacency found among those who study such communities, leaving unexam- ined the normative structure that is used to pathologize certain choices and demonize specifi c communities. I offer their work as a lesson to us all about the instinctive move, even among some of our most dedicated and respected scholars, to judge and pathologize the lives of those most vulnerable in Black communities. At the root of such judgments sits an unexamined acceptance of normative standards of association, behavior, and even desire that limits our ability to respect the subjects under consideration and to explore their lived decisions with an eye toward its transformative and oppositional potential. It would be disingenuous of me to suggest that those studying the Black poor have only engaged in the pathologizing of those com- munities. There is a contrasting literature on the Black poor that has explained their seemingly deviant behavior as refl ecting the limited and adaptive choices of a marginal- ized group. Whether it is ethnographies like Carol Stack’s All Our Kin (1997) or Mitch Duneier’s Slim’s Table (1994), these works have stopped short of demonizing the actions of the Black poor, seeking instead to under- stand the reasons for such choices and the functions they serve. However, still left unex- plored in these texts are the possibilities for | CATHY J. COHEN488 broader and more radical transformation. No doubt the political potential of these acts is ignored, in part because the intent of these and other ethnographic studies is to detail what exists and offer reasoned explana- tions of why these patterns are maintained. Rarely is an ethnographic work focused on the question of what might be, especially in the political realm and especially beyond the neighborhood or community under study. Thus, because of past limitations in focus, question, and method, I believe a new focus on the relationship between deviant practice, discourse, and politics is necessary. DEVIANCE, AGENCY, AUTONOMY, AND RESISTANCE Throughout this reading I have argued for a renewed focus on those acts of perceived deviance in Black communities, not to explain their functional or dysfunctional characteristics but instead to investigate their potential for the production of counter nor- mative behaviors and oppositional politics. As I stated earlier, I am interested in why individuals with little access to and protec- tion from dominant power choose to engage in behaviors that are largely deemed, at least by dominant narratives, to be outside the realm of acceptable behavior. These choices can threaten or call into question one’s sta- tus within Black communities, but more often they jeopardize the formal standing of already marginal individuals in relation to the state. 6 In addition to these individual acts of deviance, I am also interested in how deviant choices that are repeated by groups or subgroups of people can create a space where normative myths of how the soci- ety is naturally structured are challenged in practice (the decision to have a baby before one is married) and in speech (the state- ment “I don’t need a man” by the same single mother). While I accept the warning of Dorian Warren that cumulative acts of individual agency are not the same as collec- tive agency, I do believe that in this counter normative space exists the possibility of radi- cal change, not only in the distribution of resources but also defi nitional power, rede- fi ning the rules of normality that limit the dreams, emotions, and acts of most people. Observing and probing the agency of people who, understanding the expectations of the larger society and their communities, choose differently from what is prescribed must be the point from which we start to build a new research agenda for African American Studies in general and the study of Black politics in particular. The centering of those most marginal in Black communities is, for me, the real work of queering Black stud- ies. Using a theoretical framework closely associated with the commitments of Black feminists, queer theorists, and students of Black politics, where the counter normative behavior and marginal position of different segments of Black communities are high- lighted, not with an eye not toward patholo- gizing or even justifying such behavior but instead with an eye toward recognizing and understanding its possible subversive poten- tial, we can reorient our respective fi elds to focus on the potential libratory aspects of deviance. I am not suggesting that researchers ignore the deviant positioning of the choices and behaviors of individuals relative to normative standards. In fact, it is their diminished posi- tion that makes such choices in part worthy of study. My hope, however, is that our research not stop there, merely noting their deviant status and the seemingly self-destructive “nature” of such acts. Instead, I am suggest- ing that we also explore why people believe they made these decisions. Did they under- stand, expect, and experience negative con- sequences from these choices, and does such behavior demonstrate some degree of agency on the part of marginalized individuals that can be mobilized for more explicitly political goals? These deviant choices, which are by DEVIANCE AS RESISTANCE: A NEW RESEARCH AGENDA FOR THE STUDY OF BLACK POLITICS | 489 no means chosen freely in the liberal sense, have the ability to help us delineate the rela- tionship between agency, autonomy, and opposition that has been missing in many of our most insightful analyses of oppositional politics by oppressed people. Specifi cally, I hypothesize that many of the acts labeled resistance by scholars of oppositional politics have not been attempts at resistance at all but instead the struggle of those most marginal to maintain or regain some agency in their lives as they try to secure such human rewards as pleasure, fun, and autonomy. In no way is this statement meant to negate the political potential to be found in such behavior. It does underscore, however, my stance that the work marginal people pursue to fi nd and protect some form of autonomy is not inherently politicized work and the steps leading from autonomy to resistance must be detailed and not assumed. We must begin to delineate the conditions under which transgressive behavior becomes transformative and deviant practice is trans- formed into politicized resistance. For example, Jim Scott in both the Weap- ons of the Weak (1987) and Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990) implores the reader to look beyond the public transcript of formal interactions between the dominant and those much less powerful to understand the full range of political acts of resistance being pursued by those dominated. Scott writes: Until quite recently, much of the active politi- cal life of subordinate groups has been ignored because it takes place at a level we rarely rec- ognize as political. To emphasize the enormity of what has been, by and large, disregarded, I want to distinguish between the open, declared forms of resistance, which attract most attention, and the disguised, low-profi le, undeclared resistance that constitutes the domain of infrapolitics . . . Taking a long historical view, one sees that the luxury of relatively safe, open political opposition is both rare and recent . . . So long as we confi ne our conception of the political to activity that is openly declared we are driven to conclude that subordinate groups essen- tially lack a political life or that what political life they do have is restricted to those excep- tional moments of popular explosion. To do so is to miss the immense political terrain that lies between quiescence and revolt and that, for better or worse, is the political environment of subject classes. (1990, pp. 198–199) Similarly, Robin Kelley in Race Rebels (1994) argues that if we expand where we look for political acts and what counts as politics, one can fi nd numerous everyday acts of resistance in the lives of “ordinary” people. Extend- ing this line of reasoning, Kelley argues that independent of the intended effect, marginal people can and do resist daily, through acts ranging from the outright challenge to those in power to participation in cultural forms thought to be deviant. He writes: Like Scott, I use the concept of infrapolitics to describe the daily confrontations, evasive actions, and stifl ed thoughts that often inform organized political movements. I am not sug- gesting that the realm of infrapolitics is any more or less important or effective than what we traditionally understand to be politics. Instead I want to suggest that the political his- tory of oppressed people cannot be understood without reference to infrapolitics, for these daily acts have a cumulative effect on power relations. While the meaning and effectiveness of various acts differ according to the par- ticular circumstances, they do make a differ- ence, whether intended or not . (p. 8, emphasis added) While I, too, believe that an expanded frame for recognizing resistance or more generally political acts would reveal daily examples of what Scott calls infrapolitics, I worry that both Scott and Kelley collapse important and necessary distinctions that exist in the choices and intent of those labeled marginal and deviant. Specifi cally, while I believe that some choices that are labeled deviant such as | CATHY J. COHEN490 the choice to live one’s life as an out gay, les- bian, bisexual, transgender, or queer person may be driven by a conscious intentionality to resist the heteronormativity of the society and the second-class position of gay subjects, surely not all acts of deviance are examples of politicized resistance to either larger or local manifestations of domination and oppres- sion. Some acts labeled deviant are defi ant in nature, where individuals make a conscious decision to go against established rules either publicly or through hidden means. How- ever, every counter-normative defi ant act is not political, either in intent, result, or both, where political resistance is the intent to defy laws, interactions, obligations, and norma- tive assumptions viewed as systematically unfair. Thus, one of the signifi cant challenges facing scholars is to determine how to dif- ferentiate deviant practice, defi ance, and resistance. It is the distinction I make among devi- ance, defi ance, and resistance and the sig- nifi cant role I assign to intent in marking politicized resistance that I believe helps us to build on the important insights provided by Scott and Kelley while offering more ana- lytic precision to our efforts to identify and understand the political potential contained in deviant behavior. Again, I am not suggest- ing that Scott and Kelley do not recognize the difference between, for example, cultural expression and political resistance, but in their writings there exists less clarity about the boundaries between these categories. For example, in describing the work and plea- sure of “dance halls, blues clubs and ‘jook joints’ ” in the South, Kelley writes, In darkened rooms ranging in size from huge halls to tiny dens, black working people of both sexes shook and twisted their overworked bodies, drank, talked, engaged in sexual play, and—in spite of occasional fi ghts—reinforced their sense of community . . . I am not suggesting that parties, dances, and other leisure pursuits were merely guises for political events, or that these cultural practices were clear acts of resistance. Instead, much if not most of African American popular culture can be characterized as, to use Ray- mond Williams’s terminology, “alternative” rather than oppositional. Most people attend those events to escape from the world of assembly lines, relief lines, and color lines, and to leave momentarily the individual and collec- tive battles against racism, sexism and material deprivation. . . . Knowing what happens in these spaces of pleasure can help us understand the solidar- ity black people have shown at political mass meetings, illuminate the bonds of fellowship one fi nds in churches and voluntary associa- tions, and unveil the confl icts across class and gender lines that shape and constrain these col- lective struggles. (pp. 46–47) Again, while I agree with Kelley s call to study nontraditional sites of social gather- ing in Black communities, it is his claims about the creation of communal bonds in social spaces that transfer to more explicitly political and civic formations that I believe demand greater elaboration and empirical investigation. I hypothesize that most acts labeled deviant or even defi ant of power are not attempts to sway fundamentally the distribution of power in the country or even permanently change the allocation of power among the individuals involved in an interaction. Instead, these acts, decisions, or behaviors are more often attempts to create greater autonomy over one’s life, to pursue desire, or to make the best of very limited life options. Thus, instead of attempting to increase one’s power over someone, people living with limited resources may use the restricted agency available to them to create autonomous spaces absent the continuous stream of power from outside authorities or normative structures. And while an act of defi ance can be misinterpreted as having political intent and a direct challenge to the distribution of power and may result in the actual redistribution of power, I would con- tend that the initial act was not one of resis- tance. Thus, understanding the distinction DEVIANCE AS RESISTANCE: A NEW RESEARCH AGENDA FOR THE STUDY OF BLACK POLITICS | 491 between deviance, defi ant acts, and acts of resistance lies in recognizing the perspective or intent of the individual. It is my empha- sis on understanding intent as it relates to the agency of marginal individuals where I believe I part ways with Kelley and Scott. I want to be clear. I am not suggesting that acts somehow deemed as deviant or defi ant have no relationship to the category of acts I label resistance or are devoid of political consequence. Instead, I am suggesting that such acts cannot be read as resistance inde- pendent of some understanding of the intent and agency of the individual. While there may be political possibilities in the devi- ant or defi ant acts of marginally positioned people, that potential has to be mobilized in a conscious fashion to be labeled resis- tance. This distinction is not arbitrary but one that signals the need for intervening mechanisms to transform deviant and defi - ant behavior into politically conscious acts that can be used as a point of entry into a mobilized political movement. Of course, the following question logically is what type of intervening mechanisms are necessary? While I believe there exists multiple possi- bilities of effective interventions, from a rela- tively traditional approach to politics, one such intervention might be an increase in the number of grassroots organizations focused on talking to and organizing young people, including the so-called “deviants” of Black communities. For example, organizers who will listen to the stories of young people, who can relate to the cultural vehicles of this group, who recognize the counter normative potential that exists in their nontraditional living and sexual arrangements, and who can aid in developing and articulating a political agenda that speaks to their lived condition is one example of an intervening mecha- nism I would recommend. In fact, some of the most interesting political work around the country is happening among organiza- tions trying to mobilize those segments of society too often deemed deviants—young people who are unemployed, not in school, and possibly struggling with children, people incarcerated and now reentering their com- munities, and undocumented workers. Unfortunately, too often scholars con- cerned with the politics of marginal commu- nities have ignored the distinction of defi ant or resistant acts and acts of politicized resis- tance, misdiagnosing the resources that exist and the resources needed for political mobilization. It might be that marginal sub- jects with a politicized consciousness choose localized attempts at control and autonomy because they have no mobilized outlet to confront the larger political context. Or they reject politics because they believe that the mobilized organizations that do exist have no interest in and commitment to the issues that animate their lives; those disrespectable life and death issues in hiding in Black com- munities. These are empirical questions wait- ing for study. It is possible that eventually the cumula- tive impact of individual deviant choices may indeed have an effect on power relations as Kelley suggests, creating spaces or counter publics, where not only oppositional ideas and discourse happen but lived opposition, or at least autonomy, is chosen daily. And through the repetition of deviant practices by multiple individuals, new identities, com- munities, values, and politics may be cre- ated where seemingly deviant, unconnected behavior was thought to exist. And to go one long step further, it might also be that in those counter normative choices lie the seeds for challenging many of the normative struc- tures that have defi ned some in Black com- munities as deviant. Thus, it is possible that through deviant choices individuals open up a space where public defi ance of the norms is seen as a possibility and an oppositional worldview develops. But again, while this newly created space of autonomy and dif- ference may in fact change the incentive and norm structure for that subgroup, the origi- nal choice was not one of resistance even if | CATHY J. COHEN492 the continued practice of deviant behavior has long-lasting political consequences. Of course, this example suggests that intended political resistance is not the only way to achieve political results, although it may be a necessary and effective component to pro- tect and maintain newly created spaces and norms. My instinctive move toward collec- tive mobilization leads me to believe that the modeling of public defi ance and the open- ing up of new counter-normative space is not enough. Organizations, networks, and groups have to be mobilized that will engage those making deviant decisions in a sus- tained discussion about opposition, agency, and norms in and out of Black communities. Consciousness must be raised as processes and institutions of regulation are exposed. CONCLUSION It is my belief that a new focus on those previously understood as deviant in Black communities opens up important research questions for social scientists, different from the work of earlier scholars like Du Bois, refl ecting the changing political and racial landscape of the twenty-fi rst century. The benefi t of a new approach to Black politics with a focus on deviance is not that we arrive at some unexamined position of support for every counter normative and seemingly self-destructive behavior that exists in Black communities. Instead, at its best, questions about the construction of Black deviance should lead us fi rst to an engagement with the normative assumptions that structure Black politics and the lives of Black people, interrogating whose rule-breaking will be labeled deviant, altering signifi cantly their political, social, and economic standing. Second, a focus on deviance, different from Du Bois’s attempt to mask those seen as culturally inferior, should lead to the inclusion of previously silenced and absent members of our communities, expanding our understanding of who constitutes Black communities and reconstructing the bound- aries of membership and identity. This means that we must pay attention to power within our communities, something Black femi- nists have demanded for some time. For me this is the process of the queering of Black studies: making visible all those who in the past have been silenced and excluded as full members of Black communities—the poor, women, lesbians, and gays—those people on the margins of society and excluded from the middle-class march toward respectabil- ity. But we must remember that reconstitut- ing and expanding the membership of Black communities is not enough; we must also understand and detail the work of power that constructs and disseminates the idea of outsider or deviant within and outside of Black communities. Third, a centering of deviance should also generate new theories and models of power, agency, and resistance in the lives of largely marginal people, cognizant of the different intents involved in defi ant acts and acts of politicized resistance. Despite my disagree- ment with some of his analysis, I see the work of Robin Kelley, in particular in Race Rebels , as taking on this charge in excep- tional fashion, providing the reader with a much more complicated understanding of the work, politics, and leisure habits of the Black working class. Kelley attempts to dem- onstrate how behavior previously deemed as deviant, decadent, or even self-destructive was driven in part by a politics of resistance or infrapolitics as James Scott has labeled such processes. While I believe that both Kelley and Scott at times see and impose an oppositional motive in the lives of the poor and oppressed where it does not exist, I hold both scholars in very high esteem for their attempt to interrogate the assumptions of what constitutes resistance, opposition, and agency, broadening how we think about pol- itics and the possibility for transformational politics from below. DEVIANCE AS RESISTANCE: A NEW RESEARCH AGENDA FOR THE STUDY OF BLACK POLITICS | 493 Fourth, a focus on acts of deviance in Black communities should also direct our attention to the power and oppression being imposed on Black lives from structures and institutions outside of Black communities. We must all remember that the norma- tive categories of “respectable” and “devi- ant” have signifi cant political consequences beyond the academy in determining one’s access to needed resources. If we take, for example, the idea of the family, specifi cally the ideal of the nuclear family, we fi nd its continued prominence or at least one’s con- formity to it, as a standard in determining the distribution of political, economic, and social resources. Not too unlike the policing of intimate relationships of women on wel- fare by caseworkers in the 1960s and 1970s, there has emerged a new commitment on the part of the government to compulsory mar- riage among the poor. Anyone familiar with the Bush adminis- tration’s policies toward women’s reproduc- tive rights both here and abroad has seen up close the use of normative ideals of the family and the “unborn child” to structure a policy agenda. The promotion of fatherhood programs and paternity requirements that seek to tie funding for the poor to being mar- ried is now a common standard by which agencies and organizations are judged with regard to funding. Even President Bush’s recently passed AIDS initiative to provide money to treat AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean was stalled in Congress as other conservatives sought to restrict HIV and AIDS prevention and education funds from those international organizations and agen- cies providing integrated family planning— including counseling around abortion. Con- tinually, the Bush administration has used family structure as a litmus test for the allo- cation of needed resources both here and abroad. In line with this move have been efforts to restrict everything from head start to welfare assistance based on conformity to the nuclear family structure. However, the diminished political status of those defi ned as deviant is not only the result of right-wing politics. As I noted ear- lier, within established Black political orga- nizations there is also reluctance to embrace those issues and subpopulations thought to be morally wanting or ambiguous (Warren 2000). Despite the feelings of some in Black communities that we have been shamed by the immoral behavior of a small subset of our community, some would label the under- class, scholars must take up the charge to highlight and detail the agency of those on the outside, those who through their acts of nonconformity choose outsider status, at least temporarily. It is an intentional deviance given limited agency and constrained choices. These individuals are not fully or completely defi ning themselves as outsiders or content with their outsider status, but they are also not willing to adapt completely or conform. The cumulative impact of such choices is pos- sibly the creation of spaces or counter pub- lics, where not only oppositional ideas and discourse happens but lived opposition, or at least autonomy, is chosen daily. Further- more, it may be that through the repetition of deviant practices by multiple individuals new identities, communities, and politics are created and a space emerges where seemingly deviant, unconnected behavior might evolve into conscious acts of resistance that serve as the basis for a mobilized politics of deviance. Only through serious and sustained exami- nation can we begin to understand what is possible through deviance. I hope that this new space of possibility is at the center of studies of Black politics in the twenty-fi rst century. NOTES 1. This reading was originally prepared for the confer- ence “The Ends of Sexuality: Pleasure and Danger in the New Millennium,” Northwestern University, April 4–5, 2003. My thinking has evolved since its fi rst inception because of the helpful comments of Brandi Adams, Alan Brady, Michael Dawson, | CATHY J. COHEN494 Victoria Hattam, Sheldon Lyke, Patchen Markell, Barbara Ransby, Beth Richie, Dorian Warren, Deva Woodly, Iris Marion Young, and the partici- pants of the University of Texas Center for African and African American Studies’ Race, Gender, and Sexuality Series. Of course, any and all shortcom- ings in the argument and the article are the respon- sibility of the author. 2. I am lucky to be a part of an amazing community of scholars in Chicago committed to the develop- ment of a fi eld of research we might call Black queer studies. Some of the members of this intel- lectual and social family include Jennifer Brody, Jackie Goldsby, Sharon Holland, Lynette Jack- son, E. Patrick Johnson, Waldo Johnson, Dwight McBride, Darrel Moore, and Beth Richie. 3. The recent revelations of mixed-race children by racist and prominent White men such as Thomas Jefferson and Strom Thurmond as well as the recent hysteria of purported “down-low” sexual behavior by some unknown number of Black men underscores the possible disjuncture between one’s expressed public and lived private sexual behavior and power. 4. See for example, the work of Tricia Rose (2003); E. Frances White (2001); Jennifer DeVere Brody (2000); Dwight McBride (1998); Philip Brian Harper (1998); Kendal Thomas (1997); and Siob- han Somerville (1994); and Ann DuCille (1990). 5. Throughout the paper when I use the term deviant I am referring to those groups of people who have been constructed as engaging in substantial rule- or norm-breaking behavior, whose counternormative social behavior is attributed not only to individual choice but to defi ciencies in their fundamental or inherent character, making such behavior predict- able or inevitable. Among such individuals, devi- ant behavior in one social realm, such as in the composition of family, is seen as connected to deviant behavior in other realms, such as norms around work. I am not talking about, for example, individuals who have a pattern of rolling through stop signs instead of coming to a complete stop— rule-breaking behavior. Instead, I am focused in this reading on those individuals thought to break the assumed agreed upon norms of socially accept- able behavior. See, for example, Becker 1973 for an extended discussion of deviance. 6. It is important here to note that normative struc- tures around such essential ideas as family, work, or sex can vary between their macro or dominant articulation and their microgroup-based articula- tion and practice. Thus, having children before one is married may result in harsh consequences from the state with regard to fi nancial support, for example, but be largely accepted and seemingly embraced in Black communities. REFERENCES Anderson, Elijah (1992). Streetwise : Race, Class and Change in an Urban Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Becker, Howard S. (1973). Outsiders : Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press. Bobo, Lawrence D. (Ed.) (2000). Prismatic Metropolis : Inequality in Los Angeles. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Brody, Jennifer DeVere (2000). “Theory in Motion: A Review of Black Queer Studies in the Millennium Conference.” Callaloo, 23: 1274–1277. Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. Carby, Hazel (1987). 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The Battle of Los Angeles: The Cultural Politics of Chicana/o Music in the Greater Eastside Victor Hugo Viesca Chicanos are, when you call yourself that, you know your history, you know where you came from, you know where you need to go. —Yoatl, Aztlán Underground 1 I try to fi nd my own Chicana sensibility in the dance. —Martha Gonzales, Quetzal 2 East Los Angeles is the center of a fl ourish- ing musical cultural scene with a renewed “Chicana/o” sensibility. 3 This scene is being led by a collective of socially conscious and politically active Latin-fusion bands that emerged in the 1990s, including Azt- lán Underground, Blues Experiment, Lysa Flores, Ozomatli, Ollin, Quetzal, Quinto Sol, Slowrider, and Yeska. These groups compose original songs that weave together the sounds of the Americas, from soul, samba, and the son jarocho to reggae, rumba, and rap. Mul- tilingual lyrics in Spanish, English, Cálo , or Nahuatl that speak to themes of urban exile, indigenous identity, and multiracial unity are layered over the music to produce a sonic Chicana/o imaginary of the global city in the twenty-fi rst century. 4 Several of the bands within the scene have released full-length albums on their own independent record labels such as Xicano Records and Film (Aztlán Underground and Quinto Sol), De Volada Records (Slowrider and Blues Exper- iment), and Lysa Flores’s Bring Your Love Records (see discography). The bands often collaborate with one another, producing or playing on each other’s records and touring on the same bill. While their music is sold primarily in California, where they perform most often, the Eastside scene is building an enthusiastic and global following through the growing popularity of Quetzal and Ozom- atli. Since releasing their self-titled debut in 1998, Quetzal has released two successful and critically acclaimed albums on the pre- mier folk label Vanguard Records. Ozomatli has sold more than half a million records of its fi rst two CDs, its eponymous debut and the Grammy Award–winning Embrace the Chaos (2001). The popularity of the Eastside scene in California refl ects a consumer market inhab- ited by millions of Latina/os with a bilingual and bicultural sensibility. 5 Latina/os make up a third of California’s population and a near majority of Los Angeles County residents. Notably, more than 70 percent of Latina/os in Los Angeles are of Mexican origin. 6 The musi- cians and the audience of the Eastside scene are predominantly bilingual ethnic Mexican and Latina/o youth of the one-and-a-half, sec- ond, and third generations. 7 The cultural for- mations of the East L.A. scene emerge from this Latina/o population, as subjects of their lyrical voices, as potential consumers, and, most important, as cultural producers. Along with visual artists, activists, and audiences, the musicians of the Eastside scene form an emergent cultural movement that speaks powerfully to present conditions. THE BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES | 497 This community represents a form of politi- cal possibility that inheres in postindustrial culture, one that is grounded in the new spatial and social relations generated in Los Angeles in the transnational era. 8 Thus, it is critical that we consider how these cultural activities reveal an understanding and nego- tiation of these forces. The very conditions of oppression and disenfranchisement that characterize the new economy have enabled (and required) a particular counterresponse, a response that is necessarily different from older forms of struggle. The Eastside scene is both a product of and a means for counter- ing the impact of globalization on low-wage workers and aggrieved racialized popula- tions. The Eastside scene serves as a fl oating site of resistance, a mechanism for calling an oppositional community into being through performance. Groups within the scene link together diverse parts of a spatially dispersed community through the activities of live per- formance, listening to recordings and radio, and following the bands to marches, demon- strations, and direct action protests. THE CHICANA/O CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE EASTSIDE MUSIC SCENE Musicians in the Eastside scene look to the past and to the present for cultural traditions and formations that they can use to construct their own political and aesthetic practices of Chicana/o identity. One manifestation of this tendency is the affi liation with an indigenous Mexica(n) identity, 9 signaled by the names of many of the bands in the scene. Scott and Randy Rodarte named their language of Nahuatl. 10 Quetzal retains the Nahuatl name for a native bird of southern Mexico that is considered sacred by the Aztecs and the Mayans. Ozomatli is named after the Aztec god of dance who is represented as a monkey fi gure in the famous Aztec Sun Stone. Quinto Sol refers to the historical period of the fi fth sun, the present era according to Aztec phi- losophy. Aztlán Underground uses the name of the original homeland of the Aztecs, Azt- lán, to signify their indigenous identity and origin in the Southwest. This understanding of Aztlán was popularized by Chicana/o art- ists and activists of the Chicano movement in the 1960s, who reclaimed much of the United States Southwest as the homeland of the Chicano/Mexicano nation. The band names that do not explicitly suggest an indig- enous Mexican identity implicitly signal their affi liation with other recognizable eth- nic Mexican cultural formations. Slowrider, for example, alludes to the popular barrio art of car customizing, or lowrider culture, while Yeska is slang for marijuana, evoking the 1940s Pachuco argot of Cálo . The connection to Mexican culture is fur- ther expressed in the use of traditional Mexi- can music styles and instruments. The son jarocho, an Afro-Mexican song and dance form originating in Vera Cruz, Mexico, is an important element in the music of Quetzal. Quetzal Flores, its founder and lead guitarist, composes much of the band’s music around the rhythms of his jarana, the small, four- to eight-stringed guitar that is the main instru- ment of the son jarocho. 11 When perform- ing and recording songs in the jarocho style, band member Martha Gonzales stomps on the tarima, a wooden box with sound holes that is an essential percussive element of the Veracruzan son. Raul Pacheco, guitarist and vocalist for Ozomatli, makes use of the bajo sexto, a twelve-stringed Mexican bass guitar that is the rhythm instrument for conjunto groups that play music from the northern states of Mexico as well as the Texas-Mexican variation, Tejano. The hardcore/hip-hop sound of Aztlán Underground is layered with the percussion, fl utes, and rattles of indige- nous Mexico. These expressions of indigenous and eth- nic Mexican identity are not anchored in claims for a separate nation-state of Chi- cana/os based in the Southwest. Rather, | VICTOR HUGO VIESCA498 these stylistic markers are used to reaffi rm an ethnic origin and identity that precedes the nation-state. As Aztlán Underground explained: We wanted to bring back the understanding of Aztlán and place of our origin. The connec- tion to the land that was torn from us. To dis- sect the way in which they have colonized us and made us believe in the white ways and not our own from the Spanish to the English. We wanted and want to resurrect our true identity is how we started. So we united the ancient with the present by fusing our native instru- ments with hip-hop and our message to create a bridge to our identity. 12 This turn toward traditional musical prac- tices is similar to the experience of East L.A. band Los Lobos, which fi rst used the son jarocho and other traditional Mexican music styles in their own Latin-rock fusions in the late 1970s. Their adaptation of traditional Mexican elements highlighted the impact of the Chicano movement in East Los Angeles just prior to their emergence. As Steven Loza noted, “A large part of the group’s desire to appropriate folkloric jarocho genres into their repertoire was based on an urge not only to preserve such music, but to promote it as a viable art form in an urban and, in many respects, a culturally hostile environment.” 13 The musicians of Los Lobos are mentors to the East L.A. scene. David Hidalgo played the requinto doble and accordion on Ozomatli’s song “Aqui No Sera” on their debut album, and saxophonist Steve Berlin produced Quet- zal’s third album, Worksongs (2003). In the context of the contemporary eco- nomic and political marginalization of eth- nic Mexicans in Los Angeles, the musical practices that emerge from the Greater East- side continue to serve as a strategic site for the production and negotiation of emergent national, racial, class, and gendered identi- ties. Although Chicano/a culture speaks to the shared experiences, institutions, and practices of Mexican Americans as a distinct ethnic community, other expressions of cultural affi liation are also at play. Interethnic iden- tifi cation and unity through culture rather than nationality or color are integral com- ponents of a new Chicana/o sensibility being forged in the current East L.A. scene. Neither assimilationist nor separatist, this complex of Chicana/o cultural production affi rms its cultural heritage and history of place in Los Angeles while creatively engaging in and adapting to the diversity of communities and cultural forms that make up the city. One of the most vital infl uences of the Eastside scene has come from Mexican immigrant culture. The banda music scene that dominates much of the Mexican immi- grant cultural, social, and radio space of Los Angeles has captured the imagination of thousands of Mexican American youths in the Greater Eastside. Banda originated in Sinaloa, Mexico, and was transformed into “techno- banda ” in the 1980s when musicians in northwestern Mexico adapted elements of rock and roll and replaced tra- ditional brass instruments and bass drums with the electric bass, modern drums, tim- bales, and synthesizers. Banda ’s popularity exploded in Los Angeles in the early 1990s as local Spanish-language radio stations began programming the music in response to the musical preferences of recent immi- grants. Nightclubs, radio stations, and swap meets that catered to the emerging ethnic Mexican majority in Los Angeles produced a thriving dance and music scene based on the sound of the tambora (bass drum) and the dance of the quebradita (little break). Many of the immigrants in the initial market audi- ence had come from rural areas that had not previously sent many migrants to Los Ange- les. This audience responded enthusiastically to banda ’s rural immigrant identity. Banda artists presented themselves in the vaquero (cowboy) style of dress, wearing hats, boots, and jeans, and sang of life on the ranch and the experiences of crossing the border in the ranchera voice of the region. In the THE BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES | 499 nativist era of Pete Wilson and Proposition 187, banda was a potent source of commu- nity prestige for ethnic Mexicans who turned to the musical culture as an active affi rmation of their own Mexican background. Mexican American youths and adults now compose a major base of consumers and producers of this transnational musical culture, and the music’s impact has transcended the banda scene itself. 14 Ozomatli, Ollin, and Quetzal all incorporate elements of banda and ranch- era music into their repertoire. The Eastside hardcore (punk) scene was another formative musical culture infl uenc- ing the East L.A. scene. Members of Azt- lán Underground, Blues Experiment, Ollin, Quinto Sol, and Slowrider actively engaged in this precursory scene. Punk produced by ethnic Mexican and Latina/o youth in East and Southeast Los Angeles has had a popu- lar following since the late 1970s, despite little radio airplay, minimal recorded work and record labels, and only a few short-lived clubs. 15 Punk is often performed in backyard gatherings, one of the more common ways to celebrate the weekend in the working-class suburbs of the Greater Eastside. The Rod- arte twins of Ollin and Robert Tovar of Blues Experiment, as well as members of Aztlán Underground and Quinto Sol, paid their dues in hard-core bands such as Bloodcum, Peace Pill, Subsist, and Golpe de Estado. The popular music that dominates the audible spaces of contemporary urban radio and local nightclubs has been a fundamen- tal element of the new musical practices of the Eastside scene as well. The increasing popularity of Jamaican reggae in the urban United States is refl ected in the music of both Quinto Sol, which blends roots-reggae with Latin rhythms like cumbia, rumba, and son, and Yeska, whose take on Jamaican ska is fused with the sounds of Latin jazz. The elec- tronica sounds of dance music can be heard in the work of Quetzal and the remixes of Slowrider. Yet it is hip-hop that has had the most generative infl uence on the Eastside scene. Ozomatli and Slowrider incorporate a DJ and an MC into their albums and live performances. One of the pioneers of West Coast and Chicano rap, Aztlán Underground is considered one of the innovators of the rap-rock genre. 16 Rap groups that are affi li- ated with the Eastside scene, such as 2Mex, the Black Eyed Peas, and La Paz, record more traditional versions of hip-hop by rhyming over break beats produced electronically. The cultural hybridity of the Eastside scene is not new to urban Chicana/o musi- cal practice. The rise of Eastside jump blues bands like the Pachuco Boogie Boys in the 1940s and the growth of the Eastside sound in the 1960s and 1970s showed particu- lar affi nities between ethnic Mexicans and African Americans in music, audiences, and band membership. 17 What is different about the contemporary Eastside scene is the politi- cization of these hybrid practices into new forms of political expression. The evolving social movements and cultural practices of Chicana/os are producing an emergent form of oppositional identity that not only draws on their history and collective memory but speaks to new ways of thinking and practic- ing community across national and ethnic lines. The use of the son jarocho by Quet- zal, for example, is not only an expression of Mexican identity, but it is a link to the cultural struggles waged by African slaves. As Quetzal Flores explains, “We performed at an academic conference in Kentucky about the infl uence black culture had on the Americas earlier this year. One of the professors made the point that, as mania- cal and genocidal as slavery was, black cul- ture survived and thrived. That’s son. The slaves had drums; the Spaniards took them away. The slaves said, ‘All right, fuck you. I’ll stomp on wood then,’ and created this wondrous music. It shows how rich humans are. Human resilience will always prevail. And that’s what we try to convey—the prob- lems and beauty of Los Angeles.” 18 Quinto Sol bassist Martin Perez characterized his | VICTOR HUGO VIESCA500 band’s movement away from punk to the Latin-fusion style and community-oriented lyrics that distinguishes the East L.A. scene as a desire to raise the political conscious- ness of his community. According to Perez, “We used to play in punk rock bands that maybe were politically aware but not too conscious. That was why we started play- ing roots. We saw what Bob Marley was doing for his people and we thought, ‘Hey, our people need a message too.’ ” 19 Aztlán Underground echoed this sentiment when asked about the formation of the group: “By 1988, when we fi rst were turned on to black nationalist groups such as Public Enemy and BDP (Boogie Down Productions) in hip-hop, we were moved by their message and real- ized that there was nothing for our people to look to and we were confi ned to embrac- ing the dominant culture. Ways of the Iztac. 20 So we wanted to break the notions that we were illegal by affi rming to our people our native identity and roots, which are lost in these western schools that teach us George Washington is our father, huh!!” 21 The political ideology of Chicana/o iden- tity manifested in the current Eastside scene is distinct from previous generations of Chi- cano nationalism and expression. Several activists and later critics have pointed to the exclusive and masculinist aspects of the “Chicano” subject of the political and cul- tural movement of the 1960s and 1970s. 22 Richard T. Rodriguez has noted how the representations of Chicano nationalism in contemporary “Chicano rap” echo the dom- inant masculinism of the past. The mascu- linist element of Chicano rap, such as (Kid) Frost’s representation of “La Raza,” makes it susceptible to sexism while its concern with traditional notions of Mexican culture such as la familia or carnalismo (brother- hood) may reproduce within in it notions of the Chicana/o community as exclusively or predominantly masculine. In contrast, the East L.A. scene acknowl- edges and attempts to sustain a vision of gender equity and respect for different sexual orientations. As Quetzal Flores has noted, “The whole East L.A. scene is into the mode of making a conscious effort to acknowledge the struggle of women and for us as men to act on that as well.” 23 The participation of woman is critical to the male dominated Eastside scene. Martha Gonzales and vio- linist Rocio Maron are central members of Quetzal and their cultural community. The music they produce stakes a claim for a par- ticular female perspective. As Martha notes, “I learned the traditional tarima but then took it out of its element into rock ’n’ roll. It’s not just about the footwork, but there’s an upper body movement that affects the sound as well. I try to fi nd my own Chicana sensibility in the dance.” 24 The folk-rock of Lysa Flores eloquently expresses a Chicana standpoint as well. Flores composes songs that deal with her quotidian struggle as a proud and independent woman of color, refl ected in her representation as “Queen of the Boulevard” in her self-produced album Tree of Hope (1998). Indeed, Chicana femi- nists are at the forefront of this scene, includ- ing spoken word artists such as the all-female crew Cihuatl Tonalli (Woman Force) and the women of color performance art collective Mujeres de Maiz (Women of the Corn). Another aspect of the new political ideol- ogy is being shaped by the struggle to build a politicized cultural community. Quetzal Flores, a child of organizers for the United Farm Workers, argues that Chicana/o iden- tity has to be reformulated in terms of com- munity: “I think that being Chicano now is still valid and still very important in terms of identity and self-determination, but I think more and more people are starting to take this position: how to create an identity as a way to build a foundation so that you can communicate and collaborate with other communities.” 25 This idea of community building extends through all of the groups of the Eastside scene. These artists have not only shared the stage at concerts throughout THE BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES | 501 Los Angeles but have also come together to record and/or produce one another’s albums. Yet this collaborative work is not limited to musicians. In addition to the women’s collec- tives mentioned above, visual artists, drama- tists, and fi lmmakers have been an important element in the constitution of the East L.A. scene. Chicano visual artists Chaz Bojorquez and Joseph “NUKE” Montalvo designed the cover art for two independent compilation albums: Sociedad = Suiciedad (1996) and the 2000 release Mex-America. 26 The Chicana/o comedy troupe ChUSMA, Spanish slang for “Outcasts,” have collaborated with the East L.A. music scene since their founding in 1997. The Latina/o theater troupe Cul- ture Clash’s critical and popular play Chavez Ravine (2003), about the displacement of an ethnic Mexican community in 1950s Los Angeles, was supported by Ollin’s musical production. Additionally, the media-arts col- lective Smokin’ Mirrors has produced videos for Quetzal (“Grito de Alegria” and “Elegua Jarocho”) and Aztlán Underground (“Blood on Your Hands”). CONCLUSION In August of 2000 the internationally popu- lar rock-rap group Rage Against the Machine performed for the thousands gathered in the “designated protest area” of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) held at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles. In solidarity with the demonstrators, lead singer Zach de la Rocha stormed through Rage’s trib- ute to Mayan and Mexica resistance, “People of the Sun,” and songs from their 2000 release The Battle of Los Angeles , including “Maria,” about the struggle of Latina immigrants, and “Guerilla Radio.” 27 The latter song remarks on de la Rocha’s work with Centro de Regen- eracion in Highland Park, a Chicana/o cul- tural center he cofounded in 1996, where, among other activities, he subsidized the microradio station Radio Clandestina. Although Rage Against the Machine emerged out of the hard-core scene in Orange County, the group was affi liated with the East L.A. scene through the activ- ism of de la Rocha, who was a resident of East Los Angeles and the son of Roberto “Beto” de la Rocha, a well-known artist, activist, and founding member of the seminal Chicano art group Los Four. Zach’s Chicano identity informed his band’s commitment to the struggles of immigrants, people of color, and the Zapatistas. Rage provided access to progressive organizations and media by set- ting up tables for such groups in their con- cert performances and by offering links to their organizations on Rage’s offi cial Web site. In 1999 Rage invited Aztlán Under- ground to open its concerts in Mexico City, while Ozomatli opened what turned out to be Rage’s fi nal show at Los Angeles’ Grand Olympic Auditorium in 2000. The possibilities of collective organiza- tion that had been practiced at the Peace and Justice Center inspired Zach de la Rocha’s formation of another signifi cant but also short-lived experiment in community build- ing through cultural practice. He renamed the People’s Resource Center in Highland Park the Centro de Regeneracion. 28 There, many of the same artists and activists who had participated in the struggle over the Peace and Justice Center maintained their commit- ment to providing youth a space for cultural expression and training. Along with music workshops and the development of Radio Clandestina, Centro members also organized graffi ti workshops and youth fi lm festivals. 29 Although the Centro lasted only two years, it was an important space in the ongoing insti- tutionalization of the community politics, cultural practices, and social networks of the Eastside scene in the nineties. The cultural politics waged by the con- temporary Chicana/o music scene in Los Angeles registers in precise and detailed fashion the injuries done to low-wage work- ers and racial others by globalization and | VICTOR HUGO VIESCA502 transnationalism. But new social forces cre- ate new social subjects, who in turn create new social imaginaries. At the very moment when political and economic leaders scape- goated multilingual “mongrel” communities and cultures, music groups associated with the East L.A. scene challenged the cultural and political pretensions of white/Anglo culture. In the process, they exploited the contradiction between the nation’s political reliance on fi ctions of cultural homogene- ity and the nation’s economic dependence on securing low-wage labor, markets, and raw materials from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Speaking from the interstices between commercial culture and the new social movements, Chicana/o musical cul- ture and its political work offers us invalu- able bottom-up perspectives on the terrain of counterpolitics and cultural creation at the beginning of the twenty-fi rst century. NOTES 1. Quoted in Brian Cross, It’s Not About a Salary . . . Rap, Race and Resistance in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1993), 264. 2. Quoted in Nancy Redwine, “Quetzal Flashes Its Brilliance, in Two Shows,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, December 11, 2003. 3. An earlier draft of this reading was prepared for the Mexican American Studies History Workshop, sponsored by the Center for Mexican American Studies and the Department of History at the University of Houston. I would like to thank the organizers of the workshop, Luis Alvarez and Raul Ramos, and all of the participants for their valu- able suggestions and comments. I am also indebted to George Sánchez, Barry Shank, and Raul Villa, readers for American Quarterly, for their helpful comments and prudent guidance on this reading. This reading is dedicated to the work and vision of all of the organizers and artists of the Eastside scene. 4. See Janet L. Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities (Minneapo- lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). See also Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, Lon- don, and Tokyo, 2d ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 5. Lisa Catanzarite, California’s Growing Latino Population: Census 2000 Dismantles Stereotypes (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, March 2003). According to Catanzarite, 71 percent of Latinas/o adults and 80 percent of Latina/o youth, ages fi ve to seventeen, in Los Angeles are bilingual. 6. U.S. Census Bureau, “State and County Quick Facts,” http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/ 06037.htm1 (accessed on April 28, 2004). 7. I use ethnic Mexican to refer to people of Mexican descent residing in the United States, including native-born or U.S.-raised Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants. I use Latina/o to describe U.S. residents of Latin American descent across race and national origin. The 1.5 genera- tion refers to immigrants who were raised in the United States. 8. George Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 3–30. 9. Steven Loza, Barrio Rhythm: Mexican American Music in Los Angeles (Urbana: University of Illi- nois Press, 1993), 95–107. 10. Ibid., 95. 11. Victor Valle and Rodolfo Torres, Latino Metrop- olis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 21. 12. Quintosolmusic.com (accessed on May 3, 2004). 13. Mike Davis, “L.A. Inferno,” Socialist Review 22.1 (January–March 1992): 57–81. 14. Nora Hamilton and Norma Stoltz Chinchilla, Seeking Community in a Global City: Guatema- lans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles (Philadel- phia: Temple University Press, 2001). 15. Manuel Pastor, “Economics and Ethnicity: Pov- erty, Race, and Immigration in Los Angeles County,” in Asian and Latino Immigrants in a Restructured Economy, ed. Marta López-Garza and David R. Diaz (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni- versity Press, 2001), 106–7. 16. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992), 267–322. For a historical study of the criminalization of ethnic Mexicans in Los Ange- les, see Edward J. Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Ameri- cans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900–1945 (Berkeley: University of California, 1999). 17. This latter proposition severely affects youth in Los Angeles County, the source for nearly one- third of the state’s juvenile offenders, most of whom are African American or Latina/o. See Vince Beiser and Karla Solhei, “Juvenile Injustice: Proposition 21 Aims to Send Thousands of Cali- fornia Teenagers to Adult Prisons,” L.A. Weekly, February 11–17, 2000. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06037.html http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06037.html http://Quintosolmusic.com THE BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES | 503 18. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profi t from Iden- tity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998). 19. Lisa Cacho, “ ‘The People of California Are Suf- fering’: The Ideology of White Injury” Cultural Values 4.4 (fall 2000): 390. Although the mea- sures prescribed by Proposition 187 were ruled unconstitutional by the state, several aspects of the initiative survived as part of the Illegal Immi- gration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act that were signed into law by a democratic president in 1996. 20. Yvette C. Doss, “Choosing Chicano in the 1990s,” in Urban Latino Cultures, ed. Gustavo Leclerc, Raul Villa, and Michael Dear (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications), 151. 21. Mexica is the proper name for the cultural group who migrated from Aztlán in the north to the cen- tral valley of Mexico, where they constructed the great city of Tenochitlan, now Mexico City, in the twelfth century. 22. Randy Rodarte, interview with author, October 21, 2003. 23. Quetzal Flores biography located at quetzalmu- sic.org (accessed April 28, 2004). 24. Quoted in Kurly Tlapoyawa and Ilwixochitl, “Q&A with AZTLÁN UNDERGROUND,” in Kuauhtlahtoa: Journal of Native Resistance, n.d., http://www.mexika.org/CoverStoryhtml (retrieved April 27, 2004). 25. Steven Loza, “From Veracruz to Los Angeles: The Reinterpretation of the Son Jarocho,” Latin American Music Review 2.2 (1992): 188. 26. Helen Simonett, Banda: Mexican Musical Life Across Borders (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Uni- versity Press, 2001). 27. See Josh Kun’s reading in this issue. 28. Duane Leyva, “Teenage Alcoholics: Punk Rock in East Los Angeles,” http:// muisctap.net/Duanes PunkPitNotes/elapunk (accessed on June 29, 2004). One of the more popular groups to emerge out of the current scene is the hard-core bilingual group Union 13. 29. See the Aztlán Underground interview in Cross 1993. http://www.mexika.org/CoverStoryhtml http://muisctap.net/DuanesPunkPitNotes/elapunk http://muisctap.net/DuanesPunkPitNotes/elapunk http://quetzalmusic.org http://quetzalmusic.org “I Was Aggressive for the Streets, Pretty for the Pictures”: Gender, Difference, and the Inner-City Girl Nikki Jones It is a late June afternoon and I am standing outside of a café on Fillmore Street in San Francisco. I am holding fl yers for Kiara, 1 a young woman I met a few hours earlier. Kiara is 22 years old with a light brown com- plexion and long, wavy hair that suggests a multiracial heritage. Her style of dress is 1980s-retro. She wears a purple lace glove with the fi nger cut off on her right hand, a short-sleeved jacket over a yellow and green Brazil fútbol jersey, and tight denim jeans that ride low, causing her belly to peek out sometimes between her jeans and her jersey. Two large star-shaped earrings dangle from her ears and a small white fl ower is tucked into her hair. She was born and raised in the Fillmore, a once-vibrant Black neighborhood that is now quickly gentrifying after decades of blight and neglect. I have conducted fi eld research here since 2005 and just fi nished interviewing Kiara inside the café. Kiara’s grandmother, like many older Black Fillmore residents, migrated from the South. She owned the house in which she raised Kiara after Kiara’s mother was killed by her father, who, Kiara tells me, was a big-time drug dealer in the neighborhood before he was sent to prison. Kiara remembers how her father’s tough reputation infl uenced how oth- ers interacted with her in the neighborhood; even though she was a child she garnered a level of respect. She learned early on how to manage her interactions with others dif- ferently in different situations: “[As a child] I had the street element, and I was aggressive for the streets, pretty for the pictures.” Kiara is helping to collect signatures for an anti-redevelopment campaign in Hunt- er’s Point-Bayview, a larger and even more distressed Black neighborhood in San Fran- cisco. Kiara offers to give me a tour of the Fillmore, and I follow along as she walks with clipboard in hand. Kiara’s play on mainstream and local expectations of race, gender, class, sexuality, and power is on full display during her brief interactions with strangers. She confi dently, assertively, even aggressively approaches men on the street to sign her petition and then draws on norma- tive expectations of manhood and feminin- ity to encourage them to add their names to the list: babies and women are in danger, she tells them, letting the implication that real men would sign up to protect babies and women hang in the air. She switches from aggressive to demure just long enough to fl irt with a man passing by on the street and then to defi ant when she passes the police station on the corner. “They don’t give a fuck!” she declares loudly. A few moments later we stop to observe the RIPs scratched into the concrete sidewalk of a neighborhood block “where a lot of the trouble happens.” Kiara calls these scratches that mark the murders of young Black men “modern-day hiero- glyphics.” She gets silent and still but just for a moment. She has work to do so she keeps on moving. “I WAS AGGRESSIVE FOR THE STREETS, PRETTY FOR THE PICTURES” | 505 Twenty years after the publication of West and Zimmerman’s “Doing Gender” (1987), critical and feminist scholars have the ana- lytical tools to observe and represent Kiara’s interactions on this city block in ways that illuminate how gender, race, and class are accomplished during situated interaction. An interactional analysis of Kiara’s walk through the Fillmore reveals moments where the accomplishment of gender, race, or class emerges as most signifi cant. Such an analysis is also likely to reveal moments when Kiara violates or manipulates the normative expec- tations associated with categorical identity and the consequences of her doing so. Yet, as Patricia Hill Collins writes in her critical response to “Doing Difference” (1995), such an analysis, on its own, is not likely to reveal how the social contexts in which these inter- actions take place are shaped by the “messy” intersection of various systems of oppression (1995, 491–94). Kiara and other neighbor- hood residents describe these oppressive forces as “redevelopment,” referring to the urban redevelopment agency that many longtime Fillmore residents hold responsible for decades of neighborhood underdevelop- ment and exploitation. Another oppressive force that has shaped life for young people in the neighborhood—boys and girls—is the local police force, including the city’s gang task force, which has grown stronger in the nation’s never-ending War on Drugs. If we focus only on interactional accom- plishments of categorical identity we can miss the chance to illuminate the recursive rela- tionship between Kiara’s interactions with others, her identity (or identities), and these larger oppressive forces, which are shaped by various overlapping and intersecting–isms. To be fair, I do not think such an omission is a necessary or desired outcome of the theoreti- cal frameworks of “doing gender” or “doing difference” (West and Fenstermaker 1995). However, the ubiquitous use (or misuse) of the respective frameworks can sometimes leave the impression that a scholar’s most important objective is to “test” the respec- tive theoretical approaches—spotting gender or difference here, there, and everywhere— not, instead, to use these frameworks to illuminate the complicated and sometimes contradictory ways in which situated inter- action is linked to structural circumstances. My recent ethnographic work on Black girls and inner-city violence does not set out to test either framework. My analysis is deeply and simultaneously informed by the interactional concerns of West, Zimmer- man, and Fenstermaker and the theoretical and political concerns of Patricia Hill Col- lins, Howard Winant, and other critical race and feminist scholars. After the sometimes contentious but important debates on how to conceptualize intersecting identities and oppressions, I fi nd that drawing on both approaches helps me to more accurately rep- resent the lives of young women like Kiara. Drawing on both interactional analysis and Black feminist thought encourages us to situ- ate Black women’s and girls’ experiences, including their interactional experiences , at the center of our empirical investigations. Such an integrative approach challenges us to develop better explanations for how inter- action, identity, and various structural–isms are linked. Additionally, such an approach pushes social scientists to consider Black women and girls not simply as problems to be solved or explained (e.g., single mothers or “violent” girls) but rather draws atten- tion to the dilemmas and contradictions that Black women and girls encounter and in some measure reconcile in their everyday lives. This is a Black feminist interactional studies, perhaps. At the same time that she is “doing gen- der” or “doing difference” with others, for example, Kiara is also deeply invested in a struggle for survival. “It’s about being a sur- vivor,” she responds when I ask her how she developed the strong sense of indepen- dence that she revealed during our interview, “and we have to survive.” This overarching | NIKKI JONES506 concern for survival was also revealed dur- ing my fi eld research amongst African Amer- ican inner-city girls in Philadelphia (Jones 2004 & 2008). In a recent article, for exam- ple, I describe how inner-city girls work the “code of the street” (Jones 2008), which is described by urban ethnographer and race scholar Elijah Anderson (1999) as a system of accountability that governs formal and informal interactions in distressed urban areas, especially interpersonal violence. At the heart of “the code” is a battle for respect and manhood. In Black Sexual Politics (2004), Patricia Hill Collins writes that as Black men embrace “the code,” they embrace a hegemonic masculinity that is based on the coupling of strength with dominance—white men with wealth and power are able to dem- onstrate such masculinity through economic or military dominance (in addition to physi- cal dominance). Poor Black men in distressed urban areas must rely primarily on physical domination, which makes them and others in their community more vulnerable to vio- lent victimization. African American inner-city girls may have no manhood to defend, yet the shared circumstances of inner-city life engender a shared concern for physical safety and survival. Over time, girls coming of age in distressed urban areas come to realize too how respect, reputation, and retaliation—the three R’s at the heart of the code—organize their social worlds. Much like Kiara, the girls I met knew quite well the situations in which presenting oneself as “aggressive,” “good,” or “pretty” paid off. Listening to the stories of these girls, it is diffi cult to imagine them as held hostage to accountability. Instead, they strategically choose from a variety of gender, race, and class displays depending on the sit- uation, the public identity they are invested in crafting, and in service of a survival proj- ect that has historically defi ned the lives of poor, Black women and girls in the United States—a project with especially high stakes in neighborhoods like the one in which Kiara has grown up. These stories complicate our under- standings of “doing gender” and “doing difference” in ways that take account the complexities of structure and its intersec- tions with race, class, and gender. Twenty years after the publication of “Doing Gen- der,” and over a decade after “Doing Dif- ference,” maybe the most fi tting tribute is not only to offer a critique but also to use our knowledge of the social worlds of girls like Kiara to complicate these frameworks in ways that may or may not have originally been imagined by their authors. NOTE 1. Kiara is a pseudonym. REFERENCES Anderson, E. 1999. Code of the Street : Decency , Vio- lence , and the Moral Life of the Inner City . New York: W. W. Norton Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1995. “Symposium: On West and Fenstermaker’s ‘Doing Difference.’ ” Gender & Soci- ety 9: 491–94. ———. 2004. Black Sexual Politics : African Americans , Gender , and the New Racism . London: Routledge. Jones, N. 2004. “ ‘It’s Not Where You Live, It’s How You Live’: How Young Women Negotiate Confl ict and Violence in the Inner City.” Annals of the Ameri- can Academy of Political and Social Science 595: 49–62. ———. 2008. “Working ‘The Code’: On Girls, Gender, and Inner-City Violence.” Australia and New Zea- land Journal of Criminology 4: 63–83. West, Candace, and Sarah Fenstermaker. 1995. “Doing Difference.” Gender & Society 9: 8–37. West, Candace, and D. H. Zimmerman. 1987. “Doing Gender.” Gender & Society 1: 125–51. Connections Marginality, Identity, and Music Scenes Tammy L. Anderson INTRODUCTION Asian and Hispanic lesbian rapper JenRo was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay area. From a very early age, she was nurtured by a musically talented family and gained immediate recognition. JenRo began writing songs and performing for people in her community, mostly Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics, at the age of 10. A local drug gang even commissioned her to write a song, and by the time she turned 15, she was the only female rapper competing in local competitions against more experienced and older males (LatinRapper.com). JenRo is part of the Homo Hop or Queer Hip Hop scene. Tim’m T. West, MC of Deep Dickollective, explained that the Homo Hop genre and scene were an effort to give credence to a sub-genre of hip hop that the mainstream was ignoring. It’s not a dif- ferent kind of hip hop, but places identity at the center of production, which is a blessing and curse. I’m a hip hop artist, ultimately, who happens to be queer. Homo Hop, as a mobilizing medium for queer artists, did, in fact, serve a purpose. (Woo 2013) Like others, JenRo’s lyrics have often been about her diffi culties being a minority, lesbian rapper or experiences as a sexual and racial minority group member. This has put her at odds not only with the mainstream music industry and society’s norms but also the domi- nant themes of hip hop and rap music—which celebrate maschismo and heterosexuality. On her Facebook page JenRo states, “Dear music, thank you for being there when nobody else was.” This statement and the quote by West indicate that music furnishes an important source of support and an opportunity for an empowered identity to people who are mar- ginalized in society due to their ethnic, racial, and sexual identities. When we talk about the marginalization of minority groups, we mean relegating or confi ning Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, gays, lesbians, transgender, and lower-class people, for example, to lower statuses in society that can block their opportunity and integration in society. Today, sociology has a good understanding of how music helps resolve individual and col- lective identity issues among marginalized people from diverse, multicultural backgrounds. By producing and consuming diverse types of music in unique spaces, young people have addressed their marginality and resisted their classifi cation as “other” or deviant in society. While doing so, people from more dominant groups (white, heterosexual, and middle-class males) have increasingly gravitated to music scenes, in part, because they value diversity and want to experience others’ music and cultural styles. A sort of multicultural integration http://LatinRapper.com | TAMMY L. ANDERSON508 and solidarity—even if only temporary—can result. Evan—a 30-year-old white male whom I interviewed in my rave culture project (Anderson 2009)—described this experience at a house music party in Philadelphia: There was a party on Sundays called Heart & Mind , which was the epitome of what house [ music ] was about—community—people—Black, White, Latino, gay, straight, everybody. I could be danc- ing with her, turn around and there will be a guy behind me and I’m dancing with him. Then turn around and I will be dancing with a Latino, then turn around and I will be dancing with another African-American girl. And the music was all over the place too. But, everybody was there for the same reason. That is the spirit of EDM—that community bond. Section 11 addresses the link between critical race theory, multiculturalism, identity, and marginality and its relevance to the fi eld of deviance today and in the future. It includes readings by Cohen (2004), Viesca (2004), and Jones (2009) and this Connections reading on music scenes. The purpose of this section is to consider that a possible pathway forward for the study of deviance is in attending to social change and scholarly contributions in multi- culturalism and marginality or “otherness.” Multiculturalism is a term social scientists use to denote the moral and political claims of oppressed groups in society. Their goal is to attain equal citizenship rather than simple toleration by the dominant majority. Why is multiculturalism important to the study of deviance? Because the United States is becoming increasingly diverse, its economy is interdependent with nations across the globe, new legislative actions and policies are expanding rights to oppressed groups, and modern forms of communication (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, etc.) expose us to people, places, and experiences we might have never learned about or encountered pre- viously. These advances mean that norms, social roles, and expectations, and cultural forms and styles—and defi nitions of deviance—have changed over time and will continue to do so in the future. For the most part, the fi eld of deviance has ignored multiculturalism and has too often conveyed either a pejorative or pessimistic view about racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and other minority or oppressed groups in society. Szasz (1970) believes sociologists’ use of the phrase “social deviants” has been an obstacle to understanding this: The term “social deviants” . . . does not make suffi ciently explicit—as the terms “scapegoat” or “victim” do—that majorities usually categorize persons or groups as “deviant” in order to set them apart as inferior beings and to justify their social control, oppression, persecution, or even complete destruction. (Szasz 1970: xxv–xxvi) Such viewpoints of minorities and “others” has cost deviance some credibility and utility in sociology, reducing it to the study of nuts, sluts, and perverts (Liazos 1972). For example, Best (2004) noted a major blow to deviance followed from the out-migration of classic topics in deviance (e.g., disabled, women, minorities, LGBT populations) to new subfi elds in sociol- ogy catering to multicultural interests. These groups used to be hot topics in classic studies of deviance, where scholars theorized about them from a sort of pathology or powerlessness perspective. Today, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, LGBT studies, disability studies and the intersectionality project 1 are just a few of the contemporary subfi elds of sociology that have given us a more positive and empowered viewpoint on multiculturalism, identity, and marginality. Thus, the fi eld of deviance lags behind in both explaining how multicultur- alism and marginality impact deviant behaviors and identities and also in applying contribu- tions from these subfi elds to deviance theory and concepts. Therefore, the purpose of this 509CONNECTIONS | connections reading is to explain how music scenes and musical pursuits by young people can not only teach us about the link between multiculturalism, identity, and marginality but also how those lessons can be extended to the study of deviance and carve out a promising path for its future. MULTICULTURALISM, IDENTITY, AND MARGINALITY IN THE FIELD OF DEVIANCE The fi eld of deviance has historically discussed outsiders, marginals, and people like JenRo and Tim’m T. West using terms such as degeneracy , pathology , labeling , stigma , and anomie . Degeneracy and pathology defi ned racial, ethnic, and sexual minority groups in derogatory ways—as biological inferiors—whereas labeling, stigma, and anomie highlighted their power- lessness, inability to thwart social pressure, and blocked opportunity. In fact, few early studies considered how racism, sexism, heterosexism, or class privilege impacted how deviance was defi ned in the fi rst place or led to the classifi cation of deviant traits and behaviors in society. One reason for this is that norms, social expectations, and identity traits have been based on a white, patriarchal, heterosexual, and middle-class ideal. Consider the leading televisions shows at the height of the fi eld of deviance—the 1950s through the 1970s. According to TV.com, the Brady Bunch , Gunsmoke , Bonanza , Perry Mason , and the Twilight Zone —along with a few news magazine shows—round out the top ten most popular in the 1960s. Each of these shows features all-white casts that convey stories and situations of the white, middle- class, and heterosexual lifestyle. According to the Museum of Broadcast Communications: What was consistently projected, without public fanfare but in teeming myriads of programs, scenes, news priorities, sportscasts, old movies, ads, was the naturalness and normalcy of social whiteness . . . According to television representation, the United States was a white nation, with some marginal “ethnic” accretions that were at their best when they could simply be ignored, like well-trained and deferential maids and doormen. (Museum of Broadcast Communications, n.d.) A similar pattern can be found in popular music of the 1950s and 1960s, even though they were the defi ning decades of the civil rights era. For example, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and Motown originated in black cultures during this time period. However, few blacks found access on mainstream radio or in industry recording studios and when they did, they had to “tone down” their blackness for a more “appealing” white aesthetic and style (Shank 2001; McMichael 1998). According to the People’s History (The People’s History, 2013): Rhythm & Blues (R&B) and Rock ’n’ Roll popularized “black” music and many African-American musicians rose to prominence and enjoyed success, but while some were able to reap the benefi ts of their work, many others were forgotten or denied access to audiences through segregation. A lot of people believe that during the fi fties many of the white artists stole music from African-Americans and capitalized on it for their own benefi t in a way that the original artists could not. A perfect example of this happening is when Pat Boone was made to cover Little Richard’s song “Tutti Frutti” and Boone’s version topped higher on the charts, while considered by many to be the inferior ver- sion of the song. Symbolic Deviance: Being “Other” = Being Deviant . Departures from a white, middle- class, heterosexual standard have been judged not only “different” but at times dysfunctional, http://TV.com | TAMMY L. ANDERSON510 dangerous, and immoral. Being “other” (i.e., not white, male, heterosexual, or middle-class and above) is, consequently, often equated with being deviant, simply because of the ste- reotypes or xenophobic ideas majority and privileged groups have about the cultural back- grounds and practices of minorities. Even though Goffman (1963) coined the term “tribal stigma” to note possible discrimination and social consequences for racial minorities, classic deviance research has paid insuffi cient attention to society’s culturally biased norms, roles, expectations, and social structures. This marginality can have signifi cant consequences for groups in society. For example, the Cohen reading in this section points out that labels such as “heterosexual” and “queer” obscure the power differences between middle-class, gay, white males and poor, black, het- erosexual females. Yet, since society’s norms refl ect the nuclear family, traditional gender roles, and a middle-class way of life, gays and minorities with such labels are confronted daily with a sort of “normative moral superstructure” (Cohen 2004: 29) that defi nes them as outcasts. Public condemnation, stigma, discrimination, inequality in opportunity, increased surveillance and punitive social control are even more serious penalties experienced by indi- viduals who are “demographically or culturally different” from society’s norms. When people are deemed “other” or even deviant in this symbolic fashion—simply due to their demographic makeup or cultural heritage—research shows they respond in at least two important ways. The fi rst is to assimilate—that is, to adopt the beliefs, values, norms, and ways of the mainstream. Assimilation requires detachment from one’s background and culture and a redefi nition of the self according to dominant society’s standards. A second response, however, is to resist, celebrate one’s “otherness,” shore up solidarity among fellow group members, and engage in the politics of difference and recognition. This more resistance-based comeback often begins within or when individuals decide to take matters into their own hands. For example, the Jones (2009) reading in this section calls attention to a young black girl named Kiara. Kiara responds to her “otherness” and multiple forms of oppression by manipulating the mainstream society’s expectations for her as a black female, raised in a poor urban area. These acts of resistance can ultimately attract “normals” or those who aren’t marginal at all. When this happens, innovation comes to society, culture changes, and norms are rede- fi ned. Thus, the alternative ways and cultural practices of minority groups are often visionary and can advance society in both small and large ways. The fi eld of deviance must polish its lens to see these possibilities rather than fi tting them to a pessimistic and dated framework of “social deviants.” Take hip hop, for example. Research (Kubrin 2005) has shown the value of local hip hop scenes to young black males and females like Kiara. The music fosters an awareness of and appreciation for black experiences in Africa and America. Hip hop’s pioneers were mostly black and Hispanic youth or young adults living in stressful, inner-city conditions in the 1970s and early 1980s. By combining rhythmical talk over electronic beat patterns, young DJs and rappers produced a new musical genre that simultaneously told stories of oppres- sion, while fashioning a new form of leisure activity (Kitwana 2002). The music stylistically different from more commonly recognized genres like country, blues, jazz, pop, and rock because it featured talking instead of singing and electronic instruments (i.e., drum and bass machines) instead of more classical ones that required “training.” Moreover, hip hop originated in poor minority communities with rappers and artists articulating messages about local conditions and historical oppression (Rose 1994). This was a dramatic departure from the artist profi le and lyrical content of the commercial mainstream (Watkins 2005). 511CONNECTIONS | The popularity of hip hop grew so quickly, though, that by 1979 it went commercial and had crossed over to the white mainstream. It has dominated the 1980 and 1990s U.S. music industry and secured a global popularity (Watkins 2005). Hip hop has not only reshaped music industries and the larger economies that house them, it has also altered culture in pro- found ways. There are hip hop clothing lines and other aesthetic styles, language, and forms of interaction (dancing, dating, and courtship) that have gravitated out of the “ghetto” and into the American mainstream. Actual Deviance: Being “Other” and “Acting Deviant.” A second way minorities have been viewed as deviant is more overt and about actual deviant behavior. Marginal groups may engage in deviant behaviors that violate codes of conduct or laws in society. They may do so for some of the very same reasons majority group members do (i.e., peer pressure, boredom, opportunity, etc.), or their behavior might be inspired by their oppression in society. Music scenes often feature deviant acts and/or condone a deviant lifestyle. For exam- ple, hip hop has been championed by gangs active in selling illicit drugs and has been accused of being misogynistic, exploitative, and homophobic (Watkins 2005). Recall that JenRo was commissioned by a drug gang to produce a hip hop song for them. Also, rap- per Nelly was criticized and boycotted at Spellman College (an all-black university) a few years ago for his misogynistic song “Tip Drill” that describes men taking turns having sex with a female, which some interpreted as condoning gang rape (Willens 2004). Hip hop has been documented a “music of choice” among gang members and drug dealers active in a wide range of deviant and criminal behaviors (Rose 1994; Kitwana 2002; Baker and Homan 2007). Certainly, hip hop is not the only music scene to feature deviant behavior. Following on the heels of hip hop is the growing popularity of narcocorridos south of the U.S. bor- der in Mexican towns riddled with drug-traffi cking violence. Narcocorridos are Mexican folk songs that celebrate drug dealers as social bandits, heroes, and rags-to-riches entre- preneurs (Campbell 2005). The music glamorizes the drug trade and associated violence, serving as a form of entertainment for all. According to Edberg (2004: 120–121) a unique drug-traffi cker persona is commonly portrayed in narcocorridos: (1) the juxtaposition of poverty and wealth on the U.S.–Mexico border; (2) racial and class hierarchies in Mexico; (3) cross-border confl icts; (4) Mexican personalismo —that is, individual-centered agency and power; and (5) images of northern Mexican machismo. Artist Mario “El Cachorro” Delgado sings: His cartel is well-known it’s called La Vecindad His jealous enemies want to take him out but “8” isn’t alone his people are killers, too. (cited in Shachtman 2011) And from the Wikipedia page on nacrocorridos, posted text describes the lyrics in a song called “El Cabron” (2005) by Los Capos. Ever since I was a lad (child) I had the fame of a badass, already hittin the parrot (Cocaine) and blowing dope (Cannabis/Weed) with more reason. It’s because in my beloved Mexico anyone there is a badass (Los Capos 2005) | TAMMY L. ANDERSON512 Understanding that norms, standards, and social roles and expectations are based on a white, middle-class, heterosexual ideal can help us see how marginality and deviance work on a symbolic level to shape our beliefs, values, biases, and prejudices. Given our variable backgrounds, we may each have different viewpoints about what is normal and deviant in society. This underscores the subjective defi nition of deviance: that what might be seen as normal to one person could be viewed as deviant by another. In addition, we know from the Cohen (2004) reading that “moral superstructures” inspire actual deviant behavior by mar- ginal groups. While deviant acts can often be attempts to challenge power relations in society, Cohen (2004) maintains most are not. Instead, they are symbolic and simply done to increase autonomy or satisfaction in one’s life or to make the best of a bad situation. Symbolic and actual responses to marginality via music scenes are discussed below. MUSIC SCENES AS SOLUTIONS TO IDENTITY PROBLEMS To understand how music scenes help marginal people from highly diverse backgrounds resolve symbolic deviance and participate in actual deviance, two identity concepts—col- lective and personal—require explanation. Collective identity refers to a shared sense of “we-ness” and the bonds and commitment people get from others as being part of a group (Melucci 1995), whereas personal identity is how people defi ne themselves (Goffman 1963). Attempts to address symbolic deviance or rectify power inequalities through music are likely more collective identity issues associated with group marginality. On the other hand, indi- vidual involvement in music endeavors is a more personal identity matter. Thus, music scenes provide both collective and personal identity solutions to marginal groups and people. Collective Identity . Discussion of the role of music in shaping collective identities for mar- ginal or oppressed groups in society emerged in the pre–civil rights era or mid-1960s through 1970s. Sociologists (Denison and Peterson 1972; Frith 1981; Eyerman 2002) studied music’s role in fashioning collective identity and mobilizing movements for social change among the oppressed. Oppressed people demanded a politics of recognition—by their own cultural styles and groups identities—rather through the deviance lens cast by the white middle-class mainstream. Teens and young adults from a wide range of ethnic and racial backgrounds have cre- ated or contributed to musical genres based on their cultural heritages and histories. These musical styles are showcased in local scenes. Music also has the power of political expres- sion, as it offers marginal and stigmatized groups a voice or outlet for resisting the sort of moral superstructure Cohen (2004) notes above. Youth-oriented music scenes have also offered alternative fashions or new aesthetic styles, as well as group or collective identities, political action, and social change (Denisoff and Peterson 1972; Frith 1981; Shank 1994; Eyerman 2002). People have multiple identities, and they can be a source of richness and/or confl ict. For example, England has been troubled by anti-Asian sentiment resulting in “Paki-bashing” of people hailing from Pakistan and India. Tensions between white Brits and East Asian Brits or immigrants runs high, leading to East Asians being stigmatized, stereotyped, and even victimized. One way Pakistani and Indian youth have responded to this dilemma is by creat- ing Bhangra music scenes (Bennett 2000). Bhangra music comes from the Punjab province of India and Pakistan. It is a style that combines classic Punjab folk music with Western pop 513CONNECTIONS | music. For young East Asians, Bhangra events are sites of celebrating traditions from their homelands. It has worked to make ethnic traditions appealing to young East Asians and shore up their pride in a national collective East Asian identity, even when that identity is challenged by a white British mainstream. Moreover, the popularity of Bhangra music has garnered increased respect and admiration among non-Asian and white British populations (Bennett 2000). The reading by Viesca describes a similar phenomenon for Chicanos in Los Angeles. He contends that the Latin Fusion or Eastside music scene there serves as a “mechanism for calling an oppositional community into being through performance” (2004: 725) for Latino youth and young adults. This music scene, with groups such as Aztlan Underground, puts on live performances, radio shows, demonstrations, and protests to resist the marginalization and oppression Latino communities have experienced over the course of time. The scenes also celebrate cultural activities, including those that are considered deviant in the Califor- nian mainstream. For example, Viesca notes that Latin Fusion bands derive their names from traditional culture, expressing an indigenous Mexican identity. He writes that a name such as “Slowrider, for example, alludes to the popular barrio art of car customizing, or lowrider culture, while Yeska is slang for marijuana, evoking the 1940s’ Pachuco argot of Cálo ” (2004: 725). Music is used to send marginal people important messages about who they are in line with the recognition goals of multiculturalism. It also seeks to counter idea that being “other” equals being “deviant.” Lyrics send empowering messages about identity and a group’s cul- ture, which opposes the stigmatizing view of the group had by the mainstream. These lyrics serve also as a call to action for positive social and political change, if not on a structural level at least on a community and individual one. Viesca (2004) notes that the eastside Latin Fusion music scene in LA has produced an oppositional identity that draws on Chicano history and outlines new forms of interaction that transcend ethnic barriers. For example, Viesca (2004: 726) claims: The use of the son jarocho by Quetzal, for example, is not only an expression of Mexican identity, but it is a link to the cultural struggles waged by African slaves. As Quetzal Flores explains, “We performed at an academic conference in Kentucky about the infl uence black culture had on the Americas earlier this year. One of the professors made the point that, as maniacal and genocidal as slavery was, black culture survived and thrived. Personal Identity . On less political level, music plays a fundamental role in shaping youth identity. DeNora’s (2000) research shows the self is located in music or that people, espe- cially youth, defi ne themselves through it. Music scenes also serve as a solution to personal identity problems for youth. Such troubles may emanate from trauma, blocked opportunity, family discord, and school failure. Often, minority or oppressed groups fi nd themselves at high risk for personal identity problems and seek out youth scenes and subcultures as a way to cope (Anderson 1995, 2009). In a recent study, Leblanc (2005) found that girls gravitated to the punk rock scene after experiencing family trauma (divorce of parents or being sexually abused). It served as a pseudo-family that enabled them to rebel against their parents and reject mainstream expectations and conventions. A punk rock lifestyle became a means of survival for these personally and socially marginalized young women. In my own research on rave culture (Anderson 2009), I also found young people across numerous race, ethnic, gender, | TAMMY L. ANDERSON514 and sexual identity groups used music scenes—such as techno, house, trance, and other EDM genres—to resolve alienation and personal identity issues. The reading by Viesca (2004) notes that the Latin fusion scene in LA is also a way for young Chicanos to fashion a per- sonal identity—one that gets tarnished through childhood trauma or negative experiences— but also one that suffers a broader social marginalization from structural changes. Music scenes like homo hop, hip hop, narcocorridos on the Mexican border, Latin Fusion, Bhangra and rave culture are, therefore, enticing collectives for young “marginals” in search of belonging and personal identity empowerment. THE “ACCIDENTAL” REPRODUCTION OF MARGINALITY AND INEQUALITY BY EMPOWERED MUSIC SCENES Sometimes music scenes—and the identities they fashion to thwart or resist marginalization— end up reproducing still other forms of oppression, namely sexism and homophobia. Thus, not all multiculturalist efforts resolve marginality and oppression or realize the goals of equity. People often address one type of marginalization—class or race—but not others. Imagining and addressing the problems that can arise from the intersection of multiple iden- tities is quite diffi cult. By telling Kiara’s story, Jones (2009) makes this very point. Kiara might be empowered, for example, by hip hop’s racial messaging, but she is subordinated by its misogyny and sexism. What is her response? She manipulates race and gender expecta- tions to her own personal advantage. In the reading by Viesca (2004), we also learn how addressing one form of marginality and symbolic deviance ends up perpetuating others. In reverting to an authentic Chicano or Mayan cultural sensibility, Viesca notes that Chicano men reproduce sexism, patriarchy, het- erosexism, and homophobia. This leads them into diffi culties with female and gay members of the Latin Fusion scene or the larger community. Researchers have found similar patterns and experiences with narcocorridos on the Mexican border (Campbell 2005). In fact, some argue that race has been the predominant social message in popular music in the U.S., inspir- ing the most innovation. It is no wonder, then, that sexism and heterosexism have lingered. CONCLUSION Music scenes are places that celebrate uniqueness, diversity, and respect. Such contexts have atmospheres that encourage people to be “themselves,” while creating and performing music that meets their entertainment needs or sends sociopolitical messages about who they are and how they would like to be treated by others and recognized in society. They also allow people, especially those hailing from oppressed minority groups, to carve out meaningful lifestyles, new identities, via new social worlds (Bennett and Peterson 2004; Anderson 2009). While it is true that music scenes and the musicians, DJs, producers, and other stakehold- ers therein have, at times, been guilty of creating hostile climates for participants (women and homosexuals), they have achieved the central goals of multiculturalism: recognition of cultural difference and awareness of social oppression and the consequences that has for individuals. At times, what young people accomplish in music scenes impacts the larger soci- ety, but it doesn’t have to. 515CONNECTIONS | Mainstream society might look onto oppressed group’s creative expression or their daily activities with a deviance lens, defi ning them symbolically as “different” and “marginal” and categorizing their behavior as nonnormal or even threatening, such that surveillance and social control are warranted. But there will also be members from the majority, privileged group who appreciate, seek out, and learn from these so-called marginals. This is where the goals of multiculturalism can be met. Yet, music scenes are not the only spaces with a multicultural cast of players who attempt to promote atmospheres of diversity, respect, and acceptance. Such places can be found everywhere in our lives, and as we interact together in them the fi eld of deviance should attend to the new norms, social expectations, aesthetics, lifestyles, and behaviors that will result. CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS 1. In what ways can the values, identities, and cultural ways of ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual minority groups challenge our understanding of what is normal and deviant in society? Use examples to make your points. 2. Is a white rapper authentically hip hop? Can a white person be an insider in a hip hop music scene? Can a black person be a member of a white power music subculture? Why or why not? Explain this as a case of marginality, identity, and deviance. 3. Do you believe music is a more effective way for young people to resolve their differences by race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender than it is for older adults? How so? Why? NOTE 1. Studying the intersection between multiple identities, such as gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class. REFERENCES Anderson, Tammy L. 1995. “Toward a Preliminary Macro Theory of Drug Addiction.” Deviant Behavior 16: 353–372. Anderson, Tammy L. 2009. Rave Culture: the Alteration and Decline of a Philadelphia Music Scene . Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Baker, Sarah and Homan, Shane. 2007. “Rap, Recidivism and the Creative Self: A Popular Music Programme for Young Offenders in Detention,” Journal of Youth Studies , 10(4): 459–476. Bennett, Andy. 2000. Popular Music and Youth Culture . New York: Palgrave. Bennett, Andy and Peterson, Richard A., eds. 2004. Music Scenes . Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Best, Joel. 2004. Deviance: the Career of a Concept . Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Bogle, Donald. 2009. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films . New York: Continuum. Campbell, Howard. 2005. “Drug Traffi cking Stories: Everyday Forms of Narco-Folklore on the U.S.–Mexico Bor- der.” International Journal of Drug Policy 16(5): 326–333. Cohen, C. J. 2004. “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics.” Du Bois Review 1(1): 27–45. Denisoff, R. Serge and Peterson, Richard A., eds. 1972. The Sounds of Social Change . Chicago: Rand McNally. DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edberg, M. 2004. El Narcotrafi cante. Narcocorridos and the Construction of a Cultural Persona on the U.S.- Mexican Border . Austin: University of Texas Press. Eyerman, Ron. 2002. “Music in Movement: Cultural Politics and Old and New Social Movements.” Qualitative Sociology 25(3): 443–458. Frith, Simon. 1981. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock and Roll . New York: Pantheon. Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. | TAMMY L. ANDERSON516 Jones, Nikki. 2009. “‘I Was Aggressive for the Streets, Pretty for the Pictures’: Gender, Difference and the Inner-City Girl.” Gender & Society 23 (1): 89–93. Kitwana, Bakari. 2002. The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture. New York: Basic Books. Kubrin, Charis. 2005. Gangstas, Thugs, and Hustlas: Identity and the Code of the Street in Rap Music, Social Problems 52 (3): 360–378. LatinRapper.com. n.d. “Urban Latino Music and Culture News Since 2004.” Retrieved February 21, 2013, www. latinrapper.com/artistsjuly2.html. Leblanc, Loraine. 2005. Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rut- gers University Press. Liazos, Alexander. 1972. “The Poverty of the Sociology of Deviance: Nuts, Sluts and Perverts.” Social Problems 20(1): 103–120. Los Capos. 2005. El Cabron. Retrieved on May 15, 2013, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcocorrido). McMichael, Robert K. 1998. “‘We Insist—Freedom Now!’: Black Moral Authority, Jazz, and the Changeable Shape of Whiteness.” American Music 16(4): 375–417. Melucci, Alberto. 1995. The Process of Collective Identity . Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Museum of Broadcast Communications (n.d.). Retrieved May 25, 2013, http://www.museum.tv/eotv/racismethni. htm. Pough, Gwendolyn D., Richardson, Elaine, Durham, Aisha, and Raimist, Rachel. 2007. Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology . Mira Loma, CA: Parker Publishing. Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America . Middletown, CT: Wes- leyan University Press. Schachtman, Noah. 2011 (January 31). “ Narcocorridos : Music to Mexican Drug Lords’ Ears.” Wired Magazine . Retrieved April 16, 2013, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/pl_narcoscorridos/. Shank, Barry. 1994. Dissonant Identities: The Rock and Roll Scene in Austin, Texas . Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Shank, Barry. 2001. “From Rice to Ice: The Face of Race in Rock and Pop.” Pp. 256–271 in The Cambridge Compan- ion to Pop and Rock , edited by Simon Frith, Will Straw, and John Street. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Szasz, Thomas S. 1970. The Manufacture of Madness . New York: Harper and Row. The People’s History. 2013. “Music Played in the 1950s: Popular Music from the 50s,” Retrieved April 10, 2013, http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/50smusic.html. Viesca, Victor Hugo. 2004. “The Battle of Los Angeles: The Cultural Politics of Chicana/o Music in the Greater Eastside.” American Quarterly 56(3): 719–739. Watkins, Craig. 2005. Hip Hop Matters . Boston: Beacon Press. Willens, Kathy. 2004 (April 23). “Black College Women take Aim at Rappers.” USA Today . Retrieved April 10, 2013, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2004-04-23-spelman-protest-rappers_x.htm. Woo, Jen. 2013 (March 11). “Homo Hop is Dead, Queer Hip Hop is the Real Deal.” 429 Magazine . Retrieved April 11, 2013, http://dot429.com/articles/1645-homo-hop-is-dead-queer-hip-hop-is-the-real-deal. http://www.latinrapper.com/artistsjuly2.html http://www.latinrapper.com/artistsjuly2.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcocorrido http://www.museum.tv/eotv/racismethni.htm http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/pl_narcoscorridos/ http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/50smusic.html http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2004-04-23-spelman-protest-rappers_x.htm http://dot429.com/articles/1645-homo-hop-is-dead-queer-hip-hop-is-the-real-deal http://www.museum.tv/eotv/racismethni.htm http://LatinRapper.com SECTION 12 Biomedicalization, Biopower, and Biocitizens This page intentionally left blank Introduction Tammy L. Anderson On February 11, 2012, singer/actor Whitney Houston was found dead in a hotel bathtub. Her death was ruled an accidental drowning related to cocaine use and heart disease. 1 By now, most of us know Houston’s story: a remarkable rise to fame and fortune in the 1980s followed by dramatic fall into addiction by the late 1990s. Less than a year before her death, another celebrity also ran into trouble with cocaine addiction. On March 7, 2011, actor Charlie Sheen was fi red from his popular TV show Two and a Half Men by CBS due in part to Sheen’s erratic behavior related to his extensive abuse of drugs, especially cocaine. Both Sheen and Houston had been in rehab numerous times over the course of their careers and both were arrested for drug possession in years prior. How can we explain Whitney Houston’s and Charlie Sheen’s drug abuse? Once we settle on those explanations, how should we respond to drug addicts like Houston and Sheen, or others less famous, and will we fi nd different approaches necessary? What can our answers to these questions reveal about our future reactions to behaviors, traits, and conditions that straddle the line between sickness and immorality? Section 12 covers a promising area for the future of the sociology of deviance: biomedi- calization, biopower, and biocitizens. The readings in this section view biomedicalization, a growing theory in the broader discipline of sociology, as an important “next step” in the medicalization of deviance (see Section 4). Biomedicalization refers to biologically based efforts and innovations to “fi x” those traits, behaviors, and conditions now considered types of illness instead of moral failings or deviant behavior (Clarke et al. 2003). The readings identify important areas of study for deviance in the future but also potential dilemmas we could face in our own lives or collectively as a society: How will we distinguish between dis- ease and deviance? What will be the preferred methods of intervention and control? When will we respond in a humanitarian or more punitive fashion? Who will benefi t and who will suffer based on these decisions? Recall a lesson from Section 4, that the evolution in understanding deviance as a biologi- cal inferiority passed on through the family (degeneracy) to a patient with a disease requir- ing medical attention (medicalization) allowed for greater sympathy and mitigation of the social consequences such as stigma, prejudice, and discrimination. The more recent shift to biomedicalization presents us with even more alternatives and dilemmas. For example, what should we do with the cocaine addict? A familiar response has been to handle the matter through the criminal justice system. Should drug addicts be sent to prison for breaking the law and forced into prison drug treatment programs? Upon their release, should their proba- tion offi cers make them attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings, randomly drug test them, | TAMMY L. ANDERSON520 and hold them accountable to a life of abstinence from all drugs and alcohol? Or should their control be of a medical nature, where doctors prescribe treatments to manage their withdrawal symptoms and cravings? The fi rst recommendation calls for state intervention, public funds, institutional support and surveillance, and personal accountability. The second path is much more focused in scope and impact and can be handled by the private healthcare system. It simply requires the drug addict to have medical insurance, consult a doctor, and follow his or her treatment plan. Which alternative would you recommend for addicts from different backgrounds, dependent on drugs such as Oxycontin, Vicodin, Percocet, Valium, Adderall, or heroin? According to Vrecko (2010), biomedicalization poses new ethical and moral questions by shifting our attention from the poor choices made by rational persons, to our own inter- nal biology, or selves (Vrecko 2010). Invariably, this will also shift our ideas about who is responsible for addressing deviance: the public or private sector, government, or ourselves. For example, the fi rst path described above requires a long, hard journey through a web of personal choice, moral strengthening, social cooperation, as well as institutional support and surveillance. On the other hand, taking medications (the second path), is what Vrecko (2010) conceives of as a more voluntary and private form of self-control. When we follow doctor’s orders and specifi ed medical regimens to treat problematic traits or conditions, we are being good “biocitizens.” What this means is that we agree with the medical classifi ca- tions offered to defi ne us, conform to expert medical advice, and take initiatives to fi x such problems biomedically, without inconveniencing others. This is an effi cient and fairly inex- pensive form of social control. But are some addicts just too problematic and incapable of being good biocitizens? Do some simply need, or even deserve, criminal justice control and more punitive interventions? Let’s return to Whitney and Charlie. According to the popular Web site www.famous celebritydrugaddicts.com, Whitney Houston’s addiction can be explained by her problematic childhood, marriage to musician and bad boy Bobby Brown, and the excesses of their celeb- rity lifestyle. However, the Web site’s page on Charlie Sheen explains his cocaine problems as a chronic illness—in line with a biomedical model—and that he should be treated as a patient similar to someone suffering from cancer. In my connections reading with Philip R. Kavanaugh, we further examine this issue by asking if opiate addiction (e.g., Oxycontin, Vicodin, Percocet, and heroin) is defi ned bio- medically, as a brain disease (NIDA 2007), then isn’t it best treated through medications that cater to Whitney, Charlie, and other addicts, rather than punishing them through the crimi- nal justice system? Howard Markel, a physician and professor of the history of medicine at the University of Michigan, is one of many medical experts who think so. Markel supports the new DSM-V defi nition of addiction that removes the “committing illegal acts” criterion and replaces it with a “craving” criterion. Like many others, Markel also supports the new category of mental illness called “Addiction and Related Disorders”: The conclusion to draw here is that though substances like cocaine are very effective at triggering changes in the brain that lead to addictive behavior and urges, they are not the only possible triggers: just about any deeply pleasurable activity—sex, eating, Internet use—has the potential to become addictive and destructive. . .We should embrace the new DSM criteria and attack all the substances and behaviors that inspire addiction with effective therapies and support. (Markel 2012: 1) The Dworkin reading in this section shows us that these trends in medicalizing undesirable traits, conditions, and behaviors—such as depression—and controlling them with biomedical http://www.famouscelebritydrugaddicts.com http://www.famouscelebritydrugaddicts.com INTRODUCTION | 521 technologies (like antidepressant medication and other pharmaceuticals) will continue to expand into the future and will ultimately target our most simple emotions and goals: every- day unhappiness or anxieties. Like other skeptics, Dworkin (2001) is concerned that such broad criteria for mental illness (like the new classifi cations for depression and addiction disorders in the DSM-V) will pathologize human emotion and lead to overdiagnosis and the expanded and unnecessary treatment of perfectly healthy people. Allen J. Frances, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University, is also concerned such medical expansion will create “false epidemics,” while health insurance companies are panicking about the hundreds of millions of dollars annually that will have to be spent treating this growing range of maladies (Markel 2012). For sociologists studying deviance, we can expect this biomedicalized future to redefi ne norms, social roles, the expectations we have for ourselves and those that others have for us. It will test our beliefs and convictions about which particular deviants are deserving of this emerging form of biocitizenship and of broader social inclusion: drug dealers, prostitutes, property crime offenders, risk-takers, feedees and the obese, tattooed friends and coworkers, bugchasers or those who practice unsafe sex, juvenile delinquents, transgender prisoners, and so forth. Sociologists must pay careful attention to the institutional infl uences that continue to defi ne, and redefi ne, deviance. As medical facilities, in conjunction with private drug com- panies, the FDA, and other federal organizations such as NIDA continue suggesting deviance is located in our disordered brains and bodies, it will become more important to examine who benefi ts from this characterization, who gets excluded, and how (and why) defi nitions of deviance continue to change in the biomedical era. Doing so will require the fi eld of devi- ance to move beyond its usual conceptual territory. NOTE 1. See http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/whitney-houston-death-surprising-details-coroners-report/story?id= 16076589#.UG7iQrX1ryU. See also Dolak, Kevin and Marikar, Sheila. 2012 (April 5). “Whitney Houston’s Death: 9 Surprising details in Coroner’s Report.” Retrieved September 5, 2012, http://abcnews.go.com/ Entertainment/whitney-houston-death-surprising-details-coroners-report/story?id=16076589. REFERENCES Clarke, Adele E., Shim, Janet K., Mamo, Laura, Fosket, Jennifer Ruth, and Fishman, Jennifer R. 2003. “Biomedi- calization: Technoscientifi c Transformations of Health, Illness, and U.S. Biomedicine.” American Sociological Review 68: 161–194. Dworkin, Ronald W. 2001. “The Medicalization of Unhappiness.” The Public Interest 144: 85–99. Markel, Howard. 2012 (June 5). “The D.S.M. Gets Addiction Right.” New York Times . Retrieved June 7, 2013, at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/opinion/ the-dsm-gets-addiction-right.html?_r=0. National Institute on Drug Abuse. 2007. Drugs, Brains, and Behavior: The Science of Addiction , NIH 07–5605. Washington DC: National Institute of Health. Vrecko, Scott. 2010. “Civilizing Technologies and the Control of Deviance.” Biosocieties 5(1): 36–51. http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/whitney-houston-death-surprising-details-coroners-report/story?id=16076589#.UG7iQrX1ryU http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/whitney-houston-death-surprising-details-coroners-report/story?id=16076589 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/opinion/the-dsm-gets-addiction-right.html?_r=0 http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/whitney-houston-death-surprising-details-coroners-report/story?id=16076589#.UG7iQrX1ryU http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/whitney-houston-death-surprising-details-coroners-report/story?id=16076589 The Medicalization of Unhappiness Ronald W. Dworkin The use of psychotropic medication in depressed patients has increased in the United States by more than 40 percent over the last decade, from 32 million offi ce visits resulting in a drug prescription to over 45 million. This is in marked contrast to the period between 1978 and 1987, when the number of offi ce visits resulting in a psy- chotropic drug prescription remained rela- tively stable. The bulk of the increase can be accounted for by the aggressive use of SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) in patients. It is the class of drugs that includes Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil. The question is, Are more Americans clinically depressed now than in the past, or has medical sci- ence started to treat the far more common experience of “everyday unhappiness” with medication, thereby increasing the number of drug prescriptions? No one knows the answer to this ques- tion. We do know that the number of patients diagnosed with depression has doubled over the last 30 years, without any great change in diagnostic criteria. But this simply raises another question: Are doctors more aggres- sive in diagnosing depression, or are they sim- ply diagnosing “everyday unhappiness” as a variant of depression and reporting it as such? These questions are at the center of a major debate within the medical commu- nity over who the new patients being treated with antidepressants are, and what treatment guidelines are being used. There is suspicion among some doctors that it is not the sick- est patients who are being given psychotropic drugs but those patients who complain the loudest about being unhappy. Some physi- cians blame managed care for the problem of overprescription. Because the offi ce envi- ronment under managed care is so rushed and impersonal, many doctors take the path of least resistance by prescribing medication whenever a patient is feeling “blue.” Also, managed-care companies save money when depressed patients receive medication rather than an indefi nite number of counseling sessions. This suspicion is well founded, but the origin of the problem does not lie solely in managed care. The sources of overprescrip- tion are much more complex. Physicians are being encouraged to think about every- day unhappiness in ways that make them more likely to treat it with psychotropic medication. It is part of a growing phenom- enon in our society: the medicalization of unhappiness. In the past, medical science cared for the mentally ill, while everyday unhappiness was left to religious, spiritual, or other cul- tural guides. Now, medical science is moving beyond its traditional border to help people who are bored, sad, or experiencing low self-esteem—in other words, people who are suffering from nothing more than life. THE MEDICALIZATION OF UNHAPPINESS | 523 This trend fi rst became widely known with the publication in 1992 of Listening to Prozac, Peter Kramer’s book, which became a national best seller; it described the positive benefi ts enjoyed by depressed patients when they were put on Prozac. The drug appar- ently increased self-esteem and reduced neg- ative feelings when nothing else could. The book led many in the medical community and the broader public to look more favor- ably on a liberal use of antidepressants. Medical science should aggressively use drugs like Prozac for patients suffering from clinical depression. This is totally appropriate— and important. But medical science errs when it supposes that a connection exists between everyday unhappiness and clinical depres- sion, something it increasingly does. It is hard to know where everyday unhappiness ends and clinical depression begins, and there is no easy way to distinguish between borderline depression (i.e., low spirits without any phys- ical signs or symptoms) and everyday unhap- piness. Traditionally, doctors have relied on their wisdom, intuition, and personal experi- ence to separate the two. Such a method is neither precise nor foolproof, but it is possibly the best we can aspire to. The problem is that medical science has placed everyday unhap- piness and depression on a single continuum, thereby interfering with the efforts of doctors to make fi ne but necessary distinctions. Medical science has adopted a method of classifying mental disorders that blurs the line between sickness and health. And more radi- cally, it has embraced a theory that explains all mental states in terms of their biochemi- cal origins. Medical science has done this in order to make the problem of unhappiness simpler and more comprehensible to doctors. But the new science actually works against the efforts of doctors to separate everyday unhappiness from depression. The upshot is that physicians are more likely to treat mere unhappiness the way they would treat seri- ous mental illness—with psychotropic drugs. CATEGORIES OF UNHAPPINESS One way that science establishes a link between clinical depression and everyday unhappiness is through a diagnostic instru- ment called the DSM. First published in 1952 and now in its fi fth edition, the DSM ( Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Men- tal Disorders ) is the essential diagnostic tool in the psychiatric fi eld. It is a classifi cation scheme for the entire range of human men- tal pathology. The DSM includes 16 major diagnostic classes (e.g., mood disorders, anx- iety disorders, substance-abuse disorders), and these categories are divided up again and again in accordance with certain signs and symp toms. The DSM was originally devel- oped by psychiatrists and psychologists, but even primary-care physicians refer to its nomenclature and categories in determin- ing whether or not a patient has a signifi cant mental illness. The original purpose of the DSM was to satisfy the psychiatric profession’s need for statistical and epidemiological data. But by establishing a relationship between clinical depression and everyday unhappiness when no such relationship existed before, the DSM has led inexorably to a liberal use of psycho- tropic medication. Prior to the development of the DSM, feelings of unhappiness were not consid- ered related to any of the authentic disease states that existed in medical science, such as depression or schizophrenia. While clinical depression had an offi cial status in medical science, everyday sadness did not. The DSM changed this by creating large categories of mental illness and then ever-increasing sub- categories, replete with subtypes and speci- fi ers. “Major depression,” for example, was broken down into a host of subtypes, includ- ing “minor depression,” which was broken down further into symptoms of everyday unhappiness like pessimism, hopelessness, and despair. With the creation of the DSM, | RONALD W. DWORKIN524 everyday unhappiness suddenly gained a fi xed position in medical science, if only as a subcategory of a subcategory of a major mental illness. The DSM incorporates everyday unhappi- ness into medicine in another way. It encour- ages doctors to use its multiaxial system, which allows the mental state of a patient to be assessed in different ways. For example, Axis I is used for reporting any major men- tal disorders. Axis III is used for reporting a patient’s general medical condition. Axis IV is used for assessing a person’s psychosocial and environmental problems. It is within Axis IV that everyday unhappiness takes a position within medical science. For exam- ple, one can fi nd on Axis IV job dissatisfac- tion, discord with one’s boss, or trouble with one’s spouse. Such everyday troubles are given their own special diagnostic code in a companion book called the ICD-9 ( Inter- national Classifi cation of Diseases ). Trouble with one’s spouse, for example, is listed as a Partner Relational Problem and is assigned number V61.1. Through the use of this multiaxial system, everyday unhappiness is brought into the orbit of medical science. By itself, this does not lead to an increased reliance on psychotropic medication. The problem arises because the categories of mental illness in the DSM are so porous as to allow everyday unhappiness to pass into the category of a more signifi cant disease. The diagnosis of “minor depression,” for example, requires only a feeling of sadness and a loss of pleasure in daily activities— a mood that may characterize the pain of everyday life as well as any medical pathol- ogy. Because “minor depression” often gets treated with medication, so too does every- day unhappiness. “Adjustment disorder with depressed mood” is another DSM category that has the potential to be confused with everyday emotional trouble. Included in this diagnos- tic group would be the person who is sad and tearful because of some painful event, like the termination of a romantic relationship or a sudden business diffi culty. Distinguish- ing an adjustment disorder from the despon- dency that people might feel during one of life’s routine downturns can be very diffi - cult. Because adjustment disorders are often treated with medication, everyday unhappi- ness is too. Another catch-all category is “Depressive Disorder NOS (Not Otherwise Specifi ed).” An example of a patient with “Depressive Disorder NOS” was described to me by a psychiatrist as someone who says, “Doc- tor, I’m feeling sad and my sleep is restless. I don’t know if I’m depressed or getting depressed, but I’m feeling down. My appetite is fi ne and I’ve got plenty of energy, but I’m unhappy.” Such a patient may be a candidate for antidepressants. Doctors have long recognized this defi - ciency of the DSM, but it was not a serious problem in 1952 when it was created. Psy- chotropic medications were not as readily available as they are now, so doctors could not use drugs to treat everyday unhappiness even if they had wanted to. With the develop- ment of psychotropic medications, doctors now can. The combination of safe, effective drugs like Prozac and a relatively imprecise method of categorizing mental pathology results in a wide use of psychotropic medica- tion in borderline cases of depression. Many psychiatrists argue that overpre- scription is largely the fault of primary-care physicians, who provide the majority of mental-health care in this country. In the view of the psychiatrists, primary-care phy- sicians are not suffi ciently well versed in the nuances of the DSM to use it properly. In one study, over 30 percent of the family practitioners interviewed confessed to need- ing further training to treat emotional disor- ders, even though it was part of their routine practice to do so. But even though mental- health professionals are more experienced in treating depression, patients do not want to be referred to a psychiatrist or therapist for THE MEDICALIZATION OF UNHAPPINESS | 525 fear of the stigma attached—the fear of being thought “crazy.” For this reason, they insist on being treated in the primary-care setting, where expertise in managing mental illness is not great. Again, the result is an increased use of psychotropic medication in cases of everyday emotional trouble. THE “LAWS” OF SADNESS While the potential for diagnostic error may cause some doctors to think twice about aggressively writing drug prescriptions, a new medical theory actually justifi es the liberal use of psychotropic drugs. Doctors now point to a biochemical mechanism that comes close to uniting serious mental pathology and every- day emotional trouble under a single prin- ciple. It is called the “biogenic amine theory.” According to this theory, blocking the reuptake of serotonin or other neurotrans- mitters in the brain has a positive effect on the human psyche. Chemical compounds like serotonin, dopamine, noradrenalin, and acetylcholine are the means of communica- tion across nerves. Since many of the drugs used to treat depression increase the amount of these neurotransmitters available in nerve spaces (called synapses), it is reasoned that depression might be caused by a defi ciency of amines at the level of the nerve junction. The biogenic amine theory has been in existence for several decades. It was devel- oped through a series of inferences after the fi rst generation of antidepressants, called tricyclics, was created. Because these drugs brought about an improvement in mood, and because they had a specifi c effect on the amines in nerve terminals, researchers con- cluded that amines must regulate mood. While Kramer’s Listening to Prozac exam- ined the effects of Prozac on patients who were clinically ill, new research focuses on the effects of Prozac and other SSRIs on everyday unhappiness. According to medical science, the normal spectrum of individual differences in mood and social behavior may be tied to the same mechanism of neurotrans- mission that governs real mental pathology. One study postulates that different compo- nents of the human personality may have their own neurochemical substrates. These unique substrates, such as dopamine and serotonin—the same substrates involved in the biochemistry of clinical depression—may modulate the expression of everyday happi- ness and sadness. Physicians have this theory in the back of their minds when they see depressed patients. They admit that depression may have many causes, but they still insist that moods are ultimately determined at the neuronal junc- tions of the brain where antidepressants work. In their view, all unhappiness neces- sarily leads back to these junctions in the same way that all roads once led to Rome. This mindset prepares the way for a broad use of antidepressants. Because the DSM is a relatively arbitrary classifi cation scheme, physicians think that even though their depressed patients may not fi t the neces- sary diagnostic criteria for depression, they “almost do.” And because the criteria for depression change with virtually every new edition of the DSM, being slightly off should not prevent a patient from receiving drug treatment, especially since his unhappiness, whatever its cause or level of intensity, will fi nd its way back to the neuronal junctions of the brain as readily as all forms of depression. Patients think in a similar vein. They understand that the classifi cation scheme by which physicians measure the intensity of depression is arbitrary and that the differ- ence between a DSM-sanctioned depression and a more mild depression is not at all like the difference between being pregnant and not being pregnant. One cannot be a “little pregnant,” but one can be a little depressed. In the minds of patients, the various shades of depression merge into a single unity that expresses itself eventually at the brain’s neu- ronal junctions. | RONALD W. DWORKIN526 The proven value of psychoactive drugs in treating a wide spectrum of depressed patients encourages people who are just unhappy to ask for them. It seems unfair that patients who fi t the DSM criteria for depres- sion get to enjoy the quick benefi ts of drug treatment while those who do not are forced to endure the long, often painful process of talk therapy—a process that seems obscure and confusing and, to some, a bit dubious. Thus symptoms of depression are increas- ingly treated according to their level of inten- sity rather than according to their specifi c cause, which is unknown anyhow. IS THIS HAPPINESS? The neuronal junctions of the brain where psychotropic drugs exert their effect are looked upon by medical science as a kind of corridor between matter and mood. Here at the subcellular level, the mystery of the human mood is believed to play itself out. A quantum of neurotransmitters is released at the neuronal junctions, and a person’s mood either rises or fl ags. The feeling of hap- piness gains an absolute unit of measurement in medical science and becomes, for all prac- tical purposes, a visible phenomenon. The fl aw in this theory can be understood in the following way: matter and mood are two different phenomena, as different as light and air, and so can have no physical inter- face. Just as light and air cannot affect one another, since there is no place in the universe where they “meet,” neither can matter and mood affect one another, since there is no place in the physical world where they meet. One is fi nite; the other is infi nite; the two are composed of different substances and so can never be joined together in physical reality. It is true that neuronal junctions exist in the brain and that complex changes occur within these junctions during mental activ- ity. But this does not necessarily make them a place where matter and mood share a com- mon boundary. To say that they do is like watching a person get into a car, then sec- onds later watching the car move, and from this observation making the deduction that the car moves because someone gets into it. It is a false science to infer from the study of matter a knowledge any deeper than that of knowing the forms of matter and their relationships. It is a false science to say that on the basis of material knowledge, one can pretend to “know” and understand the emo- tional experience of life. Kramer suggests that feelings like home- sickness or loneliness are mediated through neurotransmitters like serotonin, or possibly encoded in neurons, and the fact that Pro- zac eases these conditions seems to confi rm this view. But the notion that matter and mood can have a direct connection with one another—that somewhere at the neuronal junction, loneliness and serotonin “meet”— is tantamount to saying that the human mood is material and that it can be touched by matter. Buried within the biogenic amine theory is an illogical belief—that neurotrans- mitters are shedding their physical existence, becoming even smaller than atoms, and ulti- mately merging with pure thought or idea. The error in the biogenic amine theory can be understood in a slightly different way. Augustine once said that the human heart has more moods and emotions than hairs on the head or stars in the sky. What he meant by this is that happiness has an infi nite num- ber of shades, refl ecting the infi nite that is the human soul, which mirrors the infi nite that is God. Even if every particle of serotonin crossing the synaptic cleft of a nerve terminal could be measured, along with every particle of noradrenalin and dopamine, the num- ber of particles would still be fi nite, while the moods of a human being would still be infi nite. By defi nition, there are simply not enough particles to express every conceiv- able human mood. THE MEDICALIZATION OF UNHAPPINESS | 527 CREATING VIRTUAL REALITIES But what about drugs like alcohol or narcot- ics? They alter our moods when ingested, pro- ducing feelings like euphoria and indifference. Is this not a case of matter affecting mood by way of a common border inside the brain? No, it is not, and this is key to understand- ing how drugs like antidepressants really work. Alcohol and narcotics do not produce such feelings by being received directly into the “substance” of human emotions. On the contrary, they simply alter human conscious- ness in a way that allows the mind to shift its mood. These drugs work by dampening certain aspects of brain function— they cre- ate an altered mental state —such that true reality becomes concealed from a person’s consciousness. The dampened brain func- tions allow a person to imagine an alternate “reality” that is generally more pleasing. For example, when a man contrasts his humble circumstances with some ideal of success, tension arises in his psyche. His con- science berates him, and he feels the well- known misery of failure. He might try some diversion, like golf or stamp-collecting, in order to hide from himself what he does not want to face, but sometimes the diversion does not suffi ciently block the sight of things that he dislikes. So he starts to drink, and the alcohol alters his consciousness in such a way that he is diverted. After ingesting alcohol, the eye of his mind no longer sees the images that were causing him so much pain. At this point, the man starts to feel better, even “happier.” Drinking is a reliable method of dealing with unhappiness not because it exerts a direct effect on a person’s mood but because it helps conceal from view what he does not want to see. It is by dampening or altering brain functions and by affecting conscious- ness that alcohol transforms how we feel. It is the same with antidepressants. They are merely another form of stupefaction. True, people who take them because they are unhappy are not like alcoholics or drug addicts—they function at work, they are well mannered, and they do not vomit in the streets. But although their method is “cleaner,” they are attempting the same thing as the person who uses alcohol to raise his spirits. Unlike the drunk, their minds remain awake, clear, and lucid, but the drugs have still tampered with their brain functions, hiding from them what they do not want to see. This point was revealed to me in the case of one friend who was taking Prozac for general unhappiness, though not under my supervision. He said, “I feel a lot better. I don’t have to look into the abyss anymore. I see my problems, but they don’t seem as daunting as they once did.” With the help of a psychoactive drug, he was able to retire further and further from his mind’s sight those images that were painful to him. He still saw their visible outlines, but his new mood was based on an altered perception of their image. He was no longer menaced by them because they had grown distant to him. The same phenomenon can account for what Kramer calls “cosmetic psychopharma- cology.” Kramer reports with amazement how one of his female patients, after taking Prozac, changed from a social misfi t into an accom- plished coquette, capable of maneuvering smoothly from one man to the next, even of securing three dates in a single weekend. But is this any different from what alcohol might do for someone with similar hesitations? Is this really a “new self” courtesy of Prozac? Of course not. A woman wants to fl irt with men, but her self-doubt tells her not to do so. The result is tension and unhappiness. So she takes alcohol in order to silence the critic within and feel “liberated.” This is nothing new. PROZAC NATION Yet despite the rather obvious nature of anti- depressants, medical science studiously avoids | RONALD W. DWORKIN528 putting antidepressants in the same category as alcohol and narcotics. It struggles to pre- serve the deceit of a special mood–matter link at the level of the neuronal junctions. Why is this so? Why does it bother to support the irrational notion that mood and matter share a common interface? To the degree that it is a conspiracy, it is one enjoined by our entire culture: people desperately want to believe in such a link; they want to believe that the cause of happiness is located in the physical world and that happiness somehow comes about scientifi cally in the form of a pill. The promise of such a view is security and comfort. First, to admit one’s dependence on psy- choactive drugs is to shield oneself from life’s imponderables and unpredictability. If hap- piness is serotonin, and serotonin is happi- ness, then these drugs guarantee happiness, for one can take psychoactive drugs for years. It is with this attitude that people with mild depression might substitute the chance of real happiness with some semblance of happiness achieved through medication. Second, to declare happiness a law of necessity allows science to emphasize the subcellular processes inside the brain at the expense of everything else. Science can say: “It is man’s basic nature to want hap- piness, but if the natural desire for happi- ness is linked to the physical nature of his brain, it cannot be linked to culture, which varies from society to society. The search for happiness begins and ends in nature, and so there is no reason to go beyond science.” By believing this to be true, people can put aside other approaches to coping with daily troubles—which is convenient, since these remedies, whether they involve talking to a friend or asking for divine guidance, are never a sure thing. Third, the notion that happiness is a law of science appeals to human pride. If unhap- piness is chemical or biological, along with its treatment, a person need not ask, “Why am I unhappy?” In the past, this ques- tion provoked serious introspection and self-examination, as the effort to cope with unhappiness merged with larger questions about life and existence. Religion and phi- losophy demanded that people see them- selves as part of a larger whole and taught that happiness depended on more than self- satisfaction. But if happiness is a law of sci- ence, then one does not have to go through this humbling experience. Through drugs, one can fi nd happiness as a single, isolated individual. Fourth, and perhaps most crucial, depressed persons equate the pleasant mood evoked by psychoactive drugs with happiness, even though, in the depths of their hearts, they are not sure exactly what they feel. Still, people do not want to live a lie, and so they will accept their drug-induced “happiness” as the real thing only if they believe that science has truly uncovered the biology of happiness. And this is what the biogenic amine theory of mat- ter and mood represents. It reassures people who take medication that their good feeling is indeed happiness. For people suffering from clinical depres- sion, the mental state produced by these drugs must be considered an improvement, and often, a necessary one. But for those people who suffer from unhappiness, per- haps because of stress or because they are in bad relationships, these drugs are nothing more than a shortcut to a particular mental state that they believe to be happiness but is not. Your Mind on Drugs What exactly do people feel when they take antidepressants? It is diffi cult to say because each person expresses the feelings aroused by medications like Prozac differently. There is simply no universal feeling. Nevertheless, a broad understanding of the phenomenon is possible, and what emerges among medicated patients is a defi nite change in consciousness. In most of the testimonies published, patients note that the good feeling arising THE MEDICALIZATION OF UNHAPPINESS | 529 from the infl uence of mood-modifying drugs does not come about immediately. It often takes several weeks, and this delayed effect is considered to be so predictable that doctors warn their patients about it. The slow onset of the drug causes the change in people’s atti- tude to be barely perceptible. There is gener- ally no minute or hour that marks the onset of their improved mood. And so it is not surprising that after peo- ple start taking medication, life continues by virtue of its own momentum. If, before taking the drug, people biked for recreation or shopped because it was their favorite pas- time, they generally do so afterward. Except in rare cases of “cosmetic psychopharmacol- ogy,” described by Kramer, the tastes and interests of a person do not change; the per- son on medication remains the same person. For this reason, however, it cannot be a change in life that causes the uplift in spirit, since for the people taking these drugs, life does not change. Generally, most people calculate their happiness by external cir- cumstances. But psychotropic drugs enable people to feel better even though their exter- nal circumstances are unchanged. The cause- and-effect relationship that has dominated their lives is not working properly, and while they feel better, they are confused. Patients on psychotropic drugs still react to specifi c external events in an appropri- ate manner. Their mood goes up or down according to what happens in their environ- ment. But while these patients may smile at a party or laugh at another’s jokes, I have often observed a general lack of congruence between outside circumstances and a medi- cated patient’s good feeling, and this obser- vation is commensurate with the amazement expressed by these people at feeling well despite the lack of change in their outside circumstances. The outside world becomes, in a way, detached from their inner life. Its infl uence decreases. Casual conversation with hundreds of pa - tients taking psychotropic medication serves as the basis for this opinion. One patient of mine who was asked on a preoperative evalu- ation how medication helped him replied, “I see the same things as before, but I don’t care so much. I still feel good no matter what happens.” Another patient in the same situa- tion said, “I don’t know why. I just feel really good about myself.” For such people, the relationship between their outer life and their inner life becomes like two wheels that once rotated in tandem, and continue to do so, but are now ever so slightly off, with barely differ- ent speeds, such that while they appear to be connected by an axle, it is impossible for them to be so. People medicated for depression often talk about enjoying activities that they did not enjoy prior to starting medication. But again, there is something suspicious in their pleasure. For example, two friends of mine told me that they “felt better” on medication, which enabled them to play tennis and feel good again while doing so. Yet it was not so much that they extracted pleasure from playing tennis but, rather, brought the pleasure they enjoyed through medication into this activ- ity. It was a pleasure that they experienced for no discernible reason, and it mildly confused them since, deep down, they were the type of people who felt good only when external cir- cumstances were going their way. Yet nothing in their lives had changed but a pill. It has been observed that people who are not depressed and who take psychoac- tive drugs sometimes feel uncomfortable. The above observation might explain this phenomenon. The mood of such people is altered by drugs, but in a way that they cannot understand. They become like the traveler in a boat who feels confused by the imperceptible changes beneath his feet and, worse, has no beacon on the horizon on which to fi x his gaze. He cannot establish a connection between what he is feeling and what he is seeing, so he starts to feel queasy. Nothing in the outer world seems to move, and so he cannot ascribe his inner feeling to | RONALD W. DWORKIN530 an outside event. And if he does fi nd a bea- con sitting on the horizon, he cannot read- ily admit to himself, “Yes, I feel this way because of what I see,” since what he sees never produced a feeling like this before. The whole thing makes no sense, and so he starts to feel seasick. Know Thy Self Psychoactive medication, much like alcohol and narcotics, causes a disconnect between the inner and outer life. This is the problem with using it to treat everyday unhappi- ness. The disconnect caused by medication is very different from the state of thoughtful detachment encouraged by many cultures for the purpose of insulating people from every- day disappointment. The latter contributes to wisdom, stability, and maturity; the for- mer creates a state of mind that is stuporous and purposely unknowing. Medical science should confi ne itself to the treatment of clinical depression, rather than extend itself into the realm of every- day unhappiness. Medical science “helps” unhappy people by clouding their thoughts, by making them less aware of the world and by sapping their urge to see themselves in a true light. People medicated for everyday unhappiness gain inner peace, but they do so through a real decrement in consciousness. “Civilizing Technologies” and the Control of Deviance Scott Vrecko BIOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL MATTERS IN BEHAVIOURAL ADDICTIONS The distinction between drug and nondrug addictions has become increasingly blurry over the last few decades. By the end of the 1980s it had become largely agreed upon by brain scientists that the addictiveness of ‘substances of abuse’ could be understood to arise not out of the particular properties of drug themselves but out of their simi- lar effects on parts of the brain involved in the control of emotions and motivation (cf. Keane and Hamill, 2010; Kushner, 2010). Drug use had come to be understood as being rewarding because of substances’ abilities to activate, either directly or indirectly, the brain’s ‘pleasure systems’ that are involved in rewarding ordinary behaviours that make us feel good, such as having sex or eating. As scientists came to posit that these and pos- sibly other brain mechanisms ‘may be com- mon to the establishment and maintenance of all addictions, be they chemical or behav- ioural’ (Marks, 1990, p. 1391), the ‘reality’ of behavioural addictions began to be taken much more seriously than they had formerly been, by researchers and also by other cul- tural authorities. Some of the new ideas about behavioural compulsions that emerged in the 1980s are nicely framed in a 1993 report in The Econ- omist , entitled ‘High and Hooked’—one of the many media pieces that have, over the last couple of decades, considered the sci- ence and nature of behavioural addictions. Accompanied by a photo montage of vials, a syringe and other drug paraphernalia—as well as a roulette wheel, running shoes and a Nintendo Gameboy—the article informs readers: ‘Foreign bodies in the synapses are not an absolute prerequisite for an addic- tion [. . .]. Other behaviours that carry an intensity with them—and thus presum- ably overstimulate some parts of the brain’s wiring—can produce similar effects’ to those of drugs like cocaine and heroin (1993, p. 124). The article insists that while many peo- ple still currently see as problematic the appli- cation of the addiction concept to domains unrelated to drug use, there is no reason to believe that compulsive forms of sex, gambling and so on are necessarily in a different class from ‘compulsive chemical-taking’. Indeed, on the basis of emerging evidence that activa- tion of the dopamine system is the common denominator of all compulsions—supporting the so-called ‘dopamine hypothesis’ of addiction—the article suggests that we might think of crack heads, heroin junkies, patho- logical gamblers and others likewise addicted to the pleasure-inducing chemicals in their brains in similar terms: as ‘dopamine heads’. Right around the time when the dopamine head was being conceived, the renowned cul- tural theorist Eve Sedgwick was also taking stock of changing ideas about behavioural | SCOTT VRECKO532 problems and provided an account of behav- ioural addictions that was very different from the science reported in The Economist . Extrapolating from Berridge and Edwards’s (1981) historical research on the emergence of the ‘addict’ as a taxonomic category (involving a shift in attention from bad behaviours, to pathological identities) and on the expansion, over the course of the fi rst two-thirds of the twentieth century, of sub- stances classifi ed as ‘addictive’, Sedgwick’s analysis focused on the then-current devel- opments that brought ‘not only every form of substance ingestion, but more simply every form of human behavior’—from eat- ing and refusing to eat, working and shop- ping, to exercising, having sex and being in a relationship—‘into the orbit of potential addiction attribution’ (1993, p. 131). Sedgwick’s essay sheds light on how tropes of addiction are increasingly used in modern societies to demand more self-control from individuals who experience fewer societal constraints on their lives and behaviours; on how individuals identifi ed as addicts are expected to work on themselves in an ever- expanding array of 12-step programmes and self-help groups; and on how even those of us who currently consume and behave in noncompulsive, unproblematic ways may fi nd ourselves subjects of preemptive regimes of monitoring and control, as when we more or less constantly refl ect on the nature of our behaviours and our risks of becoming one or another type of addict. ( Did I drink too much last night? Am I spending too much time on the internet? Could I stop if I wanted to? Do I have a problem? Would I know if I had a problem? ) There is little doubt that Sedg- wick’s analysis of how we increasingly live by the metaphor of addiction in everyday life remains relevant to cultural politics. Recently writing in the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper, for example, Anthony Giddens— a leading public intellectual, advisor to the United Kingdom’s Labour Party and member of the House of Lords—expounded exactly the sort of position with which Sedgwick may have taken issue. Using a defi nition of addiction that includes nonsubstance com- pulsions, Giddens called for the UK gov- ernment to commit to developing strong interventions for dealing with any and all compulsive behaviours: ‘Whenever individu- als’ behaviour is controlled by habits that they should control, we are at the fulcrum of the relationship between domination and freedom’, he writes. ‘Government has been reluctant to intrude, but now it must’ (2007, p. 32). While Sedgwick’s analysis remains a pow- erful reminder of the ways in which addic- tion is bound up with politics, governance and ideals of individual freedom, there is a danger that her insights could be dismissed as irrelevant to conceptions of addiction used within the biosciences today. Avoid- ing engagement with the possibility of there being a biological component to addiction, she restricts her analysis to ‘addiction attri- bution’ rather than addiction per se; that is, to ‘the rapidity with which it has now become a commonplace that, precisely, any substance, any behavior, even any affect may be pathologized as addictive’ (1993, p. 132). This focus results in insight into some of the consequences of the discursive framing of addiction and the labelling of addicts (cf. Reith, 2004), but it also raises the question of whether addiction is just about discourse, identities, labels and so forth. While it seems that Sedgwick’s refusal to consider the bio- logical is based on her recognition of the cir- cularity of addiction concepts (they only refer to what those who utter them intend) and the lack of a transcendent basis for defi ning addiction, I believe that contemporary forms of biological technoscience have social sig- nifi cance even if they cannot prove the exis- tence of a universal form of addiction. For regardless of whether or not neurobiological fi ndings, such as those early ones reported in The Economist , provide enough evidence to defi nitively confi rm the physiological reality “CIVILIZING TECHNOLOGIES” AND THE CONTROL OF DEVIANCE | 533 of behavioural addictions, they nevertheless do have real effects—for example, insofar as they change the way in which behav- ioural problems are conceptualized in popu- lar culture and the media and play a role in increasing interest in biological approaches to managing behavioural compulsions. PHARMACEUTICALS AND THE NEUROTYPING OF BEHAVIOURAL ADDICTIONS A wide range of psychiatric medications such as mood stabilizers, tranquilizers and antidepressants have been used in managing behavioural compulsions, with at least some success (Potenza, 2001; Grant et al , 2003). But these prescription drugs have also been used therapeutically in relation to an array of other psychiatric disorders unrelated to addiction, including schizophrenia, panic disorder, dementia, narcolepsy and attention defi cit and hyperactivity disorder; and it is consequently diffi cult to describe these mul- tipurpose interventions as though they spe- cifi cally target distinctively addiction-related biological processes. For example, the effi - cacy of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) antidepressants in man- aging pathological gambling could impli- cate the serotonin system in some gambling problems, but this would be (and is) taken to indicate that some gambling problems arise in relation to a depressive disorder—not an addictive one. Thus, while the introduction of the SSRIs into addiction medicine may be taken as a therapeutic advance (insofar as it provided a new means for helping some patients), it cannot, in and of itself, be taken as a development of particular theoretical or conceptual importance for the fi eld of addic- tion biopsychiatry. However, in the late 1990s an opiate antagonist, ‘anticraving’, medication already used in the treatment of heroin addiction and alcoholism—naltrexone, which acts directly on the endorphin system and indirectly on the dopamine system—began to be introduced into the management of behavioural compul- sions, and this move has been described as a development of almost paradigm-shifting proportions in the fi eld of addiction stud- ies. The fi rst published suggestions of nal- trexone’s effi cacy in managing behavioural compulsions appeared in 1998, when cli- nicians reported their success in treating a compulsively gambling patient with it in a letter to the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry (Crockford and el-Guebaly, 1998). In the same year, a researcher at the University of Minnesota published a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry in which he reported promising results from an open study of naltrexone in the treatment of path- ological gambling (Kim, 1998). These and subsequent studies of naltrexone (Grant et al , 2006; Grant et al , 2008) are understood to ‘bolster the argument that pathological gambling is, at least in part, an addiction ill- ness’ (Arehart-Treichel, 2006, p. 28) because naltrexone is understood to act on exactly the parts of the brain that have come, since the 1980s, to take centre stage in addiction neuroscience: the reward system. Evidence of naltrexone’s effi cacy is interpreted as indicat- ing that claims of neuroscience experts that behavioural compulsions are addiction-like brain problems can be backed up with objec- tive evidence: If pathological gambling is not an addiction, then why would an addiction treatment work on it? After fi rst being used in relation to prob- lem gambling, naltrexone and other anti- craving medications (such as nalmefene and rimonabant) have subsequently been found to be effective in the management of an array of other problems, such as those involving compulsive sexual activity (Ray- mond et al , 2002; Ryback, 2004; Bostwick and Bucci, 2008), disordered eating (Mar- razzi et al , 1995; Yeomans and Gray, 2002) and urge-driven forms of shopping, buying and stealing (Grant and Kim, 2002; Bullock | SCOTT VRECKO534 and Koran, 2003; Grant, 2003, 2005). The effects of these medications have been mobi- lized not only by scientists but also in the media, to bolster claims about the addictive nature of behavioural problems. Charac- teristic of these reports are suggestions that naltrexone ‘blocks the interaction between cells and chemicals in the brain that create feelings of pleasure’ (Cox, 2001, p. 1A), and that when individuals who take such a pharmacotherapy, known to dampen the activity of the brain’s dopamine system, they may ‘also fi nd that the number of cigarettes they smoke decreases. Also chocolate, gam- bling, pot—anything with craving decreases’ (Symons, 1999, p. 2). Whereas in the early 1990s it had become possible to think in terms of a neurobiologi- cal kind of addict, brain-targeting, anticrav- ing medications make it possible to act upon oneself as such a subject. For example, a piece in the Montreal Gazette frames the effects of naltrexone as defi nitive evidence of the real, addictive nature of compulsive buying: Do you shop till you drop? Are you in fi nan- cial straits because you are addicted— yes, addicted— to that rush of endorphins that comes from buying things willy-nilly, even if they only nearly fi t? [ . . . ] now, help is nigh. For a drug that is used to treat alcoholics and heroin and cocaine addicts has been proven to help compulsive shoppers, too. (Fitterman, 2003, p. D2) That the objective, material effects of biology- targeting medications often speak louder than the words of scientists who claimed that behaviours could be considered addictions is perhaps most evident in reports featur- ing the stories of individuals whose doubts about expert explanations disappear as they personally experience the effects of naltrex- one. For example, a newspaper story on an early gambling study reports an experimen- tal subject who was so doubtful of naltrex- one working that he almost withdrew from the trial. But after deciding to remain in the study, and despite his doubts, within a week of beginning the medication he reports hav- ing noticed that ‘the urges [for gambling] went away. They just stopped’ (quoted in Marcotty and Lerner, 2001). I am convinced—by anecdotal reports (Deluca, 2001), clinical trial research (Modesto-Lowe and Van Kirk, 2002) and qualitative interviews that I have done with users of anticraving medications (Vrecko, forthcoming)—that these pharmaceuticals do something to the bodies and minds of individuals taking them; at least in the most successful instances these medications stop cravings, almost as if by magic. It is tempt- ing to refl ect upon such evidence and con- clude that because these medications target the brain’s reward system, and can be used to manage compulsive behaviours, behavioural addictions must indeed involve a disease of the brain’s reward system (this style of phar- maceutical reasoning assumes that our treat- ments prove what we have long suspected, namely that behavioural addictions are biologically analogous to drug addictions). However, when we pay close attention to the work and practices of those clinicians and researchers who study naltrexone and behavioural problems, it becomes clear that anticraving medications do not simply mate- rialize our preexisting conception of behav- ioural addictions. Instead, they help create a new one, insofar as they play an active part in reconfi guring, or ‘mangling’ (Pickering, 1995), clinical and laboratory understand- ings of behavioural problems. Most clinical systems established to man- age repetitive, problematic behaviour have relied on behavioural phenotypes as a fun- damental means of sorting out individuals. Problem gamblers, overeaters, kleptoma- niacs and so forth have by and large been understood as ‘behavioural kinds’: that is, it has been assumed that it was the particular type of behaviour that an individual engaged in that provided a basis for knowing her and for grouping her together with others who “CIVILIZING TECHNOLOGIES” AND THE CONTROL OF DEVIANCE | 535 could be dealt with in similar ways. Any differences among individual pathological gamblers, for example, would be consid- ered less important than the similarities in their behaviours, and the same would go for binge eaters, kleptomaniacs and so on; people caught up in different behavioural problems were separated and distinguished from one another. Anticraving medications, however, made it possible for researchers to question the apparent unity of existing behavioural classifi cations. On the basis of the fi nding that some subjects respond well to naltrexone but others do not, research- ers have begun to distinguish among differ- ent subspecies that exist within behavioural kinds—each of which can be understood and managed in different ways. In relation to the early studies of naltrexone that mainly focused on pathological gambling, research- ers came to see their objectives, and their patients, in new ways. They discovered that the ‘real question is not so much whether the medication will help gamblers, but in the end, which kinds of gamblers it will be good for’ (Toneatto, quoted in Van Den Broek, 2003). Among the clinical populations that met the behaviourally oriented diagnostic threshold for pathological gambling, clinicians came to see themselves as ‘really dealing with only the subset of gamblers who had intense crav- ings, uncontrollable impulses’ (Kim, 2002) and not the ‘other sub-types, such as perhaps gamblers with undiagnosed attention-defi cit disorder, who would call for a different type of intervention’ (Grant, quoted in Van Den Broek, 2003). Researchers encountering the subdivisions of clinical populations that are made appar- ent by the effects of the medications they use (in relation to the management of gambling as well as other behavioural problems) sug- gest the need for new schemes of classifi ca- tion: among pathological gamblers and other behavioural compulsives, potential naltrex- one responders need to be distinguished from other classes of subjects, not on the basis of behaviour but on mind/brain states—what some researchers refer to as ‘endopheno- types’. In an important sense, the pathologi- cal gambler, the compulsive shopper and the overeater cease to be ‘behavioural kinds’ of individuals and become subsets of new neu- robiological kinds. Problematic conduct is understood only as a symptom of an underly- ing neuropathology, and pioneers of naltrex- one therapies for behavioural addiction are explicit in their moving beyond the targeting of particular behaviours, towards the target- ing of biological matters. As one researcher explained the rationale behind this shift: ‘We don’t have a gambling center (in the brain) or a kleptomania center, but we do have an urge center’ (quoted in Chin, 2001). Treating Addiction, or Civilizing the Craving Brain? Just as the ‘dopamine head’ suggested the formation of a neurobiological human kind within popular culture, assertions made by researchers studying anticraving medication suggest that a new kind of addict has appeared within the fi eld of addiction studies— one that can be known in terms of a particu- lar neurotypology and that can be managed with a medication that acts on parts of the brain associated with craving. As already indicated, however, it would be misleading to suggest that anticraving medications rep- resent a new treatment for a preexisting dis- order; indeed, it would be misleading to even suggest that anticraving medications rep- resent a ‘treatment’ for a recently reshaped biological disease (which is one possible interpretation of the developments discussed in the preceding section). For medications like naltrexone do not treat a brain disease: they do not cure brain lesions in an ontologi- cally distinct population of diseased individ- uals, and they would, of course, be deemed ineffective if they brought about neurobio- logical changes but did not alter subjective and social outcomes. What such medications | SCOTT VRECKO536 do do is reduce the intensity and frequency of impulses that individuals experience to engage in a problematic behaviour. This, in turn, reduces the risk that such behav- iour will produce the negative personal and social consequences that characterize (for example, in diagnostic criteria) behavioural compulsions. While I do not believe that there are any a priori reasons to avoid the use of biologi- cal interventions in order to deal with social or personal problems, particularly when such interventions are valued by those tak- ing them, I do think that we should avoid the inaccurate suggestion that all that anti- craving medications do is ‘treat’ a biologi- cal abnormality in order to restore a normal state (since this runs exactly the risk alluded to at the outset of this reading: of reifying a useful diagnostic concept into something that can be taken as a simple biological disorder). One possibility for critically conceptualizing the logic and use of anticraving medications such as naltrexone—in a way that is conso- nant with neuroscientifi c understandings—is to think of such interventions as part of the family of civilizing technologies. In a general sense, anticraving medications are used as a means of producing states in which indi- viduals are healthier, more responsible and more able to adhere to the duties, expecta- tions and obligations of their families and societies. That is, a state in which individu- als are better citizens. It is worth reminding ourselves, here, that the words citizen and civilization have a common root; in ancient times, a citizen was originally a person who had the right to inhabit a city-state and who, by exercising rights and fulfi lling duties like other citizens, helped build a civilization. And indeed, the term a ddict derives from a process in Roman law in which a court would decree, or dict ate, that an individual is to be given over to ( ad- ), or enslaved by, another (free) individual. The addicted was a slave, unable to take part in the civilization of free men. The notion of a ‘civilizing technology’ is intended to invoke an additional register of meaning beyond etymology, to suggest that anticraving medications may in some ways be usefully considered in relation to what the historical sociologist Norbert Elias, referred to as the ‘civilizing process’ (1994). Elias con- ceptualizes civilization as ‘a specifi c transfor- mation of human behavior’ (p. 42), and his work examines how, in a multitude of ways, different behaviours—for example, those relating to the eating of meat, blowing one’s nose, yawning, spitting, bathing, sleeping and sexual activity, sport and violence—have been socially reshaped over time. Behaviours are ‘civilized’ to the extent that a standard- ized code of conduct emerges within a society, and ‘the individual is compelled to regulate his conduct in an increasingly differentiated, more even and more stable manner’ (p. 445). While his focus is on medieval societies and processes, technology enters the picture as Elias astutely points out that the civilizing process often involves technological develop- ments; for example, when ‘people learn to exploit lifeless materials to an increasingly greater extent for the use of mankind’ (p. 7). 1 There is a still deeper connection to be made between Elias’s work on civilization and current addiction technoscience. Although Elias is usually read as being concerned with forms of conduct such as those described above (and indeed his work does consider the minutiae of a great number of forms of behavioural regulation), he in fact describes his most fundamental interest as the control of urges, motivations and desires—the ele- ments of human life that precede action and that he (writing in the golden age of psycho- analysis) relates to the ‘instincts’ and ‘drives’. He is concerned with a ‘kind of circuit in the human being, a partial system within the total system of the organism’, the control of which ‘is of decisive importance for the functioning of society as of the individuals within it’ (p. 157) and is a central aspect of the civilizing process. “CIVILIZING TECHNOLOGIES” AND THE CONTROL OF DEVIANCE | 537 The essential motivational circuit that interests Elias very much resembles the ‘reward circuitry’ that is described by addic- tion neuroscientists and that is modulated by medications like naltrexone. Recall the neuroscientist’s formulation of addictive behaviours quoted above: ‘We don’t have a gambling center (in the brain) or a klepto- mania center, but we do have an urge cen- ter’. Scientists describe this centre in a variety of ways (for example, as the ‘reward cir- cuitry’, ‘pleasure centre’, the limbic region, the ‘motivation system’), all of which relate to the understanding that this part of the brain rewards (with pleasurable feelings) behaviours that are essential for species sur- vival, such as eating and sexual activity. The reward/pleasure system is framed as hav- ing decisive importance for the functioning of society and its constituent individuals, given that it is understood to motivate all human behaviours. But it can also give rise to a series of social and personal problems— from drug abuse, alcoholism and gambling, to obesity, violence, overspending and debt and sexually transmitted infections—if not adequately kept in check (cf. Burnham and Phelan, 2000). This system is understood to be one of the fi rst parts of the brain to have evolved and to be more or less the same among humans, nonhuman primates and other animal species; scientists assert that what separates humans from other animals is that in our evolution we have developed a more advanced and rational brain region (the prefrontal cortex) that can subdue the ‘lower level emotional responses’ of the older limbic system. Neuroscientifi c explanations of addictive behaviour explicitly formulate compulsions as arising out of primitive (which is in a sense to say ‘uncivilized’) urges that result when the lower brain, rather than the distinctively civilized higher brain, exerts control over conduct. As a leading textbook on substance abuse and addictive behaviour puts it: ‘The neurologic substrate for addiction is located in the limbic system. Within the limbic system is housed the biologically primitive circuitry for the drive states such as hunger, and thirst’ (Lowinson, 2005, p. 203). That a variety of addiction treatments may be linked both indirectly and directly to a civilizing logic is clear when even psychosocial experts frame the effi cacy of their interventions in terms of neurobiological models. Sex addiction psy- chotherapists, for example, assert that ‘suc- cessful treatment mandates the restoration of cortical control over such pre-conscious primitive motivation’ as are experienced by patients (Carnes et al, 2005, p. 100). And while a range of psychological therapies can indirectly infl uence the ‘primitive’ sys- tem, naltrexone offers a more direct civiliz- ing infl uence. As one researcher explains, in a newspaper article on naltrexone’s use in addiction treatment: ‘There’s this real battle between that lower part of the brain and the upper part. The lower part is saying, ““Yes. Do it! I want it now!” and the upper part is saying, “No. Better not”‘ [. . .] That’s where medication comes in [. . .]. Medica- tion can lower the shouting of the lower part of the brain (quoted in Powell, 1995, p. 1C). Naltrexone, as a civilizing technology, reduces the urgency of purportedly primitive impulses and allows for increased control over physiological processes associated with undesirable conduct. If it makes conceptual sense to think about addiction treatments as ‘civilizing technolo- gies’, it is by no means clear that such tech- nologies should be unequivocally endorsed. Indeed, my intention here is to provide a crit- ical assessment, rather than an endorsement, of such interventions. While Elias and addic- tion scientists may believe unquestioningly in the necessity of civilizing ‘primitive’ impulses and desires, I do not. Certainly, I think that Elias’s empirical insights into behavioural regulation, and particularly into how such forms of regulation are coproduced with new forms of technology, are useful to think with—especially given the extent to which | SCOTT VRECKO538 the theme of civilization resonates with the discourses of addiction science. But I think it best to leave aside the value judgments that Elias makes about the materials and pro- cesses he studies. Civilizing processes may be necessary for producing certain kinds of societies, but whether those kinds of societies are preferable to other ones is not a question that empirical study can answer. Indeed, as contemporary work in the fi elds of postco- lonial studies and cultural theory has con- vincingly demonstrated, the assumption that some people and cultures can possess ‘more civilization’ than others is a political, histori- cal and cultural product, and we need to be extremely careful about the kind of policies and interventions that we may wish to make in pursuit of ‘civilized’ life (cf. Said, 1995; Bederman and Stimpson, 1996; Van Krieken, 1999). Thus, my suggestion that addiction interventions may be situated within a civi- lizing logic is intended to induce a pause for critical thought; a pause to think about why we (our governing offi cials, our scientists, ourselves) so often encounter and support programmes to regulate the behaviours and emotions of some individuals in the name of ‘treatment’ and about what it exactly is that these programmes seek to do. CONCLUSION This reading has sought to build upon the important contributions that critical cultural studies have made to the interdisciplinary fi eld of addiction studies, by questioning contemporary neuroscientifi c accounts and practices that, without interrogation, might lead to addiction being taken as a bona fi de biological disease that exists independently of culture and politics. While critical social analyses of behavioural addictions have tended to be dismissive of, or unwilling to consider in a serious way, scientifi c accounts and biological aspects of human behav- iour, the approach taken here has been to avoid dismissing biology out of hand and instead to think about how developments in the biosciences—even if they cannot yield an essentially biological representation of addiction—are nevertheless involved in pro- cesses of social change and social regulation. Over the last two decades, analyses of addiction within the humanities and social sciences have convincingly demonstrated that, on a cultural level, addiction has long been (and remains) a hybrid entity. Psy- chological, spiritual and moral accounts of addiction remain potent today, and addiction continues to be conceptualized and managed in many spheres as a sort of ‘disease of the will’—a condition that is attributed to a lack of willpower, a defi ciency of character or a psychological maladaptation that impairs the capacities of self-control possessed by normal persons. Within such understand- ings, the addicted subject is not thought to be affl icted by particularly urgent cravings that are more powerful than cravings experienced by ‘normal’ individuals; instead, the problem is that the subject suffers from defi ciencies in self-control, which make her unable to ‘say no’ (to the impulses that normal people are able to resist). Although these ideas hearken back to the moral therapies of the nineteenth century, scholars such as Eve Sedgwick have powerfully demonstrated that tropes of, and anxieties about, the loss of self-control remain powerful ‘ideological codes’ in contemporary society (on ideological codes, see Smith, 1998; see also Campbell, 2010). Indeed, Sedgwick convincingly argues that issues of willpower and self-control have become increasingly salient within the anomic conditions of con- sumerist, international capitalism as a means of keeping commodity fetishism and unlim- ited trajectories of demand in check and of inducing individuals to maintain their con- sumption (of alcohol and other drugs and of all types of commodities) within a realm of controlled autonomy. However, the continuing importance of these cultural ideas about addiction does not mean that addiction, as a hybrid entity, remains unchanged. Indeed, I have suggested “CIVILIZING TECHNOLOGIES” AND THE CONTROL OF DEVIANCE | 539 that an exclusive focus on cultural and soci- etal matters may obfuscate signifi cant shifts that occur within the specifi c domains of addiction biopsychiatry and neuroscience: as indicated above, the interventions of con- temporary medicine have been formulated and justifi ed on the basis of modulating the biochemical mechanisms that produce the intense, pathological cravings that many individuals experience as overwhelming. Thus, I have argued that the contemporary brain sciences have not taken as their project the governing of wills but rather the civiliz- ing of problematic cravings and desires. 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Yeomans, M. R. and Gray, R. W. (2002) ‘Opioid Pep- tides and the Control of Human Ingestive Behaviour’. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 26(6): 713–728. http://www.camh.net/Publications/Cross_Currents/Winter_2003/medsforgambling_crcuwinter0304.html http://www.camh.net/Publications/Cross_Currents/Winter_2003/medsforgambling_crcuwinter0304.html Connections Biomedicalization of Drug Addiction and the Reproduction of Inequality Tammy L. Anderson and Philip R. Kavanaugh INTRODUCTION In this reading we discuss the relationship among biomedicalization, inequality, and drug addiction, specifi cally to opiates, to inform possible developments in the future of deviance in our society. If the medicalization of deviance means that nonnormal traits, behaviors, and conditions are defi ned using medical language and viewed from a medical perspective (see Section 4), then we can understand biomedicalization as a next step or biologically based efforts and innovations to “fi x” those traits, behaviors, and conditions (Clarke et al. 2003). By discussing biomedicalization across a range of behaviors and conditions, the read- ings in Section 12 forecast some interesting possibilities for the study of deviance and raise important questions concerning the persistence of discrimination and inequality that have characterized it throughout time. For example, if opiate addiction (e.g., Oxycontin, Vicodin, Percocet, and heroin) is defi ned medically—that is, as a brain disease (National Institute on Drug Abuse [NIDA] 2007)—then isn’t it best treated through medications that cater to the individual addict, rather than punishment by the criminal justice system? Will such treat- ments be available to all addicts or will there be differences among them? Specifi cally, we review two medication-assisted treatments (MATs)—methadone and buprenorphine (trade name Suboxone)—for opiate addiction to inform the relationship among biomedicalization, deviance, and inequality. It is motivated not only by the trends and observations Dworkin (2001) and Vrecko (2010) address but also by past attempts to medicalize addiction (Anderson, Lane, and Swan, 2010; Hansen and Roberts 2012) and the resulting inequality and discrimination experienced by addicts. Our reading asks the reader to think critically about the impact of biomedicalization on deviance and inequality and in light of the broader observation by esteemed drug historian David Courtwright (2001: 4), who notes, “What we think about addiction very much depends on who is addicted.” Consider two opiate addicts—Primo and Adam—who are trying to get their lives back together after years of debilitating consequences from drugs. Their stories highlight our key themes of biomedicalization, deviance, and inequality. Primo is a 20-something Hispanic male who transitioned from a crack dealer and recreational heroin user to a legitimate blue- collar worker, addicted to heroin and looking for a MAT to regain control over his life. In the passage below, ethnographer Bourgois (2000: 166) describes Primo’s experiences with methadone: 543CONNECTIONS | Primo began sniffi ng two $10 bags of heroin every weekday before and during work, and six-to- eight bags each weekend to celebrate. When Primo’s union laid him off at the end of the summer he suddenly ran out of money and discovered that he “had a monkey—King Kong—on [his] back.” He attempted to quit “cold turkey,” but two days later in the midst of wrenching opiate withdrawal symptoms he received a phone call from the union offering to rehire him. In order not to lose this opportunity for well-remunerated—even if unstable—legal employment, Primo immediately enrolled in the methadone clinic that was located next to the luxury condominium where he mopped and hauled garbage. Because Primo was legally employed, the methadone clinic offered him prefer- ential hours—a 45-minute window of time—to receive his medication, during his lunch hour. For the next three years, Primo became a very stable porter despite the fact that he was laid off for at least 2 weeks every three months in order to prevent him from qualifying for seniority and health benefi ts. Because of his methadone addiction, Primo would travel downtown past his site of employ- ment every day at lunch hour to continue receiving his medication even during the weeks when he was laid off. This relationship between Primo’s methadone addiction and his reliability at work fell apart when his conveniently located methadone clinic closed down due to budget cuts and neighbor- hood gentrifi cation. He began arriving late from his lunch break due to the distant commute to his new ghetto-located clinic. On the Web site of The National Alliance of Advocates for Buprenorphine Treatment (NAABT 2013), we can read Adam’s story. While his age and race/ethnicity are unclear, certain markers in his story indicate he has a higher social class standing than Primo. For example, he talks about losing a precious and expensive family heirloom to his addiction and burning through a large tax refund to fi nance his addiction to pain pills. The clearest indica- tor of his more privileged class position and difference from Primo, however, is how his story is packaged neatly within the U.S. healthcare system where his efforts to stop using opiates are supervised by doctors in private practice. An excerpt from Adam’s story provides a stark contrast to Primo’s: Three days into withdrawals I was so lost and depressed. I started searching the internet for any- thing that could help me. I had used a lot of methadone off the street, but I knew that was not a direction that I wanted to go. In-patient rehab was an absolute last resort that would have destroyed my job and hurt those around me. I was going to beat this thing or take my own life if I couldn’t. I then came across the naabt.org forum. People there gave me direction. I found an excellent doctor (neurologist/psychologist—a gift from God for me) with a real understanding of addiction and Sub- oxone therapy. No games, no lies and no blind enthusiasm. He clearly explained what sub does, and told me, in no uncertain terms, that the success or failure of this treatment was up to me. Suboxone could only help me cure my addiction in the long run if I was determined to do so. In terms of trad- ing one addiction for another, my doctor explained it like this: “You are trading addictive behavior for medical behavior, and this therapy will give you the chance to address the true causes of your addiction” (NAABT 2013). The class-based differences between Primo and Adam are not isolated cases. Reporting on opiate addiction in NYC, Bourdet (2012) concluded, “Opiate maintenance treatment is a tale of two cultures. People who can afford Suboxone get to keep their addiction private. People who are restricted to methadone clinics pay the price of stigma.” Her research was based on a buprenorphine study in NYC that found MATs like Suboxone are based largely on the depth of the addicts’ pocketbook, rather than the severity of their addiction. Assessing what these stories can teach us about biomedicalization, deviance, and inequality today fi rst requires a brief discussion of the evolution of medicalization in society. http://naabt.org | TAMMY L. ANDERSON AND PHILIP R. KAVANAUGH544 MEDICALIZATION, BIOMEDICALIZATION, AND INEQUALITY The enormous growth of medicine over the last half-century is hailed by many citizens as simple evidence of scientifi c progress. However, the rise of the medical industry—as seen in the increased prestige of fi elds such as psychiatry as well as the increased use of pharmaceuti- cal drugs—must also be viewed as a signifi cant change in how conditions and behaviors are defi ned in our society. By medicalizing, or recasting, certain deviant behaviors as medical conditions—such as the misuse of alcohol or drugs as “alcoholism” or “drug addiction,” or hyperactivity or child misbehavior as “ADHD” or “conduct disorder”—their perceived causes shift from the irresponsible or immoral behavior of an individual to that of a medical illness, disease, or condition requiring treatment. This is what Conrad and Schneider (1992) note as a transformation in defi ning deviance “from badness to sickness.” While recasting deviant behaviors as medical conditions may be useful in managing stigma and easing reintegration into society (Goffman 1963), as the medical industry continues to expand, the number of stigmatizable conditions has grown right along with it! Clarke and colleagues (2003) contend this marks the beginnings of the biomedicalization era, an era where physical differences between our bodies have become pathologized but ultimately cor- rectable, with one of the many available technoscientifi c products or procedures. Undesirable physical features can now be altered with plastic surgery; obesity with stomach stapling; erectile dysfunction in older persons with pharmaceutical drugs such as Viagra or Cialis. In the biomedical era it is our bodies—not just behavior—that can be labeled deviant. Yet West- ern biomedicine holds the promise of correcting the deviant aspects of our selves physiologi- cally, masking our defi ciencies with new and ever-emerging medical interventions, allowing us to pass as normal (Goffman 1963). Biomedicalization is a shift from enhanced control over the external world around us to a transformation of our internal biology, or selves (Rose 2007; Vrecko 2010). Moreover, unlike mechanisms of formal social control, such as law, medication is often a voluntary or desired (and so more effective) form of control, directed at the self, by the self—with the encouragement of our trusted family doctors. As Dworkin (2001: 90) notes: Even though mental-health professionals are more experienced in treating depression, patients do not want to be referred to a psychiatrist or therapist for fear of the stigma attached . . . For this reason, they insist on being treated in the primary-care setting, where expertise in managing mental illness is not great . . . The result is an increased use of psychotropic medication in cases of everyday emotional trouble. But, as sociologists have long noted, stratifi cation (i.e., the dividing of a society, and its people, into hierarchical levels based on power or socioeconomic status) and inequality occur at all levels of society (Massey 2009), and the medical realm is certainly no exception. While medicine has continually expanded into new areas of life, new forms of drug treatment—like MATs for opiate addiction—and other medical innovations have long been made available to “white middle- and upper-class groups, while punitive and exclusionary tendencies . . . have prevailed for people of color and the poor” (Clarke et al. 2003: 170). So, the latest cutting- edge biomedical treatments are available only to those with the fi nancial resources (i.e., private insurance—see Bourdet 2012 and the case of Adam described above) to access them. While the most vulnerable and disadvantaged segments of society are denied access to the latest biomedical advances, pharmaceuticals and medication have become increasingly wide- spread among more affl uent groups. In fact, they are often deemed necessary to keep up with the demands and expectations of our society. The use of psychotropic medication for those 545CONNECTIONS | with attention defi cit problems (Loe and Cuttino 2008) or mental health problems like depres- sion or mood disorders—as referenced by Dworkin (2001)—has risen precipitously over the last two decades. In fact, the readings in this section both note that biomedicine is an expand- ing industry, featuring a growing number of diagnosable disorders. Dworkin (2001: 86) notes: In the past, medical science cared for the mentally ill, while everyday unhappiness was left to reli- gious, spiritual, or other cultural guides. Now, medical science is moving beyond its traditional border to help people who are bored, sad, or experiencing low self-esteem—in other words, people who are suffering from nothing more than life [itself]. Biomedicine, therefore, becomes the latest site for stratifi cation in society, one where class- and race-based inequalities could be perpetuated. We contend that stratifi ed biomedicaliza- tion (Clarke et al. 2003) and the attendant class- and race-based inequality are especially visible in the area of drug addiction and has remained so over time despite claims to the contrary. BIOMEDICALIZATION, INEQUALITY, AND DRUG ADDICTION After more than a century of debate about addiction being a criminal or medical matter (Campbell 2000; Courtwright 2010), the harsh criminal policies for drugs that prevailed in the latter 20th century are giving way to a medical or disease approach based on the neu- roscience of drug addiction (Anderson, Swan, and Lane 2010). Its proponents claim it will provide better and more humane treatment for all, including reduced stigma and discrimina- tion toward addicts. Nora Volkow (2009), director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, recently told the U.S. Congress: Recent scientifi c advances have revolutionized our understanding of drug abuse and addiction, which is now recognized as a chronic relapsing brain disease expressed in the form of compulsive behaviors. This understanding has improved our ability to both prevent and treat addiction. And in a 2007 speech to the U.S. Congress, then senator Joe Biden claimed: Addiction is a neurobiological disease, not a lifestyle choice, and it’s about time we start treating it as such. By changing the way we talk about addiction, we change the way people think about addiction, both of which are critical steps in getting past the social stigma too often associated with the disease. 1 Medical experts’ discovery that drug craving is rooted in a disordered brain has opened the doors to treating opiate addicts with pharmaceuticals like methadone and Suboxone. And they soon began using the latest psychotropic medications to control an ever-widening array of undesirable behaviors, such as gambling and overeating, for example (Vrecko 2010). However, experts soon realized these drug treatments didn’t work for all those who had addictions. Rather than addressing possible problems with MATs such as methadone and Suboxone, experts decided that only certain “types” of addicts were treatable in this man- ner and so developed more nuanced classifi cations of addicts based on differences in their brain functioning—rather than emphasizing the similarity of their deviant behaviors. Vrecko (2010) refers to biomedical interventions—such as methadone and Suboxone—not as “treat- ments” but rather as “civilizing technologies” because they are “used as a means of producing | TAMMY L. ANDERSON AND PHILIP R. KAVANAUGH546 states in which individuals are healthier, more responsible, and more able to adhere to the duties, expectations and obligations of their families and societies. That is, a state in which individuals are better citizens” (Vrecko 2010: 45). Adam personifi es this viewpoint. Subox- one “civilizes” him within the auspices of the private health care industry. Meanwhile, Primo and the poor opiate addicts Bourdet (2012) studied in NYC fi nd themselves lodged in the publicly funded and stigmatized methadone maintenance system or, in some cases, under the control of the criminal justice system. The neuroscience approach currently dominating talk about addiction gained momentum during the 1990s Decade of the Brain (Leshner 1997). “Indeed, on the basis of emerging evidence that activation of the dopamine system is the common denominator of all compul- sions . . . we might think of crack heads, heroin junkies, pathological gamblers and others likewise addicted to the pleasure-inducing chemicals in their brains in similar terms: as ‘dopa- mine heads’ ” (Vrecko 2010: 39). This move to a newer biomedical explanation follows a cen- tury of debate over the causes and solutions to drug addiction. For example, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, both heroin and cocaine were hailed as effective medical treatments (Brecher 1972). Both drugs, however, soon became the focus of moral and legal crusades as abuse and addiction to them spread dramatically (Courtwright 2001). Another impor- tant part of these campaigns was race and class-based scapegoating, featuring the defi nition of poor Chinese opium and black cocaine addicts as criminals wreaking havoc on middle- class white society (Musto 1999). The result—the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914, which would effectively defi ne opiate and cocaine addicts as junkies and criminals. Since the early 1900s, addiction to opiates (e.g., heroin) and cocaine has been defi ned as a criminal matter—and those addicted to them as junkies. This criminalization model was dramatically expanded by Presidents Nixon, Reagan, G. H. Bush, and Clinton into a full-out war on drugs in the last quarter of the 20th century. As a result, both heroin and cocaine addicts have been heavily stigmatized in society and have encountered sharp social control tactics administered by a punitive criminal justice system (Provine 2007). But while the punitive criminal justice response was dominating the American public’s consciousness about illegal drugs and drug addicts in the latter 20th century, there was also a growing sense among experts and stakeholders that addiction was best handled by the medi- cal profession through treatment, in varying forms—including cognitive-behavioral, as well as pharmacological-biomedical. The phrase “medicated-assisted treatment” (MAT) refers to the biotechnologies that treat individual drug addiction, specifi cally to federally regulated, but legal, opioid preparations such as Oxycontin, Percocet, and Vicodin—as well as strictly illegal ones (e.g., heroin). According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Association (SAMHSA): MAT is the use of medications, in combination with counseling and behavioral therapies, to provide a whole-patient approach to the treatment of substance use disorders. Research shows that when treating substance-use disorders, a combination of medication and behavioral therapies is most suc- cessful. (2013: 1) METHADONE’S “ADDICTS” VERSUS SUBOXONE’S “PATIENTS” The two most popular MATs used to treat opiate addiction today are methadone mainte- nance treatment (MMT) and opiate substitution using buprenorphine, trade name Suboxone or Subcutex. Methadone has been the primary biomedical treatment for opiate addiction, 547CONNECTIONS | specifi cally heroin addiction, since the 1960s and 1970s (Dole and Nyswander 1967). It is classifi ed as a Schedule 2 drug by the federal government, which means its distribution is controlled by the Feds and cannot be administered privately by physicians. Instead, it is disbursed at small hospital-like clinics under strict federal control and subsidy. These clinics (often located in low-income, high-crime urban areas) sit on the edge of medicalization and criminalization of addiction or what Conrad and Schneider (1992: 218) refer to as a kind of “medical–legal hybrid,” with both clinical and criminal justice jurisdiction. Importantly, methadone clinics are not staffed by primary-care physicians and have limited medical staff. Harris and McElrath (2012: 813) studied sentiments about heroin addicts on methadone and found the following: Individuals who held power over methadone provision often framed client identities around the master status of “addict.” 2 Furthermore, methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) clients were treated as addicts regardless of their stage of recovery. The saliency of this identity was manifested through (a) rules and regulations that equated addicts with deviants and criminals, (b) contractual power differentials, (c) labels that incorporated a clean/dirty dichotomy, and (d) clients’ lack of input into treatment decisions. Bourgois (2000: 170) describes that people view Primo in a similar manner: As Primo’s addiction illustrates, MMT is often experienced as a hostile and/or arbitrary forum for social control and enforced dependency among street addicts. It seeps into the fabric of one’s most intimate relationships, distorting (in Primo’s case) respectful interaction with children, wives, and intellectual friends. And, since Primo believes methadone users are viewed as “broken down, toothless garbage heads” (Bourgois 2000: 180), it sounds as if he buys into the stereotype adopted by the wider society. As mentioned, buprenorphine is another MAT for opiate addiction that often goes by the trade name of Suboxone. As a trade brand, Suboxone has its own private company and Web site 3 and is used, primarily, to treat people—like Adam—addicted to prescription opiates like Oxycontin, Vicodin, and Percocet. It is intended as a long-term treatment for opiate depen- dence and medical experts recommended it as part of a comprehensive response to addiction that also features counseling and other forms of social support. Suboxone was released to the public in 2002 as a Schedule 3 drug, which means pharmacists and doctors can fi ll prescrip- tions in private healthcare settings. To date, nearly 10,000 physicians have taken the training needed to prescribe Suboxone and other buprenorphine analogs (National Institute on Drug Abuse 2006). Both Suboxone and methadone are used to treat patients with opiate dependency or addic- tion. Suboxone is a partial opiate agonist (i.e., its effects are limited even when taken in large doses) but methadone is a full opiate agonist. The implications of this are that Suboxone is harder to abuse so patients are allowed to take it home. Conversely, methadone is more eas- ily abused, so addicts often start treatment by having to go to a clinic each day to take their medication. In later stages of the treatment they are allowed take-home doses of methadone but usually only a week’s worth. Suboxone is believed to work best for shorter-term addic- tion to opiates, while methadone is found to be more effective with heavier and longer-term opiate addicts. Additionally, the withdrawal symptoms from Suboxone are less intense, and there is also a diminished risk of overdose compared to methadone. | TAMMY L. ANDERSON AND PHILIP R. KAVANAUGH548 IMPLICATIONS OF STRATIFICATION AND INEQUALITY IN ADDICTION Recall that addicts have been alternatively cast as patients and junkies over time. It is our contention that medicalization and biomedicalization reproduce these images and perpetu- ate a stratifi ed system of inequality between them. “Patients” are viewed as having a disease, often with biological origins, that requires medical treatment. “Junkies,” on the other hand, are morally depraved and dangerous. They must be socially controlled—often with punitive criminal justice policies—because of their deviant lifestyles (Agar 1977; Bourgois 2000). The signifi cance of medicalizing some opiate addicts and criminalizing others is likely to become even more problematic, we maintain, with biomedical responses. First, addicts rendered patients might receive MATs and avoid legal sanctions—an example of Vrecko’s (2010) “civilizing technology”—while others could be viewed as junkies and processed through the criminal justice system, which may be conceptualized as a “ de civilizing” process (Elias 2000). Second, all opiate addicts might be defi ned in some respect as patients suffering a dis- ease, but some, like Adam, have greater access to a preferred MAT that protects them from stigma, discrimination, and other complications. While Bourdet (2012) discusses class-based inequalities in MATs for opiate addiction, another likely discrepancy is in the racial breakdown of the addict population. Sociologists have noted, for example, racial disparities in health care and across conditions other than addiction despite increased medicalization in society (Acker 2002). A study by Nunn and colleagues (2009) specifi cally found that MATs such as methadone and buprenorphine are, in general, unavailable to prisoners, who are disproportionately black and Hispanic. More to the point is a study by Acker (2010). In Pittsburgh’s Hill District, she found lower-income and disproportionately black addicts were treated as criminals (i.e., arrested and incarcer- ated) while wealthier white addicts—who purchased drugs in the Hill District—were sent to rehabilitation programs rather than prison. The two-tiered system of public and private treatment—discussed above—is well- documented in social science. Researchers have found addicts treated in publicly funded programs get lower-quality services than those attending privately funded ones (Sullivan et al. 2005). In light of this reality, Knudsen, Ducharme, and Roman (2006) warn that since Suboxone is more expensive than methadone and is more often made available to opiate addicts through prescription by primary-care physicians, inequality between public and pri- vate treatment programs may persist, with the heavily stigmatized methadone being the MAT of choice in public programs that service poor and minority addicts. In her doctoral disserta- tion research on drug treatment programs, Laura Monico (2011) also found that MATs for opiate addiction play out along two lines, reproducing inequality: heroin users were treated with MMT (the more stigmatized form of MAT), while prescription opiate addicts were treated with Suboxone (a less stigmatized and newer medication). CONCLUSION In this reading we have argued that cutting-edge biomedical technologies that promise to rede- fi ne “badness as sickness” (Conrad and Schneider 1992) or “civilize” deviants (Vrecko 2010) might instead reproduce stratifi cation in society and inequality among groups. We reviewed past and current thinking and policies about opiate addiction to make our case. Since history 549CONNECTIONS | has shown that addiction has been viewed as a disease for some and a hedonistic or criminal behavior for others, a few questions become relevant for the study of deviance as biomedi- calization gains evermore momentum in society: (1) For what types of deviant behavior and individuals will biomedical explanations and frameworks apply? (2) To what extent will bio- medical interventions lead to stratifi ed systems of treatment for addicts and other deviants? (3) How will biomedical responses to deviance impact stigma, citizenship, and social control? Experts, stakeholders, and institutions involved in biomedical campaigns, such as the National Institute of Drug Abuse, believe that defi ning and treating opiate addiction as a medical disease will not only help reduce the physiological consequences of addiction but also the stigma and social suffering addicts face in society. Their efforts are humane and should be commended. At this point in time, however, we can see some familiar inequalities perpetuated as a result of biomedicalization. Available evidence on private treatment groups or government agencies shows a bifur- cated system emerging where prescription opiate addiction to Oxycodone, Vicodin, and so forth—emanating from the treatment of pain—are treated with Suboxone and the experience is medicalized by private health agencies and doctor’s offi ces. Addiction here is viewed as a medical condition in more affl uent areas among middle-class whites, especially when abuse of legal drugs such as Oxycontin or Percocet lead to heroin addiction. This is Adam’s story. This more benevolent image holds even when those legal drugs are used in ways not pre- scribed and/or are obtained through criminal or deviant channels. Unlike Primo, Adam and other privileged addicts can escape the stigma of the methadone clinic. Conversely, opiate addiction is often constructed as a social problem in poor areas popu- lated with minority groups, especially with those addicts—like Primo—who did not get into heroin via prescribed pain medication. In fact, addiction is more likely to be viewed as a social problem when the drugs involved are illicit or illegal for anyone to have (Campbell 2010; Kushner 2010). Such addicts are more likely to be defi ned as junkies—culpable, in some ways, for their deviance. They are viewed through a hybrid lens (Conrad and Schneider 1992) that prioritizes criminal justice interventions or dubious and stigmatized medical treat- ments such as methadone. The medicalization of drug addiction and the classifi cation of addiction as a brain dis- ease promises benefi cial results for addicts by defi ning them as patients to be treated and rehabilitated. This narrative is a refreshing change from the criminalized narrative that gov- erned approaches to drug misuse throughout the 20th century. Acker (2002) noted that the development of methadone maintenance to treat heroin addiction took place at the same time white middle-class heroin use began escalating, in the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, poor, minority heroin addicts—like Primo—fi nd themselves treated at the heavily stigma- tized government-sponsored methadone clinics while middle-class white “hillbilly heroin” 4 addicts—like Adam—get treated with Suboxone in the privacy of a doctor’s offi ce. An important question to consider, then, is if other medicalized types of deviance will also feature stratifi ed biomedical interventions and resulting inequality between those affl icted. Answering this question will require sociologists to pay closer attention to the relationship between biomedical trends and their impact on deviance and inequality in the future. CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS 1. Although defi nitions of addiction have changed to emphasize the causal role of one’s disordered brain functioning, Conrad and Schneider (1992: 218) have argued that drug | TAMMY L. ANDERSON AND PHILIP R. KAVANAUGH550 addiction remains a kind of “medical–legal hybrid.” For example, in 2011, roughly half of all federal prison inmates were serving time for a nonviolent drug offense. Why do you think this number remains so high, even in the biomedical era? Why is drug misuse still criminalized to such a sharp degree? 2. In 2001, Portugal became the fi rst European nation to abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession, use, and sale of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and meth. Jail time was replaced with therapy. An independent study found that fi ve years after decriminalization, illegal drug use among Portuguese teens declined substantially, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled. Do you suppose such a policy would be effective in the United States, Canada, or other Western nations? Defend your position. 3. One of the key points we argue is that the biomedicalization of drug addiction has reproduced inequality due to differential access to the best treatments. Scholars contend that the biomedical era is relatively new, tracing its origin to the early to mid-1990s. Has there simply not been enough time for medical scientists to develop effective medicines for different kinds of drug addictions? Do you think the inequality we currently see in addictions treatment will attenuate or worsen as biomedicalization advances? Why? NOTES 1. From NIDA Director Reports, 2008 (February), retrieved January 11, 2010, http://www.drugabuse.gov/ DirReports/DirRep208/DirectorReport14.html. 2. In this case the word addict denotes the stigmatized label of “junkie.” 3. Retrieved February 2, 2013, http://www.suboxone.com/. 4. 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Oxford: Blackwell. http://www.drugabuse.gov/DirReports/DirRep208/DirectorReport14.html http://www.suboxone.com/ http://www.thefix.com/content/methadone-Suboxone-stigma-maintence-treatment8555?page=all http://www.thefix.com/content/methadone-Suboxone-stigma-maintence-treatment8555?page=all http://www.drugabuse.gov/DirReports/DirRep208/DirectorReport14.html 551CONNECTIONS | Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity . New York: Simon & Schuster. Hansen, Helena, and Samuel K. Roberts. 2012. “Two Tiers of Biomedicalization: Methadone, Buprenorphine, and the Racial Politics of Addiction Treatment.” Advances in Medical Sociology 14: 79–102. Harris, Julie and McElrath, Karen. 2012. “Methadone as Social Control: Institutionalized Stigma and the Prospect of Recovery.” Qualitative Health Research 22(6): 810–824. Knudsen, Hannah, Ducharme, Laura, and Roman, Paul. 2006. “Early Adoption of Buprenorphine in Substance Abuse Treatment Centers: Data from the Private and Public Sectors.” Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment 30: 363–373. Kushner, Howard L. 2010. “Toward a Cultural Biology of Addiction.” BioSocieties 5(1): 8–24. Leshner, Alan I. 1997. “Addiction is a Brain Disease, and It Matters.” Science 278(5335): 45–47. Loe, Meika and Cuttino, Leigh. 2008. “Grappling with the Medicated Self: The Case of ADHD College Students.” Symbolic Interaction 31(3): 303–323. Massey, Douglas S. 2009. “Racial Formation in Theory and Practice: The Case of Mexicans in the United States.” Race and Social Problems 1(1): 12–26. Musto, David. 1999. The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control . 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. National Alliance of Advocates for Buprenorphine Treatment (NAABT). 2013. “Education: Patient Stories.” Retrieved March 8, 2013, http://www.naabt.org/buprenorphine-treatment-stories/trading-addictions.cfm. National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). 2006. “Topics in Brief: Buprenorphine: Treatment for Opiate Addiction Right in the Doctors Offi ce.” Retrieved February 12, 2013, http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/topics-in- brief/buprenorphine-treatment-opiate-addiction-right-in-doctors-offi ce . National Institute on Drug Abuse. 2007. Drugs, Brains, and Behavior: The Science of Addiction , NIH 07-5605 . Washington, DC: National Institutes of Health. Nunn, Amy, Zaller, Nikolas, Dickman, Samuel, Trimbur, Catherine, Nijhawan, Anka, and Rich, Josiah D. 2009. “Corrigendum to ‘Methadone and Buprenorphine Prescribing and Referral Practices in U.S. Prison Systems: Results from a Nationwide Survey.” Drug & Alcohol Dependence 105(1–2): 83–88. Provine, Doris. 2007. Unequal Under the Law: Race and the War on Drugs . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rose, Nikolas. 2007. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Association (SAMHSA). 2013. “About Medicated Assisted Treat- ment.” Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, Rockville, MD. Retrieved May 9, 2013, http://dpt.samhsa.gov/patients/ mat.aspx. Sullivan, Lynn E., Chawarski, Marek, O’Connor, Patrick G., Schottenfeld, Richard S., and Fiellin, David A. 2005. “The Practice of Offi ce-Based Buprenorphine Treatment of Opioid Dependence: Is It Associated with New Patients Entering into Treatment?” Drug & Alcohol Dependence 79(1): 113–116. Volkow, Nora. 2009. “Fiscal Year 2010 Budget Request Before the Senate Subcommittee on Labor-HHS-Education Appropriations.” Testimony to U.S. Congress, May 21, 2009. Vrecko, Scott. 2010. “Civilizing Technologies and the Control of Deviance.” BioSocieties 5(1): 36–51. http://www.naabt.org/buprenorphine-treatment-stories/trading-addictions.cfm http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/topics-in-brief/buprenorphine-treatment-opiate-addiction-right-in-doctors-office http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/topics-in-brief/buprenorphine-treatment-opiate-addiction-right-in-doctors-office http://dpt.samhsa.gov/patients/mat.aspx http://dpt.samhsa.gov/patients/mat.aspx This page intentionally left blank Robert Agnew is the Samuel Chandler Dobbs Professor of Sociology at Emory University and served as president of the American Society of Criminology. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and his main research interests are criminology and juvenile delinquency. Howard S. Becker (1928–) is an American sociologist who has made major contributions to the sociology of deviance, sociology of art, and sociology of music. His 1963 book, Outsiders , provided the foundations for labeling theory. Nachman Ben-Yehuda is a professor and former dean of the department of sociology and anthropology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. His work includes Sacrifi cing Truth and Moral Panics: The Social Construc- tion of Deviance (with Erich Goode). Joel Best is professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on deviance and social problems, along with awards, prizes, and honors in American culture. He is a former president of the Midwest Sociological Society and the Society for the Study of Social Problems and a former editor of the journal Social Problems . Cathy J. Cohen is the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Her work includes Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics , The Boundaries of Black- ness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics , and Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader (with Kathleen Jones and Joan Tronto). Stanley Cohen (1942–2013) was professor of sociology at the London School of Economics. He was a major con- tributor to the fi elds of criminology and sociology and is credited with coining the term moral panic in his 1972 study, Folk Devils and Moral Panics . Peter Conrad is Harry Coplan Professor of Social Sciences and chair of the Health, Science, Society, and Policy program at Brandeis University. He is a medical sociologist who has researched and published on several topics including ADHD, the medicalization of deviance, and the experience of illness. His most recent book is The Medi- calization of Society . Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) was a French sociologist who formally established the academic discipline. He is commonly known as the father of sociology. Ronald W. Dworkin is a practicing physician who also holds a PhD in political science from Johns Hopkins Univer- sity. Widely published, he is the author of The Rise of the Imperial Self and Artifi cial Happiness . Kai T. Erikson (1931–) is an American sociologist whose research revolved around the social consequences of cata- strophic events. His work includes Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance , Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood , and A New Species of Trouble: Explorations in Disaster, Trauma, and Community . CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES | CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES554 Amin Ghaziani is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia. He earned his PhD in sociology and organization behavior from Northwestern University and principally researches sexualities, though he often connects this with culture, social movements, and cities. Erving Goffman (1922–1982) was a Canadian-born sociologist who was very infl uential in the 20th century. One of his major contributions to social theory was his study of symbolic interaction in the form of dramaturgical analysis, which he began in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life . His work also includes Asylums , Stigma , Interaction Ritual , Frame Analysis, and Forms of Talk. Erich Goode is an American sociologist who teaches at the University of Maryland. He received his PhD from Columbia University and specializes in the sociology of deviance. His work includes Marijuana Smokers , Drugs in American Society , and Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance (with Nachman Ben-Yehuda). Ryken Grattet is professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis and a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. He received his PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his areas of specialization include law, deviance, organizations, methods, criminology, and public policy. John M. Hagedorn is an associate professor in the Criminal Justice Department at the University of Illinois– Chicago. He was principal investigator of a fi ve-year National Institute on Drug Abuse study of male and female gangs, drug abuse, and drug dealing. His published work includes Forsaking Our Children: Bureaucracy and Reform in the Child Welfare System and People & Folks, Gangs, Crime, and the Underclass in a Rustbelt City . Katherine Jones is a graduate student in sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her interests include gender, sexuality, culture, and intersectional analysis. Nikki Jones is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her PhD in sociology and criminology from the University of Pennsylvania, and her areas of expertise include urban ethnography, urban sociology, race and ethnic relations, and criminology and criminal justice. Her published work includes Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence , and she is coeditor of Sociolo- gists Backstage: Answers to 10 Questions About What They Do (with Sarah Fenstermaker). Miliann Kang is a professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she also teaches sociology and Asian American studies. She received her PhD from New York University, and her research interests include the social construction of race, class, and gender, sociology of the body, and emotional labor and service interactions. John I. Kitsuse (1923–2003) was an American sociologist who contributed to the sociology of social problems, criminology, and deviance. He is known for his pioneering work in studying social problems as social constructions, which resulted in his book, Constructing Social Problems (with Malcolm Spector). John H. Laub is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, College Park. His interests include crime and deviance over the life course, juvenile delin- quency and juvenile justice, and the history of criminology. In 2011 he was awarded, along with Robert J. Sampson, the Stockholm Prize in Criminology for work on how and why offenders stop offending. Edwin Lemert (1912–1996) was an American sociologist who developed the idea of primary and secondary devia- tion as a way to explain the process of labeling. He received his PhD from Ohio State University and taught at several university, including University of California, Davis. His work includes Social Pathology: A Systematic Approach to the Theory of Sociopathic Behavior , Social Action and Legal Change , and Instead of Court: Diversion in Juvenile Justice . Stephen Lyng is professor of sociology and criminal justice at Carthage College. He received his PhD from the Uni- versity of Texas at Austin, and specializes in medical sociology, social theory, social psychology, and the sociology of risk. He is author of Edgework: The Sociology of Risk Taking . Henry D. McKay (1899–1980) was an American sociologist who, along with Clifford R. Shaw, conducted, using oral history, some of the fi rst systematic, empirical, sociological interpretations of the problem of juvenile delinquency. CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES | 555 Robert K. Merton (1910–2003) was an American sociologist. Merton served as professor at Columbia University and in 1994 won the National Medal of Science for his contributions to the fi eld and for founding the sociology of science. Lee F. Monaghan is senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Limerick, Ireland. He has written extensively on issues relating to male embodiment, including work published previously in Body & Society . His current project uses embodied sociology to engage with recent debates on (male) obesity. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927–2003) was an American politician and sociologist. From 1975 to 2000, he was the senior United States Senator from New York. He was also the author of numerous books, including Pandemonium: Ethnicity and International Politics (1993). Sharon S. Oselin is an assistant professor of sociology at California State University, Los Angeles. She earned her PhD in sociology from the University of California, Irvine, and her research focuses predominately on sex workers, specifi cally street prostitutes, and antiwar movements. Anthony M. Platt is professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento. His work includes The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency , The Politics of Riot Commissions, 1917–1970 , and E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered . Victor M. Rios is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include juvenile justice, social control, race, dignity, resilience, and educational equity. He is also author of Punished: Policing Lives of Black and Latino Boys . Robert J. Sampson is Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard University and director of the social sci- ences at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2008 and served as president of the American Society of Criminology from 2011 to 2012. Widely published, he is the author of Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect , the culmination of over a decade of research based on the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN). In 2011 he was awarded, along with John H. Laub, the Stockholm Prize in Criminology for work on how and why offenders stop offending. Clifford R. Shaw (1895–1957) was an American sociologist who, along with Henry D. McKay, conducted, using oral history, some of the fi rst systematic, empirical, sociological interpretations of the problem of juvenile delinquency. Jonathan Simon is the Adrian A. Kragen Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the role of criminal justice and punishment in modern societies and insurance and other contemporary forms of governing risk. His published work includes Poor Discipline: Parole and the Social Control of the Under- class, 1890–1990 and Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear . Yvette Taylor is a professor at London South Bank University, where she is head of the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research. Her work includes Working-Class Lesbian Life: Classed Outsiders and Lesbian and Gay Parents: Social and Educational Capitals . Sheldon Ungar is a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto. His research involves real-world events that have produced social scares, including the nuclear arms race, emerging diseases, and global climate change. Valli Rajah is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She received her PhD from Columbia University, and her research interests include women’s experience of partner violence, social stratifi cation, and qualitative research methodologies. Victor Hugo Viesca is a professor of California State University, Los Angeles. He received his PhD from New York University, and his research draws from the fi elds of ethnic studies, urban studies, and cultural studies. He is also cofounder of the urban art and skateboard company UN SK8’s. Scott Vrecko is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Exeter, where his work focuses on political, social, and economic aspects of the life sciences, especially those relating to mental health and illness. | CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES556 CONNECTIONS CONTRIBUTORS Tammy L. Anderson is a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware. Her recent books Rave Culture: The Alteration and Decline of a Philadelphia Music Scene , Sex, Drugs, and Death and Neither Villain nor Victim: Empowerment and Agency among Women Substance Abusers (Rutgers University Press), along with her many peer-reviewed papers on substance abuse, crime, and music scenes, showcase her range of scholarship in the areas of deviance, culture, and social control. Emily Bonistall is a doctoral student at the University of Delaware. She earned her BA from the University of Dayton in 2009 and her MA from the University of Delaware in 2012. Her research interests generally include gender, devi- ance, and culture, with a specifi c focus on sexual violence prevention. John J. Brent is a doctoral student at the University of Delaware in the department of sociology and criminal justice. After completing his undergraduate studies at Northern Kentucky University, he completed his MA in Criminal Justice at Eastern Kentucky University. His recent work focuses on the structural and cultural trends of transgressive behavior, building a theoretical foundation for criminal justice theory, and the methodological trends in criminology. His work has been published in a book and several peer-reviewed journals including the British Journal of Criminol- ogy , Justice Quarterly , the Journal of Criminal Justice , and the Journal of Criminal Justice Education . Philip R. Kavanaugh is an assistant professor of criminal justice at Pennsylvania State Harrisburg. Dr. Kavanaugh earned his MA and PhD in sociology from the University of Delaware with substantive emphases in theory and deviance. A former graduate research fellow with the National Institute of Justice, his doctoral project examined how contextual, situational, and dispositional factors coalesce to shape physical and sexual assault outcomes among young adults with active night lives. Related publications have appeared in Feminist Criminology , Adicciones , Deviant Behavior , and Sociological Quarterly . He maintains interests in crime and deviance, sociological theory, and qualitative methods. Aaron Kupchik is professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware. His research focuses on the punishment of youth in schools, courts, and correctional facilities. He is the author of Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear and Judging Juveniles: Prosecuting Adolescents in Adult and Juvenile Courts , and he is a past recipient of the American Society of Criminology Michael J. Hindelang Award and the American Society of Criminology Ruth Shonle Cavan Young Scholar Award. David Lane holds a doctorate from the University of Delaware. He is currently an assistant professor of sociology at the University of South Dakota. His research interests include issues within deviance, collective behavior, identity, and culture. Current research focuses on how tattooists construct their social world, as individuals in a marginal occupation in advanced capitalism, relying on an anachronistic guild/craft form of organization. An extension of this work uses the routine activities perspective to examine the relationship between violence and the spaces where tattoo shops, liquor stores, strip clubs, adult bookstores, and restaurants are located in the largest cities in the United States. R. J. Maratea is an assistant professor of criminal justice at New Mexico State University. His research interests include mass communication, social problems, deviance, and the production of social reality in cyberspace. Laura Monico received her BS in sociology and political science from Shepherd University and MA in sociology from the University of Delaware, where she is currently a PhD candidate. Her areas of specialization include quantitative and qualitative research methods, social epidemiology, public health programming, and addiction science. For the last four years, Monico has been a research assistant at the Center for Drug and Alcohol Studies, where she primar- ily works on the Criminal Justice Drug Abuse Treatment Studies (CJDATS). She recently joined the Friends Research Institute as a research consultant on projects concerning medication assisted treatment for opioid addiction. Victor Perez is an assistant professor in the department of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Dela- ware. His interests include the medicalization of neuro-diversity in childhood, lay production of health knowledge, and social movements that challenge scientifi c consensus. Kevin Ralston is currently a doctoral student in the sociology and criminal justice department at the University of Delaware. He obtained his BA from Wake Forest University in 2005 and his MA from the University of CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES | 557 Delaware in 2010. Ralston’s primary areas of interest include intersectionality and victimization. He has pub- lished work on male sexual assault victimization and pedagogy and has been involved in research examining diversion programs for sex workers. Currently, Ralston is in progress on his dissertation work examining how male victims of sexual assault reconstruct their masculinity postvictimization. Lori Sexton is an assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. She has a PhD in criminology, law, and society from the University of California, Irvine, and an MA in criminology from the University of Pennsylvania. Sexton’s interests lie at the intersection of criminology and sociolegal studies, with a specifi c focus on prisons, punishment, and the lived experience of penal sanctions. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, and the Fletcher Jones Foundation and has been published in Justice Quarterly and Criminology & Public Policy . Holly Swan is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Drug and Alcohol Studies, affi liated with the University of Delaware, where she completed her doctorate in sociology. She has been involved in two NIH-funded studies examining HIV services for individuals involved with the criminal justice system: one tested the implementation of evidence-based HIV services in correctional settings, and the other qualitatively examined the barriers and facilita- tors to continuous HIV care for individuals involved in the criminal justice system. The second project funded her dissertation research. Her research interests include the intersection of deviance and health, and implementation science. This page intentionally left blank Robert Agnew, excerpt from “A General Strain Theory of Community Differences in Crime Rates” from Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 36.2 (1999): 123–155. Copyright © 1999 by Sage Publications. Reprinted with the permission of Sage Publications. Howard S. Becker, “Defi nitions of Deviance” and “Kinds of Deviance: A Sequential Model” from Outsiders: Stud- ies in the Sociology of Deviance . Pp. 25–39. Copyright © 1963 by Free Press of Glencoe. Copyright © 1991 by Howard S. Baker. Reprinted with the permission of Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster. Joel Best, excerpts from “Whatever Happened to Social Pathology? Conceptual Fashions and the Sociology of Devi- ance” from Sociological Spectrum 26 (2006): 533–546. Copyright © 2006 Routledge. Reprinted by permission of Routledge/Taylor & Francis. C. J. Cohen, “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics” from Du Bois Review 1.1 (2004): 27–45. Copyright © 2004 W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. Stanley Cohen, Chapter 1, “Deviance and Moral Panics” from Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. Pp. 46–66. Copyright © 1972, 1980, 1987, 2002 by Stanley Cohen. Reprinted by permission of Routledge/Taylor & Francis. Peter Conrad, excerpt from “The Shifting Engines of Medicalization” from Journal of Health and Social Behavior 46.1 (2005): 3–14. Copyright © 2005 by the American Sociological Association. Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications. Emile Durkheim, “Rules for the Distinction of the Normal and the Pathological” from Rules of the Sociological Method , pp. 85–87, 91–101, translated by W. D. Halls, edited by Steven Lukes. Translation copyright © 1982 by Macmillan Press. Reprinted with the permission of The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster. Ronald W. Dworkin, “The Medicalization of Unhappiness” from The Public Interest 144 (2001): 85–99. Reprinted with the permission of National Affairs. Amin Ghaziani, “There Goes the Gayborhood” from Contexts 9.4 (2010): 64–66. Copyright © 2010 by the Ameri- can Sociological Association. Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications. Erving Goffman, Chapter 2, “Stigma and Social Identity” from Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Iden- tity . Pp. 1-19. Copyright © 1963 by Erving Goffman. Reprinted by permission of Pearson Education. Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, “Moral Panics: Culture, Politics, and Social Construction” from Annual Review of Sociology 20 (August 1994): 149–171. Copyright © 1994 Annual Reviews. Reprinted with the permis- sion of Annual Reviews. Ryken Grattet, “The Urban Ecology of Bias Crime: A Study of Disorganized and Defended Neighborhoods” from Social Problems 56.1 (2009): 132–150. Copyright © 2009 by The Society for the Study of Social Problems. Pub- lished by the University of California Press. John M. Hagedorn, “Homeboys, New Jacks, and Anomie” from Journal of African-American Men 3.1 (1997): 7–9, 12–28. Copyright © 1997 by Transaction Publishers. Reprinted with the permission of Springer. Nikki Jones, “I Was Aggressive for the Streets, Pretty for the Pictures: Gender, Difference and the Inner-City Girl” from Gender & Society 23.1 (2009): 89–93. Copyright © 2009 by American Sociological Association. Reprinted with the permission of Sage Publications. Miliann Kang and Katherine Jones, “Why Do People Get Tattoos?” from Contexts 6.1 (2007): 42–47. Copyright © 2007 by American Sociological Association. Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications. CREDITS | CREDITS560 John I. Kitsuse, “Coming Out All Over: Deviants and the Politics of Social Problems” from Social Problems 28.1 (1980): 1–12. Copyright © 1980 by The Society for the Study of Social Problems. Published by the University of California Press. Edwin M. Lemert, “Beyond Mead: The Societal Reaction to Deviance” from Social Problems 21.4 (1974): 457–468. Copyright © 1974 by The Society for the Study of Social Problems. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press Journals. Stephen Lyng, “Edgework: A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk Taking” from American Journal of Sociology 95.4 (1990): 851–886. Copyright © 1990. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press. Lee F. Monaghan, excerpts from “Big Handsome Men, Bears, and Others: Virtual Constructions of ‘Fat Male Embodiment’ ” from Body & Society 11.2 (2005): 81–82, 88–111. Copyright © 2005 by Sage Publications. Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications. Daniel Moynihan, “Defi ning Deviance Down” from The American Scholar 62.1 (1992): 17–28. Copyright © 1992 by Daniel Moynihan. Reprinted with permission. Sharon Oselin, “Weighing the Consequences of a Deviant Career: Factors Leading to an Exit from Prostitution” from Sociological Perspectives 53.4 (2010): 527–550. Copyright © 2010 by Pacifi c Sociological Association. Published by the University of California Press. Anthony M. Platt, Chapter 5, “The Child-Saving Movement in Illinois,” from The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency. Pp. 101–107 and 123–155. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). Copyright © 1977 by the University of Chicago. Reprinted with the permission of the author. Victor Rios, excerpts from “The Hyper-Criminalization of Black and Latino Male Youth in the Era of Mass Incarcera- tion” from Souls 8 (2006): 40–54. Copyright © 2006 Taylor & Francis. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis. Robert J. Sampson, “Collective Effi cacy Theory: Lessons Learned and Directions for Future Inquiry” from Taking Stock: The Status of Criminological Theory , edited by Francis T. Cullen, John Paul Wright, and Kristie R. Blevins. Pp. 149–150, 152, 156, 167. Copyright © 2006. Reprinted by permission of Transaction Publishers. Robert Sampson and John Laub, “Crime and Deviance in the Lifecourse” from Annual Review of Sociology 18 (1992): 63–84. Copyright © 1992 Annual Reviews. Reprinted with the permission of Annual Reviews. Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay, Chapters 1 and 2, “Introduction” and “Growth of Chicago and Differentia- tion of Local Areas,” from Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas . Pp. 1, 5, 10, 14, 17, 42. Copyright © 1969 by Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press. Jonathan Simon, excerpts from “Reforming Education through Crime” from Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear . Pp. 210, 214, 216, 220, 230– 231. Copyright © 2007 by Oxford University Press. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. 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Reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan Journals via Copyright Clearance Center. abominations of body, as stigma 254 , 257 , 291 action, risk-taking behavior as 225 , 226 actual social identity 256 – 7 addiction: biomedicalization of 542 – 3 ; dopamine hypothesis of 531 ; DSM-V defi nition of 520 ; to opiates 542 – 9 ; reward/pleasure system in 537 ; tropes of 532 ; see also behavioral addiction ADHD in adults 192 adult court, transfer of juveniles to 433 African American Studies: pathologicalization of Black deviance and 484 – 8 ; queering 478 – 80 , 488 , 492 age-crime curve 314 , 315 , 344 agency: in Black communities 480 , 488 – 92 ; deviant careers, life-course criminology, and 347 Agnew, Robert 46 – 7 , 69 – 90 , 92 , 94 – 5 , 97 – 8 alcoholism, medicalization of 185 Altgeld, John P. 400 – 1 altruistic redefi nition of deviance 28 – 9 , 38 ambivalence and edgework resistance 237 , 240 amoral panics 380 anarchists, edgeworkers compared to 248 Anderson, Tammy L. 3 – 5 , 35 – 41 , 45 – 7 , 91 – 8 , 103 – 4 , 169 – 71 , 209 – 11 , 253 – 5 , 303 – 5 , 353 – 5 , 391 – 3 , 441 – 3 , 467 , 475 – 7 , 508 – 16 , 521 – 3 , 544 – 52 angry/frustrated individuals, interaction between, and crime rates 80 – 1 anomie/anomie theory: defi ned 46 ; doping in elite sports and 95 – 8 ; gang drug dealing and 56 – 8 , 65 – 6 , 93 – 4 ; GST compared to 94 – 5 , 95 ; Lander and 134 ; overview of 92 – 3 ; premise of 91 ; social structure and 49 – 54 Note: Page numbers in italics indicate fi gures and tables; page numbers in bold indicate readings. anticraving medications 533 – 4 , 535 – 8 antidepressants see selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors antigay bias crime 146 , 146 – 7 antisocial behavior, stability of 316 – 19 Armstrong, Lance 91 , 96 arrests and jail, as turning points of change 329 – 30 assimilation: defi nitions of 476 ; deviance and 510 ; dominant-minority relations and 446 – 7 ; of LGBT people 457 – 9 attributes: master status 291 , 309 – 10 ; stigmatizing 257 audience, as critical variable in study of deviance 14 – 17 aversive treatment of deprived communities 77 avian/bird fl u 354 – 5 , 383 – 4 Bakhtin, Mikhail 254 , 292 banda music 498 – 9 barebackers 467 – 8 Becker, Howard S. 4 , 18 – 25 , 39 , 209 , 244 – 5 , 303 , 304 , 306 – 13 , 341 , 343 , 449 , 481 becoming deviant 448 behavior: antisocial, stability of 316 – 19 ; collective, and moral panics 357 ; compulsive, biomedicalization of 531 – 9 ; morality-based defi nitions of 37 ; risk-taking, voluntary 219 – 26 , 243 – 9 ; see also sociopathic behavior behavioral addiction: biological and cultural matters in 531 – 3 ; overview of 538 – 9 ; pharmaceuticals and neurotyping of 533 – 8 Bennett, William 418 – 19 Ben-Yehuda, Nachman 353 , 363 – 70 , 374 , 385 Best, Joel 169 , 171 , 180 – 4 , 199 – 200 INDEX | INDEX562 Bhangra music scene 512 – 13 bias crime see urban ecology of bias crime biocitizenship 520 , 535 – 8 biogenic amine theory 525 – 6 , 528 biological approach to study of sociopathic behavior 175 – 6 biomedical enhancements 190 – 1 biomedicalization: of compulsive behaviors 531 – 9 ; defi ned 187 ; of drug addiction 542 – 3 ; overview of 519 – 21 biotechnology and medicalization 187 – 91 Black politics: deviance, agency, autonomy, resistance, and 488 – 92 ; overview of 478 – 81 , 492 – 3 ; pathologicalization of deviance and 484 – 8 ; of respectability, elites, and public opinion 481 – 4 Black queer studies 494n. 2 Black youth, hypercriminalization of 409 – 10 , 412 – 17 , 435 body deviance: carnival of grotesque and 251 ; forms of 290 – 1 ; language and 294 – 6 ; stigma and 256 – 64 ; tattoos 266 – 71 ; see also fat male embodiment Bonds, Barry 96 , 97 Bonistall, Emily 303 , 304 , 340 – 9 boundaries, systems as maintaining 15 – 16 breast cancer and tattoos 269 Brent, John J. 209 , 210 , 211 , 243 – 50 bridges to role exiting 333 – 6 bugchasers 442 , 466 , 467 – 71 buprenorphine (Suboxone) 542 , 543 , 545 , 546 – 7 , 548 carnival of grotesque: fat male embodiment and 283 – 4 ; fatness and 292 – 3 ; identity and 294 ; overview of 251 , 254 ; social organization of 297 ; stigma compared to 254 – 5 , 298 change, turning points of 329 – 31 , 344 – 5 , 346 Chicago: demolition of substandard housing in 113 – 14 , 116 ; economic segregation of population of 118 , 118 , 119 , 120 ; families on relief in 118 – 19 , 121 ; growth and expansion of 111 – 13 , 114 ; median rentals 120 , 122 ; nationality and racial group segregation in 120 , 122 – 4 , 123 , 124 , 125 , 126 ; occupation groups in 120 ; population changes in 115 – 16 , 117 , 118 ; processes of city growth 109 – 11 ; segregation and differentiation of areas within 108 – 9 Chicago School ecological perspective 55 , 140 Chicano/a cultural production 497 – 9 children’s problems, medicalization of 189 child-saving movement: delinquent children 394 – 7 ; jailed children 397 – 400 ; success of juvenile court act 404 – 5 ; wards of state 400 – 4 cities, prisons compared to 157 – 8 , 159 citizenship: biocitizenship 520 , 535 – 8 ; communities and 470 – 1 ; equality and 476 ; outsider quests for 442 – 3 ; sexual 460 – 4 civilizing technologies, anticraving medications as 535 – 8 , 545 – 6 claims-makers 379 class: access to opportunity and 46 ; discrimination by, and crime rates 75 ; gangs, values, and 56 ; opiate addiction and 542 – 9 ; tribal stigma and 264n. 3 ; views of deviance based on 14 ; views of juvenile delinquency based on 22 Clementi, Tyler 460 , 461 – 2 , 463 , 464 code of the streets 75 , 506 code switching 416 Cohen, Cathy J. 475 , 478 – 95 , 510 , 512 Cohen, Stanley 353 , 356 – 62 , 364 – 5 , 371 , 378 – 9 , 417 collective behavior and moral panics 357 collective effi cacy/collective effi cacy theory: comparative studies 135 – 6 ; of deprived communities 79 – 80 ; discriminant validity and 134 – 5 ; empirical results of testing 130 – 2 ; overview of 104 , 128 – 30 , 132 , 137 ; prison community and 157 – 65 ; “structure” as endogenous 132 – 4 , 133 ; technology mediated effi cacy 136 – 7 collective identity and music 512 – 13 collective organization of Chicana/o community 501 – 2 collective type, crime as deviation from 11 – 13 coming out: assimilationist conception of dominant-minority relations and 446 – 7 ; defi ned 444 – 5 ; interactionist perspective and 448 – 54 ; politics of protest and 445 – 6 , 451 – 4 ; social reaction approach and 447 – 8 commitment to norms and institutions 307 community: Black, politics of deviance in 481 – 93 ; citizenship and 470 – 1 ; as critical variable in study of deviance 14 – 17 ; cultural approach to 161 – 3 ; defended neighborhoods 104 , 105 , 141 – 3 ; defi ned 69 ; deprived 77 – 84 ; East Los Angeles 496 – 502 ; gay-friendly 441 ; in-migration and crime 154n 7 ; lesbian and gay 456 – 9 , 458 ; marginality and 467 ; online scenes 469 – 70 ; prison as 157 – 65 ; queer presences and absences in 460 – 4 ; rule making and creation of deviance 20 – 4 , 39 ; spatial INDEX | 563 approach to 158 – 60 ; subcultures 467 – 9 ; support for school security programs in 425 ; transgender, in prison 104 – 5 , 161 – 3 ; use of by outcasts or marginals 441 ; see also general strain theory (GST) of community differences in crime rates community centers, probation offi cers and 413 – 14 , 417 compulsive behaviors see behavioral addiction concentrated disadvantage of prisoners 159 concepts: decline in usefulness of 180 ; natural history of conceptual fashion 182 – 3 confl ict-oriented theory 39 conformity/conformists 51 , 52 , 93 Conrad, Peter 169 , 170 , 185 – 96 , 201 , 202 – 3 , 204 consumers of health care and medicalization 191 – 3 control see culture of control; social control; youth control complex control institutions 16 , 27 coping strategies in deprived communities 81 – 4 cosmetic surgery 191 – 2 crime: Durkheim views of 11 – 13 , 26 , 27 ; ecological study of 128 ; Erikson views of 26 – 7 ; fear of 373 – 4 ; governance through 391 , 412 , 422 – 7 , 432 , 434 ; in-migration and 154n 7 ; level of as normalized 32 – 4 ; life-course perspective and 304 – 5 , 314 – 19 , 343 – 6 ; opportunities for 83 ; organized, reductionist theories of 176 ; as psychopathic symptom 176 ; rates of, and collective effi cacy theory 131 – 2 ; stability of 316 – 19 ; see also general strain theory (GST) of community differences in crime rates; urban ecology of bias crime criminalization: of Black and Latino youth 409 – 10 , 412 – 17 ; as social displacement 417 – 19 Criminological Verstehen 249 critical criminology 391 critical cultural studies of addictions 538 – 9 critical race theory of “intentional deviance” 475 critical theory 39 critical thinking skills, sharpening xix cultural deviance theory 56 , 64 cultural transmission perspective 55 culture: adaptation to 57 – 8 ; deviance and 17 ; goals, purposes, and interests defi ned by 49 – 50 ; see also gay culture culture of control: as escalating 245 ; overview of 244 , 391 ; probation offi cers 413 – 14 culture-of-poverty perspective 56 death-defying activities 221 – 2 defended neighborhood arguments 104 , 105 , 141 – 3 , 163 defi ance and deviance 490 defi ning deviance down 5 , 26 – 34 , 37 – 8 defi nitions: biomedicalization 187 ; condition- based 182 – 3 ; hate crimes 104 ; morality-based, of behavior 37 ; of social pathology 181 ; troubling-based 183 ; see also defi nitions of deviance defi nitions of deviance: altruistic 28 – 9 , 38 ; as breach of morals 37 ; functional 19 – 20 ; medical 19 ; morality-based 182 ; normalizing 32 – 4 ; opportunistic 29 – 32 , 38 ; problems with 445 ; as property conferred upon behavior 14 ; as rule breaking 20 , 494n. 5 ; as social reaction 39 ; sociological xvii, 3 ; statistical 18 – 19 , 36 – 7 ; as subjective 512 degeneracy: mental illness as 198 – 9 ; overview of 170 , 171 ; views of 519 degradation, rituals of, and carnival 292 – 3 deinstitutionalization movement 28 – 9 de la Rocha, Zach 501 depression and medicalization of unhappiness 522 – 30 deprived communities 77 – 84 desistance 324 , 345 – 6 ; see also role exiting deviance: defi ance and 490 ; defi ning down 5 , 26 – 34 , 37 – 8 ; individual-level view of 92 , 95 , 97 – 8 ; macro-level view of 92 ; normalizing 32 – 4 , 38 ; oversocialized conception of 448 – 9 , 451 ; pairing classic and contemporary views of xviii; primary 342 , 343 , 359 ; sociology of 14 – 17 ; symbolic 509 – 11 ; tertiary 453 – 4 ; transactional approach to 358 – 60 ; vitality of concept of 181 – 2 ; see also body deviance; defi nitions of deviance; secondary deviance deviance amplifi cation 417 deviant careers: life-course perspective compared to 346 – 8 ; outsiders and 306 – 12 ; overview of 304 – 5 ; see also prostitution Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) 520 , 523 – 4 , 525 difference: gender, overlapping identities, and 504 – 6 ; as origin of deviance 476 Dilulio, John J. 418 discipline in schools 425 discreditable stigma 272 , 445 discredited stigma 272 , 445 discrimination: crime rates and 75 , 93 – 4 ; against opiate addicts 542 – 9 ; prostitution and 343 ; same-sex marriage and 463 – 4 | INDEX564 “Doing Difference” (Collins) 505 , 506 “Doing Gender” (West and Zimmerman) 505 , 506 dopamine hypothesis 531 doping in elite sports 47 , 91 – 2 , 95 – 8 drug use: addiction and 531 ; bugchasing and 470 ; by celebrities 519 ; deviant careers and 308 , 310 , 311 – 12 ; as edgework 221 – 2 ; emotions and 527 ; intimate partner violence and 232 – 40 ; marijuana 3 , 4 – 5 ; methamphetamine 354 , 380 – 2 ; moral panics about 368 – 9 ; opiate addiction 542 – 9 ; options for treatment of 519 – 20 ; prescription stimulants 45 ; prostitution and 327 – 8 , 343 drunk driving 35 – 40 DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) 520 , 523 – 4 , 525 Du Bois, W.E.B. 484 – 5 Durkhiem, Emile 4 , 6 – 13 , 26 , 27 , 36 – 7 Dworkin, Ronald W. 520 – 1 , 522 – 30 , 542 , 544 , 545 ecological study: of crime 128 ; of delinquency 107 ecometrics 129 , 130 economic deprivation and crime rates 78 economic success goals and crime rates 73 – 4 edgework: activities subsumed under concept of 221 – 2 ; overview of 211 , 220 – 1 ; parkour as 248 – 9 ; as resistance 231 – 2 ; sensations of 223 – 6 ; skilled performance and 222 – 3 , 235 – 40 ; voluntary risk-taking as 226 Elias, Norbert 536 – 8 elitist orientation of edgeworkers 223 embodied perspective: body theorists 287 – 8 ; on intimate partner violence 230 endophenotypes 535 epigenetics 197 epithets, use of, among minorities 449 – 50 Erikson, Kai T. 4 , 14 – 17 , 26 , 32 , 37 eroticization: of fatness 277 , 278 – 80 , 281 – 2 , 290 ; of HIV and AIDS 468 – 71 ethnicity: connection between deviance and 449 – 51 ; cultural production and 497 – 9 ; defended neighborhoods and 142 – 3 ; discrimination by, and crime rates 75 ; Hispanic resistance 476 , 477 , 496 – 502 ; incarceration of youth and 408 – 10 ; intergroup confl ict and bias crime 152 – 3 ; juvenile delinquency and 502n. 17 ; see also race eugenics movement 170 expertise in school crime 425 – 7 exposure to aversive stimuli in deprived communities 77 – 80 external attribution of blame in deprived communities 82 family structure: in Black communities 484 – 8 ; Bush administration and 493 ; disruption of, and crime rates 78 – 9 ; opportunistic defi nition of deviance and 29 – 32 ; street orientation and 59 , 61 , 62 , 63 fat male embodiment: admiration and eroticization of fat male bodies 281 – 2 ; appeals to “real” or “natural” masculinities 280 – 1 ; Bears 275 – 7 ; Big Handsome Men 273 – 5 ; carnival and 283 – 4 ; Chubbies and Chubby Chasers 277 – 8 ; management of spoiled masculine identities and 272 – 3 ; pragmatics and politics of 284 – 6 ; transgression, fun, and carnivalesque 282 – 4 ; typology of 273 fatness, gendered studies of 286 – 8 feedees xvii, 277 , 278 – 9 Fey, Tina xviii fl ow, risk-taking behavior and 225 Flower, Lucy 400 , 402 , 403 , 404 fl u, avian/bird 354 – 5 , 383 – 4 folk devils 353 , 356 , 357 , 365 , 371 , 379 food porn 277 functional defi nition of deviance 19 – 20 functionalism 36 – 7 ; see also anomie GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder) 188 – 9 gambling: as disease 169 , 171 ; as moral failing 170 ; naltrexone and 533 , 534 , 535 ; pervasiveness of 170 – 1 gang drug dealing: anomie theory and 65 – 6 ; overview of 55 – 6 ; study of 58 – 9 ; typology of 56 , 57 , 58 – 9 , 60 , 61 – 3 , 62 ; values and 56 – 7 , 64 , 65 – 6 ; violence and 63 – 4 , 65 gay culture: eroticization of fatness and 282 ; standard image of male beauty in 276 ; see also homosexuality gender: difference, overlapping identities, and 504 – 6 ; dimensions of fatness and 284 – 5 , 286 – 8 ; see also fat male embodiment; women Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) 188 – 9 general strain theory (GST): anomie compared to 94 – 5 , 95 ; deviant careers and 306 ; doping in elite sports and 95 – 8 ; overview of 46 – 7 general strain theory (GST) of community differences in crime rates: factors increasing likelihood of criminal response 81 – 4 ; failure to achieve positively valued goals INDEX | 565 72 – 5 ; interaction between angry/frustrated individuals 80 – 1 ; loss of positive stimuli 77 – 80 ; overview of 69 – 72 , 73 , 84 – 5 , 94 – 5 ; relative deprivation 75 – 6 Genet, Jean 453 – 4 genetics: medicalization and 189 – 91 ; mental illness and 203 – 5 genetic stigma 445 Ghaziani, Amin 441 , 442 , 443 , 456 – 9 , 467 , 471 Giddens, Anthony 532 gift givers 442 , 466 , 467 – 71 gluttony 279 , 283 , 287 , 292 goals: cultural 49 – 50 ; disproportionate accent on 50 – 1 ; range of, in deprived communities 82 ; of residents of communities, and crime rates 72 – 5 ; of society for people or athletes 91 ; success, overconformity to 57 , 65 – 6 Goffman, Erving 251 , 254 , 256 – 65 , 285 , 291 – 2 , 295 , 296 , 445 , 480 – 1 , 510 Goode, Erich 353 , 363 – 70 , 374 , 385 governance: defi ned 245 ; as social control 209 , 210 ; through crime 391 , 412 , 422 – 7 , 432 , 434 Grattet, Ryken 104 , 105 , 140 – 56 , 163 grotesque realism 292 , 298 ; see also carnival of grotesque group confl ict theory: bias crime and 152 – 3 ; defended neighborhoods and 143 group interaction model of deviance 214 – 15 , 217 Groves, Adelaide 399 , 401 GST see general strain theory; general strain theory (GST) of community differences in crime rates Gunn, Sakia 463 gun violence in schools 423 – 4 habitus of addicts 236 Hagedorn, John M. 46 , 47 , 55 – 68 , 92 , 93 – 4 , 97 hate crimes 104 ; see also urban ecology of bias crime heterotypic continuity 317 – 18 hGH (human growth hormone) 190 – 1 , 193 hip hop 510 – 11 Hispanic resistance 476 , 477 , 496 – 502 homelessness and deinstitutionalization 29 Homo Hop music scene 507 homosexuality: acceptance of 441 – 2 ; antigay bias crime 146 , 146 – 7 ; bugchasers and gift- givers 466 ; as deviant career 308 , 310 , 311 , 312 ; gay culture 276 , 282 ; “It Gets Better” campaign 462 – 3 , 464 ; postgay era 457 – 9 ; residential patterns and 441 , 456 – 9 , 458 ; Stonewall Rebellion and 451 – 2 homotypic continuity 316 – 17 hospitalizations, as turning points of change 330 – 1 Houston, Whitney 519 , 520 human growth hormone (hGH) 190 – 1 , 193 hypercriminalization: of Black and Latino youth 409 – 10 , 412 – 17 ; as social displacement 417 – 19 hyperreality experience of edgework 224 ICD-9 (International Classifi cation of Diseases) 524 identities: carnival of grotesque and 294 ; Chicano/a 499 – 501 ; deviant 293 – 4 , 309 , 452 – 4 ; marginal 441 , 466 – 7 ; music scenes and 507 – 15 ; outsiders 18 – 24 , 244 – 5 , 306 – 12 ; overlapping 477 , 504 – 6 ; range of, in deprived communities 82 ; social, and stigma 256 – 64 , 291 – 2 ; see also fat male embodiment Illinois State Reform School 394 – 7 immigration: from Mexico 497 – 9 ; nationality and racial group segregation in Chicago and 120 , 122 – 4 , 123 , 124 , 125 impotence and Viagra 188 incivility, signs of, and crime rates 79 individual-level view of deviance 92 , 95 , 97 – 8 ; see also general strain theory individuals, adaptation by 51 – 2 industrialization see risk society inequality: biomedicalization of addiction and 542 – 9 ; in school discipline 435 ; see also discrimination; segregation “innovators” and innovation 46 , 51 , 52 – 3 , 56 , 93 in-school detentions 423 institutions: commitment to norms and 307 ; control 16 , 27 ; norms and 49 – 50 ; social control of youth across 429 – 36 ; total, prisons as 157 , 159 interactionist perspective: on deviance 444 , 448 – 54 ; on gender and difference in inner-city girl 504 – 6 intergroup confl ict: bias crime and 152 – 3 ; defended neighborhoods and 143 International Classifi cation of Diseases (ICD-9) 524 intimate partner violence (IPV): edgework and 232 ; overview of 229 – 30 ; sample characteristics 233 – 4 ; study of 232 – 3 “It Gets Better” campaign 462 – 3 , 464 JenRo 507 Jones, Katherine 251 , 254 , 255 , 266 – 71 , 294 | INDEX566 Jones, Nikki 475 , 477 , 504 – 6 , 510 , 514 judgment of deviance 18 juvenile court: creation of 391 – 2 , 429 ; critical views of operations of 431 – 2 ; social control of youth and 430 – 1 ; see also child-saving movement Juvenile Court Law in California 214 – 17 juvenile delinquency: child-saving movement and 394 – 7 ; ethnicity and 502n 17 ; hustling homosexuals 311 ; moral panics and 356 – 8 ; neutralization of law-abiding values and 307 – 8 ; resistance to authority fi gures and 417 ; urban areas and 106 – 13 , 114 , 115 – 16 , 116 , 117 , 118 , 118 – 20 , 119 , 121 , 122 , 122 – 4 , 123 , 124 , 125 , 126 ; views of, based on class 22 juvenile transfer/waiver 433 Kagan, Elena 392 Kang, Milliann 251 , 254 , 255 , 266 – 71 , 294 Kavanaugh, Philip R. 354 – 5 , 378 – 87 , 520 , 542 – 51 Kelley, Robin 489 , 490 , 491 , 492 Kelly, Florence 400 , 402 Kitsuse, John I. 441 , 442 , 444 – 55 , 466 – 7 , 471 Kramer, Peter, Listening to Prozac 523 , 525 , 526 , 527 , 529 Kupchik, Aaron 392 , 429 – 37 labeling theory: deviance and 4 , 20 – 3 , 39 , 182 , 183 ; deviant careers and 309 – 10 ; mental illness and 200 – 1 ; overview of 210 ; parkour and 244 – 5 ; prostitution and 341 ; see also societal reaction theory Lander, Bernard 134 Lane, David C. 251 , 290 – 9 language and defi nitions of deviance 294 – 6 Lathrop, Julia 400 , 402 – 3 , 404 Latin Fusion 477 , 496 – 502 , 513 , 514 Latino youth, hypercriminalization of 409 – 10 , 412 – 17 , 435 Laub, John H. 303 – 4 , 314 – 22 , 344 Lemert, Edwin 169 , 170 , 173 – 9 , 200 , 209 , 210 , 211 , 212 – 18 , 244 , 245 , 359 , 360 , 445 , 447 lesbian and gay community 441 , 456 – 9 ; see also homosexuality life-course perspective in criminology: deviant careers compared to 346 – 8 ; overview of 304 – 5 , 314 – 19 , 343 – 6 limbic system 537 Listening to Prozac (Kramer) 523 , 525 , 526 , 527 , 529 Lyng, Stephen 209 , 211 , 219 – 28 , 248 McGwire, Mark 96 , 97 McKay, Henry D. 103 , 106 – 27 , 157 , 164 macro-level view of deviance 92 ; see also anomie MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) Program 35 , 37 , 40 managed care and medicalization 193 – 4 , 522 mandatory life-without-parole sentences 391 , 392 Maratea, R. J. 354 – 5 , 378 – 87 marginality: citizenship, community, and 466 – 7 ; identity, music scenes, and 507 – 15 ; see also outsiders marijuana 3 , 4 – 5 Markel, Howard 520 masculine identities 506 ; see also fat male embodiment mass incarceration: collateral consequences of 410 , 419 ; social control of youth and 432 – 5 ; as social displacement 417 – 19 ; study of 410 – 11 ; youth control complex 411 – 12 ; as youth of color phenomenon 408 – 10 mass media and moral panics 360 – 2 master status 291 , 309 – 10 MAT (medicated-assisted treatment) 546 Mead, G. H. 212 , 213 – 14 media and moral panics 360 – 2 , 378 – 9 , 392 medical defi nition of deviance 19 medicalization: changes in medicine and 186 – 7 ; of deviance 542 ; emergent engines of 187 – 94 ; inequality and 544 – 5 ; of marijuana 3 ; of mental illness 201 – 3 ; overview of 170 – 1 , 185 ; rise of 185 – 6 ; of unhappiness 522 – 30 ; see also biomedicalization medicated-assisted treatment (MAT) 546 medication see psychotropic medication men see fat male embodiment mental illness: broadened criteria for 520 – 1 ; conceptual development of 204 – 5 ; as degeneracy 198 – 9 ; deinstitutionalization movement 28 – 9 ; geneticization of 203 – 4 ; medicalization of 201 – 3 ; overview of 197 – 8 ; as residual rule breaking 201 ; as social pathology 199 – 200 ; social reactions of others and 200 – 1 Merton, Robert K. 46 , 47 , 49 – 54 , 56 , 91 , 92 – 3 , 96 methadone 542 – 3 , 545 , 546 – 7 , 548 methamphetamine 354 , 380 – 2 minority groups, connection between deviance and 449 – 51 ; see also coming out INDEX | 567 minority group threat hypothesis 143 mods and rockers in U.K. 356 – 8 , 364 , 369 Monaghan, Lee F. 251 , 254 , 272 – 89 , 292 , 295 monetary goals and crime rates 73 – 4 Monico, Laura 442 , 443 , 466 – 72 moral crusaders 379 moral enterprise 357 moral entrepreneurs 353 , 360 morality-based defi nitions: of behavior 37 ; of deviance 182 moral panics: avian infl uenza 383 – 4 ; criteria for 365 – 7 , 371 – 2 , 374 ; demise and institutionalization of 368 – 9 ; mass media and 360 – 2 ; methamphetamine use 380 – 2 ; overview of 353 , 356 – 8 , 363 – 5 , 367 – 8 , 371 – 2 , 378 – 9 , 384 – 5 ; risk society compared to 373 – 4 ; safety discourse and 375 ; science, risk and 380 – 4 ; sensitization and 365 ; social threat and 379 – 80 ; transactional approach to deviance and 358 – 60 mores and social pathology 173 Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) Program 35 , 37 , 40 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick 5 , 26 – 34 , 37 – 8 multiculturalism: defi ned 475 , 476 , 508 ; deviance fi eld of study and 508 – 12 ; music and 507 – 8 music scenes: Hispanic 496 – 502 ; marginality, identity, and 507 – 15 ; overview of 477 naltrexone 533 – 4 , 535 – 6 , 537 narcocorridos 511 natural history of conceptual fashion 182 – 3 neighborhood see community neighborhood defense see defended neighborhood arguments Neighborhood Watch programs 103 neo-primitives 269 – 70 neurotransmitters and mood 525 – 6 normalizing deviance 32 – 4 , 38 normal phenomena, pathological phenomena compared to 6 – 13 norms: defi ned 16 ; deviance as violations of 182 ; institutional 49 – 50 ; meaning of xx; origins of 4 obesity: as disease 193 ; stigma of 272 – 3 ; see also fat male embodiment; gluttony opiate addiction 542 – 9 opportunistic redefi nition of deviance 29 – 32 opportunities for crime 83 oppositional subculture 164 oppression: intersecting 505 ; music scenes as reproducing 514 organizations, as fostering collective effi cacy 131 ; see also prostitution-helping organizations organized crime, reductionist theories of 176 Oselin, Sharon S. 303 , 304 , 323 – 39 , 343 , 345 – 6 others see community outsiders 18 – 24 , 244 – 5 , 306 – 12 oversocialized conception of deviance 448 – 9 , 451 parkour: as edgework 248 – 9 ; labeling theory and 244 – 5 ; overview of 209 , 243 – 4 ; as resistance 245 – 6 ; views of 248 – 9 pathologicalization of Black deviance 484 – 8 pathological phenomena, normal phenomena compared to 6 – 13 Paxil 188 – 9 , 522 peer groups, unsupervised, and crime rates 79 perceptual focus and edgework 224 Perez, Victor 169 , 170 , 171 , 198 – 206 personal identity and music 513 – 14 pharmaceutical industry and medicalization 187 – 9 , 192 – 3 PHOs see prostitution-helping organizations Platt, Anthony M. 391 , 394 – 408 , 429 , 430 – 1 , 432 , 433 politics: of Chicana/o identity 499 – 502 ; of protest 445 – 6 , 451 – 4 ; see also Black politics positivism 170 postgay era 457 – 9 postindustrialism, control of youth and 433 – 4 poverty, as predicted outcome of low collective effi cacy 133 , 133 power, rule making, and creation of deviance 24 , 39 pregnancy and childbirth, as turning points of change 331 prescription stimulant use and abuse 45 presence of criminal others 84 primary deviance 342 , 343 , 359 prison, movement in and out of 303 prison community from social disorganization and collective effi cacy perspective: cultural approach to community 161 – 5 ; overview of 157 – 8 ; spatial demarcation of neighborhoods 158 – 60 ; transgender prisoners 162 – 3 ; violence 160 – 1 probation offi cers 413 – 14 , 416 – 17 , 427 prostitution: case example 340 ; data collection and methodology 325 , 325 ; as deviant career | INDEX568 341 – 3 ; exit from 323 – 5 , 337 – 8 ; factors leading to exit 325 – 9 ; labeling theory and 341 ; life-course perspective on 345 ; turning points of change 329 – 31 ; types of 304 , 340 ; see also prostitution-helping organizations prostitution-helping organizations (PHOs): described 323 , 325 , 325 , 337 ; learning of 331 – 3 ; perceptions of 336 – 7 ; third-party bridges to 333 – 6 Prozac 188 , 522 , 523 , 524 , 525 , 526 , 527 – 8 psychological and psychiatric approaches to study of sociopathic behavior 176 – 7 psychotropic medication: inequality of access to 544 – 5 ; methadone 542 – 3 , 545 , 546 – 7 , 548 ; neurotyping of behavioral addictions and 533 – 8 ; overprescription of 522 – 30 ; Paxil 188 – 9 , 522 ; prescription stimulants 45 ; see also selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors public nature of adversity in deprived communities 82 public opinion and Black politics 482 – 3 queer presences and absences 460 – 4 queer theorists 478 – 9 race: access to opportunity and 46 ; bias crime and 148 – 53 , 149 , 151 ; defended neighborhoods and 142 – 3 ; discrimination by, and crime rates 75 , 93 – 4 ; drug addiction and 548 ; epithets, use of, among minorities 449 – 50 ; hypercriminalization of youth of color 409 – 10 , 412 – 17 , 435 ; as master status 310 ; queer theory and 479 ; segregation by, in prisons 159 – 60 ; social control of youth and 432 ; status/respect goals, crime rates, and 74 – 5 ; views of deviance based on 22 ; see also Black politics; ethnicity Rajah, Valli 209 , 211 , 229 – 42 , 248 Ralston, Kevin 303 , 304 , 340 – 9 rebellion/rebels 51 , 52 – 3 , 93 reciprocal structural dynamics in urban social systems 133 reform movements 173 – 4 relative deprivation in general strain theory 75 – 6 relative deprivation theory 69 , 70 resistance: to authority fi gures, and juvenile delinquency 417 ; barebacking and 468 ; in Black communities 483 , 488 – 92 ; bugchasing and 469 ; in Chicana/o communities 476 , 477 , 496 – 502 ; deviance as 478 – 81 , 510 ; of deviant labels xviii; grotesque bodies and 295 – 6 ; grotesque realism and 293 ; intimate partner violence and 232 – 40 ; overview of 210 ; parkour as 245 – 6 ; risk thresholds and rewards of 234 – 5 ; see also edgework retreatism 51 , 52 Rios, Victor M. 391 , 409 – 21 , 429 , 433 – 4 risk society: moral panic compared to 371 , 373 – 4 ; overview of 353 , 354 ; science and 380 – 4 ; social anxiety in 372 – 5 risk-taking, voluntary 219 – 26 , 243 – 9 ritualism/ritualists 51 , 52 – 3 , 53n. 4 , 93 role exiting 323 , 324 , 333 , 347 ; see also desistance rule making and creation of deviance 20 – 4 , 39 Rutgers University 460 , 461 – 2 SAD (Social Anxiety Disorder) 188 – 9 Safe Schools Act of 1994 424 – 7 same-sex marriage 463 – 4 Sampson, Robert J. 104 , 129 – 39 , 303 – 4 , 314 – 22 , 344 scenes 467 , 469 – 70 schools: governing crime in 422 – 4 ; media reports about 392 ; probation offi cers and 413 – 14 , 416 – 17 ; Safe Schools Act of 1994 424 – 7 ; social control in 434 – 5 school-to-prison pipeline 392 Scott, Jim 489 , 490 , 491 , 492 secondary deviance 342 , 343 , 359 , 451 , 453 Sedgwick, Eve 531 – 2 , 538 segregation: in Chicago 108 – 9 ; economic, in Chicago 118 , 118 , 119 , 120 ; by nationality and racial group, in Chicago 120 , 122 – 4 , 123 , 124 , 125 , 126 ; in prisons 159 – 60 selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) 188 – 9 , 522 , 525 , 528 – 30 , 533 ; see also Prozac self-fulfi lling prophecy 39 , 310 self-medicalization 192 self-realization and edgework 223 – 4 Sen, Amartya 475 sensationalism and moral panics 379 – 80 sensitivity to aversive treatment in deprived communities 77 sensitization and moral panics 365 Sexton, Lori 104 – 5 , 157 – 66 sexual abuse survival and tattoos 269 sexual citizenship-making 460 – 4 sexual desire and fat male embodiment 275 ; see also eroticization sexuality and residential patterns 456 – 9 , 458 sexual performance: drug use and 237 ; medicalization of 188 ; resistance and 238 – 9 , 240 INDEX | 569 sex workers see prostitution Shaw, Clifford R. 103 , 106 – 27 , 157 , 164 Sheen, Charlie 519 , 520 Shepard, Matthew 463 Simon, Jonathan 391 , 412 , 422 – 8 , 429 , 432 , 434 single-parent families 29 – 32 skeptical theorists 358 – 9 skilled performance and edgework 222 – 3 , 235 – 40 skydiving subculture 220 – 1 , 223 , 224 Smith, Robert 402 SMSAs (standard metropolitan statistical areas) 69 Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) 188 – 9 social anxiety in risk society 372 – 5 social class see class social cleavages and crime rates 79 – 80 social constructionist stance: moral panics and 374 ; toward medicalization 185 ; toward social problems 183 social control: “civilizing technologies” and 531 – 9 ; classic and contemporary views of xviii; in deprived communities 83 ; governance as 209 , 210 ; informal and formal 429 , 434 – 5 ; institutionalization as mode of 29 ; mass incarceration and 432 – 5 ; of prison “neighborhoods” 158 ; pushing back against 209 – 10 ; as reaction to deviance xvii – xviii; shared expectations for 129 ; unintended consequences of 359 ; of youth 430 – 6 ; see also collective effi cacy/collective effi cacy theory; culture of control social disorganization/social disorganization theory: bias crime and 140 , 141 – 3 , 151 – 2 ; crime rate differences and 69 ; deviance as 19 – 20 ; gang behavior and 55 ; overview of 103 ; prison community and 157 – 65 social mechanism, defi ned 128 social norms see norms social organization: of deviance 312 ; of stigmas 296 – 7 social pathology: demise of use of term 180 – 1 ; early viewpoints on 173 – 4 ; mental illness as 199 – 200 ; overview of 170 , 171 ; see also sociopathic behavior social problems: politics of protest and 445 – 6 ; social constructionist stance toward 183 ; social pathology compared to 180 social processes in everyday life xx social reaction approach 4 , 39 , 447 – 8 ; see also labeling theory social species and defi nitions of normal 8 – 9 social structure: anomie and 49 – 54 ; culture and 57 – 8 ; processes as mediating effects of 132 – 4 ; societal reaction and 215 – 17 social support/capital in deprived communities 83 social system, concept of 15 – 16 social types 357 – 8 societal reaction theory: of deviance 212 – 13 , 217 – 18 ; group interaction and 214 – 15 ; structures and 215 – 17 ; symbolic interaction and 213 – 14 sociological approach to study of sociopathic behavior 177 sociology of deviance 14 – 17 sociopathic behavior: biological approach to study of 175 – 6 ; psychological and psychiatric approaches to study of 176 – 7 ; sociological approach to study of 177 ; systematic theory of 174 – 5 , 177 – 8 Sosa, Sammy 96 sports: elite, doping in 47 , 91 – 2 , 95 – 8 ; high-risk 219 – 26 SSRIs see selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors stability of crime and deviance 316 – 19 standard metropolitan statistical areas (SMSAs) 69 statistical defi nition of deviance 18 – 19 , 36 – 7 , 181 – 2 status offenses 431 status/respect goals and crime rates 74 – 5 stereotypes and stigma 294 stigma: carnival of grotesque compared to 254 – 5 , 298 ; deviant careers and 342 – 3 ; discreditable and discredited 272 , 445 ; of fatness 272 – 3 ; genetic 445 ; language and 294 – 6 ; medicalization and 544 ; methadone treatment and 548 , 549 ; overview of 253 – 4 , 447 ; of referral to psychiatrist or therapist 524 – 5 ; resistance stance on xviii; social identity and 256 – 64 , 291 – 2 , 293 ; social organization of 296 – 7 ; of tattoos 270 – 1 , 290 , 291 – 2 ; tribal 254 , 257 , 291 , 445 , 510 ; weaknesses of individual character as 254 , 257 , 291 Stonewall Rebellion 451 – 2 , 457 subcultural deviance theory 69 subcultural theories of violence 77 subcultures: community 467 – 9 ; oppositional 164 ; of tattoos 269 – 70 ; see also skydiving subculture Suboxone (buprenorphine) 542 , 543 , 545 , 546 – 7 , 548 | INDEX570 success goal, overconformity to 57 , 65 – 6 “superpredator” thesis 418 survival capacity, as innate 223 Sutherland, Edwin H. 180 Swan, Holly 442 , 443 , 466 – 72 “switch it out” xx symbolic deviance 509 – 11 symbolic interaction 212 , 213 – 14 , 447 tattoos: criminality and 293 – 4 , 296 ; meaning of 266 , 270 – 1 ; popularity among youth 266 – 7 ; stigma and 270 – 1 , 290 , 291 – 2 ; subculture of 269 – 70 ; women’s interest in 268 – 9 Taylor, Yvette 441 , 442 , 443 , 460 – 5 , 466 , 471 technology-mediated collective effi cacy 136 – 7 terminology, decline in usage of 180 tertiary deviance 453 – 4 theory: biogenic amine 525 – 6 , 528 ; confl ict- oriented 39 ; critical 39 ; critical race theory of “intentional deviance” 475 ; cultural deviance 56 , 64 ; group confl ict 143 , 152 – 3 ; queer 478 – 9 ; relative deprivation 69 , 70 ; subcultural deviance 69 ; subcultural violence 77 ; see also anomie/anomie theory; collective effi cacy/ collective effi cacy theory; general strain theory; labeling theory; social disorganization/social disorganization theory; societal reaction theory Thompson, Hunter S. 220 , 221 – 3 total institutions, prisons as 157 , 159 traceurs see parkour trajectories in life-course perspective 315 , 316 , 344 transactional approach to deviance 358 – 60 transgender community in prison 104 – 5 , 161 – 3 transitions in life-course perspective 315 – 16 , 344 – 5 treatment, two-tiered system of 546 – 9 tribal stigma 254 , 257 , 291 , 445 , 510 Trobriand Islands, nature of deviance on 21 – 2 turning points of change 329 – 31 , 344 – 5 , 346 underage drinking 35 – 40 underdog, deviant as 447 , 449 Ungar, Sheldon 354 , 371 – 7 , 381 unhappiness: biogenic amine theory and 525 – 6 ; categories of 523 – 5 ; deceit of mood-matter link and 527 – 8 ; drug use and 527 ; effects of antidepressants on 528 – 30 ; medicalization of 522 – 3 urban areas see Chicago; collective effi cacy/ collective effi cacy theory; juvenile delinquency, urban areas and urban ecology of bias crime: data and methods 143 – 7 , 144 , 145 , 146 ; disorganized and defended neighborhoods 141 – 3 ; fi ndings 147 – 51 , 148 , 149 , 150 , 151 ; overview of 140 – 1 , 151 – 3 urban village model 131 utility, notion of, and normality 10 – 11 Vail, Angus 293 validity of concept of collective effi cacy 134 – 5 value-confl ict conception of social problems 179n. 6 values: conducive to crime 83 – 4 ; law-abiding, and juvenile delinquency 307 – 8 Vaughters, Jonathan 91 – 2 , 97 Viagra and erectile dysfunction 188 vicarious strain 80 victimization: risk of 374 ; stigma-based 259 – 60 ; “superpredator” thesis and 418 victim-precipitation theories 230 Viesca, Victor Hugo 475 , 476 , 477 , 496 – 503 , 513 , 514 violence: in prisons 160 – 1 , 163 ; prostitution and 326 – 7 ; in schools 423 – 4 ; see also intimate partner violence viral pandemics 354 – 5 virtual constructions of fat male embodiment see fat male embodiment virtual social identity 256 – 7 Vrecko, Scott 520 , 531 – 41 , 542 , 545 – 6 weaknesses of individual character, as earned stigma 254 , 257 , 291 , 445 wealth, as symbol of success 51 , 53n. 5 Wilson, William Julius 486 – 7 Wines, Frederick 395 , 396 – 7 , 398 – 400 , 403 , 404 women: politicization of bodies of 284 – 5 ; pregnancy and childbirth, as turning points of change for 331 ; tattoos and 268 – 9 ; see also gender; intimate partner violence youth: explanations of deviance in 429 ; hypercriminalization of Black and Latino 409 – 10 , 412 – 17 , 435 ; popularity of tattoos among 266 – 7 ; social control of, across institutional spheres 429 – 36 ; underage drinking 35 – 40 ; see also child- saving movement; juvenile court; juvenile delinquency youth control complex 411 – 12 , 419 , 436 Cover Title Copyright CONTENTS Series Foreword Preface Acknowledgments PART 1: CLASSICAL AND CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO DEVIANCE SECTION 1 Defining Deviance Introduction Rules for the Distinction of the Normal from the Pathological Notes on the Sociology of Deviance Outsiders: Definitions of Deviance Defining Deviancy Down Connections: Definitions of Deviance and the Case of Underage Drinking and Drunk Driving Critical Thinking Questions SECTION 2 Functionalism, Anomie, General Strain Theory Introduction Social Structure and Anomie Homeboys, New Jacks, and Anomie A General Strain Theory of Community Differences in Crime Rates Connections: Understanding Doping in Elite Sports through Anomie and General Strain Perspectives Critical Thinking Questions SECTION 3 Social Disorganization and Collective Efficacy Introduction Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas Collective Efficacy Theory: Lessons Learned and Directions for Future Inquiry The Urban Ecology of Bias Crime: A Study of Disorganized and Defended Neighborhoods Connections: The Prison Community from a Social Disorganization and Collective Efficacy Perspective Critical Thinking Questions SECTION 4 Social Pathology, Degeneracy, and Medicalization Introduction Social Pathology Whatever Happened to Social Pathology? Conceptual Fashions and the Sociology of Deviance The Shifting Engines of Medicalization Connections: Mental Illness as Degeneracy, Disease, and Genetics Critical Thinking Questions SECTION 5 Labeling, Resistance, and Edgework Introduction Beyond Mead: The Societal Reaction to Deviance Edgework: A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk-Taking Resistance as Edgework in Violent Intimate Relationships of Drug-Involved Women Connections: Parkour through Labeling, Resistance, and Edgework Critical Thinking Questions SECTION 6 Stigma, Carnival, and the Grotesque Body Introduction Stigma and Social Identity Why Do People Get Tattoos? Big Handsome Men, Bears, and Others: Virtual Constructions of “Fat Male Embodiment” Connections: Explaining Body Deviance with Stigma and Carnival of the Grotesque Critical Thinking Questions SECTION 7 Deviant Careers, Identity, and Lifecourse Criminology Introduction Outsiders: Kinds of Deviance: A Sequential Model Crime and Deviance in the Life-Course Weighing the Consequences of a Deviant Career: Factors Leading to an Exit From Prostitution Connections: Deviant Career and Life-Course Criminology Using Street Prostitution Critical Thinking Questions SECTION 8 Moral Panics and Risk Society Introduction Deviance and Moral Panics Moral Panics: Culture, Politics, and Social Construction Moral Panic Versus the Risk Society: The Implications of the Changing Sites of Social Anxiety Connections: [A]moral Panics and Risk in Contemporary Drug and Viral Pandemic Claims Critical Thinking Questions SECTION 9 Critical Criminology, Culture of Control, Mass Incarceration Introduction The Child Savers: Chapter 5: The Child-Saving Movement in Illinois The Hypercriminalization of Black and Latino Male Youth in the Era of Mass Incarceration Governing through Crime: Safe Schools: Reforming Education through Crime Connections: The Social Control of Youth Across Institutional Spheres Critical Thinking Questions PART 2: EMERGENT POSSIBILITIES AND THE FUTURE OF DEVIANCE SECTION 10 Queer Theory, Communities, and Citizenship Introduction Coming Out All Over: Deviants and the Politics of Social Problems There Goes the Gayborhood? Queer Presences and Absences: Citizenship, Community, Diversity—or Death Connections: HIV and Bugchasers across Queer Collectives Critical Thinking Questions SECTION 11 Critical Race Theory, Multiculturalism, and Identity Introduction Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics The Battle of Los Angeles: The Cultural Politics of Chicana/o Music in the Greater Eastside “I Was Aggressive for the Streets, Pretty for the Pictures”: Gender, Difference, and the Inner-City Girl Connections: Marginality, Identity, and Music Scenes Critical Thinking Questions SECTION 12 Biomedicalization, Biopower, and Biocitizens Introduction The Medicalization of Unhappiness “Civilizing Technologies” and the Control of Deviance Connections: Biomedicalization of Drug Addiction and the Reproduction of Inequality Critical Thinking Questions Contributor Biographies Credits Index