The Laws Of Social Control

James Eagan Holmes was born December 13, 1987. Holmes is now identified as a mass murder after murdering 12 people and wounding 70 in a shooting that took place at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. Heterotypic continuity best described James Holmes behavior throughout his life. His underlying developmental process impairment stayed the same, but the way he acted them out drastically changed leading to the mass shooting. This impairment being James’ antisocial behavior. I would look at James Holmes through Sampson and Laub’s age-graded theory of social control. The three components of this theory are that structural context is intervened by informal family and school social controls, there is a continuity in antisocial behavior from childhood through adulthood, and that informal social bonds to family and employment during adulthood explain changes in criminality over the life span (Laub and Sampson 1993: 7).

“Norms are written and unwritten rules that specify behaviors appropriate and inappropriate to a particular social situation (Ferrante, 2015, p. 50).” There are two types of norms; folkways and mores. “Folkways are norms that apply to the mundane aspects or details of daily life (Ferrante, 2015, p. 50).” The folkways included in survivalism involve moving to Idaho, attaining a swimming pool fish farm, and developing a grasp on the language that the survivalists use (Walsh, Vandici, Itz, & Collins, n.d.). “Mores are norms that people define as critical to the well-being of a group. Violation of mores can result in severe forms

What differentiates American society from other societies is the rules and values that they follow. In sociology, these are called norms. Norms govern our lives by showing us how to behave in a certain ways. Codified norms turn into laws. One such norm is to shake hands when meeting someone. Another norm is when using public transportation, to give up his or her seat to someone who is elderly, disabled or pregnant. William Graham Sumner was one of the first American sociologists to distinguish between norms and folkways. Folkways stem from norms that most often are done unconsciously, and emerge from repetition. They are vital to society, are flexible, and do not provoke strong public responses if broken (Sumner, 1906, p. 1).

Social control/bond theory was developed by Travis Hirschi in1969. The social control approach is one of the three major sociological perspectives in understanding crime in our contemporary criminology. The theory holds that individuals will break the law as a result of the breakdown of the social bonds (Akers & Sellers, 2004, p. 16). Control theorists believe that an individual conformity to societal social values and rules produced by socialization and maintained through social ties to the people and institutions. The social bond may include family attachment, an individual commitment to social norms or institutions like school, employment, churches and mosques. The key elements of the social bonds theory are an attachment to other individuals in the society and the desire to remain committed to following rules. In addition, an individual involvement in typical social behaviours as well as one 's belief or the value systems a person ascribes. According to the theory, crime and delinquency will result when a person bond to society is weak or lose (Demuth & Brown, 2004, p.65). Moreover, as social bonds increase in strength, individual costs of crime increases as well and this ultimately act as a barrier for committing a crime.

Misfit. Rebel. Troublemaker. These are all names that may be given to people who go against the social norm. According to Andersen, Taylor, and Logio, the authors of Sociology: The Essentials, norms are defined as the specific cultural expectations for how to act in a given situation (2016). When someone disrupts the expectations, they commit a norm violation and may display deviant behavior. Since norms are so automatically built into our everyday lives, the rules of social interaction can be subtle and may be imperceptible to the people who participate in them. Therefore, sociologists often purposefully commit a norm violation in order to study what the rules or norms are. This approach, known as ethnomethodology, interprets society as being

In social psychology, social influence is a process where someone’s beliefs, thoughts and behaviour change by being exposed to beliefs, thoughts and opinions of others. It manifests in several forms, such as obedience, compliance and conformity. All these types of social influence have been studied by numerous researchers who investigated the reasons why people conform to social norms and obey to authorities, such as Milgram’s classic studies on obedience. His experiments support the popular idea of ‘banality of evil’ –Hannah Arendt (1963)’s famous phrase referring to the capability to accomplish dreadful things out of banal reasons–, revealing that people conform submissively and thoughtlessly to the orders that authorities deliver, no

Mores and folkways are two different types of norms. Folkway being one norm that is not really being enforced (Henslin). It can be not smiling when a stranger gives you a smile or, not waving back when someone waves at you. Mores is the opposite of that, it involves something for the most part everyone hates i.e. killing, robbing, raping (Henslin). Specifically it can be a pedophile. One can say that many parents across the United States dislike pedophiles. Parents do not want their kids experiencing getting touched by someone older than them in inappropriately or even worse rape them. Now that would be a negative sanction.

Cultures around the world have their own set of behaviors and actions that are considered acceptable and appropriate to humanity. Because of the differences between cultures, some may experience the idea of deviance without realizing they are doing so. The term deviance is any behavior that violates rules or cultural norms. A norm is a social expectation that guide human behavior. When one violates cultural practices, he or she may seems like everything would be okay but there are people who may not be appreciate of such behaviors and/or think that one is acting social norm. Understanding culture practices require one to be involved and participating in the culture. Sometime the best method to truly comprehend a practice is to act upon it and realized that it may or may be “right” behavior within a particular culture.

Throughout life, in any society we develop a sense to conform and adjust to our surroundings but why? Our values in our society determines our norms and why we do the things we do. I recently sought out to break these social conformities that violated the values, and norms we hold as a society. Every society is different and, in every society there are different and similar values, norms, sanctions folkways, and mores. Breaking them up and analyzing them we began to understand why these terms and values are so important to us.

Mr. L accepts and lives out stereotypes placed on him by culture, media and sustained by community he was raised in “Young Hispanic males sell drugs use drugs and are criminals.” This idolization has become a tradition handed down from one family member to the next. It is because of this very reason the client has become a walking breathing stereotype. Client has became a characterization of what it is to be a young Hispanic male.

The violation of the social norm can be meant to be utilized as a way of sustaining power, position, and influence of a specific group of people or organizations. In most cultures, the idea of deviance is based on the values, deeds, and beliefs that are achieved through interaction among people that have influence in the society and from the understanding that culture is passed on from member to member. Societies are also comprised of the subculture and the culture itself. The huge cultural forces depict what deeds are appreciated and which are unaccepted or discouraged. On the other hand, the subculture in a certain setting creates a resistance to the dominating culture and in doing so, they give a hand in the behavior that violates the large culture social norms. Therefore, the deviation from the cultural norms can be attributed to the social classes and financial classes. For example, prostitution in regions of the developing world is deviant in most cultures, however poverty pressure pushes young girls toward it for survival.

In Chapter 3, sociology students learn about culture. One section in the chapter mentions norms and taboos. A norm basically sets restrictions on what society should and should not do. A taboo is an action that society prohibits because it insults their culture. Throughout the world, different cultures practice different norms and taboos.

Human behavior varies widely in the presence of different individuals and settings. This is due largely to the fact that people are under the control of the fluctuating rules within particular settings and a person’s inclination to follow them. During the fall semester of my freshman year, I was in two organizations; Bonner Community Scholars and Phi Mu Alpha, a music fraternity. I spent a lot of time with the other students in Bonner and I noticed that many of us had similar hobbies and world views, whereas I only saw my fraternal brothers at meetings. Inevitably, I decided to stay with Bonner and leave the fraternity. I believe that this can be explained by observing the Principle of Social Control, which states that an abundance of interconnected

Similarly, another case in which social control is interpreted as a response to ethnical conflict occurred in Rwanda, a country located in East Africa. According to international law specialist John Quigley, Rwanda was “probably the most concentrated mass killings ever seen” (Jones 2011 Page 346). In twelve weeks, approximately one million Tutsi, and tens of thousands of Hutus were murdered. About 80 percent of victims were caught in the “hurricane of death” between the second week of April and the third week of May. Gerard Pruiner notes that “if we consider that probably around 800,000 people were slaughtered during this short period… the daily killing rate was at least 5 times that of the Nazi Death Camps” (Jones, 2011 Page 346).

Our current lesson tells us that folkways are expected behaviors and/or attire but that they are not usually required of the individuals/community at question. Some of the folkways that I observed were that the men and women were dressed appropriately for their age, gender, and the weather. In addition to this, babies were dressed appropriately for their gender