![]() Judging only from the amount of deviancy they punish, there's no difference between a halfway house and a monastery. A community's capacity for handling deviance, let us say, can be roughly estimated by counting its prison cells and hospital beds, its policemen and psychiatrists, its courts and clinics."ĭurkheim's interesting theory is that there can be no such thing as a "crime free" community (he suggests it may even be dangerous to reduce deviancy too much) but only communities that redefine "crime" to accommodate their means for dealing with it. "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. Erikson, whose 1965 examination of crime in the Massachusetts Bay Colony was designed to test Durkheim's theory. ![]() The basic notion comes from Emile Durkheim (1895), with an elaboration by Kai T. We keep the level of punishment more or less constant by redefining deviancy. I've just seen a paper of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's (The American Scholar, Winter 1993) in which the New York senator explores the notion that communities have a certain amount of punishment (fussing) to mete out for deviant behavior. I thought it was just my awkward way of expressing gratitude for three pretty decent children. I'm just glad that I've been able to expend my quotient on relatively minor stuff." "It doesn't matter whether the fussing is about gang fights and drug abuse or only unmade beds and minor curfew violation we've all got our fussing quotient. "All parents have a certain amount of fussing in them," I said. When our correcting mechanisms are overloaded, what was once deviant becomes acceptable.I remember telling my children a few years ago (it was an unusually peaceful time around the house) that they should try to keep Dad's fussing in perspective. ![]()
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