Sociology · Chapter 7

Deviance, Crime & Social Control

Every group draws a line between what is acceptable and what is not — and then spends enormous energy patrolling that line. Deviance is the violation of a social norm; crime is the narrower category of acts a government has made illegal; and social control is the whole machinery, from a raised eyebrow to a prison sentence, that keeps most people most of the time inside the lines. The sociological surprise is that none of these categories is fixed by nature. What counts as deviant shifts across time, place, and situation, and it is decided not by the behavior alone but by how others react to it. This chapter asks the questions sociologists have argued over for a century: why does deviance exist, who gets to define it, how do we measure crime, and what happens to the people a society decides to punish.

By the end of this chapter you can

Define deviance, social norms (folkways, mores, taboos), and social control, and explain why deviance is relative rather than inherent in an act.
Distinguish informal from formal social control and positive from negative sanctions.
Explain Durkheim's claim that deviance is normal and functional, and define anomie.
Apply Merton's strain theory and its five modes of adaptation, and summarize subcultural explanations of deviance.
Contrast the conflict and labeling accounts, and distinguish primary from secondary deviance.
Identify the major types of crime and evaluate how the UCR/NIBRS, the NCVS, and self-report surveys measure it.
Describe the three branches of the criminal justice system — police, courts, corrections — and the four justifications for punishment.
Apply the three sociological paradigms to a single case of deviance and see how each reframes it.

Section 1What deviance is

Note. Public disorder and the reaction to it — every society defines norms and then mobilizes social control to enforce them.

Norms, and the many ways to break them

A social norm is a shared expectation about how people ought to behave in a given setting. Norms are not all equal in weight, and sociologists sort them by how seriously a group treats a violation. Folkways are everyday customs of politeness and routine — facing forward in an elevator, chewing with your mouth closed, waiting your turn in line. Breaking a folkway makes you rude or odd, not evil. Mores (pronounced "MOR-ays") carry a moral charge: honesty, fidelity, respect for the vulnerable. Violating a more brings real condemnation. Taboos are the most deeply held mores, so profoundly felt that the very thought of violating them provokes disgust — cannibalism, incest. Some norms are also written into law, backed by the coercive power of the state.

Deviance, then, is any behavior, belief, or condition that violates a social norm and draws a negative reaction. Notice how wide that is: deviance includes crime, but it also includes tattoos in a conservative workplace, a hermit's withdrawal from society, or a billionaire's eccentric habits. Deviance can even be positive or admired — the whistle-blower and the saint both break with what most people do. The sociological point is that deviance is defined by reaction, not by harm.

Type of norm	What it governs	Reaction to violation	Example violation
Folkway	Everyday etiquette & custom	Mild — seen as rude or strange	Cutting in line; loud phone call in a quiet car
More	Core moral standards	Strong — seen as wrong or immoral	Lying to a friend; cheating on a partner
Taboo	The most sacred prohibitions	Revulsion & horror	Incest; cannibalism
Law	Norms codified by the state	Formal punishment	Theft; assault

Deviance is relative, not inherent

No act is deviant in and of itself. The same behavior can be deviant in one setting and required in another, which is why sociologists say deviance is socially constructed. Killing is murder in a back alley and heroism on a battlefield. Public nudity is deviant on a city street and normal at a nude beach. Cannabis use is a crime in one state and a taxed retail product across the border. Even the passage of time redefines the line: interracial marriage, left-handedness, and same-sex relationships were all treated as deviant within living memory in places that now protect them. What makes an act deviant is not the act but the time, place, culture, and situation in which it occurs, and the audience that judges it.

Social control: keeping people in line

Social control is the set of mechanisms a society uses to encourage conformity and discourage deviance. It operates through sanctions — reactions that reward conforming behavior or punish deviant behavior. Sanctions can be positive (a smile, a promotion, a medal) or negative (a frown, a fine, a jail term). They can also be informal, applied in everyday interaction by peers and family, or formal, applied by institutions and officials empowered to enforce the rules. Most conformity is produced not by police but by the informal, internalized sense that certain things are simply "not done."

Lead. The most powerful form of social control is the one you can't see — the norms you have internalized so thoroughly that you obey them without being watched. Long before any officer arrives, most people police themselves. That is why sociologists insist that order rests less on punishment than on socialization: control that works best is control you no longer notice.

Interactive Hold a single act perfectly still and carry it from room to room — the body, the blade, the voice never change, but the reaction does, showing that deviance lives in the audience rather than in the behaviour itself. Open full ↑

Key points

Norms range from folkways (etiquette) to mores (morals) to taboos (the sacred) to laws (codified by the state).
Deviance is any norm violation that draws a negative reaction; it is defined by reaction, not by harm, and can be positive as well as negative.
Deviance is relative — the same act is deviant or normal depending on time, place, culture, and situation.
Social control works through sanctions that are positive or negative and informal or formal; most conformity is informal and internalized.

Section 2The functionalist view of deviance

Diagram of Merton's typology showing five modes of adaptation to cultural goals and means — **Reference.** Merton's strain typology — the five ways people adapt to the gap between cultural goals and legitimate means. Diagram after Robert K. Merton. Source and licence: see the figure credits

Durkheim: deviance is normal and useful

The founder of the functionalist tradition, Émile Durkheim, offered the most counterintuitive idea in this chapter: deviance is not a sickness in society but a normal, permanent, and even useful feature of every social order. In a famous thought experiment he imagined "a society of saints, a perfect cloister of exemplary individuals." Even there, he argued, ordinary faults invisible to us would be treated as scandalous crimes, because the group needs a boundary and will always find one to draw. Durkheim identified several functions that deviance performs: it affirms cultural values and norms (we learn what is right partly by seeing what is punished), it clarifies moral boundaries, it promotes social cohesion as people unite in reaction against the offender, and it can encourage social change, since today's deviant may be tomorrow's reformer.

Durkheim also gave us anomie — a condition of normlessness in which the rules that ordinarily guide behavior weaken or break down, typically during rapid social change. When old expectations collapse faster than new ones form, people lose their moral compass, and deviance rises. Anomie became the seed of the most influential functionalist theory of deviance.

Merton's strain theory

Robert K. Merton took Durkheim's anomie and rooted it in the structure of society. His strain theory begins with an observation about culture: a society such as the United States loudly promotes certain cultural goals (wealth, success, the "American Dream") while distributing the legitimate means to reach them — good schools, decent jobs, connections — very unequally. The gap between the goals everyone is told to want and the means available to reach them produces strain. People adapt to that strain in five ways, and only the first is fully conforming.

Adaptation	Cultural goals	Legitimate means	Example
Conformity	Accept (+)	Accept (+)	Works hard through school and a job to get ahead
Innovation	Accept (+)	Reject (–)	Wants wealth but pursues it illegally — theft, fraud, drug dealing
Ritualism	Reject (–)	Accept (+)	Abandons the dream but rigidly follows the rules — the burned-out bureaucrat
Retreatism	Reject (–)	Reject (–)	Drops out of the whole game — some addiction and chronic homelessness
Rebellion	Replace	Replace	Rejects both goals and means and works to build a new system

Strain theory's great strength is that it locates the source of much deviance not in bad individuals but in a social structure that dangles universal goals while denying many people the means to reach them. It explains why property crime concentrates where legitimate opportunity is scarce — innovation is the predictable response of someone who has fully absorbed the goal of success but has been shut out of the ladder.

Subcultures and differential opportunity

Later functionalists asked where people learn deviant adaptations, and answered: in subcultures — groups whose values and norms differ from the mainstream. Albert Cohen argued that working-class boys, judged by a "middle-class measuring rod" they cannot meet, experience status frustration and band together to invert those standards, prizing exactly what the school condemns. Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin added differential opportunity theory: just as legitimate opportunity is unequally distributed, so is illegitimate opportunity. Whether a strained neighborhood produces organized criminal enterprise, violent conflict, or drug-focused retreat depends on which illegitimate paths are actually available there. Deviance, in this view, is learned in groups — a bridge to the interactionist theories of the next section.

Lead. Durkheim's boldest claim is worth sitting with: a world without crime is impossible, because a group that ran out of criminals would simply lower the bar and start punishing lesser faults. Deviance is not the failure of social order — it is one of the ways social order defines and renews itself. Punishment is aimed less at the offender than at the audience watching.

Interactive Expel a village's deviants and watch the line move back — Durkheim's four functions of deviance — then build all five of Merton's strain adaptations on a clickable goals-and-means grid. Open full ↑

Key points

Durkheim: deviance is normal and performs functions — affirming norms, clarifying boundaries, building cohesion, and enabling change; anomie is normlessness.
Merton's strain theory: deviance flows from the gap between cultural goals and legitimate means.
The five adaptations are conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, rebellion.
Subcultural theories (Cohen; Cloward & Ohlin) show deviance is learned in groups and shaped by unequal illegitimate opportunity.

Section 3Conflict and labeling

Pie chart of the racial composition of people killed by police in the United States — **Reference.** Share of people killed by police in the United States, by race. Note that this is a breakdown of victims, not a rate: rates need a population denominator. Read against that denominator the disparity is visible — Black Americans are roughly 13–14% of the U.S. population but about 24% of those killed — which is the kind of comparison conflict theorists press when they ask whose behavior gets defined and punished as deviant. Source and licence: see the figure credits

Conflict theory: deviance and power

Where functionalists ask what deviance does for society, conflict theorists ask a sharper question: who benefits from defining it? Drawing on Karl Marx, the conflict paradigm holds that the norms and laws a society enforces are not a neutral consensus but reflect the interests of its most powerful groups. Those with wealth and power shape what gets written into law, whose behavior gets watched, and whose gets excused. The result is a system that comes down hard on the "street crime" of the poor — theft, drugs, disorder — while treating the far costlier "suite crime" of the powerful — wage theft, financial fraud, environmental harm — with fines and settlements. A hungry person who shoplifts is arrested; an executive whose fraud costs thousands their savings may never see a cell. Conflict theory also underwrites feminist analyses of how deviance is gendered and critical-race analyses of how enforcement is racialized.

Labeling theory: deviance is a social response

Labeling theory, an offshoot of symbolic interactionism, makes the most radical move of all: it says deviance is not a quality of the act but a consequence of the label. In Howard Becker's formulation, social groups create deviance by making rules whose violation constitutes deviance, and then applying those rules to particular people. The same act — smoking cannabis, a teenage fight — may be ignored in one person and prosecuted in another; what differs is the reaction. Erving Goffman analyzed the stigma that attaches to a spoiled identity, and how a deviant label can become a master status — the one trait through which everything else about a person is now seen. "Ex-convict" or "addict" can eclipse every other identity a person holds.

The theory's key distinction comes from Edwin Lemert. Primary deviance is an initial rule-breaking act that provokes little reaction and no change in self-concept — nearly everyone commits some. Secondary deviance begins when society reacts, applies a label, and the person reorganizes their identity and behavior around that label. The labeled shoplifter, treated as a thief and shut out of legitimate opportunity, may come to see themselves as a thief and offend again. The reaction, not the original act, produces the durable deviant career — a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Question	Functionalism	Conflict theory	Symbolic interactionism / labeling
Level of analysis	Macro	Macro	Micro
What is deviance?	A normal feature that helps society function	A definition imposed by the powerful	A label produced by social reaction
Why does it exist?	Structural strain; it serves functions	Inequality; laws protect elite interests	People learn and are labeled into it
Key thinkers	Durkheim, Merton	Marx and successors	Becker, Lemert, Goffman
Reform implies	Restore norms & opportunity	Redistribute power	Reduce labeling & stigma

Lead. Labeling theory carries an uncomfortable warning for every institution that punishes: the label meant to correct behavior can instead manufacture it. Brand a teenager a delinquent, expel and exclude them, and you may produce the hardened offender you claimed to be stopping. The reaction becomes the cause — which is why sociologists watch not only the rule-breaker but the rule-enforcer.

Interactive Run one identical rule-break down two futures at once and watch a label become a master status, turning Lemert's primary deviance into secondary deviance. Open full ↑

Key points

Conflict theory (from Marx) argues laws and enforcement reflect the interests of the powerful; "street crime" is punished, "suite crime" excused.
Labeling theory (Becker) holds deviance is created by the social reaction, not by the act itself.
Primary deviance provokes little reaction; secondary deviance follows labeling and reorganizes identity around the label.
A deviant label can become a master status and a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Section 4Crime and how we count it

Bar chart comparing the rates of several different categories of crime — **Reference.** Crime is not one thing — rates vary sharply by category, and how we count them shapes what we think we know. Source and licence: see the figure credits

The many kinds of crime

Crime is the subset of deviance that violates a law and is subject to formal punishment by the state. It is far from uniform. Violent crime uses force or its threat against a person — homicide, assault, robbery, rape. Property crime takes or destroys property without force against a victim — burglary, larceny, motor-vehicle theft, arson. White-collar crime, a term coined by Edwin Sutherland, is committed by respectable people of high status in the course of their occupations — embezzlement, insider trading, tax evasion, fraud. Though it rarely fills the evening news, it drains far more money from society than all street crime combined. Corporate crime extends this to illegal acts by companies themselves. Organized crime is the ongoing business of supplying illegal goods and services. And consensual or "victimless" crimes — some drug use, gambling, sex work — involve willing participants and no direct complainant, which is exactly why they are so hard to police and so contested to define.

Category	What it involves	Examples
Violent crime	Force or threat against a person	Homicide, assault, robbery
Property crime	Taking/destroying property, no force on a victim	Burglary, larceny-theft, arson
White-collar crime	Committed by high-status people at work	Fraud, embezzlement, insider trading
Corporate crime	Illegal acts by organizations	Price-fixing, pollution, unsafe products
Organized crime	Ongoing supply of illegal goods/services	Trafficking, extortion rackets
Consensual (victimless) crime	Willing participants, no direct complainant	Some drug use, gambling, sex work

Measuring crime — and the dark figure

Everything we claim to know about crime rates depends on how crime is measured, and no single measure is complete. The Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) — now being replaced by the more detailed NIBRS — compile offenses reported to and recorded by police. They are national and long-running, but they miss everything never reported and everything police choose not to record. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) instead asks a large sample of households whether they have been victimized, capturing much crime that never reached the police — but it relies on memory and omits homicide (the victim cannot answer) and crimes against businesses. Self-report surveys ask people to confess their own offending anonymously, which is invaluable for hidden and juvenile deviance but depends on honesty. The gap between all the crime that happens and the crime that shows up in official statistics is called the dark figure of crime, and for some offenses — sexual assault, domestic violence, corporate wrongdoing — it is enormous.

Lead. Whenever you read that crime is "up" or "down," ask whose count. A rise in reported assaults may mean more violence — or more trust in police and more willingness to report. Crime statistics measure two things at once: how much people offend and how institutions respond. Confuse the two and you will misread the trend every time.

Interactive Tap one city block — the tower, the apartment, the street — to explore the three families of crime, then sort twelve real cases into the right bin and see why each type is counted and punished so differently. Open full ↑

Key points

Crime is deviance that breaks a law; major types include violent, property, white-collar, corporate, organized, and consensual crime.
White-collar crime (Sutherland) costs far more than street crime yet is punished far more lightly.
The three main measures are the UCR/NIBRS (police reports), the NCVS (victim survey), and self-report surveys — each with distinct blind spots.
The dark figure of crime is the large share of offenses that never enter official statistics.

Section 5The criminal justice system

People completing paperwork inside a courthouse — **Reference.** The courts are one of three branches — police, courts, corrections — through which the state administers formal social control. Source and licence: see the figure credits

Police: the gatekeepers

The criminal justice system is the formal apparatus a society uses to enforce its laws, and it has three interlocking branches. The first is the police. Because officers cannot act on every violation they encounter, their defining feature is discretion — the power to decide whom to stop, question, cite, or arrest, and whom to let go. That discretion makes police the gatekeepers of the whole system: a person only becomes a "criminal case" if an officer decides to make one. Where and how that discretion falls — which neighborhoods are patrolled, which behaviors are treated as suspicious — shapes everything downstream, which is why conflict and labeling theorists watch policing so closely.

Courts: adjudication and the bargain

Once charged, a case moves to the courts, built in principle on an adversarial contest between prosecution and defense before a neutral judge, with the accused protected by due process — the presumption of innocence, the right to counsel, the right to a jury. In practice, the dramatic trial is the exception. The overwhelming majority of criminal convictions are obtained through plea bargaining, in which the accused pleads guilty, usually to a reduced charge, in exchange for a lighter sentence. Plea bargaining keeps a crowded system moving, but critics note it pressures even innocent defendants to plead, and it shifts real power from judges and juries to prosecutors.

Corrections: what punishment is for

The third branch, corrections, carries out the sentence — through incarceration, community supervision on probation or parole, fines, or, in some jurisdictions, death. Sociologists organize the debate over corrections around four competing justifications for punishment. Retribution punishes because the offender deserves it. Deterrence punishes to discourage future crime, whether by the individual (specific deterrence) or by society watching (general deterrence). Incapacitation simply removes the offender's ability to reoffend by confining them. Rehabilitation aims to reform the offender so they can return as a law-abiding member of society. These goals often pull in different directions, and which one dominates shapes an entire penal culture. The United States now incarcerates one of the largest shares of its population of any nation — a phenomenon called mass incarceration — and high rates of recidivism, the tendency of released offenders to reoffend, raise a hard question about whether prisons rehabilitate or merely warehouse and label.

Justification	Logic of punishment	Aimed at
Retribution	The offender deserves to suffer for the wrong	The past act
Deterrence	Punishment discourages future offending	The offender and the watching public
Incapacitation	Confinement removes the ability to reoffend	Public safety now
Rehabilitation	Treatment reforms the offender to return safely	The offender's future

Lead. Every branch of criminal justice runs on discretion — the officer's choice to arrest, the prosecutor's choice to charge and bargain, the judge's choice to sentence. That is where a system meant to apply the law equally can quietly reproduce the very inequalities the conflict and labeling paradigms describe. Studying justice sociologically means examining not only the person in the dock but every decision that put them there.

Interactive Step a thousand offenses down the criminal justice funnel — police, courts, and corrections — reading each stage through all three sociological paradigms, then sort eight real decisions by which branch made them. Open full ↑

Key points

The criminal justice system has three branches: police, courts, and corrections.
Police discretion makes officers the system's gatekeepers; most convictions come from plea bargaining, not trials.
Punishment is justified in four ways: retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation.
Mass incarceration and high recidivism raise whether prisons rehabilitate or simply confine and label.

The chapter in one breath

Deviance is a norm violation that draws a negative reaction; it is relative and defined by reaction, not by harm.
Norms run from folkways to mores to taboos to laws, and social control enforces them through positive/negative, informal/formal sanctions.
Durkheim showed deviance is normal and functional; Merton's strain theory ties it to the gap between cultural goals and legitimate means, with five modes of adaptation.
Conflict theory (Marx) says the powerful define deviance to protect their interests; labeling theory (Becker, Lemert) says the social reaction creates it, turning primary into secondary deviance.
Crime is illegal deviance — violent, property, white-collar, corporate, organized, and consensual — and white-collar crime costs the most while being punished least.
We measure crime with the UCR/NIBRS, the NCVS, and self-report surveys, each blind to a different dark figure.
The criminal justice system runs on discretion through police, courts, and corrections, and punishment is justified by retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation.

ReferenceWords worth knowing

A quick reference for the terms in this chapter — skim it now, or circle back whenever a word trips you up.

Anomie: A condition of normlessness in which the guiding rules of society weaken or break down, often during rapid change; Durkheim's concept, central to strain theory.
Conflict theory: The paradigm, rooted in Marx, that laws and social control reflect the interests of the powerful and are applied unequally across social classes.
Corrections: The branch of the justice system that carries out sentences through incarceration, probation, parole, fines, or execution.
Crime: Deviance that violates a codified law and is subject to formal punishment by the state.
Deterrence: A justification for punishment that aims to discourage future offending, whether by the individual (specific) or by the watching public (general).
Deviance: Any behavior, belief, or condition that violates a social norm and provokes a negative reaction.
Folkways: Everyday customs and etiquette whose violation is mildly sanctioned as rude or strange rather than immoral.
Formal social control: Control exercised by institutions and officials empowered to enforce rules — police, courts, schools — as opposed to informal, everyday control.
Labeling theory: The interactionist view that deviance is produced by the social reaction to an act — the label — rather than by the act itself.
Master status: A status so dominant it overrides all others in how a person is seen; a deviant label such as "ex-convict" can become one.
Mores: Norms with strong moral significance; violating them brings serious condemnation.
Primary deviance: An initial norm violation that provokes little reaction and does not alter the person's self-concept.
Recidivism: The tendency of a previously punished offender to reoffend; a key measure of whether corrections rehabilitate.
Sanction: A reaction that rewards conformity or punishes deviance; sanctions may be positive or negative, informal or formal.
Secondary deviance: Deviance that follows labeling, when a person reorganizes identity and behavior around the deviant label.
Social control: The mechanisms a society uses to encourage conformity and discourage deviance.
Social norm: A shared expectation about how people ought to behave in a given setting.
Stigma: A powerfully negative label or "spoiled identity" that discredits a person in the eyes of others; analyzed by Goffman.
Strain theory: Merton's theory that deviance arises from the gap between culturally approved goals and the legitimate means available to reach them.
Subculture: A group whose values, norms, and lifestyle differ from those of the dominant culture; a common site for learning deviance.
Uniform Crime Reports (UCR): The FBI's long-running compilation of crimes reported to and recorded by police, now transitioning to the more detailed NIBRS.
White-collar crime: Crime committed by respectable, high-status people in the course of their occupations; a term coined by Edwin Sutherland.

Check yourself

1. A student argues that some acts are "just naturally deviant." Use the idea that deviance is relative to correct them.

No act is deviant in itself; deviance depends on time, place, culture, and situation. Killing is murder in an alley but heroism in war; public nudity is deviant on a street but normal at a nude beach. Deviance is defined by social reaction, not by the act alone.

2. Distinguish folkways, mores, and taboos, and rank the severity of reaction to violating each.

Folkways are everyday customs (mild reaction — rude/odd); mores are moral norms (strong condemnation); taboos are the most sacred prohibitions (revulsion). Severity climbs folkway → more → taboo, and laws add formal state punishment.

3. Give an example of a positive sanction and a negative sanction, and explain the difference between informal and formal social control.

Positive sanction: a promotion or a medal (rewards conformity). Negative sanction: a fine or a frown (punishes deviance). Informal control is applied in everyday interaction by peers and family; formal control is applied by institutions and officials empowered to enforce rules.

4. Durkheim claimed deviance is "normal" and even useful. Name two functions he said it performs.

Any two: it affirms cultural norms and values; it clarifies moral boundaries; it promotes social cohesion (people unite against the offender); it can encourage social change. His "society of saints" shows a group will always draw a boundary and find someone to punish.

5. Define anomie and explain how Merton built strain theory on it.

Anomie is normlessness — a breakdown of the rules that guide behavior. Merton located that strain in social structure: society promotes universal cultural goals (success) but distributes legitimate means unequally, and the gap pressures people toward deviant adaptations.

6. A person accepts the goal of wealth but pursues it through fraud. Name Merton's mode of adaptation, and contrast it with retreatism.

This is innovation — accepting cultural goals but rejecting legitimate means. Retreatism rejects both goals and means, dropping out of the game entirely (e.g., some chronic addiction), whereas the innovator still chases success, just illegitimately.

7. Explain how conflict theory accounts for the different treatment of "street crime" and "suite crime."

Conflict theory says laws and enforcement reflect the interests of the powerful, so the street crime of the poor is heavily policed while the far costlier white-collar/corporate crime of elites is treated leniently. Definitions of deviance protect those who write the rules.

8. Using labeling theory, distinguish primary from secondary deviance and explain the "self-fulfilling prophecy."

Primary deviance is an initial act that provokes little reaction and no change in self-concept; secondary deviance follows the label, when the person reorganizes identity around it. Being treated as a deviant and shut out of legitimate roles can push someone to embrace the label and keep offending — the reaction produces the behavior it named.

9. What is a master status, and how can a deviant label become one? Whose concept is stigma?

A master status is a trait that dominates how a person is seen, overriding all others; labels like "ex-convict" or "addict" can eclipse every other identity. Stigma — a discrediting "spoiled identity" — is Erving Goffman's concept.

10. Define white-collar crime and explain why sociologists say it is under-punished relative to its cost.

White-collar crime (Sutherland) is crime committed by high-status people in the course of their occupations — fraud, embezzlement, insider trading. It drains more money than all street crime combined, yet offenders are respectable and powerful, so it is policed lightly and often resolved with fines rather than prison.

11. Compare the UCR/NIBRS, the NCVS, and self-report surveys, and define the "dark figure of crime."

UCR/NIBRS count crimes reported to police (miss unreported crime); the NCVS surveys victims (captures unreported crime but omits homicide and relies on memory); self-report surveys ask people to confess their own offending (good for hidden/juvenile deviance but depend on honesty). The dark figure is the large share of crime that never appears in official statistics.

12. Name the three branches of the criminal justice system and the four justifications for punishment, and explain why "discretion" matters sociologically.

Branches: police, courts, corrections. Justifications: retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation. Discretion — the officer's choice to arrest, the prosecutor's to charge and plea-bargain, the judge's to sentence — is where a system meant to apply law equally can reproduce the inequalities that conflict and labeling theories describe.

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