Deviance

This week really opened my eyes to the social construct of punishable deviance. I believe that it is a social construct because someone at some point decided that when you go out of the norm there should be consequences. While I agree that negative deviance should be punished, it was scary to read the Courtroom 302 article and watch the 30 days episode and see how the deviant people were treated. Our system of penalizing and punishing does less rehabilitating and changing what society doesn't like, but more oppressing and controlling what they do and when they do it. I don't know how a society could avoid punishing negative deviance because then there would be too few consequences to have any control. Without the laws and penalties that stigmatize deviance, there would be far more occurrences of what society shuns. Our penitentiaries show how society wants to control the actions of its people to create a utopian-esque way of life. The ideal community is one without crime or any other acts of negative deviance. By locking them up, society hopes to rid the world of the men and women that would harm that ideal. In doing so, many people are punished harshly as means of prevention rather than in response to a problem. Because of the harshness and intensity of the criminal justice system, I am very thankful not to be a part of the negative side of it.