Crime and Deviance

An inventory of the topics and issues most important to social theory reveals that crime is a critical social experience that has been instrumental to the development of the disciplines’ theories and methodologies. Deviance and transgression are at the heart of theories aimed at explaining human behavior, and the twinned issues of conformity and deviance are central to the rich sociological theorizing over the last two centuries. This entry considers the scholarship of deviance—necessarily, in abridged form—and critically examines the arguments about the death knell of deviance as they relate to the contemporary landscapes of crime, deviance and crime control, and questions its relevance to scholarship and practice.