In the world today, there are people that have the desire to live according to society’s rules so as to keep from being the odd person out, and that desire is even stronger today than it was 25 years ago.
People either scramble into groups or are put into them because of how the world views them or how they grew up, and both have a critical impact on how a person views the world or the people around them.
There are also other evils in the world or about society that makes people yearn to be loved, appreciated or even noticed, and it has caused the downfall of generations throughout the ages. People seek to understand why they have to pick a side because it is well within their favor to do so, and live their life knowing that they made what they think is the right choice.
There are others who have to fight every day to keep everything they have so they can feel like they are just one step closer to getting ahead, and there are people that go through this on a daily basis.
Some people wonder, what point is there to living in a world where the rich and powerful try to exert their power over poor or middle class citizens who have worked hard their entire lives just to get their fair piece of the pie.
Even sadder is that people feel that they have to go back to school in order to feel like they will amount to something because of people who have nicer things than they have, and it is not just about their car or house.
Our children are adopting the social order of things where the strong would rather bully the weak instead of trying to back them up, and it is sad too because there are some kids that can benefit from having bigger and stronger kids to help them out.
These examples are forms of social control theory and conflict theory, and to the naked eye, you would not think that there is any difference to them because of their similarities, but there are a lot of differences between them.
You cannot fully understand either one of these terms if you never took the time to examine which one of these theories areas that you fall under, and I assure you that by the time you get to the end of this paper you will have full knowledge of both social control and conflict theories.
Interesting enough, it can be said that the comparison between social control theory and conflict theory are similar when in fact they are very different. Let’s start with Conflict Theory, conflict theory covers areas of both criminal activity and the morality of the choices that support why a person chooses to commit or not commit crimes.
For example, a young boy has a very biased teacher who feels that every teenage boy will grow up to be a criminal or at the very least a juvenile delinquent if he gets into trouble just one time.
However, because society associates criminal activity with something as small as getting sent to the principal’s office, this is likely to create a future criminal because young kids are so impressionable and they take everything they are told to heart.
Now, on the darker side of this comparison, a rich kid gets drunk, gets in his father’s 4 million dollar Rolls-Royce, and causes a 14 car pile-up. Do you know what his teachers say about him; he is just under a lot of stress from finals, and trying to take his professional college basketball team to state.
When the rich kid goes before the judge to answer for what he has done, the judge demands that he pays a $25,000 and spend a week on house arrest. This is where the conflict comes in, the idea that a person depending on their economic status should never have to pay for their sins as long as they can buy their way out of trouble, and twist the legal system to their tender so they can get away with murder is completely cockamamie. As for everyone else who cannot buy their way out of trouble, they will be prone to getting into more of it because of the seriousness of the offense.
Conflict Theory is sanctioned to allow the rich and famous to get away with murder while people in lower social classes to go broke trying to hire a good lawyer to keep from spending the rest of their life in jail. Because the poor is unable to obtain higher education, they are generally unable to get higher paying jobs, and thus, remain poor. (Marx). It is both sad and ironic.
Social Control Theory is similar to Conflict Theory; the difference is that Social Control Theory affects people of all social classes, and that includes the rich not being exempt to the machinations of this theory class. Social Control Theory monitors people’s actions to commit crime because of a greater good to that person or people around them in the name of peer pressure, and status or respect in some cases. Case in point, a kid from a poor community is sent to a school where rich kids and descendants of politicians go to. Right away, the kid falls under pressure to do something stupid and drastic in order to fit in like steal their parent’s car to take to the local hangout or to joyride with a couple of friends even though the kid is 2 years under the driving age. Like Hobbes, adherents to social control theory suggest morality is created within a social order by assigning costs and consequences to certain actions that are marked as evil, wrong, illegal or deviant. (Foucault). This is due in part to the Social Control Theory where the less than popular have to succumb to some high standards in order to fit in so they can prove that they are just as worthy if not more, and going to any extent to break the law in order to become popular.
Social Control Theory also examines people using their moral compass to do the right thing to avoid caring about not being popular, and doing whatever it takes for them to not go to jail. If a person believes that losing weight by any means necessary is not worth going to jail for then they will use their common sense to keep from going to jail, social control theory is about people expressing their desire to keep from going to jail based on their beliefs or morals. Another example, a person is in need of food but they know that stealing is wrong, and they know that
God will punish the unjust. As a result, that person, who used their belief system to keep them from committing a crime, avoided going to jail because their belief in God kept them from breaking the law in any way, shape or form. Social Control Theory is put in place to file people into categories that speak of them following their morals in order to make just decisions about how to live their life, and not live it according to the peer pressure that society poses on people to make them think before they act. In so doing, this keeps people out of jail and in their homes.
Now, based on the information and examples of Social Control and Conflict Theory, one has to wonder which one is more likely linked to crime in American society. You would think that both of them because they are heavily related to people choosing to go against society norms at the cost of getting peace of mind no matter what, and the people they hurt are not even a concern because they have been wronged. However, the theory class that is mostly responsible for the occurrence of crime in modern day American society is Conflict Theory. The logic behind this is quite simple, and easy to understand. Conflict Theory is responsible for crime in modern day
America because of the fact that people used to just settle for how things were 20, 30 or 40 years ago like if you are rich then you live it, and you enjoyed your life staying out of trouble while looking down on the poor masses. However, time has evolved, and so has people’s lack of tolerance to being ridiculed and looked down upon by people who are wealthy as well as successful.
People are at the point where they are not taking it anymore, and they are find more and more dangerous reasons to retaliate against the wealthy and pompous. It used to be that when a poor person was made fun of by a wealthy person, they were just told to let it go because counterattacking is not worth going to jail for or getting into less severe trouble for trying to come back at them. Nowadays, the wealthy and rich are made targets instantly if they ridicule someone in a popular clique especially if everyone in that clique is from the poor side of town.
These rich and wealthy people are getting mugged, shot, robbed, beaten up, kidnapped and held hostage because of their flashy display of wealth. We live in an age where people are tired of being subjects of ridicule because of what they do not have, and as a result, they take it from those who have it so those who had it will be the subjects of ridicule; it is ironic really. People in different social classes seem to ignore the fact that people in lower classes have feelings, and are really sensitive about their upbringing especially if it was a “just under middle class upbringing”.
The effects of positive and negative reinforcement on crime in the Conflict Theory class are very immense, and contradictory. But in the sensory reinforcement literature, this latter behavior customarily is also described as under the control of positive rather than negative reinforcement. (Baron & Galizio). Evidently, there is something that can be taken from the positive and negative reinforcement of the Conflict Theory class; since it speaks of vigilantism and seemingly justified retribution for social class per person. One of the negative reinforcements of crime in the
Conflict Theory class is removing the minimum punishment for the most minor offense. Case in point, to dissuade any lower class people from trying to steal from other people to get money, the courts decided to take away the minimum punishment for stealing which is a night in jail and a 50 dollar fine. Instead, anyone caught stealing will spend a week in jail and a 300 dollar fine.
This negative reinforcement makes it so even if the person got it in their mind to steal from a convenience store, the thought is automatically erased because no one has 300 dollars to bail another person out. The positive reinforcement to the Conflict Theory class is that if a person finds a job within the first 30 days of their 18th birthday, they will get a full pardon from the officer should they get pulled over. This prevents people from stealing from other people or their job in order to get money or get that money to do things like buy alcohol illegally because the person is underage. There are positive and negative reinforcement in the Social Control Theory class.
The positive reinforcement to the Social Control Theory is that if you follow your morals, and live your life right then you will be granted a wealth of karma points which is really big in this world of ours; people need all of the good karma points that they can get. The negative reinforcement to the Social Control Theory class is if you do commit a crime from a person whose social class is below your own, you stand a chance of being punished to the full extent of the law whether it is stealing, attempted murder, premeditated murder or gangbang. The positive and negative reinforcement of these two theories classes are absolute, and should govern how we live our lives based on our wants as well as needs.
References
Marx, K. (n.d.). The conflict perspective. Retrieved from https://www.boundless.com/sociology/sociology/the-theoretical-perspectives-in-sociology/the-conflict-perspective/
Foucault, M. (n.d.). Social control theory. Retrieved from https://www.boundless.com/sociology/deviance-social-control-and-crime/social-control/social-control-theory/
Baron, A., & Galizio, M. (2006). The distinction between positive and negative reinforcement: Use with care. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2223166/
