SOSYOLOJİYE GİRİŞ - Deneme Sınavı - 4

The norms are cultural rules, which arise with the reward and punishment system and affect the individuals’ behaviors.

The concept of anomie, which refers to normlessness and irregularity, was firstly used by the Durkheim, a French sociologist, in his work “Suicide.”

The characteristic named by Grotius as the “social appetite” leads people to live together and build societies and establish various relationships with each other.

The sociology of law is a very young science branch and its eponym is D. Anzilotti, an Italian lawyer. Anzilotti described the task of this new branch of science, which he called “sociologia juridica” in 1892, as an empirical analysis of legal events.

The subjects that are studied by the sociology of law are as follows (Milovanovic, 2003: 4): a. Justification, functions, placement and evolution of social control systems, b. Legal forms of thought in relation to a particular political economic order, c. Legitimating principles and effects, d. Transfer of correct legal forms of interpretation, e. The evolution of the legal language system, the levels of constraint or freedom in the legal order.

Crimes could be dealt with in three main groups (Macionis, 2013); a. Crimes against a person (crimes of violence), murder, battery, rape and robbery, etc. b. Crimes against property: Theft, robbery, arson, etc and c. Crimes without a victim, crimes without a visible victim.

White-collar crimes: These crimes are committed by individuals belonging to wealthy segments of society, such as tax evasion, illegal sales, securities and real estate frauds and embezzlement.

In literature, there are criticisms about the fact that only men are writing and the writings are only about men. Perhaps the only exception to this has been Pollak, who has argued that the women are more criminal and have more criminal tendencies than men, but they are further capable of hiding their crimes.

Physiological and biological theories have argued that some individuals genetically tend to be more prone to deviance than others. The first work in this sense was provided in 1870 by Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminologist (1835-1909), who suggested that the types of criminals could be detected by certain anatomical features. Lombroso, who made analyses at prisons, suggests that the criminals resemble humans’ ape-like ancestors. Lombroso examined the physical properties of criminals such as skull and forehead shape, jaw size and limb length, and suggested that they exhibit features from earlier stages of human evolution and that they return to primitive forms of humanity.

We can list the basic aspects of Durkheim’s views on deviance as follows (Macionis and Plummer, 2005: 445): a. Crime and deviance are a normal and inevitable aspect of modern life. b. It is inevitable, because it is not the case that each and every member of a society depends on the shared values and the moral beliefs of that society. c. In addition to being inevitable, crime may also be functional. However, when the ratio is too high or too low, it becomes nonfunctional and damages the society. Deviance becomes an innovative force in society by creating new mindsets and challenges, and thus creates change. d. Crime is seen in all societies and mostly in industrialized and developed countries.

The people’s obligation to live as a community makes it imperative to overcome the inconsistencies caused by living as a community. The mentioned quests, have gained different dimensions in modern times along with the Age of Enlightenment. Sociology,
which has emerged as a field of science independent from philosophy, has strived to analyze social life with a scientific point of view. In particular, the understanding of social order based on the scientific reality that was promised by modernity to humanity or the understandings in the form of the New Age of mankind set forth by a progressive approach have given rise to the opinion that an important step has been reached in the mentioned searches for harmony.

The concepts such as xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia, anti-immigration and global
terror that increased in the new world order that emerged especially after September 11 also shape the perceptions of social peace and security. There is an ongoing search for how people and societies could provide the harmony they need in their lives.