Thinking About Deviance

Book excerpt: Thinking About Deviance, second edition, explores how people participate in and produce the phenomena of deviance. Through nineteen brief and provocative chapters, such as 'Is Deviance Harmful or Helpful?', 'Once Deviant, Always Deviant?', and 'Do You Get the Time Because You Did the Crime?', the book examines how everyone is involved in the many facets of deviance. While a small portion of deviance may seem to be exotic, done by people on the fringe of society, deviance is an integral part of society and of conventional people's lives. By using everyday instances of deviance familiar to college students (such as shoplifting, academic cheating, underage drinking, and smoking) and examples from the media, the book engages readers and enables them to develop more general thinking about deviance. Through an interactive style in which the readers are asked questions and presented with hypothetical and actual situations for their thoughts, the book creates a 'conversation' with the readers. It encourages readers to think about and question deviance, including their participation in and their assumptions about it, in ways they are unlikely to have done before.