I’ve just seen a paper of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s in which the New York senator explores the notion that communities have a certain amount of punishment to mete out for deviant behavior. We keep the level of punishment more or less constant by redefining deviancy.
The basic notion comes from Emile Durkheim (1895), with an elaboration by Kai T. Erikson, whose 1965 examination of crime in the Massachusetts Bay Colony was designed to test Durkheim’s theory. Listen to Erikson:
“It is a simple logistic fact that the number of deviancies which come to a community’s attention are limited by the kinds of equipment it uses to detect and handle them. . . . A community’s capacity for handling deviance . . . can be roughly estimated by counting its prison cells and hospital beds, its policemen and psychiatrists, its courts and clinics.”
Durkheim’s interesting theory is that there can be no such thing as a “crime free” community but only communities that redefine “crime” to accommodate their means for dealing with it.
Moynihan makes a point that Durkheim seems to have neglected: Redefinition works in the other direction as well. Behavior that once was deviant and punishable (by law or social sanction) can, when our correcting mechanisms are overloaded, be redefined as acceptable.
The clearest example intimately associated with the senator is our national attitude toward unwed parenthood. When Moynihan (then an assistant secretary of labor in the Johnson administration) wrote his controversial study predicting family breakdown among black Americans would lead to social disaster, about a fifth of black babies were born out of wedlock. The rate for whites: 1 in 40.
Today, nearly 27 years later, one-fifth of white babies are born to unmarried mothers, while the rate for blacks has reached two-thirds. But much of the talk today is about the irrelevancy of “Ozzie and Harriet” models and the ascendancy of “alternative lifestyles,” as though the thing lamented by Moynihan is in fact a healthy smorgasbord of new “choices.” There are other examples of “defining deviancy down,” as Moynihan puts it, including the “deinstitutionalization” of mental patients, lowered expectations for school performance and the growing acceptance of criminal violence.
The redefinition is not benign. There is unimpeachable evidence that family structure matters enormously to the well-being of children. The homelessness of the deinstitutionalized (or never institutionalized) mentally ill is a rebuke to society. Violence, no longer linked primarily to the drug trade, has changed our cities for the worse.
I know: We worry in public and appoint commissions to examine homelessness, school failure and gunplay. We campaign for stiffer sentences (including execution) and occasionally build more jail cells. But, like Moynihan, I doubt that we are as serious as we ought to be about what is happening to us. Our predisposition is still to redefine the problem down to manageable proportions, to normalize what once alarmed us.
“We are,” as Pat Moynihan laments, “getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us.”
