Images of Deviance and Social Control

The book is excellent: comprehensive, thought-provoking, fair, and interesting. Reading it requires an investment in time and effort, not because it is difficult to read but because it focuses on ideas rather than the "nuts and sluts" mode of learning about deviance. It worked well when I used it to teach sociology of deviance and social control to typical-college-age Ivy League students. And it worked well with evenings-and-weekends urban adult students who did not have high SAT scores and did have full-time jobs, families, etc. the rest of the week. It has not worked well with typical-age college undergraduates at the minimally selective, medium-sized, small-town Midwestern university where I currently teach. When I've used this book here, about a third of the students don't read it or "skim" it, in their words, and so are lost. It is not a textbook and can not be read (or unread) successfully that way. (Testing them on the material did not encourage actual reading of the book.) Of those who try to read it, many are unwilling to read closely and slowly. They are frustrated by the focus on ideas and are intimidated or upset when Pfohl uses a word or idea they don't know. A few students read it and understand it--many of these are excited by the ideas in it--but I must choose course texts that the average, not the exceptional, student can use. I've accepted that the book is too challenging for most of my current students, not because they aren't smart enough to understand it but because, mostly, they aren't motivated to try. It's just not a good match. However, if you are a professor with ready-to-learn students who like to be intellectually challenged, or you want a deeper, more analytic perspective on the dominant theories of deviance for your own knowledge, I highly recommend it.

In the spring of 1998, I enrolled in Prof. Pfohl's Boston College course Deviance and Social Control. During that semester, my mind's doors were blown wide open. A brilliant man, as well as a talented author, educator, activist, and artist, Pfohl has expertly constructed a work examining the deviance and social control beginning with Christian Demonism and continuing through post-modern critical theory. The text is well structured, and he supplements his words with the theoretical ideas of many varied thinkers throughout history. In addition to the "heavyweights" of social theory, his references include voices ranging from entertainers Ice-T and Sting to legal theorist Patricia J. Williams, to authors as old as the biblical apostles and as fresh as Toni Morrison. Pfohl recognizes that sociology is an interdisciplinary study, and accordingly, his text is fortified with stirring images -- the chilling parellel of an embalmed Jeremy Bentham with the everpresent eye of the panoptic prison, the psuchosurgeon's invasive scalpel with the works of Sade. In addition, every section or chapter is headed with a collage image representing the themes of the chapter. Ultimately, Pfohl's work revelas itself to be a collection of the ideas and work of others, interwoven with autobiography, and adroitly structured so that this collection of ideas becomes a theory of its own. The text then becomes a parallel to the collage work included within -- a most post-modern concept indeed. The text takes existing concepts of deviance and social control, and like a collage artist, arranges them into a new structure, thereby redefining the meaning of the original ideas.Pfohl's text demonstrates the ability we have to (re)define our social reality. He even provides practical examples of subverting established heirarchy. Just as systems of social order can be erected and maintained, so can they (with some difficulty) be changed or eliminated. The text asserts that there is nothing inheirantly deviant in any given act. An act is deviant only because some people have been succesful in labeling it so. What is universal, however, is the process by which "deviance" is determined.Through this book, I was born into a greater awareness of the frightening invisibility, pervasiveness, and strength of social institutions. Yet, as well, Pfohl also instilled a strong sense of responsiblility to society and a need for substantive structural and symbolic change.