The Theater of Deviance and the Normative Boundaries of Society: Lessons from the Rabbinic Interpretations to the Biblical Law of Sotah
A widely held view on the purpose of criminal law is that it is designed to maintain social order. Assuming this view to be correct, how does criminal law achieve its purpose? The standard answer is by deterring crimes through the threat of penalties, and by incapacitating or rehabilitating criminal...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
2013
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| In: |
Journal of law and religion
Year: 2013, Volume: 28, Issue: 1, Pages: 105-142 |
| Online Access: |
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| Summary: | A widely held view on the purpose of criminal law is that it is designed to maintain social order. Assuming this view to be correct, how does criminal law achieve its purpose? The standard answer is by deterring crimes through the threat of penalties, and by incapacitating or rehabilitating criminals so that they cannot or will not engage in future crimes. Sociologists, however, have a somewhat different answer: criminal law maintains social order by branding deviant behavior as criminal. Society, it is argued, is constructed through opposition and contrast: it creates and preserves its identity, its distinct structure and unique shape, by emphasizing the differences between its own characteristics and practices and the characteristics and practices of the Other, the deviant. Deviance, in this view, is essentially a relative phenomenon. The definition of deviance, which changes from era to era and from place to place, is just that characteristic which society designates to establish, through it and in contrast to it, its identity and boundaries. Whatever the society, the deviant in that society is one who "represents the forces excluded by the group's boundaries," informing society "as it were, what the evil looks like, what shapes the evil can assume." In doing so, the deviant shows society "the differences between kinds of experience which belong within the group and kinds of experience which belong outside it." |
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| ISSN: | 2163-3088 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of law and religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0748081400000254 |