Social control
[5] Formal means comprise external sanctions enforced by government to prevent the establishment of chaos or anomie in society.
In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes discusses how the state exerts social order using civil and military power.
[12] In the decades leading up to the end of the 1980s, an increased prevalence of the individual as a feature within society led to new psychotherapeutic modalities, suggesting the use of therapy as a means of social control.
[15] Informal sanctions may include shame, ridicule, sarcasm, criticism, and disapproval, which can cause an individual to stray towards the social norms of the society.
In a criminal gang, on the other hand, a stronger sanction applies in the case of someone threatening to inform to the police of illegal activity.
In society and the laws and regulations implemented by the government tend to focus on punishment or the enforcing negative sanctions to act as a deterrent as means of social control.
[19] The marketing, advertising, and public relations industries have thus been said to utilize mass communications to aid the interests of certain political and business elites.
Powerful ideological, economic and religious lobbyists have often used school systems and centralized electronic communications to influence public opinion.
Other forms of formal social control can include other sanctions that are more severe depending on the behavior seen as negative such as censorship, expulsion, and limits on political freedom.
If a person breaks a law set forth by the government and is caught, they will have to go to court and depending on the severity, will have to pay fines or face harsher consequences.
[29] In the United States, early societies were able to easily expel individuals deemed undesirable from public space through vagrancy laws and other forms of banishment.
[28] The introduction of broken windows theory in the 1980s transformed the concepts cities used to form policies, to circumvent the previous issue of unconstitutionality.
However, environments filled with disorder, such as broken windows or graffiti, indicate an inability for the neighborhood to supervise itself, therefore leading to an increase in criminal activity.
[32] Instead of focusing on the built environment, policies substantiated by the Broken Windows Theory overwhelmingly emphasize undesirable human behavior as the environmental disorder prompting further crime.
[28] The civility laws, originating in the late 1980s and early 1990s, provide an example of the usage of this latter aspect of the Broken Windows Theory as legitimization for discriminating against individuals considered disorderly in order to increase the sense of security in urban spaces.
[28] Individuals are deemed undesirable in urban space because they do not fit into social norms, which causes unease for many residents of certain neighborhoods.
[33] This fear has been deepened by the Broken Windows Theory and exploited in policies seeking to remove undesirables from visible areas of society.
