Purpose

This assignment is designed to introduce you to the components and roles of the criminal justice system. It will also ask you to evaluate the ways in which crime and deviance are socially constructed.

Instructions

Please respond to all 5 of the following questions.

1. What is crime? (7.5%) What is deviance? (7.5%) How are crime and deviance related? (5%) How are they different? (5%)

2. What are the four C's of the criminal justice system? (2.5%) What is the role of the criminal justice system in maintaining social order and social control? (7.5%) How does the criminal justice system share this responsibility with other institutions such as schools, family and religion? (2.5%)

3. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, as tactics in the Civil Rights Movement, protesters would deliberately violate laws they saw as unjust, such as sitting in sections of restaurants designated for whites only.

• How was such an action both deviant and normative at the same time? (10%)
• Give at least three reasons such deviance was functional to social order, even though it was illegal? (10%)
• Using the conflict approach, analyze the process of defining acceptable seating arrangements as the social norm and a matter whose violation was to be deemed a crime. (10%)

4. What is the difference between due process and crime control models of the criminal justice system? (15%)

5. What does it mean to say that laws are social constructs? (10%) Please illustrate this idea with the history of jaywalking laws in the USA. (7.5%)