Informal social control, or the reactions of individuals and groups that bring about conformity to norms and laws, includes peer and community pressure, bystander intervention in a crime, and collective responses such as citizen patrol groups. The agents of the criminal justice system exercise more control when informal social control is weaker (Black, 1976).
Famous quotes containing the words informal, social and/or control:
“We are now a nation of people in daily contact with strangers. Thanks to mass transportation, school administrators and teachers often live many miles from the neighborhood schoolhouse. They are no longer in daily informal contact with parents, ministers, and other institution leaders . . . [and are] no longer a natural extension of parental authority.”
—James P. Comer (20th century)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)
“The poets were not alone in sanctioning myths, for long before the poets the states and the lawmakers had sanctioned them as a useful expedient.... They needed to control the people by superstitious fears, and these cannot be aroused without myths and marvels.”
—Strabo (c. 58 B.C.–c. 24 A.D., Greek geographer. Geographia, bk. 1, sct. 2, subsct. 8.