Crimes happen all over the world, affecting numerous people, in many different ways. Crime rates have decreased, but the media makes people think differently (Schaefer, 2013). There are several types of crimes, all categorized or organized distinctively. Some people get wrongly punished when innocent, such as John Coffey in The Green Mile; who was punished for an index crime, which was committed by Wild Bill (Darabont, 1999). Formal social control is social control that is carried out by authorized agents, such as police officers, judges, school administrators, and employers (Schaefer, 2013). Crime will never fully go away, there will always be some type of crime.
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What Wild Bill did to those girls was an index crime.
Index crimes are the eight types of crimes tabulated each year by the FBI in the Uniform Crime Report: murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson (Schaefer, 2013). These crimes happen on the daily basis all over the world for many different reasons. Lots of people who committed these crimes would have been executed years ago. As of today, Murder is an index crime that is still punished by capital punishment, such as execution. Rape is an index crime that is punishable, but is not a capital offense.
According to the feminist perspective “In the United States, for many years any husband who forced his wife to have sexual intercourse against her will was not legally considered to have committed rape.” which lead to many protests that eventually changed the law (Schaefer, 2013). A husband who forces his wife to have sexual intercourse with him is now considered rape in this country and is an index crime. Some people may not even realize that is a crime, especially if they are from a different country. This index crime happens daily in many different countries and is not punishable. In the United States, the local police departments would step in and take control of this situation, which would be an example of formal social control.
Even the formal social control authorities violates the standards of conduct. The term for this violation is deviance, which means behavior that violates the standards of conduct or expectations of a group or society (Schaefer, 2013). Prison guards or jailers are often deviant, because they do cruel stuff to the inmates that shouldn’t have been done; which makes it worse, because they are wearing the uniform for formal social control. When people apply to be a jailer or a prison guard, they have specific rules...
