ABSTRACT
Deviance and crime are different but overlapping spheres. Not all deviance has been criminalized, and the commission of certain technically illegal actions is not necessarily regarded as deviant. Nonetheless, many sociologists and criminologists argue that conviction and especially incarceration are typically stigmatized and hence, deviant. In criminology, positivism is the scientific study of criminal behavior. Positivism looks at high-consensus crimes or Index Crimes and attempts to devise explanations for why some members of the society engage in them or why societies vary with regard to their rates of committing them. In contrast, constructionism asks how some acts come to be defined as criminal and why the enactment of certain offenses activates the criminal justice system—arrest, prosecution, imprisonment—while other offenses are ignored by the criminal justice system. Increasingly, communities have criminalized or “banished” deviants by outlawing activities in which street people are likely to engage: loitering, sitting in a number of public places, trespassing, curfews, begging, playing music, busking, vagrancy, being drunk, and “failure to consume.” Recent economic developments—such as gentrification, the deinstitutionalized of the mentally disordered, and the recession and stagnation of the economy, as well as the increasing polarization of incomes—have exacerbated the issue of banishment from certain areas.
