Criminal Behavior Case Study

For my field research paper, I reached out to a friend of mine who was arrested for his deviant behavior, and I interviewed him about why he did it and what was the result of his actions. My friend, Nico, is from the same hometown as me and we became friends in high school. He was a relatively quiet kid and stayed out of trouble all throughout high school. It was not until he went away to college that he found himself in trouble with deviance. He was not the typical case of a kid who goes away and cannot handle all of the freedom and responsibility that is presented with college. He was on the football team at college, so he did not go out much, and spent most of his weekend nights in his dorm room playing video games. After about two …show more content…
He was unable to find the balance between doing nothing on the weekends, and being deviant and committing crimes. His behavior in college was learned from the people around him, his roommate stayed in his room all day, so Nico often did that. He had other friends who would go out and party and drink and do other deviant activities. Sutherland states that, “Criminal behavior is learned in interaction with other persons in a process of communication [and] the learning of criminal behavior occurs within intimate personal groups” (Adler, 87). For the first two months of college, Nico heard stories of the wild and deviant things his friends were doing, and he wanted to join them, and was slowly learning how to act like …show more content…
They were no longer a group, it was every man for themselves, and Nico watched three of his friends get arrested as he was hiding in a nearby wooded area. Nico was able to elude the police officers and get back to his dorm room without anyone noticing. He thought he had gotten away with his deviant actions, and only his friends were going to get in trouble. His friends were all now labeled as deviants because they had gotten caught. Because he had not been caught, Nico was not labeled a deviant, but his actions were still of a deviant nature. Nico is in a stage that is known as primary deviance, or “when people commit deviant acts, but their deviance goes unrecognized” (Adler,