NCJ Number
72520
Date Published
1980
Length
43 pages
Annotation
This paper views violent ice hockey players as political deviants and the social control of hockey violence as a political phenomenon, and examines the social conditions that contribute to changes in the legal status of violence in the game.
Abstract
The term 'political' emcompasses the struggle among groups over the resources for survival. To the extent that deviance is political, it involves an organization of actors and the distribution of resources, such as criminal law or police power. Thus, the social control of hockey violence may be considered a form of political control. Although deaths attributed to this game are rarer than in other sports, hockey is currently the subject of intense criticism and reform zeal over the nature, incidence, and consequences of aggressive play. Police reactions to incidents are numerous. In order to examine possible causes for the increase in legal reaction, reports of abnormally aggressive incidents and the legal responses to them from 1902 to 1976 were collected and tabulated, and four hypotheses were tested. The findings indicated that the recent reform movement cannot be explained as a direct reaction to the presence of violence, an increased incidence of violence, or the severity of violence, since these aspects of the game appeared in other periods and legal reform activity did not result. Also, increased legal responses have not necessarily led to or followed from reform activity. Instead, attempts at controlling the violence are shown to be the outcomes of conditions and changes in society, the community, and the hockey organization. The levels of attempts at external control through the game's history are examined from the perspective of a value-added-model. The model proposes a distinct series of stages, each of which requires a certain 'value' on previous stages before it can be activated as a determinant for control. A graph, tables, footnotes, and approximately 75 references are included.