Education: the Cash children weren't educated by a systematic structured school system, as most children are. They were educated by lessons from their father, which were prepared using books and other literary pieces.

Healthcare: The Cash family relies on natural and simple methods of healthcare for all circumstances. Because of their distance from society, any paid or systematic method of healthcare is erased from their lives, therefore only Ben's knowledge (about natural healthcare methods and survival) is used to aid the family if it comes to be required.

Human Interaction: The Cash family as a whole were uneducated in a "social norms" sense. They were completely ignorant in relation to ethics and morals, having stayed away from society and other humans for so long. Their understanding of human interaction was significantly less complex and comprehending than other humans.

Income: Since the Cash family relied on a life without the need of currency (rarely used money, as claimed by Ben), their understanding of the financial aspect of society was completely missing.

Income: This aspects only truly affects the storyline when the family steals from the supermarket. Because they don't require money to thrive in their own lifestyle, income doesn't strike up as a completely necessary factor. Nevertheless, once they go back into society, and steal food from the supermarket, this lack of necessity changes and the family relies on committing a crime (which Ben later defends as having been "part of their [the children's] training"). I am not sure if there were many other possibilities for the family at the moment, but surely stealing was the wrong thing to do, especially if Ben considered it acceptable once it was defined as training.

Deviance consists of those categories of condemnation and negative judgment which are constructed and applied successfully to some members of a social community by others.

Cultural Relativity is useful here: each society should be viewed by its own conceptions and standards. What is deviant for a society is relative to that society. - Ruth Benedict (1934)

Deviance is a socially attributed condition, and "deviant" is an ascribed status. Deviance does not inhere in the individual or the behavior; it is a social judgment of that behavior. In short, it is not the act but the definition that makes something deviant. 

"Social groups create Deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as [deviants]" (Becker, H. S., 1963, p. 9).

Deviance as a system of social categories constructed for classifying behavior, persons, situations, and things.

"The Medicalization of Deviance": Medical solutions being sought for a variety of deviant behaviors or conditions.

The Medicalization of Deviant Behavior: The defining and labeling of deviant behavior as a medical problem, usually an ill- ness, and mandating the medical profession to provide some type of treatment for it.

Medical Intervention as social control seeks to limit, modify, regulate, isolate, or eliminate deviant behavior with medical means and in the name of health (Zola, 1972).

Disease: something that exists "out there," apart even from the human body, that may enter the body and do harm; ideas of avoiding viruses, germs, and other "diseases" follow from this view. A systematized variant of a commonsense view might be that disease is "a specific destructive process in an organism, with specific causes and specific symptoms" (Webster's New Ideal Dictionary). Sometimes disease is seen simply as a departure from health.

Illness: if differentiated from disease, is taken as the condition of being diseased, or more commonly, the state of being sick.

Illness is the presence of disease in an organism that inhibits the functioning, or, in Leon Kass's (1975) terms, "well-working" of the physiological organs (in a most inclusive sense) of the organism.

Disease is a physiological state, and Illness is a social state presumably caused by the disease.

Illnesses represent human judgments of conditions that exist in the natural world. They are essentially social constructions - products of our own creation. “Illness," as Gusfield (1967) has written, "is a social designation, by no means given by the nature of medical fact” (p. 180).

Deviance is a universal Phenomenon.

• The very notion that a society has social norms or rules ensures the existence of deviance. There can be no deviance without social rules (and, as far as we know, there can be no society without rules and norms, either).

Deviance is universal, but there are no universal forms of deviance.

• There are few acts, if any, that are defined as deviance in all societies under all conditions.

• EX) Premeditated murder is also considered deviant in most societies, but there are societies in which a man who kills another man for committing adultery with his wife is deemed justified. Even incest and murder are not universally deviant.

Deviance is also relative. Different societies define different activities as deviant.

• EX)  In contem- porary American society the young girls of Salem might find their behavior defined as de- viant (i.e., hysterical) rather than the behaviors of those they accused of witchcraft. Certain forms of homosexuality were acceptable among the cultural elite in classical Greece, but in America such conduct is condemned and stig- matized. Suicide is considered deviant and un- godly in most of the Christian world, whereas in Imperial Japan it could be an honorable act. The extremely suspicious and treacherous behavior of the Dobu of Melanesia would be labeled "paranoid" by modern psychiatric standards, but it would be the accepting and unsuspicious individual who would be a deviant among the Dobu.

Deviance is a social definition.

• That is, deviance is not "given" in any behavior, act, or status. It must be so defined intentionally by “significant” actors in the society or social group.

Deviance is a Social Definition.

Medical definitions of deviant behavior are becoming more prevalent in modern industrial societies like our own. The historical sources of this medicalization, and the development of medical conceptions and controls for deviant behavior, are the central concerns of our analysis.

• In recent years the jurisdiction of the medical profession has expanded and encompasses many problems that formerly were not defined as medical entities. 

• The transformation of deviance from badness to sickness and the adoption of the medical model for a number of specific categories of deviant behavior.

• As Freidson (1970a) has observed, "The medical profession has first claim to jurisdiction over the label illness and anything to which it may be attached, irrespective of its capacity to deal with it effectively" (p. 251). Rieff (1966) contends that the hospital has replaced the church and parliament as the symbolic center of Western society.

• Medical treatments for deviant behavior are heralded frequently as examples of the “progress" typical of modern society, believed to unfold in a linear fashion, leaving beneficial advances in its wake... Progress is a positive evaluation of some change. But social change is not clearly linear and rarely totally beneficial or detrimental. Social change nearly always produces positive and negative effects that are distributed differentially in the affected population (Corzine, 1977).

Disease and illness are highly complex entities, far more problematic than these commonsense views indicate.

Illness and disease are human constructions; they do not exist without someone proposing, describing, and recognizing them.

• As illnesses are social judgments, they are negative judgments; an entity labeled an illness or disease is considered undesirable.

 ... both crime and illness are designations for deviant behavior (Parsons, 1951, pp. 428-479).

• Parsons conceptualized illness as deviance primarily because of its threat to the stability of a social system through its impact on role performance.

• Deviance considered willful tends to be defined as crime; when it is seen as unwillful it tends to be defined as illness (see Aubert & Messinger, 1958). Since crime and illness are both designations of deviance, it becomes necessary to distinguish between the two, especially with reference to appropriate mechanisms of social control.

We notice that deviance becomes apparent throughout the movie when there is some form of reaction from other people.

• Ex) Before even coming back into society, Ben is threatened to be arrested by Jack if he goes to the funeral

• Ex) The family dinner (first contact after coming back into society) ends in a big discussion, in which Ben is accused of ruining his children's lives.

Deviance is a concept based primarily on perspective: something can seem deviant to a person, but seem normal to another.

To thrive within a society is to have freedom, but your freedom can't be instituted into another person's life: Although Ben considers his life is filled with freedom, he can't/shouldn't automatically consider that his children's lives have freedom as well, which means the family as a whole does not thrive.

Can a society function without Deviance?

If someone chooses to be an "outsider", are they still considered deviant?

No. A society requires norms and norms lead to deviance; a society without deviance would need to be a society without norms, which isn't a society. 

Yes. Since deviance is a label instituted onto someone by a group of people, they way the group views/judges a person is what defines whether they are deviant or not. Choosing to be an outsider doesn't restrain society from judging you.

Deviance: Considering the definition(s) that the text gives, all the main and supporting ideas make sense. I agree with mostly all the points made, and could imagine how each example or idea given by the text could be inserted into society and still make sense.

Medicalization of Deviance: In this art of the text, I slightly disagreed with some points. First of all, the text gives us various definitions for Illness and Disease, but does not clearly state which one is considered while giving its main ideas. This makes it difficult to comprehend the train of thought and insert the ideas into RW Scenarios. Secondly, I found it hard to connect the aspect of Medicalization of deviance to the rest of the text. To me, it seemed as if there was some distance between the relevance of discussing this topic and connecting it to the others.