2. Labelling theory
- Created by: Amy Parkinson
- Created on: 13-04-15 13:19
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- Labelling theory
- The social construction of crime
- Interactionists are interested in how and why certain acts are labelled as deviant or criminal
- No act is inherently deviant in itself, in all situations at all times
- Deviance is in the eye of the beholder
- BECKER
- A deviant is someone who has been labelled and deviant behaviour is simply behaviour that people so label
- Moral entrepreneurs are people who lead a moral 'crusade' to change the law
- This new law has 2 effects: the creation of a new group of 'outsiders' and the creation or expansion of a social control agency
- Social control agencies may also campaign for a change in the law to increase their own power
- Therefore it is the efforts of powerful individuals who redefine certain behaviour as unacceptable
- Not everyone who commits an offence is punished for it
- Whether a person is arrested, charged or convicted depends on things like their interaction with the agencies of social control, their appearance and the circumstances of the offence
- Some groups are more likely to be labelled as deviant or criminal than others
- E.g. a study of ASBO's found they were disproportionately used against ethnic minorities
- CICOUREL: the negotiation of justic
- Officers' decisions to arrest are influenced by their stereotypes about offenders
- Officers' typifications lead them to concentrate on certain groups
- This leads to law enforcement showing class-bias. They therefore patrolled w/c areas more intensively and arrested more w/c individuals
- Other agencies also show this class-bias
- Justice is therefore not fixed but negotiable as m/c individuals are less likely to be charged because they go against typifications of the stereotyped criminal
- As a result, Cicourel argues that official crime statistics give us an invalid picture of crime amongst certain groups and should not be taken at face value
- The effects of labelling
- Primary and secondary deviance
- LEMERT
- Primary deviance refers to deviant acts that have not yet been publicly labelled
- It is pointless to seek the causes of primary deviance since it is so widespread that is it unlikely to have a single cause and in any case it is often trivial
- Secondary deviance is the result of societal reaction- that is, of labelling
- Once an individual has been labelled others may come to see him only in terms of the label. This becomes his master status
- Master statuses may lead to self-fulfilling prophecies whereby the individual lives up to their deviant label
- The further deviance that results from the master status is secondary deviance
- Secondary deviance is likely to lead to a deviant career
- A deviant career is likely to be reinforced by joining a deviant subculture
- YOUNG
- Studied hippy marijuana users
- Initially drugs were peripheral top the hippies lifestyle
- Prosecution and labelling by the control culture(police) led the hippies to see themselves as outsiders
- The hippies retreated into a subculture, wearing longer hair and way out clothes. Drugs also became an active part of the group
- The police became more interested in the deviant group and this created a self-fulfilling prophecy
- LEMERT & YOUNG
- It is not the act itself but the hostile societal reaction by the social audience that creates serious deviance
- Therefore, social control increases the deviant reaction of the deviant subcultures
- EVAL: DOWNES & ROCK: we cannot predict whether someone who has been labelled will follow a deviant career because they are always free to choose not to deviate further
- LEMERT
- Deviance amplification
- The attempt to control deviance leads to further deviance which in turn leads to more control which produces even higher levels of deviance
- S. COHEN
- His study of Folk Devils and Moral Panics shows how press exaggeration of the 'mods and rockers' rivalry lead to a moral panic
- The police responded to the panic by arresting more youths which increased public concern about the groups
- More arrests however also lead to marginalisation of the youths as 'outsiders' resulting in more deviant behaviour from them
- Unlike functionalist theories, labelling theory highlights how social control leads to deviance rather than deviance leading to social control
- Labelling and criminal justice policy
- Increases in the attempt to control and punish young offenders have the opposite effect
- TRIPLETT
- There is an increasing trend in the USA to see youths as evil
- The CJS has re-labelled status offences such as truancy as more serious resulting in much harsher sentences
- This has lead to n increase in offending
- Logically, to reduce deviance, we should make and enforce fewer rues for people to break
- Labelling theory implies that we should avoid publicly naming and shaming offenders as this is likely to push them into further deviance
- BRAITHWAITE
- Identifies a more positive role for the labelling process. he distinguishes between 2 types of shaming:
- Disintegrative shaming: where not only the crime but also the criminal is labelled as bad and the offender is excluded from society
- Reintegrative shaming: where only the act is labelled but not the actor
- Reintegrative shaming avoids stigmatising the offender and therefore encourages them to be accepted back into society. This also reduces the chances of them turning to secondary deviance
- Crime rates tend to be lower in societies where reintegrative shaming is dominant
- Identifies a more positive role for the labelling process. he distinguishes between 2 types of shaming:
- EVAL
- Deterministic, implying that once someone is labelled a deviant career is inevitable
- Emphasis on labelling gives the offender a kind of victim status
- Ignores the fact that offenders may actively choose to be deviant
- Fails to exaplin why people commit primary deviance before they are labelled
- Implies without labelling, deviance would not exist
- Primary and secondary deviance
- The social construction of crime
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