Crime and Deviance: Labelling Theory

• 'No act is deviant unless it is labelled in such a way by society'
• MORAL ENTREPRENEURS: Make rules and laws that do not benefit those which they apply to.
•  This in turn creates out laws.
• It also creates the formation and expansion of control agents e.g. the Police.
• EXAMPLE: US outlawed marijuana in 1937 redefining the behaviour of smoking it as deviant. boosting the powers of law enforces and ostracised the users of the drug.

PLATT:

 Another example is that described by Platt who found in Victorian times moral entrepreneurs wanted to make sex before marriage illegal. 

• Police focused on a certain types of youths.'Typification.'
• Justice negotiation occurs, middle classes get better lawyers or 'know the system better' so are less likely to get a conviction.
• This skews statistics, therefore labelling theorists don't take them at face-value.

PALIAVIN AND BRIAR:

Police decisions to arrest youths were based on stereotypes such as age, gender, ethnicity, etc...

PRIMARY DEVIANCE: Crime that has not yet been labelled e.g. fare dodging.

SECONDARY DEVIANCE: Deviance as a result of societies reactions e.g. Being labelled publicly labelled after you have committed of crime so you're ostracised from society.

• Self concept changes leading to an identity crisis, the new label is accepted by the person so the self-fulfilling prophecy occurs.
• This is a very deterministic view as it assumes no one can do anything to change their label.

• Attempts to control deviance actually produces an increase in deviance.
• This leads to greater control and higher levels of deviance.

EXAMPLE:  

• Police convicted Hippy Marijuana users in Notting Hill, London.
• This lead them to become ostracised from society.
• They formed small closed groups (subcultures.) 
• The central activity of these subcultures were drug use which became a central activity.

• Press exaggerate the truth when a crime caused by a group of people.
• Police increase the amounts of arrests which public see as confirming the extent of the crime.
• This causes a moral panic by the public.
• It also marginalises the group of people that committed the crime further.
• This occurred in the 1960's with the Mods and Rockers.

DISINTERGRATIVE SHAMING: Not only the crime but the criminal is labelled deviantly and excluded from society.

INTERGRATIVE SHAMING: Labels the crime not the criminal so he can go back to society, this helps avoid stigmatism and avoids punishing them into secondary deviance.

STRENGTHS:

• Shows Law is not a fixed set of rules.
• Shows that Law can be discriminating.
• Shows that statistics should not always be taken at face value.
• Shows that attempts to control deviance can back fire.

WEAKNESSES:

• Deterministic
• Emphasises negative effects of labelling.
• Assumes offenders of passive victims of labelling.
• Fails to explain primary deviance.
• Implies there would be no deviance with out labelling, yet most criminal are aware that what they are doing goes against social norms.
• Fails to analyse the source of power but recognises that there is one.
• Ignores the real victims of crime.
• Ignores the individuals who actively chose deviance.