The social construction of crime

only comes to be so when others label them as that. Deviance is the eye of the beholder.

For Becker, a deviant is simply someone to whom the label has been successfully applied. Deviant behaviour is simply behaviour that people label. 

Moral entrepreneurs - people who lead a moral 'crusade' to change the law.

Becker new law invariably has two effects :

• the creation of new group of 'outsiders' - outlaws or deviants who break the new rule. 
• the creation or expansion of a social control agency to enforce the rule and impose labels on offenders. 

Originally created as a result of a campaign by upper-class Victorian moral entrepreneurs, aimed at protecting young people at risk. 

officer's typifications led to them concentrating on certain 'types'. Law enforcement because of this, showing a class bias. 

Police patrolled working class areas more intensively as they fitted their typifications. 

Other agents of social control within the criminal justice system reinforced this bias. Juvenile delinquency was more likely to happen due to children being in poverty, broken homes and lax parenting. This meant that they saw them likely to offend in the future. Less likely to support non-custodial sentences for them. 

Circourel - justice is not fixed but negotiable. If middle-class child arrested less likely to be charged as didn't fit the typification. Also, parents likely to be able to negotiate successfully on the child's behalf.

• Circourel's study has implications for the use we make of official crime statistics recorded by the police. 
• statistics didn't give a valid picture of the patterns of crime and cannot be used as a resource - as facts about crime.
• need to treat them as a topic for sociologists to investigate. Shed light on the activities of control agencies and how they process and label certain types of people as criminal. 

• Interactionalists see official crime statistics as socially constructed. 
• the outcome of each stage the social control agents decide to go to depends on the label that they attach to the defendant or suspect. 
• the statistics produced by the criminal justice system only tells us about the activities of the police and prosecutors, rather than the amount of crime out there in society or who commits it. 
• Only just counts of decisions made by control agents at the different 'decision gates' or stages in the justice system. 

Dark figure of crime - difference between the official statistics and the 'real' rate of crime is sometimes called the dark figure, because we do not know for certain how much crime goes undetected, unreported and unrecorded. 

Alternative Statistics - some sociologists use victim surveys or self report studies to gain a more accurate view of the amount of crime. These can add to our picture of crime. Several limitations. People may conceal, forget or exaggerate when asked if committed a crime or been the victim of one.