Labelling/interactionism

• Plummer - labelling


  Societal crime - always deviant + illegal e.g. child abuse, murder

  Situational crime - sometimes deviant + illegal but sometimes legal e.g. nudity - illegal in public, legal in own home
• Critique: Plummer - labelling

  Yes, activities are labelled as deviant depending on circumstances, but this is arrived at by value consensus.
• Becker - labelling

  Deviant career path

  1. moral entrepreneur creates label

  2. deviant act committed (act labelled as deviant)

  3. social reaction / deviant 'label'

  4. potential self-fulfilling prophecy

  5. potential crime as a result

  6. punishment

  7. label of 'criminal'

  8. master status - label becomes core to person's identity
• Criticism: Becker - labelling

  Deterministic - assumes individuals can't resist labels

  Labelling treats the offender/labelled individual as a victim, rather than seeing the victim of the crime as the real victim

  Little analysis on what gives moral entrepreneurs the power to create labels
• Lemert - labelling


  Primary deviance - deviant acts that have not been publicly labelled e.g. pinching stuff from work

  - little significance for the individual's master status, don't see themselves as deviant

  Secondary deviance - more serious deviant acts, being caught and publicly labelled e.g. robbing a bank

  - labelled as criminal, becomes their master status / controlling identity

  - further deviance from acting out the label
• Cicourel - labelling

  Negotiation of justice

  officer's typifications (stereotypes) led to them to concentrate on certain groups

  Law enforcement show class bias - patrolling more w/c areas, resulting in more arrests, confirming their stereotypes

  
  

  Young middle class males arrested = less likely to be charged - partly because background doesn't fit police's idea of typical delinquent and partly because parents more likely to be able to negotiate.
• Cicourel - labelling (statistics)


  Statistics: argues official crime statistics don't give a valid picture of the patterns of crime and cannot be used as a resource. We should treat them as a topic for sociologists to investigate about biases.
• Criticism: Cicourel - labelling

  From Marxist perspective, Cicourel doesn't explain why it's w/c young men that fall into criminal type

  Marxism argues it's because of RSA focuses on w/c while m/c are treated leniently - selective law enforcement
• Young - labelling


  - carried out research into marijuana users in the 1960s

  - he saw that police began targeting a group of 'hippies'

  - this widened the gap between them and conventional society

  - drug taking become a symbol of the groups' defiance against the police and became part of their status
• Criticism: Young - labelling

  (Realists) argue that he foucses on non-harmful crimes such as drug misuse to support the argument that people are pointlessly labelled

  Ignores the fact society has an obligation to label an offender a murderer, rapist etc
• Cohen - labelling


  Deviance amplification - when the attempt to control deviance creates more of it

  Dark figure of crime - under reported, hidden, think it happens less than it does e.g. corporate crime

  Folk Devils - over-reported, exaggerated, makes you think it happens more than it does

  Moral panics - misrepresentation of crime can lead to think it is going to happen and then panic. Moral panic can lead to over-policing and to deviance amplification
• Braithwaite - labelling

  Disintegrative shaming - where the act and the person are both labelled - crime and criminal, shunning the person

  Reintegrative shaming - where only the act is labelled a crime, not the person - 'they did a bad thing, they're not a bad person' - makes it easier to reintegrate the offender into society

  Crime rates = lower where reintegrative shaming is used over disintegrative
• Critique: Braithwaite - labelling

  Not possible to reintegrate pedophiles, rapists etc.

  Society has a responsibility to keep such offenders on registers to protect women, children etc.
• Negatives of labelling

  Negatives

  - focuses on how criminals can be victims of society but does not give much attention to victims themselves

  - tends to focus on less serious crimes

  - fails to explain why people commit acts of deviance in the first place