Interactionism and labelling

• Social construction of crime (Becker)


  • A deviant is simply someone whom the label has been successfully applied
  • Moral entrepreneurs - people who lead a moral campaign to change the law
  • It is not the inherent harmfulness of a particular behaviour that leads to new laws, but rather the efforts of individuals redefining the behaviour as unacceptable
• Social construct of crime - the negotiation of justice (Cicourel)

  • Police have a stereotype of a delinquent
  • Individuals that fit those characteristics were found in certain neighbourhoods, therefore becoming the focus of police time and activity
  • Leads to more arrests in those areas, making the police confirm their stereotypes
  • Means MC gets away with crime as they don't match supposed deviant characteristics
• Social construction of crime - topic versus resource (Cicourel)


  • Statistics do not give us a valid picture of the patterns of crime and cannot be used as a resource
  • We must not take crime statistics at face value and instead investigate the process that created them
  • This will shed light on the activities of the control agencies
• Social construction of crime - crime statistics

  • The dark figure of crime - undetected, unreported and unrecorded crimes make official statistics unreliable
  • Alternative statistics - interactionalists use victim surveys gain a more accurate view of crime from the perspective of the people, not from numbers
  • Counter - limited by forgetting, concealing or exaggerating
• Effects of labelling - primary deviance (Lemert)


  • Deviant acts that haven't been publicly labelled
  • So widespread and trivial, that there is no point enforcing it
  • Littering or going over the speed limit
• Effects of labelling - secondary deviance (Lemert)

  • Master status - a crime is so atypical that it becomes someone's entire identity, like being called a paedophile
  • Deviant career - labelling furthers deviant behaviour, like how convicts find it hard to go straight due to no one employing them, forcing them to commit again to survive
• Effects of labelling - hippy case study (Young)

  • initially drugs were peripheral to hippy lifestyle and was seen as primary deviancy
  • labelling from police started
  • Hippies see themselves as outsiders
  • Drug using becomes a central activity, further attracting attention from police, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy
• Effects of labelling - deviance amplification spiral (Cohen)


  • The attempt to control deviance levels leads to an increase in the level of deviance
  • Often achieved through the media growing public concern
  • Mods and Rockers
• Effects of labelling - criminal justice policy (Triplett)


  • The American criminal justice system had re-labelled status offences, like truancy, as more serious
  • Resulted in an increase rather than a decrease
  • Negative labels push offenders towards a deviant career
• Effects of labelling - reintegrative shamming (Braithwaite)


  • Disintegrative shaming - crime and criminal are both rejected by society
  • Reintegrative shaming - crime is rejected but the criminal isn't
  • Argues that crime rates are lower in societies that favour reintegrative shaming
• Suicide - the meaning (Douglas)

  • A death comes to be officially labelled as a suicide rather than an accident or homicide due to the negotiations of relatives, doctors and coroners
  • Relatives may feel guilty for not preventing it and a coroner may see it as a sin, so it is not officially stated as a suicide
  • Shows how official statistics cannot be trusted
• Suicide - coroner's commonsense knowledge (Atkinson)


  • Focuses on taken-for-granted assumptions of coroners when reaching a verdict, rather than statistics
  • Decide based on method, location, circumstance and life history
  • Counter - this is an interpretation, making it no more helpful than the official statistics
• Mental illness - paranoia as a self-fulfilling prophecy (Lemert)


  • Secondary deviance leads to a fear of people conspiring against you, can develop to being labelled as suffering from paranoia
  • The label of 'mental patient' means anything they say or do will be seen in this light
• Mental illness - institutionalisation (Goffman)


  • Confiscation of personal effects upon arrival kills past self and replaces it with new identity of convict
  • Leads to not being able to re-adjust to the outside world