Interactionism

• States that no act is deviant or criminal in itself, but society’s reaction to the act.
• social control agencies such as police and judges, label certain groups and acts as criminal. this results in differential enforcement where the law is enforced more against one group than another.
• Piliavin and Briar found police decisions to arrest were based on stereotypical ideas against a persons manner, dress, gender and class.
• crime is a social construct which means that we create it through our social interactions
• Lemert explains how labelling encourages people to become a criminal through primary and secondary deviance
• primary deviance - acts that have not been publicly labelled. often go uncaught, such as travelling on public transport without paying.
• secondary deviance - results from labelling. the label given to the offender becomes their master status or controlling identity. this causes more deviance to occur.
• once an individual has been labelled they internalise it and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. this means that they live up to the label and it results in more deviance.
• deviance amplification spiral - the attempt to control crime through a ‘crackdown’ leads to it increasing rather than decreasing. an example of this is Mods and Rockers.