The labelling Theory of Crime 

is associated with Interactionism – the Key

ideas are that crime is socially constructed, agents of social control label the
powerless as deviant and criminal based on stereotypical assumptions and this
creates effects such as the self-fulfilling prophecy, the criminal career and
deviancy amplification.

Interactionists argue that people do not become criminals because of their

social background, but rather argue that crime emerges because of labelling
by authorities. They see crime as the product of micro-level interactions
between certain individuals and the police, rather than the result of external
social forces such as socialisation or blocked opportunity structures.

Four Key concepts associated with Interactionist

theories of deviance
 1. Crime is Sociology Constructed – An act which harms an individual or
society else only becomes criminal if those in power label that act as
criminal.
2. Not everyone who is deviant gets labelled as such – negative labels
are generally (deviant/ criminal) are generally given to the powerless by
the powerful.
3. Labelling has real consequences – it can lead to deviancy
amplification, the self-fulfilling prophecy and deviant careers.
4. Labelling theory has a clear ‘value position’ – it should aim to
promote policies that prevent labelling minor acts as deviant.

Rather than taking the definition of crime for granted, labelling theorists are
interested in how certain acts come to be defined or labelled as criminal in the
first place.

Interactionists argue that there is no such thing as an inherently deviant act –

in other words there is nothing which is deviant in itself in all situations and at
all times, certain acts only become deviant in certain situations when others
label them as deviant. Deviance is not a result of an act or an individual being
‘uniquely different’, deviance is a product of society’s reaction to actions.

As Howard Becker* (1963) puts it – “Deviancy is not a quality of the act a

person commits, but rather a consequences of the application by others of rules
and sanctions to an ‘offender’. Deviant behaviour is behaviour that people so
label

Howard Becker illustrates how crime is the product of social interactions by

using the example of a fight between young people. In a low-income
neighbourhood, a fight is more likely to be defined by the police as evidence
of delinquency, but in a wealthy area as evidence of high spirits. The acts are
the same, but the meanings given to them by the audience (in this case
the public and the police) differ. Those who have the power to make the
label stick thus create deviants or criminals.
Becker provides a more extreme example in his book The Outsiders (1963) – in
this he draws on a simple illustration of a study by anthropologist Malinowski
who describes how a youth killed himself because he hand been publicly
accused of incest. When Malinowski had first inquired about the case, the
islanders expressed their horror and disgust. But, on further investigation, it
turned out that incest was not uncommon on the island, nor was it really
frowned upon provided those involved were discrete. However, if an
incestuous affair became too obvious and public, the islanders reacted with
abuse and the offenders were ostracised and often driven to suicide.

To be clear – in the above example, everyone knows that incest goes on, but if
people are too public about it (and possibly if they are just disliked for
whatever reason) they get publicly shamed for being in an incestuous
relationship.

You could apply the same thinking to criminal behaviour more generally in
Britain – According to a recent 2015 survey of 2000 people, the average
person in Britain breaks the law 17 ties per year, with 63% admitting speeding,
33% steeling and 25% taking illegal drugs – clearly the general public is
tolerant of ‘ordinary’ deviance – but every now and then someone will get
spotted doing ‘ordinary’ criminal activities and publicly shamed.
All of this has led labelling theorists to look at how and why rules and laws get
made – especially the role of what Becker calls ‘moral entrepreneurs’, people
who lead a moral crusade to change the law in the belief that it will benefit
those to whom it is applied. However, according to Interactionists, when new
laws are created, they simply create new groups of outsiders and lead to the
expansion of social control agencies such as the police, and such campaigns
may do little to change the underlying amount of ‘deviant activity’ taking
place.

In summary – deviance is not a quality that lies in behaviour itself, but in the
interaction between the person who commits an act and those who respond
to it. From this point of view, deviance is produced by a process of interaction
between the potential deviant and the wider public (both ordinary people and
agencies of social control).
Application of the concept of ‘social constructionism’ to drug crime –

Looking at how drug laws have changed over time, and how they vary from
country to country to country is a very good way of looking at how the
deviant act of drug-taking is socially constructed…

In the United Kingdom, a new law was recently passed which outlawed all
legal highs, meaning that many ‘head-shops’ which sold them literally went
from doing something legal to illegal over night (obviously they had plenty of
notice!)

Meanwhile – in some states in America, such as Colorado, things seem to be

moving in the other direction – it is now legal to grow, sell and smoke Weed –
meaning that a whole new generation of weed entrepreneurs have suddenly
gone from doing something illegal to something legal, and profitable too!

Not Everyone Who is Deviant Gets Labelled

Those in Power are just as deviant/ criminal as actual ‘criminals’ but
they are more able to negotiate themselves out of being labelled as
criminals.

NB to my mind the classic song by NWA ‘Fuck Tha Police’ is basically

highlighting the fact that it’s young black males in the US that typically get
labelled as criminals (while young white kids generally don’t)

ack to Labelling theory proper – the key idea here is that not everyone who
commits an offence is punished for it. Whether a person is arrested, charged
and convicted depends on factors such as:

1. Their interactions with agencies of social control such as the police and
the courts
2. Their appearance, background and personal biography
3. The situation and circumstances of the offence.

This leads labelling theorists to look at how laws are applied and enforced.
Their studies show that agencies of social control are more likely to label
certain groups of people as deviant or criminal.
The main piece of sociological research relevant here is Aaron Cicourel’s
‘Power and The Negotiation of Justice’ (1968)

Aaron Cicourel – Power and the negotiation of justice

The process of defining a young person as a delinquent is complex, and it

involves a series of interactions based on sets of meanings held by the
participants. Cicourel argues that it is the meanings held by police officers and
juvenile officers that explain why most delinquents come from working class
backgrounds.

The first stage is the decision by the police to stop and interrogate an
individual. This decision is based on meanings held by the police of what is
‘strange’, ‘unusual’ and ‘wrong’. Whether or not the police stop and
interrogate an individual depends on where the behaviour is taking place and
on how the police perceive the individual(s). Whether behaviour is deemed to
be ‘suspicious’ will depend on where the behaviour is taking place, for
example an inner city, a park, a suburb. If a young person has a demeanour
like that of a ‘typical delinquent’ then the police are more likely to both
interrogate and arrest that person.

The second stage is that the young person is handed over to a juvenile
delinquent officer. This officer will have a picture of a ‘typical delinquent’ in his
mind. Factors associated with a typical delinquent include being of dishevelled
appearance, having poor posture, speaking in slang etc. It follows
that Cicourel found that most delinquents come from working class
backgrounds.

When middle class delinquents are arrested they are less likely to be charged
with the offence as they do not fit the picture of a ‘typical delinquent’. Also,
their parents are more able to present themselves as respectable and
reasonable people from a nice neighbourhood and co-operate fully with the
juvenile officers, assuring them that their child is truly remorseful.

As a result, the middle class delinquent is more likely to be defined as ill rather
than criminal, as having accidentally strayed from the path of righteousness
just the once and having a real chance of reforming.
Cicourel based his research on two Californian cities, each with a population of
about 100, 000. both had similar social characteristics yet there was a
significant difference in the amount of delinquents in each city. Cicourel
argued that this difference can only be accounted for by the size, organisation,
policies and practices of the juvenile and police bureaus. It is the societal
reaction that affects the rate of delinquency. It is the agencies of social control
that produce delinquents.

Discussion Questions

Q1 – Do you agree that the whole criminal justice system is basically biased
against the working classes, and towards to middle classes?

Q2 – From a research methods point of view, what research methods could
you use to test this theory?

The Consequences of Labelling

Labelling theorists are interested in the effects of labelling on those labelled.
They claim that by labelling certain people as criminal or deviant society
actually encourages them to become more so.

In this section I cover:

 Primary and Secondary Deviance (Edwin Lemert)

 The Deviant Career, the Master Status and Subcultures (Howard Becker)
 Labelling and the Self-Fulling Prophecy applied to education (Howard
Becker and Rosenthal and Jacobson)
 Labelling theory applied to the Media – Moral Panics, Folk Devils and
Deviancy Amplification (Stan Cohen)

If the material below seems a little samely – that’s because it’s all subtle
variations on the same theme!
Primary and Secondary Deviance

Edwin Lemert (1972) developed the concepts of primary and secondary

deviance to emphasise the fact that everyone engages in deviant acts, but
only some people are caught being deviant and labelled as deviant.

Primary deviance refers to acts which have not been publicly labelled, and are
thus of little consequence, while secondary deviance refers to deviance which
is the consequence of the response of others, which is significant.

To illustrate this, Lemert studied the the coastal Inuit of Canada, who had a
long-rooted problem of chronic stuttering or stammering. Lemert suggested
that the problem was ’caused’ by the great importance attached to ceremonial
speech-making. Failure to speak well was a great humiliation. Children with
the slightest speech difficulty were so conscious of their parents’ desire to
have well-speaking children that they became over anxious about their own
abilities. It was this anxiety which lead to chronic stuttering.

Lemert compared the coastal Inuit which emphasised the importance of public
speaking to other similar cultures in the area which did not attach status to
public-speaking, and found that in such culture, stuttering was largely non-
existence, thus Lemert concluded that it was the social pressure to speak well
(societal reaction) which led to some people developing problems with
stuttering

In this example, chronic stuttering (secondary deviance) is a response to

parents’ reaction to initial minor speech defects (primary deviance).

Labelling, The Deviant Career and the Master Status

This is Howard Becker’s classic statement of how labelling theory can be

applied across the whole criminal justice system to demonstrated how
criminals emerge, possibly over the course of many years. Basically the public,
the police and the courts selectively label the already marginalised as deviant,
which the then labelled deviant responds to by being more deviant.
Howard Becker argued that the deviant label can become a ‘master status’ in
which the individual’s deviant identity overrules all other
identities. Becker argues that there are 5 stages in this process:

1. The Individual is publicly labelled as a deviant, which may lead to

rejection from several social groups. For example, if someone is labelled
a junkie they may be rejected by their family.
2. This may encourage further deviance. For example, drug addicts may
turn to crime to finance their habit.
3. The official treatment of deviance may have similar effects. EG
convicted criminals find it difficult to find jobs.
4. A deviant career may emerge. The deviant career is completed when
individuals join an organised deviant group. This is the stage when an
individual confirms and accepts their deviant identity. 
5. This is the stage at which the label may become a master status,
overriding all other forms of relationship outside the deviant group. 

Labelling Theory Applied to Education

Labelling theory has been applied to the context of the school to explain
differences in educational achievement (this should sound familiar from year 1!)

Within Schools, Howard Becker (1970) argued that middle class teachers

have an idea of an ‘ideal pupil’ that is middle class. This pupil speaks in
elaborated speech code, is polite, and smartly dressed, He argued that middle
class teachers are likely view middle class pupils more positively than working
class pupils irrespective of their intelligence. Thus teachers positively label the
students most like them.

There is also evidence of a similar process happening with African Caribbean

children. Sociologists such as David Gilborn argue that teachers hold negative
stereotypes of young black boys, believing them to be more threatening and
aggressive than White and Asian children. They are thus more likely to
interpret minor rule breaking by black children in a more serious manner than
when White and Asian children break minor rules.
Rosenthal and Jacobsen (1968) argued that positive teacher labelling can
lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the student believes the label given
to them and the label becomes true in practise. They concluded this on the
basis of a classic ‘Field Experiment’ to test the effects of teacher labels, which
consisted of the following:

 Stage one – tested the IQ (intelligence) of all pupils in the school 

 Stage two – gave teachers a list of the top 20% most intelligent pupils.
However, this list was actually just a random selection of student names
 Stage three –One year later those students who teachers believed to be
the most intelligent had improved the most. 
 Stage four –Concluded that high teacher expectation had resulted in
improvement (= the self-fulfilling prophecy)

For a more in-depth post on the material in this section you might like:  Teacher
Labelling and the Self Fulfilling Prophecy.

Labelling Theory Applied to the Media

Labelling theory has been applied to the representation of certain groups in

the mainstream media – Interactionists argue that the media has a long
history of exaggerating the deviance of youth subcultures in particular, making
them seem more deviant than they actually are, which creates a ‘moral panic’
among the general public, which in turn leads to the authorities clamping
down on the activities of those subcultures, and finally to the individuals
within those subcultures responding with more deviance.

A moral panic is “an exaggerated outburst of public concern over the morality
or behaviour of a group in society.” Deviant subcultures have often been the
focus of moral panics. According to Interactionists, the Mass Media has a
crucial role to play in creating moral panics through exaggerating the extent
to which certain groups and turning them into ‘Folk Devils’ – people who are
threatening to public order.

In order for a moral panic to break out, the public need to believe what they
see in the media, and respond disproportionately, which could be expressed in
heightened levels of concern in opinion polls or pressure groups springing up
that campaign for action against the deviants. The fact that the public are
concerned about ‘youth crime’ suggest they are more than willing to subscribe
to the media view that young people are a threat to social order.

The final part of a moral panic is when the authorities respond to the public’s
fear, which will normally involve tougher laws, initiatives and sentencing
designed to prevent and punish the deviant group question.

Delinquency and Adolescent Males

Before Matsueda (1992), researchers saw delinquency in adolescents as a factor
of self-esteem, with mixed results. Matsueda looked at adolescent delinquency
through the lens of how parents and authorities labeled children and how these
labels influenced the perception of self these adolescents have — symbolic
interactionism.

This research is unique in that it examines informal labeling — the effects of that
other people look at an adolescent have on that adolescent’s behavior.

From a theoretical perspective, Matsueda drew on the behavioral principles of

George Herbert Mead, which states that one’s perception of themselves is formed
by their interactions with others.

This is caused by a transaction, where someone projects themselves into the role
of another and seeing if the behavior associated with that role suits their situation
(Mead, 1934).

Those who are labeled as troublemakers take on the role of troublemakers

because others’ projections onto them present delinquency as an option. The
delinquent adolescent misbehaves, the authority responds by treating the
adolescent like someone who misbehaves, and the adolescent responds in turn by
misbehaving again.

This approach to delinquency from the perspective of role-taking stems from

Briar and Piliavin (1965), who found that boys who are uncommitted to
conventional structures for action can be incited into delinquency by other boys.

Because these boys are not considering the reactions of conventional others, they
take each other’s roles, present motives for delinquency, and thus act
delinquently (Matsueda, 1992).
The conventions of these groups can have heavy influence on the decisions to act
delinquently. For example, Short and Strodtbeck (1965) note that the decision for
adolescent boys to join a gang fight often originates around the possibility of
losing status within the gang.

Consistent with labeling theory, children whose parents see them as someone
who gets into trouble or breaks rules and children who feel as if their friends,
parents, and teachers see them as someone who gets into trouble or breaks rules
tend to have higher levels of subsequent delinquency.

Many other studies and analyses have supported these findings (Bernburg,
2009). Later, Sampson and Laub (1997) argued that defiant or difficult children
can be subject to labeling and subsequent stigma that undermines attachments to
“conventional others” — family, school, and peers.

This lack of conventional tires can have a large impact on self-definition and lead
to subsequent deviance (Bernburg, 2009).

The term ‘moral panic’ was first used in Britain by Stan Cohen in a classic

study of two youth subcultures of the 1960s – ‘Mods’ and ‘Rockers’. Cohen
showed how the media, for lack of other stories exaggerated the violence
which sometimes took place between them. The effect of the media coverage
was to make the young people categorise themselves as either mods or
rockers which actually helped to create the violence that took place between
them, which further helped to confirm them as violent in the eyes of the
general public.

Find out More:  Moral Panics and the Media.

Labelling and Criminal Justice Policy

Labelling theory believes that deviance is made worse by labelling and
punishment by the authorities, and it follows that in order to reduce deviance
we should make fewer rules for people to break, and have less-serious
punishments for those that do break the rules.An example of an Interactionist
inspired policy would be the decriminalisation of drugs.
According to Interactionist theory, decriminalisation should reduce the
number of people with criminal convictions and hence the risk of secondary
deviance, an argument which might make particular sense for many drugs
offences because these are often linked to addiction, which may be more
effectively treated medically rather than criminally. (The logic here is that
drug-related crime isn’t intentionally nasty, drug-addicts do it because they
are addicted, hence better to treat the addiction rather than further stigmatise
the addict with a criminal label).

Similarly, labelling theory implies that we should avoid ‘naming and shaming’
offenders since this is likely to create a perception of them as evil outsiders
and, by excluding them from mainstream society, push them into further
deviance.

Reintegrative Shaming

Most interactionist theory focuses on the negative consequences of labelling,

but John Braithwaite (1989) identifies a more positive role for the labelling
process. He distinguishes between two types of shaming:

 Disintegrative shaming where not only the crime, but also the criminal,
is labelled as bad and the offender is excluded from society.
 Reintegrative shaming by contrast labels the act, but not the actor – as
if to say ‘he has done a bad thing’ – rather an ‘he is a bad person’. 

A policy of reintegrative shaming avoids stigmatising the offender as evil while

at the same time making them aware of the negative impact of their actions
on others. Victims are encouraged to forgive the person, but not the act, and
the offender is welcomed back into the community, thus avoiding the
negative consequences associated with secondary deviance.

Braithwaite argues that crime rates are lower where policies of reintegrative
shaming are employed.

Evaluation of Labelling Theory

Labelling theory emphasises the following

 That the law is not ‘set in stone’ – it is actively constructed and changes
over time
 That law enforcement is often discriminatory
 That we cannot trust crime statistics
 That attempts to control crime can backfire and may make the situation
worse
 That agents of social control may actually be one of the major causes of
crime, so we should think twice about giving them more power.

Criticisms of Labelling Theory

 It tends to be deterministic, not everyone accepts their labels

 It assumes offenders are just passive – it doesn’t recognise the role of
personal choice in committing crime
 It gives the offender a ‘victim status’ – Realists argue that this
perspective actually ignores the actual victims of crime.
 It tends to emphasise the negative sides of labelling rather than the
positive side
 It fails to explain why acts of primary deviance exist, focussing mainly on
secondary deviance.

Structural sociologists argue that there are deeper, structural

explanations of crime, it isn’t all just a product of labelling and
interactions.

Criticisms of labeling theory

There are many criticisms that have been raised about traditional labeling theory.
Labeling theory prospered throughout the 1960s, bringing about policy changes such as
deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill and juvenile diversion programs. However, it
came under attack in the mid-1970s as a result of criticism by conflict theorists and
positivists for ignoring the concept of deviance; these theorists believed that deviance
does exist and that secondary deviance was a useless concept for sociologists. This
criticism has survived and continues to haunt labeling theorists because of the
recent empirical evidence on the theory. Two main hypotheses have been identified
through these empirical tests, including the status characteristics hypothesis and the
secondary deviance hypothesis. The status characteristics hypothesis explains how
individual attributes affect the choice of who is and who is not labeled, and the
secondary deviance hypothesis argues that negative labels cause future deviance.

Labeling theory predicts that labeling will vary by status characteristics even when
controlling for previous deviant behaviour. The criticism, however, stems from the fact
that labeling theory does not require that status characteristics are the most important
determinant of labeling.

Secondary deviance implies a long causal chain of events, including negative labels,
objective and perceived opportunities, and deviant self-images. It is important to keep
in mind, however, that some groups may be more vulnerable than others to these
events. The literature in this area has not provided support for or contradicted labeling
theory, as it simply focuses on future deviance without thoroughly examining the
process. Most research conducted on labeling theory appears to simply take for granted
that this process is a given; however, it is problematic to assume it as such without
proper empirical support. This is a key point that ties this theory back into literature on
race and crime; some individuals are more vulnerable to the label and therefore
more susceptible to the problems that occur as a result of being stigmatized.