2. Interactionism And Labelling Theory

Question 1

Social construction of crime

Answer 1

-Interested in how and why certain acts come to be defined or labelled as criminal
-No act is inherently criminal
-It is not the nature of the act that makes it deviant, but the nature of society’s reaction to the act
-Becker (1963): ‘social groups create deviance by creating the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders’.
-How and why do rules and laws get made?

Question 2

Moral entrepreneurs

Answer 2

-The people who lead a moral ‘crusade’ to change the law
-This law has two effects: creation of new group of ‘outsiders’; those deviants who break the new rule and creation or expansion of a social control agency to enforce the rule and impose label on offenders

Question 3

Platt (1969)

Answer 3

-Juvenile Delinquency
-Created as a result of a campaign by upper class Victorian moral entrepreneurs to protect young people at risk
-Created separate category of offender
-E.G. young offenders

Question 4

Who gets labelled?

Answer 4

Factors that affect whether a person is arrested, charged and convicted:
-Interactions with agencies of social control
-Appearance, background and personal biography
-Situation and circumstances of the offence
Agencies of social control are more likely to label certain groups as criminal or deviant

Question 5

Piliavin and Briar (1964)

Answer 5

-Police are more likely to arrest a young person based on physical cues and made judgments about the young persons character.
-Decisions are also influenced by suspects gender, class and ethnicity as well as time and place.

Question 6

Cicourel: the negotiation of justice

Answer 6

-Decisions to arrest are influenced by stereotypes
-Stereotypes about what the typical delinquent is like led them to concentrate on ‘certain’ types
-Class bias- working class areas and people more likely to fit the type
-This led to more patrols in those areas which leads to more arrests which confirms and reinforces the stereotype
-Probation officers- common sense theory that juvenile delinquency caused by broken homes.
-Justice is not fixed but negotiable. Middle class less likely to be charged- doesn’t fit the stereotype and parents able to negotiate successful outcomes

Question 7

Topic vs resource

Answer 7

-Stats recorded by the police cannot give us a valid picture of the patterns of crime and cannot be used as a resource- to tell us facts about crime
-Should be treated as topic to investigate

Question 8

Social construction of crime stats

Answer 8

-Interactionists see crime stats as socially constructed
-Labels attached to individual suspects affect the outcomes
-Stats therefore only tell us about the activities of the police and prosecutors, not the crime that is out there in society or who commits it
-Stats are counts of the decisions made by control agents at ‘decision gates’

Question 9

Dark figure of crime

Answer 9

Difference between official stats and the ‘real’ rate of crime

Question 10

Alternative stats

Answer 10

Victim surveys, self-report studies may help us gain a more accurate view of the amount of crime. Limitations == forget, conceal, exaggerate, often include only a selection of less serious offences.

Question 11

The effects of labelling= Primary and secondary deviance

Answer 11

-Lemert (1951): primary deviance refers to deviant acts that have not been publicly labelled. Secondary deviance is the result of societal reaction- labelling

Question 12

Primary deviance

Answer 12

-Pointless trying to find causes of primary deviance as it is so widespread and often trivial, mostly goes uncaught

Question 13

Secondary deviance

Answer 13

-Result of being stigmatised, shamed, humiliated, shunned or excluded from normal society
-Once labelled individuals may only be seen in terms of this label= master status. Overrides all other ‘labels’
-Creates crisis for self-concept or identity. If label is accepted= self fulfilling prophecy. Acting out the label= secondary deviance

Question 14

Deviant career

Answer 14

-Secondary deviance= hostile reaction= reinforcing outsider status= more deviance careers
-Deviant subcultures
-Jock Young (1971)- study of hippy marijuana users in Notting Hill.
-It is not the act itself, but the hostile society reaction to it that creates serious deviance
-Could social control processes actually produce the opposite of what they are meant to?
-Downes and Rock (2003)- we cannot predict whether someone who has been labelled will follow a deviant career. More common but not inevitable

Question 15

Deviance amplification spiral

Answer 15

-Used to describe the process in which the attempt to control deviance leads to and increase in the level of deviance. This leads to greater efforts to control it and in turn this produces higher levels of deviance still.
-More control= more deviance in an escalating spiral
-Stanley Cohen (1972)- Folk Devils and Moral Panics
-Similar to Lemerts idea of secondary deviance
-Societal reaction doesn’t lead to successful control but to further deviance, which leads to further control

Question 16

Labelling and criminal justice policy

Answer 16

-Increases in attempt to control and punish young offenders can have the opposite effect
-Triplett (2000): increasing tendency to see young offenders as evil and to be less tolerant of minor deviance
-CJS labelled offences such as truancy more serious= harsher sentences
-Results in an increase rather than a decrease in offending
-Adds weight to argument that negative labelling pushes offenders towards a deviant career
-If we make and enforce fewer rules for people to break does it reduce deviancy?

Question 17

Shaming

Answer 17

Braithwaite (1989) - identifies a positive role of the labelling process. Two types of shaming:

Question 18

Disentegrative shaming

Answer 18

Not only the crime but the criminal is labelled as bad and the offender is excluded from society

Question 19

Reintegrative shaming

Answer 19

Labels the act but not the actor - they have done a bad thing but are not a bad person

Question 20

Positives of shaming

Answer 20

-Avoids stigmatising the offender as evil whilst making them aware their act is
not acceptable and the negative impact it has on society. Encourages
forgiveness.
-Avoids secondary deviance.
-Crime rates tend to be lower in societies where reintegrative shaming is the
dominant way of dealing with offenders

Question 21

Sociology of deviance

Answer 21

Suicide and mental illness

Question 22

Suicide

Answer 22

-Durkheim (1897) used to show sociology as a science
-Used official stats, claimed to have discovered the causes of suicide in how effectively society integrated individuals and regulated their behaviour
-Interactionists reject Durkheims positivist view- in order to understand suicide, we must study its meaning for those who choose to kill themselves
-Douglas (1967)- stats are socially constructed- they tell us about the activities of the people who constructed them rather than the real rate in society
-Before a death is labelled as a suicide- dependent on interactions between social actors (relatives, friends, doctors)
-Relatives may feel guilty about preventing the death so may want misadventure
-Coroners with strong religious views may be reluctant to issue a suicide verdict

Question 23

Suicide P2

Answer 23

-Stats don’t tell us anything about the meaning behind the act
-Use qualitative methods to do this
-Analysis of suicide notes, unstructured interviews
-‘Get behind’ the label
-Atkinson (1978)- focuses on the taken for granted assumptions that coroners make when reaching verdicts
-Ideas about typical suicide are important (mode of death, location, life history)
-If Atkinson is correct that all we can do is have interpretations of the social world, rather than real facts - his account is no more than an interpretation and there is no good reason to accept it

Question 24

Mental illness

Answer 24

-How does a person become labelled as mentally ill?
-Lemberg (1962) study of paranoia
-Individuals don’t fit easily into groups= primary deviance= labelled as off and excluded
-Negative response= secondary deviance= further exclusion

Question 25

Mental Illness P2

Answer 25

-Mental patient becomes master status
-Goffman (1961)- Asylums. Showed possible effects of being admitted to somewhere like a psychiatric hospital
-Inmate undergoes ‘mortification of the self’
-Some inmates become institutionalised- internalising new identities. Others adopt various forms of resistance or accommodation of new situation
-

Question 26

Braginski et al (1968)

Answer 26

Study of long term psychiatric patients. Inmates manipulated symptoms so as to appear ‘not well enough’ to be discharged but ‘not sick enough’ to be confined to the ward. Able to achieve aim of free movement around the hospital.

Question 27

Evaluation of labelling theory

Answer 27

-Deterministic as once somebody is labelled, a deviant career is inevitable
-Emphasis on negative side of labelling. Realists argue ignores the real victims of crime
-Tends to focus on less serious crimes
-Assumes offenders are passive victims of labelling, ignores that individuals may actively choose deviance
-Fails to explain why people commit primary deviance in the first place
-Implies without labelling deviance would not exist
-Fails to explain the origin of the labels, or why they are applied to certain groups.