Crime and Deviance - Interactionism Flashcards
Things that affect how we perceive behaviour
- Place; where the act took place e.g. nudist beach is appropriate to be naked at
- Time; when the act took place e.g. legislation
- Culture; different cultures have different behavioural expectations
- Social situation; the context in which an act takes place e.g. waving a flag at a church rather than at a rugby match
How is Interactionism different from functionalism
- Functionalism and subcultural theories are both seen as being ‘functionalist’ as they assume mainstream culture has a consensus about what criminal and deviant behaviour is
- Subcultures form their own consensus
- They also see deviants as something ‘other’; a group different to ‘normal’ society
- Interactionists take a much different view
Labelling theory states
- Most people commit crime, but only some people are caught and stigmatised
- There is no real difference between deviants and non-deviants
- Interactionists seek to understand societal reaction to crime and deviance
- From an interactionist perspective there is no deviance, there are only acts which are labelled as deviant
- The law is enforced by control agents in ways that criminalise the powerless.
- Labelling can have negative effects in those who are labelled, resulting deviance amplification.
Labelling theory focuses on -
1) Who makes the laws? - those responsible for enforcing it, and the police and courts therefore have a big role in the social construction of crime because they decide what is and isn’t crime
2) Why rules are selectively enforced and the response to law breaking is not always the same
3) Why only some individuals / groups and some acts are defined as deviant and criminal, while others carrying out similar acts are not
4) The consequences of being labelled deviant - how does the labelled individual respond and how do others in society respond to the person who is labelled
Howard Becker - The Outsiders (1963)
- There is no deviant behaviour, just labels that call it that
- Becker calls agencies (media and police) who have the power and resources to create and enforce rules and impose their definitions of deviance acting as moral enforcers - they choose what and who to punish, and they are in their own right made up of the rich and powerful
Context effects -
- A nurse injecting opiates into a patient is acceptable but a teenager injecting opiates in a park is criminal and deviant.
- Killing is criminal but in a war is acceptable. Society constructs what is deviant
Why do moral enforcers impose certain rules on people?
- Social control - Rules are made by the rich and thus benefit them.
Becker’s consequences of labelling
- Becker - one consequence of labelling is that the label becomes a person’s ‘master status’ (the aspect that becomes their main identity). ‘Deviant’ becomes the label that they adopt and then live up to (self fulfilling prophecy).
- The original label ‘deviant’ can create further deviancy.
Labelling theory and criminal behaviour - discreditable and discredited
- Everyone breaks the law at some point in their lives and what distinguishes criminals and non-criminals is not that they have violated social rules, but the real difference is between the discreditable and discredited (Goffman)
- All of us have done things in our lives that would be discrediting if they were known to the public, but through luck or other reasons they have been able to be concealed and so we are discreditable, not discredited
- In contrast, criminals have bad luck of being caught and therefore been subjected to a penal process that has produced a ‘spoiled’ identity, and so have been discredited
Lemert - Primary Deviation
- Primary deviation - consists of deviant acts before they are publicly labelled; in Lemert’s view, any number of causes of primary deviation exist and so it is pointless to investigate them, and those who are convicted of a particular crime are unlikely to be a representative sample of those who have committed the act so theories based on known offenders are invalid - Lemert suggested that the only thing that ‘known’ deviants have in common is the fact that they have been publicly labelled as such
- This primary deviation is largely unimportant as it only has marginal implications for status and psychic structure of the person, with the odd deviant act having little effect on individuals’ and their self-concept and status in community and does not prevent them continuing a normal and conventional life
Lemert - Secondary Deviance
- Secondary deviance - producing deviance in the eyes of labelling theorists is societal reaction; the public identification of the deviant and the consequences of this for the individual, and so secondary deviation is the deviant behaviour engaged in as a result of being labelled - studies of deviance should focus on this, as it has major consequences for self-concept, status and future actions
- The official causes of the deviation recede and what is more important is the disapproval, degrading and isolating reactions of society
- Societal reaction can be seen as a major cause of deviance, arguing it gives proper place to social control as a cause of deviance, and this reversed traditional views of deviance as the blame of deviance is said to lie with agents of social control rather than with the deviant
- Primary deviance is the act itself; secondary deviance is how the labelling of the criminal in the act leads them into a SFP or more crime
Lemert’s study on societal reaction
- Examined societal reaction and deviance - previous research showed a virtual absence of stuttering among Native Americans, but Lemert’s research of deviance among various tribes and their orated traditions showed a resistance to speech impediments, and so he concluded that stuttering is a societal reaction - in these communities, speech impediments were condemned and so children were less likely to have them to avoid this negative label; however, there was conversely increased anxiety about the label, which increased the likelihood of stuttering because of the anxiety of messing up tribal rituals
- As a result, deviance is a product of how people react to it in society, and being concerned about deviance and labelling it can actually lead to deviance occurring
Effects of criminal labelling - Becker
- Becker examined the possible effects upon an individual of being publicly labelled as deviant - a label defines an individual as a particular kind of person; a label is not neutral and instead contains an evaluation of the person to whom it is applied, making it a master status
- If individuals are labelled as criminal, mentally ill or sexually deviant, such labels largely override their status as a worker, neighbour or friend and others see them and respond to them in terms of their label and tend to assume that they have the negative characteristics associated with their label
-This can produce a self-fulfilling prophecy and this has multiple stages in the deviant identity becoming the controlling one
The stages of the deviant identity becoming the controlling one
1) Initially, the individual is publicly labelled as deviant, which may lead to rejection from many social groups and this causes a loss of jbs or forcing out of a neighbourhood
2) This then encourages further deviance, such as drug addicts turning to crime to support their habit as respectable employers refuse to give them jobs
3) The official treatment of deviance may have similar effects, such as ex-convicts having difficulty finding employment and be forced to turn to crime for their livelihood, with Becker arguing that the treatment of deviants means carrying on routines of everyday life open is no longer accessible and so deviant people have to develop illegitimate routines
4) The deviant career is completed when individuals join an organised deviant group and they confirm and accept their deviant identity as a result, and therefore surround themselves by others in a similar situation who provide them with support and understanding
5) A deviant subculture develops - this often includes beliefs and values which rationalise, justify and support deviant identities and activities, and Becker states that organised male homosexual groups provide the individual with a rationale for his deviance (writing before this was legal)
The ideas of Cicourel
- Phenomenological sociologist - how interpretations generated youth ‘delinquency’
- Cicourel based on two Californian cities each with a 100,000 person population which had similar socio-economic characteristics; according to structural theories, delinquency rates should be the same
- However, Cicourel found a significant difference in the numbers of delinquents arrested and charged, and argued that the size, organisation, policies and practices of the juvenile and police bureaux can account for this difference
- The city with the highest delinquency rate employed more juvenile officers and kept more detailed records on offenders, with the second city having a sharper fluctuation as the response of police to delinquency was variable based on the media attention or the police pressure, and so social reaction directly affects delinquency rates
Cicourel - the social production of delinquency
- The process of defining a young person as a delinquent is not simple or unproblematic - it is based on typifications held by participants, and these meanings can be modified by interactors so each stage of the process is negotiable
- The first stage is the decision to stop and interrogate an individual based on the police’s meanings of what is suspicious, wrong and unusual, and such meanings are related to particular geographical areas such as lower income, inner city areas being labelled as ‘bad areas’ are given a high crime rate
- Consequently, behaviour in such areas is more likely to be seen as suspicious, and interrogation does not need to lead to arrest, but the process is negotiable and depends largely on the picture the police holds of a typical delinquent and if the appearance, language and demeanour of a young person fits the picture, he or she is more likely to be arrested
- Once arrested, they go to juvenile officers who also hold a typification of a ‘typical delinquent’, and if the suspect’s background correlates to this picture, he or she is more likely to be charged with an offence, and factors assumed to be associated with delinquency include ‘broken’ homes, ‘bad attitudes’ and poor school performance
- Cicourel therefore found a significant link between delinquent labels and behaviour and social class, with most young people being convicted having manual worker parents and ⅓ of offenders came from the 7th class in the seve-class occupational scale
Cicourel - the treatment of middle class juvenile delinquency
- He blamed this numerical dominance of working-class delinquents by reference to the meanings held by the police and juvenile officers, with the interactions between them - when middle-class youths were arrested, there was less likelihood of them being charged with an offence, and their background did not fit the standard picture of the delinquent, as parents were able to negotiate better
- Middle class parents can present themselves as respectable and reasonable people from a ‘nice’ neighbourhood who look forward to a good future for their child, and so are more cooperative, assuring remorsefulness for their child
- So, the middle-class juvenile is labelled as ‘ill’ rather than criminal and having accidentally strayed from the path of righteousness rather than committed to wrongdoing, as cooperative not obstructive, as having a real change of reforming rather than being a ‘born loser’ and middle class juveniles receive counselling before imprisonment
- Cicourel views this as an over-representation of lower-class youths in delinquency statistics is not the result of their delinquent adaptation to social strain but the outcome of biased law enforcement processes
- Delinquents are produced by the agencies of social control, and certain individuals rather than others are selected, processed and labelled as deviant, and so justice becomes ‘negotiable’
