Interractionist Perspective on Crime and Deviance

Question 1

What focus do interractionists take when it comes to crime?

Answer 1

• How and why some criminal acts get labelled in the first place
• Becker, deviants are people who have been successfully labelled and deviance is behaviour that people label.

Question 2

What are Becker’s moral entrepreneurs and what effect do they have?

Answer 2

• People who lead a moral campaign to change the law causing two effects:
• A creation of a new group of outsiders and deviants who break the rules
• An expansion of a social control agency to enforce rules and applying labels to those who break them
• Ex. Platt argues juvenile delinquency created by a campaign by upper class Victorian moral entrepreneurs resulting in the creation of ‘status offences’ such as sexual activities and truancy which were only made illegal for the youth.
• Becker argues social control agencies can also be ‘moral entrepreneurs’ in order to increase their own control such as the Federal Bureau of Narcotics passing the Marijuana tax act in 1937 to outlaw tax due to its harmful effects on young people but Becker argues its an example of those in power redefining behaviour as bad to increase their sphere of influence

Question 3

What factors contribute to how someone who has committed a crime is labelled?

Answer 3

• Their interractions with agencies of social control
• Their identity such as class, race, culture etc.
• The situation and circumstances of the event

This is a point of certain people being convicted of the same crimes more than others for example:

• Piliavin and Briar found police decisions to arrest youths were influenced by the suspects gender, class, ethnicity, time and place. For example, a w/c boc stopped late at night in a high crime area would be very likely arrested.
• It was also found that behavioural orders were more commonly used against people of colour

Question 4

What is Cicourel’s negotiation of justice theory?

Answer 4

• Police formed typifications of criminals and this led them to policing certain people and areas more resulting in more arrests confirming their stereotypes
• Agents of social control within the cjs reinforced this bias due to their belief that crime amongst youths is caused by broken homes, poverty and lax parenting combined with their belief that youths from these backgrounds were more likely to offend in the future means they are less likely to support noncustodial sentences
• A middle class offender is less likely to be convicted because they do not fit the police typification of an offender and his middle class parents could better argue on his behalf showing that justice is negotiable rather than fixed

Question 5

What does Cicourel’s study suggest about police statistics?

Answer 5

• They do not give a valid picture of the patterns of crime and cannot be used as a resource
• Instead, we should use them as a topic to investigate how control agencies and how they process and label certain types of people as criminal

Question 6

How are crime statistics socially constructed?

Answer 6

• At each stage of the criminal justice system agents of social control decide whether to proceed with the case or not and the outcome depends on the label they attach
• The statistics don’t show how much crime is being committed but the amount of people the police have chosen to convict
• The dark figure of crime, the unknown difference between crime statistics and the actual amount of crime being committed
• Alternative statistics, use of victim or self report studies to give a better picture of crime but some people may lie, conceal or exaggerate their answers

Question 7

What is Edwin Lemert’s theory of primary and secondary deviance?

Answer 7

• Primary deviance, deviant acts that are not publicly labelled. Lemert argues that primary deviance is so widespread and trivial there is no point in researching the cause such as fare-dodging.
• Secondary deviance, when someone is publicly labelled as a criminal and they accept it as their master status to resolve an identity crisis leading to a self fulfilling prophecy
• This applied label can lead to the person being marginalised from society reinforcing their master status as a criminal leading them to turn a deviant career. For example, an ex-con will find it hard to become employed and turn back to their deviant career further confirming their deviant identity
• This shows that it is not the act itself but societies reaction to it

Question 8

What is the deviance amplification spiral?

Answer 8

• When the attempt to control deviance results in more deviance resulting in a greater attempt to control it in turn causing more
• Ex. Cohen, Media exaggeration of disturbances caused by mods and rockers at seaside towns created a moral panic resulting in more arrests and therefore marginalisation of the group causing them to adopt the master status of a outsider committing more crime and they become folk devils

Question 9

What is the link between labelling and criminal justice policy?

Answer 9

• Increases in attempts to control and punish the offenders often have the opposite effect
• Ex. US (2000) increasing tendency to see young offenders as evil relabelling status offences like truancy as harsher offences and giving harsher punishments led to an increase in offending

Question 10

What does John Braithwaite say about labelling/shaming?

Answer 10

• It can have a positive function for society and there is 2 types of shaming/labelling
• Disintegrative shaming, the crime and the criminal are shamed
• Reintegrative shaming, the crime is shamed but not the criminal, they did a bad thing but they are not a bad person meaning they are not stigmatised and find it easier to move back into society arguing that crime rates are lower in reintegrating countries

Question 11

What doe Douglas say about the meaning of suicide?

Answer 11

• Distrusts suicide statistics as they are socially constructed telling us about the people who construct them rather than the real state of suicides
• Whether a death is labelled as suicide depends on the interactions of the people investigating it such as police and coroners
• Ex. a religious coroner may be reluctant to label something as suicide as they don’t want to send someone to hell or a family member may feel guilty for the suicide and label it is as a suicide
• Instead we should use qualitative methods such as analysing suicide notes or interviewing family members

Question 12

How can mental illness lead to a self fulfilling prophecy?

Answer 12

• People interpret someone’s primary deviance as odd and they don’t fit in eventually being labelled as mentally ill
• This begins their secondary deviance as a result of this exclusion giving the social audience more of a reason to exclude them
• The social audience may begin discussing ways to fix the paranoia confirming the suspicions of the paranoid that people are conspiring against them and the paranoid’s reaction confirms the suspicions of the audience leading to a psychiatric intervention
• The patient is then labelled mentally ill and this becomes their ‘master status’

Question 13

What is an example of mentally ill becoming someone’s master status?

Answer 13

• Rosenhan’s pseudo-patient experiment
• Researchers sent to hospitals claiming they had heard voices and had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and this became their master status, despite acting normally they were treated as mental patients, even when they kept notes of their experiences the doctors interpreted it as mental illness

Question 14

What is Hoffman’s theory of institutionalisation?

Answer 14

• Patients undergo a ‘mortification of self’ and their old identity died becoming an inmate through degradation rituals such as confiscating valuables in all places such as prisons or in the military
• However, some don’t have to adopt inmate identity, some were able to manipulate their position to gain free access throughout the hospital appearing as too ill to be discharged but healthy enough to avoid containment

Question 15

What is the weaknesses of interactionist labelling theory?

Answer 15

• Someone has the power to resist a label and not fall into a deviant career
• By giving emphasis on the negative effects of labelling it gives them victim status ignoring the real victims of crime
• Focuses on less serious crimes such as drug taking
• Ignores that people might actively choose to be deviants
• Fails to explain why people choose primary deviance in the first place
• Implies without labelling deviance would not exist
• Implies deviants are unaware they are deviants until they are labelled
• Focuses on the middle points of power such as police but doesn’t focus on the role of ruling class and the rules they make in the first place