Labelling Flashcards
Becker - deviant acts
Becker (1963): his key statement about labelling is: “Deviancy is not a quality of the act a person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender’. Deviant behaviour is behaviour that people so label.”
Holdaway - racial stereotyping by police officers
Holdaway notes that there is strong evidence that suggests racial stereotyping by some police officers may be a crucial element governing their decision to stop black people and their interaction with black people, especially African-Caribbeans, i.e. some officers see all black people as potentially criminal.
Home Office statistics - racial stereotyping
The police stop and search Black people 6x and Asian people 2x more than White people.
Cicourel - working-class stereotyping
Cicourel found that other agents of social control within the criminal justice system reinforce this bias. For example, probation officers held the common sense theory that juvenile delinquency is caused by broken homes, poverty and poor parenting. Therefore they tend to see youths from such backgrounds as likely to offend in the future and were more likely to support custodial sentences for them.
Cicourel - justice is negotiable
Cicourel concludes that justice is often not fixed but negotiable. For example, in his study, when a middle-class youth was arrested, he was less likely to be charged because his social background did not fit the police’s ideas of a ‘typical delinquent’ but also because his parents were able to negotiate successfully on his behalf. They were more able than working-class parents to convince agents of social control that they would monitor him to make sure he stayed out of trouble. As a result he was ‘counselled, warned and released’ whilst working-class youths up for the same offences were charged with a criminal offence.
Cicourel is particularly critical of the official crime statistics – he argues that these tell us more about the negotiation of justice according to social class rather than about crime and criminality.
Lemert - primary and secondary deviance
Primary deviance refers to deviant acts that have not been publicly labelled, i.e. the person committing the act has not been observed or caught. Lemert argues that primary deviance is widespread and often trivial in nature. Such acts have little significance for a person’s status or identity. Those who commit primary deviance often do not see themselves as deviant.
Secondary deviance is that which is spotted and punished by people who have more power than the person committing the act. There is therefore a societal reaction to the act. Lemert argues that secondary deviance can have negative consequences in that being caught and publicly labelled as a criminal can involve being stigmatised, shunned and excluded from normal society.
Triplett - deviancy amplification of young people
Triplett (2000) notes an increasing tendency to see young offenders as evil and to be less tolerant of minor deviance such as truancy.
Braithwaite - reintegrative and disintegrative shaming
Braithwaite (1989) suggests there are two types of shaming available to the criminal justice system: disintegrative and disintegrative shaming.
Disintegrative shaming Involves the deviant or criminal being labelled as bad and normally involves the offender being excluded from society. The individual’s previous life and status ‘disintegrates’ as a result of the deviant/criminal master status. This is the most common outcome of the present criminal justice system.
Reintegrative shaming involves labelling the act of deviance rather than the person who carried it out, e.g. as if to say ‘he has done a bad thing’ rather than ‘he is a bad person’.
Braithwaite argues that the concept of re-integrative shaming avoids stigmatizing or negatively labelling the offender as ‘evil’ or ‘bad’ while at the same time making them aware of the negative impact of their actions upon others.
Downes and Rock - people are always free to stop engaging in crime
Labelling theory tends to be deterministic – it implies that once someone is labelled, a deviant career is inevitable. Downes and Rock (2003) argue that we cannot predict whether someone who has been labelled will follow a deviant career, because they are always free to choose not to deviate further.
