Labelling Theory of Crime Flashcards
What do labelling theorists aim to challenge?
Structural approaches
What are labelling theorists interested in?
How and why some people and actions come to be labelled as criminal or deviant and the effects of labelling.
What do labelling theorists believe crime is a result of?
Interactions between suspects and police rather than wider external forces such as blocked opportunities.
What is the focus for labelling theorists?
How agencies of social control e.g. police and media, define and react to crime/ deviance.
What are labelling theorists critical of?
Picture of crime represented in official statistics.
Who is the key thinker for the social construction of crime?
Becker
What does Becker suggest about the social construction of crime?
No action is inherently deviant or criminal, the action has to create a social reaction to be labelled as such. Not the nature of the act but the reaction.
What determines whether an act is seen as deviant or criminal?
Who commits it, who sees it, when are where it took place, the negotiation of meaning between those involved, following action that occurs from various social actors after the initial act.
What does Becker’s social construction of crime help us to understand?
How some acts may be seen as criminal in some countries but not in others and how some acts were deemed illegal in the past but are legal now/. E.g. marijuana laws and homosexuality.
What does labelling an individual as criminal impose on them?
Master status.
Who proposed the idea of a master status?
Becker
What is a master status?
When the label of being a criminal is seen as more important than their earlier established statuses.
AO2 for master status - what is an example of someone developing a master status?
Boris Johnson - before he was a prime minister trying to get the country though a pandemic and Brexit. Now he is a irresponsible hypocrite and a careless, selfish partygoer.
Who is the key thinker for the negotiation of justice?
Cicourel
Cicourel builds on Becker’s work by doing what?
Trying to explain class differences in offending shown by OS.
