The social construction of crime

Question 1

What are labelling theorists interested in?

Answer 1

They are interested in how and why certain acts come to be defined or labelled as criminal in the first place

Question 2

What does Becker think about deviance?

Answer 2

• A deviant is simply someone whom the label has been successfully applied

Question 3

What are moral entrepreneurs?

Answer 3

People who lead a moral ‘crusade’ to change the law

Question 4

What are the 2 effects of trying to change the law, according to Becker?

Answer 4

1. Creates a new group of ‘outsiders’ who try to break the new rules
2. The creation/expansion of a social control agency (the police, courts, probation officers…) to enforce the rule and impose labels on offenders

Question 5

What does Platt (1969) argue?

Answer 5

• The idea of ‘juvenile delinquency’ was originally created as a result of a campaign by upper-class Victorian moral entrepreneurs, aimed at protecting young people at risk
• Meant that juveniles were a separate category of offender, had their own courts
• Enabled the state to extend its powers beyond criminal offences involving the young into ‘status offences’

Question 6

What does Becker think about the 1937 outlaw of marijuana?

Answer 6

• It wasn’t because of its effects on young people, but rather to extend the Bureau’s sphere of influence

Question 7

What factors depend on whether a person is arrested, charged and convicted?

Answer 7

1. Their interactions with agencies of social control
2. Their appearance, background and personal biography
3. The situation and circumstances of the offence

Question 8

What did Piliavin and Briar find about why police arrested youths?

Answer 8

Mainly based on physical cues (such as manner and dress, which led on to judgements about the youth’s character

Question 9

Cicourel: the negotiation of justice

Answer 9

• Officers’ typifications (their commonsense theories or stereotypes of what the typical delinquent is like) led them to concentrate on certain ‘types’ of people
• Resulted in law enforcement showing a class bias, led to the more intense patrolling of w/c areas, led to more arrests…
• Probation officers held the commonsense theory that juvenile delinquency was caused by broken homes, poverty and lax parenting… Less likely to support non-custodial sentences for them

Question 10

Topic versus resource

Answer 10

• Cicourel’s findings show us that official crime statistics don’t give us a valid picture/patterns
• Instead, we should treat them as a topic for sociologists to investigate
• We should investigate the process that created them

Question 11

Social construction of crime statistics

Answer 11

• Interactionists: statistics tell us about the activities of the police and prosecutors, rather than the amount of crime in society

Question 12

What is the dark figure of crime?

Answer 12

The difference between the official statistics and the ‘real’ rate of crime. This is because we don’t know how much crime goes undetected

Question 13

What are some limitations of alternative statistics (self-report studies)?

Answer 13

• People may forget, conceal or exaggerate when asked if they have committed a crime or been the victim of one.