Crime and Deviance - Interactionist theory

Becker - labelling

A deviant is a person whom the label has been successfully applied.

Durkheim - suicide

The level of social integration (belonging) and moral regulation within a group influences suicide rates.

Determined 4 types of suicide:

1. Egoistic suicide

2. Altruistic suicide

3. Anamonic suicide

4. Fatalist suicide

Douglas

Studied suicide. Unlike Durkheim, he took an interactionist approach to understand the meanings behind why people commit suicide, rather than just looking at official statistics. Qualitative methods allow us to get behind the labels that coroners attach to deaths and discover their true meanings.

Atkinson

Focuses on how coroners use taken-for-granted assumptions on the idea of 'typical suicide' to construct social reality.

Lemert - paranoia as a SFP

Negative response to secondary label -> gives others further reason to exclude him -> people discuss the best way to 'deal' with the difficult person -> confirms suspicion that people are conspiring against him -> reaction justifies the fears for his mental health -> psychiatric intervention.

Results in officially being labelled as a 'mental patient': a master status. Everything he says/does will be interpreted in this light.

Rosenhan - pseudo-patients

8 sane people were admitted to hospital for 'hearing voices' - diagnosed with schizophrenia - master label - treated by staff as mentally ill despite acting normally.

Goffman

Shows the effects of total institutions.

- institutionalised: internalising new ability + unable to adjust to outside world.

Braginski et al: inmates manipulated their symptoms to appear 'not sick enough' to be confined to the ward -> able to achieve aim of free movement around the hospital.

Evaluation of labelling theory

1. deterministic, assumes that one someone is labelled, a deviant career is inevitable.

2. assumes offenders are passive victims of labelling = ignores that individuals may actively choose deviance.

3. fails to explain why people commit primary deviance in the first place.

4. implies that most deviants are unaware that they're deviant until they're labelled.

MARXISTS - recognise the role of power in creating deviance, but fails to analyse this source of power.

Pilavin and Brair

Policy decisions to arrest a youth were mainly based on physical cues from which they made judgements. Officers' decisions were influenced by the suspects' gender, class and ethnicity, as well as the time and place.

Platt- juvenile delinquency

Idea of juvenile delinquency was created because of a campaign by UC Victorian model entrepreneurs, aimed at protecting young people at risk.

- established juveniles as a separate category of offender with their own courts.

- enabled the state to extend its powers beyond criminal offenses involving the young (through status offences).

Becker

Social control agencies may campaign for a change in the law to increase their own power.

- US Federal Bureau of Narcotics: Marijuana Tax Act (1937) to outlaw marijuana use. Extended the Bureau's sphere of influence.

Cicourel - Typifications

Police officers hold stereotypes/theories of what a typical delinquent is like. Agents of social control within the CJS reinforce this bias.

- probation officers: youths from broken homes were likely to reoffend in the future -> less likely to be given a non-custodial sentence.

- M/C use capital to get away with more.

Lemert: Primary and Secondary Deviance

Primary deviance: deviant acts that have not been publicly labelled as criminal.

Secondary deviance: individual commits crime so is labelled, offender experiences consequences, "master status" leads to self-fulfilling prophecy, more crime.

It's not the act itself, but the hostile social reaction to it, that creates serious deviance. Social control processes that are meant to produce law-abiding behaviour may produce the opposite effect.

Downes and Rock (DISAGREE WITH LEMERT)

Deviant career is not always inevitable. We cannot predict whether someone who has been labelled will follow a deviant career; they're free to choose whether to deviate further.

S Cohen - deviancy amplification spiral

Folk devils

Moral panics

(Mods and Rockers panic about British youths)

Societal reaction to an initial deviant act leads not to successful control but to further deviance -> greater reaction -> more deviance.

Triplett

Increases in the attempt to control and punish young offenders can have the opposite effect. Increasing tendency to see young offenders as evil and to be less tolerant of minor deviance.

- CJS has relabelled status offences as more serious -> stigmatisation and lower tolerance-> harsher sentences -> secondary deviance. (De Haan)