Interactionism – The effects of labelling
PRIMARY DEVIANCE:
Primary deviance is deviant acts that haven’t been publicly labelled.
Lemert considers it pointless to seek the cause of primary deviance because these are widespread, unlikely to have a single cause, often trivial and so aren’t part of organised deviant way of life.
The individual views these acts as ones that are easily rationalised, have little impact on a person’s status or self-concept.
SECONDARY DEVIANCE:
Is a result of societal reaction and labelling.
Once caught, an individual can be publicly labelled as a criminal and can be stigmatised, shamed, humiliated, shunned or excluded from normal society.
A master status controls identity and overrides all other labels.
This can impact a person’s status or self-concept.
A crisis of self-concept then occurs and a way of dealing with this is accepting the label.
This then leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the individual acts up to the label.
DEVIANT CAREER:
Secondary deviance is likely to provoke further hostile reactions from society, which reinforces the ‘outsider’ status.
This could lead to more deviance, then to a deviant career. The ex-convict can’t get employed, is rejected by friends and family and so seeks other ‘outsiders’ for support.
This may involve joining a deviant subculture that offers deviant career opportunities and role models; rewards deviant behaviour and confirms his identity.
JOCK YOUNG’S STUDY OF HIPPIES:
To begin with, drugs were necessary to the hippies’ lifestyle (primary deviance).
Persecution and labelling by control culture (the police) led the hippies to see themselves more and more as outsiders.
Retreated into closed groups where they began to develop a deviant subculture.
Having longer hair and wearing more ‘way out’ clothes.
Drug use became a central activity, attracting further attention from the police and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The work of Young (and Lemert) illustrates the idea that it’s not the act itself, but the hostile societal reaction to it, which creates serious deviance.
Therefore, the social control processes that are meant to produce law-abiding behaviour may in fact produce the very opposite.
However, Downes and Rock point out that a deviant career isn’t inevitable, someone who has been labelled may not follow a deviant career because they’re free to choose not to deviate further.
DEVIANCE AMPLIFICATION SPIRAL:
This is a term used by labelling theorists to describe a process in which attempts to control deviance lead to further deviance.
This leads to greater control which leads to more deviance again, and so on.
Young’s hippies are an example of this.
FOLK DEVILS AND MORAL PANICS:
Cohen’s ‘Folk Devils and Moral Panics’ – a study of the societal reaction to the ‘mods and rockers’ disturbances involving groups of youths at English seaside resorts.
Press exaggeration and distorted reporting of the events began a moral panic, with growing public concern and moral entrepreneurs calling for a ‘crackdown’.
Police responded by arresting more youths, while the courts imposed higher penalties.
This seemed to confirm the truth of the original media reaction and provoked more public reaction.
The demonising of the mods and rockers as ‘folk devils’ caused their further marginalisation as ‘outsiders’, resulting in more deviant behaviour on their part.
FOLK DEVILS VS THE DARK FIGURES OF CRIME:
Functionalist theories of crime ‘rest heavily on the idea that deviance leads to social control. I have come to believe the reverse idea, i.e social control leads to deviance’. – Lemert.
Dark figures: unlabelled, unrecorded crime that’s ignored by the public and police.
Folk Devils: over-labelled and over-exposed to public view and the attention of the authorities.
LABELLING AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE POLICY:
Labelling theorists believe these two policies would push less people towards a deviant career:
Decriminalising soft drugs: we might reduce the number of people with criminal convictions.
Avoid publicly ‘naming and shaming’ offenders.
Braithwaite distinguishes between two types of labelling:
Disintegrative shaming: where not only the crime, but also the criminal, is labelled as bad and the offender is excluded from society.
Reintegrative shaming: by contrast, labels the act, but not the actor – as if to say, ‘he has done a bad thing’ rather than ‘he is a bad person’.
Therefore, reintegrative shaming avoids stigmatisation of the offender as evil while at the same time making them aware of the negative impact of their actions upon others, and then encourages others to forgive them. This makes it easier for both the offender and the community to separate the offender from the offence and re-admit the wrongdoer back into mainstream society. At the same time this avoids pushing them into secondary deviance. Braithwaite argues that crime rates are lower in societies where this happens.