How Did Charles Manson A Social Deviant

John Doe
Professor Klein
English 101
3 June 2013
The Mason Family Few characters have gripped the eye of the American public as successfully as Charles Manson, and even fewer have ever been as effective as Manson in creating a cult following of eager people. Manson and his “Family” are the crowning achievement of a conservative America, rife with religious passion that merged with the heavy use of addictive drugs such as cocaine and LSD in order to synthesize a cult based on a skewed worldview. I argue that Manson, labeled as a social deviant from a young age, embraced this formal classification and successfully created a message that appealed to dysfunctional and otherwise outcast American youth. Manson and his Family originated
Watson, Fromme, and Van Houten, the three killers present in the LaBianca and Tate murders, were all individuals that exhibited particular strains of social deviancy that Manson was able to prey upon. Van Houten, for example, experienced heavy drug use and had an abortion at a young age, Fromme became heavily involved in marijuana use and fringe political movements, and Watson committed burglary often at a young age. Watson, in particular, became “immersed into criminal activity and surrounded by people with favorable attitudes toward deviance” (Atchison and Heide 791). Desperate for a value system that made sense to his own worldview and his experiences, Watson would be easily seduced by Manson into the latter 's Family, merging their two philosophies of life into a single entity where only Manson 's orders mattered. Van Houten 's poor relationship with her parents and her social shunning as a result of her abortion led her to find a warm and inviting community in Manson 's Family, allowing her to “become one with the Family and to let her former identity go” (Atchison and Heide 792). This ability to recreate one 's own image and identity along views that Van Houten deemed correct created a hold on her that Manson could
Instead, one compelling explanation for Manson 's actions lay in labeling theory, which posits that “lawbreakers feel labeled as a result of being processed in the criminal justice system for committing a primary deviance” (Atchison and Heide 780). Instead of rehabilitation, these people embrace and embodied the label of deviant and commited these actions to reinforce themselves as different and “become locked into their deviant roles”. Emmons in his 1986 account of Manson 's life reports how the young Charlie, due to his financially insecure family situation, received no presents during the Christmas holiday. In a fit of anger, Manson burned all of his classmate 's toys and from then on would find himself declared a deviant from society, and labeled as a criminal (Atchison and Heide 780). Years later, Manson would be formally declared a “ringleader” of an escape attempt from a home for displaced youth and had his picture published in the local newspaper, again reflecting the importance of formal labeling on causing criminal behavior. Both of these instances occurred before Manson was an adult, thereby creating a strong self-fulfilling prophecy of deviant social behavior from a young age. At the same time, Manson was constantly exposed to and surrounded by criminals. Spending most of his life being processed by the criminal justice system, Manson never had the opportunity