Using Item from Item a and Elsewhere, Assess the View That Crime and Deviance Are the Product of Labelling Processes
When studying crime and deviance, in particular the causes of crime, it is often useful to look at the reasons behind why people commit crimes in the first place. For interactionists, crime and deviance is a product of labelling. They believe that when a crime is committed, it is because a public application of a negative description of a powerless individual has occurred and that is the reason why a crime has been committed by that individual. Labelling is deterministic of your future life. Interactionists reject official statistics on crime, seeing them as little more than a social construction. They maintain that they vastly underestimate the extent of crime and do not present an accurate picture of crime in society.
The interactionist Jock Young conducted a participant observation in London on marijuana usage by hippies. In the past hippie usage of marijuana was minor and relatively insignificant. Over time, the police started to see the hippies as dirty and scruffy, thus giving them a negative label. Due to this police reaction, the hippies united, feeling different from the rest of society. They then retreated into small closed groups, cut off from society and deviant norms and values developed. They were treated as outsiders and chose to accentuate and express their differences by becoming more and more unconventional. Thus, a deviant career developed. Interactionists would argue that because the police had labelled them so negatively they had caused more crime. Jock Young called this deviancy amplification. Before, the hippies had not been causing any trouble; they weren’t hurting or bothering anyone, until the police labelled them. Once they had been given this label, they couldn’t help but fulfil their master status.
Lemert supports Becker’s ideas on the consequences of labelling. He maintains that primary deviance which has not been labelled has few consequences for the individual concerned. However, he claims that once deviance is labelled it
The interactionist Jock Young conducted a participant observation in London on marijuana usage by hippies. In the past hippie usage of marijuana was minor and relatively insignificant. Over time, the police started to see the hippies as dirty and scruffy, thus giving them a negative label. Due to this police reaction, the hippies united, feeling different from the rest of society. They then retreated into small closed groups, cut off from society and deviant norms and values developed. They were treated as outsiders and chose to accentuate and express their differences by becoming more and more unconventional. Thus, a deviant career developed. Interactionists would argue that because the police had labelled them so negatively they had caused more crime. Jock Young called this deviancy amplification. Before, the hippies had not been causing any trouble; they weren’t hurting or bothering anyone, until the police labelled them. Once they had been given this label, they couldn’t help but fulfil their master status.
Lemert supports Becker’s ideas on the consequences of labelling. He maintains that primary deviance which has not been labelled has few consequences for the individual concerned. However, he claims that once deviance is labelled it