Labeling Theory

A different question

Most theories in this unit answer one question: why does a person break a rule? Strain, social learning, social disorganization and routine activity each propose a mechanism that operates before the offense. Labeling theory - also called the social reaction perspective - starts after it. Its subject is what happens once a rule violation is noticed: who gets named a delinquent or a criminal, by whom, and what the naming does to the person named. The intellectual roots are in symbolic interactionism, the school of sociology that treats meaning as produced in interaction rather than fixed in the act itself. That move has a consequence worth stating plainly, because it is also the theory's largest vulnerability: labeling theory does not try to explain the first offense. It hands that question back to the other theories and keeps a narrower one for itself - that the response to an offense is a cause of what happens next, and that criminology had been treating official reaction as a neutral measuring instrument when it is in fact part of the process being measured.

Tannenbaum and Lemert: tagging, and the distinction that organizes the theory

Frank Tannenbaum's Crime and the Community (1938) is the earliest work usually placed in this lineage. Tannenbaum described a process that begins in disagreement: a young person treats an activity as play while adults in the community define it as bad. If the conflict persists, the community's judgment shifts from the act to the actor. Neighbors stop letting their children play with the youth; the youth notices the exclusion and eventually accepts the community's description of him. Tannenbaum called the process of defining, identifying, segregating and making the youth self-conscious about being bad tagging, and the surrounding community drama the dramatization of evil. His argument was that the dramatization itself produces further delinquency.

Edwin Lemert's Social Pathology (1951) supplied the distinction that still organizes the theory. Primary deviance is rule-breaking a person absorbs into an otherwise ordinary life - rationalized, explained away, handled as a function of a socially acceptable role. Because primary deviance is common, transient and usually minor, Lemert did not try to explain it; its causes, he allowed, are whatever the other theories say they are. Secondary deviance is different in kind, not degree: it is behavior a person takes up as a means of defense against, attack on, or adjustment to the problems created by other people's reaction to the original deviance. Moving from the first to the second is a sequence rather than an event - an act, a reaction, further acts, a stronger reaction, and eventually the adoption of a deviant role. Reach for this distinction whenever someone claims labeling theory says labels cause crime. It says something narrower.

Becker: rules, rule-makers, and the criminal label as master status

Howard Becker's Outsiders (1963) made the perspective famous and gave it its most quoted formulation: deviance is not a quality of the act a person commits but a consequence of other people applying rules and sanctions, so that the deviant is whoever the label has successfully been applied to. Two things follow.

First, if labels are applied by people, then who applies them and why becomes a research question rather than background. Becker described two kinds of moral entrepreneur. Rule-creators campaign to have a rule made because they see some evil in the world that needs prohibiting; they care about the content of the rule. Rule-enforcers care about enforcing whatever rule exists and about justifying their own work; because content is not their concern, they develop working priorities about which rules matter and which of the many rule-breakers to pursue. This is where the labeling tradition's interest in differential enforcement originates, and it connects the theory to what this subject teaches about police and prosecutorial discretion.

Second, Becker argued that in American society the label criminal is so stigmatizing that it becomes a master status - it overrides the person's other statuses, such as parent, worker, student or neighbor, in how others treat them. He sketched a deviant career in three phases: an initial act of rule-breaking, which may or may not be intentional; apprehension and labeling, which changes public identity, interaction and self-identity; and movement into a deviant group, which supplies both the company and the rationalizations, motives and attitudes that support continued deviance. That third phase matters for the modern evidence, because it names a mechanism specific enough to test.

Goffman and stigma

Erving Goffman's Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity appeared the same year as Outsiders. Goffman defined stigma as an attribute that deeply discredits its bearer, reducing that person in others' eyes from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one. His contribution to this lineage was to treat stigma as relational rather than as a property of the stigmatized individual, and to describe what people do about it - concealing, disclosing, managing the impression they leave on others. Later sociologists refined the concept, defining stigma as the co-occurrence of labeling, stereotyping, separation, status loss and discrimination, and adding that stigmatization requires the exercise of power. For criminal justice, Goffman's frame explains why a criminal record behaves less like a fact stored in a file and more like a status that travels with a person into hiring, housing and personal relationships.

The 1970s critique and the decline

Labeling's dominance did not last. Through the second half of the 1970s the perspective came under sustained attack, and interest fell away; Charles Wellford's 1975 assessment in Social Problems is among the most-cited statements of the critique. Three objections did most of the damage. First, not everyone who is labeled goes on to offend more - deterrence research showed punishment sometimes reduces reoffending, and labeling theory had little to say about that. Second, the theory treated people as uniform receivers of labels, ignoring how differently individuals respond to the same reaction. Third, and practically: if every official response generates more crime, what is a society supposed to do? The radical non-intervention prescription some labeling writers favored struck critics as unusable.

A fourth objection is the structural one already noted: the theory says nothing about the origin of primary deviance, which for critics meant it was not a theory of crime so much as a theory of one of crime's consequences. The political climate turned as well. As rehabilitation gave way to punishment through the 1980s and correctional populations climbed, a perspective that appeared to locate the problem in society's reaction rather than in the offender found few takers. None of this demonstrated that the theory was wrong. It was genuine empirical weakness, genuine conceptual gaps, and a hostile climate together - and the honest summary is that labeling theory was set aside without ever being settled.

The modern revival and what the better designs show

Interest returned after 2000, attached to stronger designs. Four studies carry most of the weight in an introductory treatment.

Bernburg and Krohn (2003), in Criminology, used the Rochester Youth Development Study to follow 605 males over nine years. Official intervention by police or the juvenile justice system reduced the chance of graduating from high school; not graduating reduced the chance of employment; and both raised the risk of offending in early adulthood. Effects were stronger for lower-class and African American males, consistent with the labeling prediction that people with fewer resources have a harder time overcoming a label. A direct effect of intervention remained after education and employment were controlled, which the authors read as evidence that other mechanisms are at work.

Bernburg, Krohn and Rivera (2006), using three waves of the same panel, tested Becker's third phase directly. Juvenile justice intervention predicted later involvement in deviant social groups - street gangs and delinquent peers - and more serious subsequent delinquency through that involvement. Again a direct effect remained.

Gatti, Tremblay and Vitaro (2009), working with a Montreal community sample of 779 boys from low-socioeconomic-status backgrounds, showed something the first two studies could not. Among boys reporting the same level of antisocial behavior, those who were poor, impulsive, poorly supervised and exposed to deviant friends were more likely to be processed by the juvenile court in the first place - and that processing was associated with greatly increased penal system involvement in adulthood, with placement dispositions carrying the most negative association.

Petrosino, Turpin-Petrosino and Guckenburg (2010) produced the Campbell systematic review of controlled trials: 29 eligible trials covering 7,304 juveniles, reported from 1973 to 2008. Their conclusion was that formal juvenile system processing does not appear to have a crime control effect. Almost all results ran in the negative direction across prevalence, incidence, severity and self-report outcomes, and studies comparing system processing to a diversion program reported much larger negative effect sizes than studies comparing it to doing nothing.

State the limits as carefully as the findings. The Campbell review matters because randomization addresses the standing objection to the observational work, which Gatti and colleagues document from the inside: youths are not assigned to formal processing at random, and what makes formal handling more likely also predicts later offending. Even together, these studies establish that formal system contact is associated with - and in the experimental subset followed by - worse subsequent outcomes. They do not individually isolate the label as the operating mechanism, and the mediators actually tested - schooling, employment, deviant peers - never account for the whole effect.

Braithwaite: which kind of reaction, not whether to react

John Braithwaite's Crime, Shame and Reintegration (1989) reframed the argument in a way that survives the 1970s critique. Braithwaite treats shaming - expressions of disapproval intended or effective in producing remorse in the person shamed, or condemnation by others - as coming in two forms. Reintegrative shaming communicates disapproval within a continuum of respect for the person: the offender is treated as a good person who did a bad deed, and the shaming is terminated, with words, gestures or ceremonies that decertify the deviance and return the person to the community of law-abiding people. Stigmatizing or disintegrative shaming is disrespectful: the offender is treated as a bad person, and the status is left in place permanently.

Braithwaite's prediction is that crime rates are lower where shaming is reintegrative and higher where it is stigmatizing, because stigmatization blocks legitimate opportunity and pushes people toward criminal subcultures. He tied the capacity for reintegrative shaming to communitarianism - dense interdependence marked by mutual help and trust - and characterized the United States as relying heavily on the stigmatizing form. The theoretical payoff is that the labeling prediction and the deterrence prediction can both be partly right, because the effect of a sanction now depends on its form rather than on whether one is imposed. Hold that next to what the National Institute of Justice reports about deterrence: that the certainty of being caught deters far more than the severity of punishment, and that imprisonment is not an effective way to deter crime and may work in the opposite direction. Both literatures point away from severity; they disagree about why.

Policy descendants, and the limit of this lesson

Labeling theory has an unusually direct policy trail, worth naming factually. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention's own literature review states that diversion arose from two theoretical rationales, the first being labeling theory, citing Becker, and the second differential association. The National Institute of Justice's CrimeSolutions practice profile for juvenile diversion makes the same attribution and cites the Campbell review as supporting evidence. On the adult side, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights documents judicial record sealing and expungement, and fair-chance hiring rules restricting when an employer may ask about criminal history - commonly called ban-the-box - as responses to the collateral consequences of conviction.

Naming a policy's intellectual ancestor is not evaluating the policy, and this lesson does not evaluate any of them. That work belongs to program evaluation, and the record there is mixed. OJJDP's review reports one meta-analysis of 28 studies finding diversion's effect on recidivism nonsignificant and no better than traditional processing, and another of 45 studies finding significantly lower recidivism among diverted youths; CrimeSolutions rates juvenile diversion Promising rather than Effective. Whether a particular program works is an empirical question about that program, and a theory cannot answer it.

This lesson is educational material about criminological theory and the research that tests it. It is not legal advice, it describes U.S. institutions where it names them, and it takes no position on any policy.