Labeling Theory and the Sociology of Deviance

Sociologists who argue that deviance is not an inherent quality of an act or a person but the product of social reaction: a society defines certain behavior as deviant, applies that label to the people who commit it, and the labeled person's subsequent treatment by others, including formal criminal justice processing, can itself help produce a criminal identity and further offending. This group gathers the theory's own founders, the researchers who distinguished an initial rule-breaking act from the secondary deviance that follows from being formally labeled, the related concept of moral panic describing how a society reacts out of proportion to a perceived threat, and closely allied work on neutralization, drift and the symbolic interactionist study of total institutions and stigma. It excludes critical and conflict theorists whose central claim is about which acts a society chooses to criminalize as a matter of class or political power, who belong under Critical, Conflict, Marxist and Left Realist Criminology, even though both traditions study how the state's own reaction to an act shapes its meaning.