Frank Tannenbaum

Frank Tannenbaum, who lived from 1893 to 1969, was an Austrian-American scholar of history, sociology and criminology who spent much of his career at Columbia University. In his 1938 book Crime and the Community he introduced the concept later called tagging, arguing that the process of formally labeling a young offender as criminal, and the community's subsequent treatment of that label as the person's identity, can itself help produce further and more serious offending, an idea that became a direct precursor to the labeling theory of deviance developed by later criminologists.