Labeling Theory

The basic idea of this theory is that if an authority or institution defines a person in a particular way, then that person adapts himself according to that definition, and a corresponding change occurs in his self-respect and behavior. He tries to live up to the name or label that is attached to him. The idea has roots going back to Frank Tannenbaum’s work in 1938, which he called the “dramatization of evil” – the observation that once the community singles out a young person’s minor misbehavior and reacts to it publicly, the child is gradually separated from conventional society and pushed to see himself the way he has been described, until the label becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. When the theory was refined and popularized in the early 1960s, some experts supported it, stating that when a person is labeled as mentally ill, he inevitably begins to display symptoms of mental illness. Even if he becomes normal, he cannot express his normality.

In the words of the sociologist Howard Becker, whose 1963 book Outsiders became the theory’s most influential statement, social groups create deviance by formulating rules and applying them to particular individuals, thereby labeling them as outsiders. According to this viewpoint, deviance is not a quality of the act that a person commits; rather, it is the result of the rules that others apply to him. Thus, a deviant is a person on whom others have successfully affixed a label. Becker was equally clear that the power to make a label stick is not distributed evenly across society: anyone can accuse anyone else of rule-breaking, but not every accusation actually succeeds in attaching a lasting label, and whether it succeeds depends heavily on who is doing the accusing. Institutionalized authorities – police, courts, school administrators, psychiatrists – carry a socially recognized power to define who counts as normal and who counts as deviant that an ordinary citizen’s accusation simply does not carry, which is part of why identical behavior can be read as delinquency in one setting and dismissed as ordinary mischief in another, depending on who is doing the labeling and who is being labeled.

This theory has also been heavily criticized. Some of the main points are as follows:

• This theory is an extension of the ideas of the Chicago School. According to George Herbert Mead, the self is not a fixed entity but a continuous process that is constantly changing.
• It explains the continuation of crime after the first act of law-breaking, but it does not explain the causes behind a person’s initial violation of the law.
• A label can be applied, but it may produce results that even those who apply the label do not anticipate. Consequently, the cycle of crime continues.
• The only way left for the reform of a criminal is that a person’s deviance should not be dramatized.

The sociologist Edwin Lemert addressed the second objection directly by splitting deviance into two stages rather than treating it as one continuous process. What he called primary deviance is the first, often minor act of rule-breaking – skipping school, petty theft, underage drinking – committed for all the ordinary reasons criminology already studies elsewhere: poverty, upbringing, peer pressure, opportunity. Labeling theory, Lemert argued, was never meant to explain this first step at all. Its real subject is secondary deviance: the pattern that emerges only after society reacts strongly enough to primary deviance that the person begins to internalize the label, reorganizing his own self-image around it and, in the process, taking on the very identity he has been accused of. This is also why Tannenbaum’s original warning against dramatizing evil remained the theory’s chief practical lesson: since it is the reaction to the first offense, more than the offense itself, that risks manufacturing a career criminal, the least damaging response to a young person’s minor deviance is often the quietest one. Once an institutional label does take hold, it tends to close off the very contexts through which a person could otherwise have demonstrated conformity – steady employment, ordinary schooling, unremarkable social relationships – leaving him isolated among others who carry the same label. Read this way, the isolation that follows a label is less a symptom confirming the person’s underlying deviance than a structural cause of the very secondary deviance that follows it.

From this theory, it can also be inferred that being deviant or criminal is, to a large extent, an attributed process. It reflects not only the individual’s deviant act but also society’s reaction to that act. According to Erikson, deviance is not an inherent quality of a particular behavior; rather, it is a characteristic that others assign to an act. Thus, from a sociological perspective, the determining factor is the audience in society that decides whether a particular behavior is deviant or not.