THE LABELING PROCESS: REINFORCEMENT AND DETERRENT?

The labelling theory approach to the analysis of deviance depicts stable patterns of deviant behavior as products or outcomes of the process of being apprehended in a deviant act and publicly branded as a deviant person. The involvement of an individual in this process is viewed as depending much less upon what he does or what he is than upon what others do to him as a consequence of his actions. Deviant persons are regarded as having undergone a degradation ceremony with the result that they have been relegated to membership in a deviant group. In the process, they are thought to have come to acquire an inferior social status and to have developed a deviant view of the world and all the knowledge, skills and attitudes associated with that status. Labeling analysts make a basic distinction between primary and secondary deviance. Labeling analysts attach much greater significance to secondary deviance than to primary deviance, except insofar as other persons react to an act which might be labeled as deviant.