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Labeling Theory Ken Plummer, Ph.D. University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, United Kingdom Labeling theory highlights social responses to crime and deviance. In its narrowest version it asks what hap- pens to criminals after they have been labeled and sug- gests that crime may be heightened by criminal sanctions. Thus, sending an offender to prison may ac- tually work to criminalize him or her further, and stig- matizing a young offender for minor infractions at too early an age may lead into a criminal career. In its broadest version, labeling theory suggests that crimi- nology has given too much attention to criminals as types of people and insufficient attention to the panoply of social control responses—from the law and the police to media and public reactions—which help to give crime its shape. Although the elemenrary understanding of the way in which responses to crime may shape crime goes back a long way—caught in popular phrases like “give a dog a bad name. ."—the twentieth century origins of the theory are thought to lie with Frank Tannen- baum in his classic study Crime and the Community. He argued that: The process of making the criminal, therefore, is a process of tagging, defining, identifying, segregat- ing, describing, emphasizing, evoking the very traits that are complained of... . The person be- comes the thing be is described as being... . The way out is a refusal to dramatize the evil (Tan- nenbaum 1938:19-20). The theory also connects to the sociological ideas of Durkheim, G. H. Mead, the Chicago School, Symbolic Interactionism, and Conflict theory,.and draws upon both the idea of a “self-fulfilling prophecy” and the dic- tum of W, I. Thomas that “when people define sinia- tions as real they become real in their consequences.” In the period between the early 1960s and the late 1970s labeling theory became a dominant sociological theory of crime, influential in challenging orthodox positivist criminology. During this hey day the key la- belling theorists were usually seen to be the North 191 American sociologists Howard S. Becker and Edwin Lemert. Becker, whose work focused on marijuana use and its control, outlined the broad problem of labeling when he stated: “We [should] direct our attention in research and theory building to the questions: who applied the label of deviant to whom? What consequences does the application of a label have for the person so labelled? Under what circumstances is the label of a deviant successfully applied?” (Becker 1963.3). In what became the cannonical statement of labelling theory, he announced: Social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by ap- plying those rules to particular people and label- ing them as outsiders.... Deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an “offender.” The deviant is one to whom that label bas successfully been applied: deviant bebaviour is behaviour that people so la- bel (Becker 1963:9). Edwin Lemert coined two key terms, primary and sec- ondary deviance, to capture the distinction berween original and effective causes of deviance: primary devi- ation arises from many sources but “has only marginal implications for the status and psychic structure of the person concerned,” whereas secondary deviation refers to the ways in which stigma and punishment can actu- ally make the crime or deviance “become central facts of existence for those experiencing them. altering psy- chic structure, producing specialised organisation of social roles and self regarding attitudes.” (Lemert 1967:40-41), Deviant ascription became 2 pivotal or master status. It was Lemert who argued that, rather than seeing crime as leading to control, it may be more fruicful to see the process as one in which control 
