Labeling theory
[9] Frank Tannenbaum's explanation of Labeling Theory highlighted the negative consequences of police interactions with children which argues that arresting youth leads to a "dramatization of evil".
Lemert’s work emphasized how societal reactions to deviance can reinforce and escalate it, shaping an individual’s identity as deviant.
[11] Edwin Lemert writes: "His acts are repeated and organized subjectively and transformed into active roles and become the social criteria for assigning status.…When a person begins to employ his deviant behavior or a role based on it as a means of defense, attack, or adjustment to the overt and covert problems created by the consequent societal reaction to him, his deviation is secondary.
"[13]: 26 Becker's immensely popular views were also subjected to a barrage of criticism, most of it blaming him for neglecting the influence of other biological, genetic effects and personal responsibility.
The victim of racism is already living under the weight of disgrace and oppression.… In order to justify such punishment and misfortune, a process of rationalization is set in motion, by which to explain the ghetto and colonial exploitation.
Perhaps the most important contributor to labeling theory was Erving Goffman, President of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and one of America's most cited sociologists.
[20]: 81 Dealing with others is fraught with great complexity and ambiguity: "When normals and stigmatized do in fact enter one another's immediate presence, especially when they attempt to maintain a joint conversational encounter, there occurs one of the primal scenes of sociology; for, in many cases, these moments will be the ones when the causes and effects of stigma will be directly confronted by both sides.
"[20]: 13 "What are unthinking routines for normals can become management problems for the discreditable.… The person with a secret failing, then, must be alive to the social situation as a scanner of possibilities, and is therefore likely to be alienated from the simpler world in which those around them apparently dwell.
In spite of the common belief that openness and exposure will decrease stereotypes and repression, the opposite is true: "Thus, whether we interact with strangers or intimates, we will still find that the fingertips of society have reached bluntly into the contact, even here putting us in our place.
"Instead, it may be regarded as a natural biographical tendency born of personal and social circumstances that suggests but hardly compels a direction or movement.
What gives force to that movement is the development of a new identity:"To be cast as a thief, as a prostitute, or more generally, a deviant, is to further compound and hasten the process of becoming that very thing.
Related prevention policies include client empowerment schemes, mediation and conciliation, victim-offender forgiveness ceremonies (restorative justice), restitution, reparation, and alternatives to prison programs involving diversion.
Labeling theory has been accused of promoting impractical policy implications, and criticized for failing to explain society's most serious offenses.
On the other hand, it is almost impossible to deny, given both common sense and research findings, that society's negative perceptions of "crazy" people has had some effect on them.
It seems that, realistically, labeling can accentuate and prolong the issues termed "mental illness", but it is rarely the full cause.
Additionally, Page's 1977 study found that self declared "ex-mental patients" are much less likely to be offered apartment leases or hired for jobs.
Working off Thomas Scheff's (1966) theory, Thoits claims that people who are labeled as mentally ill are stereotypically portrayed as unpredictable, dangerous, and unable to care for themselves.
"[26]: 134 This statement can be broken down into two processes, one that involves the effects of self-labeling and the other differential treatment from society based on the individual's label.
[28]: 616–7 Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual.… Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into pigeonholes.
[20]: 143–4 Labeling theory was also applied to homosexuality by Evelyn Hooker[29][30][31] and by Leznoff and Westley (1956), who published the first sociological study of the gay community.
Simon and Gagnon likewise wrote: "It is necessary to move away from the obsessive concern with the sexuality of the individual, and attempt to see the homosexual in terms of the broader attachments that he must make to live in the world around him.
Members of the stigmatized group lose the opportunity to establish their own personal system of evaluation and group membership as well as the ability to arrive at their own ranking of each personal characteristic.… For example, newly self-acknowledged homosexual individuals cannot take for granted that they share the world with others who hold congruent interpretations and assumptions; their behavior and motives, both past and present, will be interpreted in light of their stigma.
In his book, Deviants and Deviance, he wrote, "There are no homosexuals, transvestites, chemical addicts, suicidogenics, delinquents, criminals, or other such entities, in the sense of people having such identities.
Their works includes: Barry Adam (1976) took those authors to task for ignoring the force of the oppression in creating identities and their inferiorizing effects.
Drawing upon the works of Albert Memmi, Adam showed how gay-identified persons, like Jews and blacks, internalize the hatred to justify their limitations of life choices.
Gay consciousness and all the rest are separatist and defeatist attitudes going back to centuries-old and out-moded conceptions that homosexuals are, indeed, different from other people.
"Persons whom we confine to back rooms and bars other societies have honored as tenders of children, astrologers, dancers, chanters, minstrels, jesters, artists, shamans, sacred warriors and judges, seers, healers, weavers of tales and magic.
Again learning to choose, they develop the ability to make the ban ambiguous, taking responsibility and refusing explanations of their behaviors.
Efforts to cope with labels, such as not telling anyone, educating people about mental distress/disorder, withdrawing from stigmatizing situations, could result in further social isolation and reinforce negative self-concepts.
The stigma was associated with diminished motivation and ability to "make it in mainstream society" and with "a state of social and psychological vulnerability to prolonged and recurrent problems".
