Labeling theory and the social reaction approach transformed criminology in the 1960s by shifting the discipline’s central question from why people commit deviant acts to how certain people and behaviors come to be defined as deviant—and with what consequences that definitional process has for subsequent behavior and identity.
This article examines the intellectual foundations of labeling theory in symbolic interactionism and the sociology of deviance, the major theoretical contributions of Howard Becker, Edwin Lemert, and Erving Goffman, the extensions of the labeling framework into reintegrative shaming theory and the collateral consequences agenda, the empirical evidence on labeling effects, and the theory’s enduring influence on criminal justice policy within the broader History of Criminology. The argument advanced here is that labeling theory’s most significant contribution was not the specific claim that official labeling increases subsequent offending—a claim that empirical research has qualified extensively—but the fundamental reconceptualization of deviance as a social product rather than a behavioral property, a reconceptualization that permanently altered how criminology understood the relationship between social reaction and criminal behavior.
Introduction
The labeling perspective emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s from the convergence of symbolic interactionist sociology, the sociology of mental illness, and a growing body of qualitative research on deviant subcultures that challenged the positivist assumption that deviance was an objective property of certain behaviors or certain types of persons. The perspective’s core claim—that deviance was not a quality inherent in acts or actors but a status conferred through social processes of definition and reaction—was simultaneously a theoretical innovation and a political intervention, challenging the legitimacy of criminal justice institutions whose processing of offenders it analyzed as a cause rather than a cure of criminal behavior.
The labeling perspective’s intellectual context was the liberal reform movement of the early 1960s, which was challenging the assumptions and practices of mental health institutions, juvenile justice systems, and correctional facilities on the grounds that these institutions were harming rather than helping the populations they claimed to serve. The sociological argument that official labeling increased deviance by stigmatizing individuals, foreclosing legitimate opportunities, and pushing labeled persons toward deviant subcultures provided a theoretical justification for the deinstitutionalization, diversion, and decriminalization programs that reformers were advocating. The connection between sociological theory and reform practice gave labeling theory an unusual degree of policy influence for an academic theoretical framework and shaped both the reception of the theory and the political contexts in which it was evaluated.
The labeling perspective drew on a rich tradition of sociological thought that predated its mid-twentieth-century articulation. Frank Tannenbaum’s 1938 concept of the “dramatization of evil”—the process by which the community’s reaction to a young person’s mischief transformed that person into a devil—had articulated the essential labeling insight decades before the perspective was systematically developed. Edwin Lemert’s Social Pathology (1951) had distinguished primary from secondary deviation and argued that the social reaction to initial deviance was often more consequential for subsequent behavior than the initial deviance itself. And a long tradition of sociological research on criminal careers, criminal subcultures, and the social organization of deviant occupations had documented the social processes through which deviant identities were acquired and maintained. What Becker, Goffman, and their contemporaries did was to synthesize these observations into a coherent theoretical perspective and to articulate its implications for criminological theory and criminal justice policy with a clarity and force that made those implications impossible to ignore.
The political context of the 1960s amplified the theoretical significance of the labeling perspective. The civil rights movement’s exposure of racial disparities in criminal justice—demonstrated through arrest statistics, court records, and the visible reality of a criminal justice system that processed Black and white Americans very differently for comparable behaviors—provided empirical grounding for the labeling perspective’s theoretical claim that criminal justice institutions were not neutral processors of objective crime but active agents in the social construction of criminality. The counterculture’s challenge to conventional morality—its questioning of the legitimacy of laws regulating marijuana use, sexual behavior, and political dissent—provided a cultural context in which the argument that criminal law reflected power rather than consensus found a sympathetic audience beyond the academic criminology community.
Intellectual Foundations of the Labeling Perspective
The Symbolic Interactionist Tradition
Symbolic interactionism—the sociological tradition associated with George Herbert Mead, Herbert Blumer, and Charles Cooley—provided labeling theory with its foundational theoretical commitments. Where positivist sociology studied behavior as a response to objective stimuli, symbolic interactionism studied behavior as a response to the meaning that actors attributed to their situations through processes of symbolic communication and interpretation. Actors did not respond directly to their environments but to their interpretations of those environments, and those interpretations were shaped by the symbolic frameworks—language, gesture, institutional rules, cultural categories—through which actors made sense of their experience.
Applied to deviance, this theoretical perspective shifted analysis from the objective properties of deviant behavior to the subjective meanings that actors assigned to that behavior and to the social processes through which some behaviors came to be assigned the meaning “deviant.” A given act—smoking marijuana, engaging in homosexual behavior, failing to show up for work—was deviant not because of any intrinsic quality of the act but because of the interpretive framework through which others responded to it, a framework that varied across time, place, and social context in ways that made the deviant quality of an act a social construction rather than an objective fact.
The historical variability of deviance definitions provided some of the most compelling evidence for the social constructionist position. Acts that were legal in one period and illegal in another—alcohol consumption during Prohibition, sodomy before the Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision, interracial marriage before Loving v. Virginia—were not intrinsically deviant but were deviant by virtue of their legal status during specific historical periods. Acts that were deviant in one cultural context—eating beef in Hindu culture, eating pork in Muslim culture, displaying one’s face in purdah—were entirely conventional in others. And acts that carried severe social stigma in one class context—manual labor, public drunkenness, cohabitation without marriage—carried little or none in others. This cultural and historical variability was, for labeling theorists, definitive evidence that deviance was a relational property produced by the intersection of specific behaviors and specific social reactions rather than an objective property of behaviors themselves.
Howard Becker’s articulation of the “moral entrepreneur” concept—the individual or group that successfully lobbied for the criminalization of a behavior they found objectionable, creating the rules whose violation would constitute a new form of deviance—extended the social constructionist insight into the process of rule creation itself. Deviance was not simply the violation of pre-existing rules but the violation of rules that had themselves been created through political processes in which the interests and moral concerns of specific social groups prevailed over those of other groups. Understanding deviance required understanding not only who violated the rules but who created them, how, and in whose interest.
Primary and Secondary Deviance
Edwin Lemert’s distinction between primary and secondary deviance, elaborated most fully in Social Pathology (1951) and Human Deviance, Social Problems, and Social Control (1967), provided the labeling perspective with its most criminologically consequential theoretical claim. Primary deviance—initial norm violations that individuals engaged in for diverse reasons—had limited consequences for identity and behavior as long as they were not officially recognized and reacted to. The vast majority of norm violations remained primary in this sense, committed without significant social response and without significantly altering the actor’s self-conception or social position.
Secondary deviance was the deviant behavior that resulted from an actor’s response to the social reaction to primary deviance—specifically, from the actor’s incorporation of the deviant identity that official labeling imposed into his or her self-conception and from the reorganization of behavior, social relationships, and life opportunities around that identity. The person who was arrested for shoplifting might experience secondary deviance if the arrest produced a criminal record that made legitimate employment difficult to obtain, if it altered the actor’s self-conception from a law-abiding citizen who had made a mistake to a criminal, and if it pushed the actor toward criminal social networks whose members shared both the criminal identity and the practical knowledge of how to sustain a criminal career.
Lemert’s concept of secondary deviance was theoretically important because it specified a mechanism through which the criminal justice system’s response to crime could increase rather than decrease subsequent criminal behavior. If official labeling produced secondary deviance—if arrest, conviction, and incarceration pushed individuals toward more persistent and serious criminal careers rather than deterring them—then the criminal justice system was not simply responding to crime but actively producing it, at least among those who experienced its interventions. This implication was empirically testable, ethically significant, and politically consequential, and it motivated a large body of subsequent research on the effects of official labeling on subsequent criminal behavior.
Table 1. Key Labeling Theory Concepts: Definition, Theorist, and Criminological Significance
| Concept | Definition | Principal Theorist | Criminological Significance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary deviance | Initial norm violations not yet recognized and reacted to officially | Lemert (1951) | Most deviance is primary and has limited career consequences |
| Secondary deviance | Deviant behavior reorganized around an accepted deviant identity following official labeling | Lemert (1967) | Labeling is criminogenic; criminal justice may increase crime |
| Moral entrepreneur | Individual or group that successfully campaigns for criminalization of a behavior | Becker (1963) | Rule creation is political; criminal law reflects power |
| Spoiled identity | Social identity discredited by stigma, preventing normal social interaction | Goffman (1963) | Criminal record functions as permanent stigma with opportunity-foreclosing consequences |
| Reintegrative shaming | Disapproval of offending that maintains social bonds and invites reintegration | Braithwaite (1989) | Stigmatizing shaming is criminogenic; reintegrative shaming reduces recidivism |
| Collateral consequences | Legal disabilities imposed on those with criminal records beyond the sentence itself | Various | Criminal records have pervasive effects on opportunities that amplify labeling effects |
Howard Becker and the Sociology of Deviance
Deviance as the Outcome of Social Reaction
Howard Becker’s Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1963) was the labeling perspective’s most influential single text, articulating its theoretical claims with unusual clarity and grounding them in ethnographic research on jazz musicians and marijuana users that demonstrated the social organization of deviant subcultures and the social processes through which individuals became defined as outsiders. Becker’s opening theoretical statement—that “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'”—crystallized the perspective’s central claim in terms whose clarity made it impossible to misunderstand while also exposing it to the empirical and philosophical objections that dominated subsequent debate.
Becker’s ethnographic work demonstrated that deviant careers—the sequences of stages through which individuals moved from initial rule violation through progressive commitment to deviant identity and deviant social organization—were socially organized rather than psychologically determined. The jazz musician who used marijuana did not begin with a deviant identity but gradually developed one through the experience of being labeled by outsiders, the acquisition of techniques for use and rationales for use from experienced musicians, and the progressive organization of social life around the deviant activity and the deviant community that practiced it. The career metaphor—borrowed from the sociology of occupations—captured the sequential, social, and contingent character of deviant development in ways that psychological theories of criminal behavior, which emphasized stable individual characteristics, could not.
Moral Entrepreneurs and the Politics of Rule Creation
Becker’s analysis of moral entrepreneurship—the process through which individuals and groups successfully lobbied for the criminalization of behaviors they found objectionable—connected the labeling perspective to the sociology of law and the political analysis of rule creation. The moral entrepreneur was not simply a citizen concerned about a social problem but an activist who devoted resources to changing the rules—to getting a behavior criminalized, a substance prohibited, a population controlled—through political and bureaucratic processes that required both moral claims and organizational capacity to succeed.
Becker’s analysis of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics’ role in the criminalization of marijuana through the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 was his most detailed study of moral entrepreneurship in action. The Bureau’s campaign combined moral claims about marijuana’s effects on users with institutional interests in expanding the Bureau’s jurisdiction and budget, producing a criminalization outcome that reflected the political capacity of the Bureau and its allies as much as the objective harmfulness of the substance being prohibited. This analysis anticipated the sociology of law’s subsequent systematic study of the political determinants of criminalization, the role of interest groups in shaping criminal law, and the relationship between moral panics and legislative action that would be developed by Stanley Cohen, Stuart Hall, and subsequent scholars of crime and social control.
The concept of the moral panic that Cohen developed in Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) extended Becker’s moral entrepreneurship analysis by examining how media amplification, expert claims-making, and political opportunism could transform relatively minor social problems into occasions for dramatic legislative or enforcement responses. Cohen’s analysis of the societal reaction to Mods and Rockers disturbances at British seaside resorts in 1964 demonstrated how the interaction among sensationalizing media coverage, claims-making by law enforcement and moral authorities, and political opportunism could produce enforcement responses and legislative changes that were wildly disproportionate to the actual scale of the problem. The moral panic concept became one of criminology’s most frequently invoked analytical tools, applied to drug scares, gang panics, sex offender panics, and terrorism panics as mechanisms through which minor social problems were transformed into occasions for criminal justice expansion.
Erving Goffman and the Sociology of Stigma
Stigma as a Discrediting Social Attribute
Erving Goffman’s Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963) provided labeling theory with its most sophisticated account of how discrediting social attributes—physical disability, mental illness, sexual deviance, criminal record—affected social interaction and individual identity. Goffman proposed that stigma involved a “spoiled identity”—a social identity that was discredited by the possession of an attribute that violated the norms of a particular social setting, making normal social interaction difficult or impossible. The stigmatized individual was not simply someone with a negative attribute but someone whose entire social identity was contaminated by that attribute in ways that prevented others from engaging with them as normal social actors.
The stigma concept was particularly relevant to the criminological analysis of criminal records and their consequences for social interaction. Goffman documented the specific interactional strategies that stigmatized individuals employed to manage the information available to others about their discrediting attribute—concealment, disclosure, passing, covering—and the psychological and social costs of managing a spoiled identity across the full range of social encounters. For individuals with criminal records, the management of the criminal stigma was a permanent feature of social life that structured job applications, housing searches, romantic relationships, and community participation in ways that the formal expiration of a sentence did not eliminate.
Goffman distinguished between the “discredited”—individuals whose stigmatizing attribute was already known to those they were interacting with—and the “discreditable”—individuals whose stigmatizing attribute was not yet known and who faced the management challenge of controlling information about themselves to avoid disclosure. For individuals with criminal records, the discreditable situation was common in new social encounters—job applications, new relationships, community participation—where the criminal record might not be immediately known but was perpetually threatening to become so through background checks, disclosure requirements, or social discovery. The management strategies that Goffman documented—passing as a normal person, selective disclosure to trusted others, the construction of cover stories—were not simply psychological adaptations to personal misfortune but socially necessary responses to a system of categorization that imposed permanent outsider status on those who had once been processed through criminal justice institutions.
The Total Institution and the Criminal Career
Goffman’s analysis of total institutions—organizations that encompassed all aspects of inmates’ lives and that systematically stripped away pre-institutional identities and replaced them with institutional ones—provided an account of how incarceration specifically, as opposed to the general labeling process, transformed individuals’ identities and social capacities. The prison as total institution processed inmates through systematic degradation ceremonies that stripped away markers of civilian identity, imposed institutional identities through uniform dress, number assignments, and controlled movement, and organized the entire phenomenological world of inmates around the institution’s administrative needs rather than the inmates’ social and psychological needs.
The total institution analysis connected Goffman’s theoretical framework to the empirical reality of incarceration in ways that were directly relevant to the labeling perspective’s critique of criminal justice institutions. If incarceration systematically destroyed the pre-institutional identities and social connections through which reintegration into conventional social life depended, then the rehabilitative aspiration of the penitentiary was self-undermining: the institution designed to reform offenders was systematically producing the conditions for continued deviance. This insight anticipated the reentry research of subsequent decades that documented how the collateral consequences of incarceration—the destruction of employment histories, family relationships, community ties, and social capital—made legitimate reintegration extraordinarily difficult for most returning citizens.
John Braithwaite and Reintegrative Shaming
A Theory of Shame, Community, and Crime Control
John Braithwaite’s Crime, Shame and Reintegration (1989) represented the most important theoretical development within the labeling tradition since the perspective’s original formulation, offering a nuanced account of when shaming reduced and when it increased criminal behavior that addressed the apparent empirical disconfirmation of the original labeling hypothesis. Braithwaite proposed a fundamental distinction between two types of social disapproval: stigmatizing shaming, which condemned the offender as a person while leaving no path to reintegration into the community of law-abiding citizens; and reintegrative shaming, which condemned the offending behavior while maintaining the social bonds that connected the offender to the community and invited him or her back into full social membership after adequate acknowledgment of the harm done.
The distinction between stigmatizing and reintegrative shaming explained the apparent paradox that some forms of social disapproval reduced recidivism while others increased it. Stigmatizing shaming—the dominant mode of Western criminal justice systems, which imposed criminal records, removed civic rights, restricted housing and employment, and in various ways permanently marked individuals as outsiders—increased recidivism by foreclosing legitimate opportunities, pushing labeled individuals toward criminal subcultures, and producing the defiant responses that Sherman’s defiance theory would subsequently analyze. Reintegrative shaming—more characteristic of the informal social controls exercised by families, communities, and some non-Western justice traditions—reduced recidivism by maintaining the social bonds through which individuals had stakes in conventional behavior and by avoiding the opportunity foreclosure that criminal stigma produced.
Policy Implications: Restorative Justice
Braithwaite’s theoretical framework generated a practical program—restorative justice—that has become one of the most influential innovations in criminal justice practice over the past three decades. Restorative justice processes bring together offenders, victims, and community members in facilitated encounters designed to address the harm caused by offending through dialogue, acknowledgment, and the development of agreements for repair, rather than through the adversarial determination of guilt and the imposition of punitive sanctions. These processes embody the reintegrative shaming framework by expressing community disapproval of the offending behavior while maintaining the offender’s connection to the community and providing a path to restored membership in conventional social life.
Research on restorative justice programs—including victim-offender mediation, community conferencing, and circle sentencing—has generally found that participants (both victims and offenders) express higher levels of satisfaction with the process and outcome than participants in conventional criminal justice processing, that reoffending rates for restorative justice participants are comparable to or lower than those for comparable conventional participants, and that victim outcomes (including reduced fear and anxiety and greater sense of resolution) are significantly better. The evidence base for restorative justice’s crime-reduction effects is more qualified than the evidence for its process and satisfaction benefits, reflecting the methodological challenges of evaluating programs that are implemented in diverse ways across diverse populations, but the accumulated evidence is sufficient to support restorative justice as a promising alternative to conventional processing for appropriate offense types and populations.
The cross-national evidence on restorative justice is particularly informative. New Zealand’s transformation of its youth justice system in 1989 to make family group conferencing the primary response to serious youth offending—rather than an alternative to conventional processing—has produced a natural experiment in large-scale restorative justice implementation. Subsequent research comparing New Zealand’s youth justice outcomes with those of comparable countries that retained conventional juvenile court processing has found lower reoffending rates and higher victim satisfaction in the New Zealand system, providing at least suggestive evidence that system-wide restorative justice implementation can achieve better outcomes than the marginal addition of restorative programs within otherwise conventional criminal justice systems. This cross-national evidence connects the labeling theory tradition’s theoretical critique of formal criminal justice processing to the comparative criminology tradition’s analysis of how different national approaches to crime and punishment produce different crime-rate outcomes.
Empirical Evidence and Theoretical Assessment
Labeling Effects Research: What the Evidence Shows
The empirical research on labeling effects—the specific prediction that official criminal justice processing increases subsequent offending beyond what would occur in the absence of that processing—has produced results that are more qualified than the original theoretical claims implied but more supportive than the critics who dismissed labeling theory as empirically bankrupt acknowledged. The methodological challenge of labeling effects research is to compare the subsequent offending of individuals who were officially processed with the subsequent offending of comparable individuals who committed similar offenses but were not officially processed—a comparison that requires either natural variation in processing decisions or experimental manipulation of those decisions.
The natural experiment provided by diversion programs—which allow criminal justice officials to divert eligible offenders out of the formal system rather than processing them through arrest, prosecution, and conviction—has been the primary source of evidence on labeling effects. Studies of diversion in juvenile justice have generally found that diverted youth show lower reoffending rates than comparable youth who were formally processed, supporting the labeling hypothesis that formal processing increases subsequent offending. Adult diversion studies have produced similar results. More recent research using regression discontinuity designs—exploiting discontinuities in processing probability around arbitrary eligibility thresholds—has provided quasi-experimental evidence for labeling effects among adults, finding that individuals just above thresholds that trigger formal processing (and thus official labeling) show higher subsequent offending rates than those just below, even after controlling for the offense characteristics that placed them near the threshold.
The labeling effects evidence is not uniformly positive, and a careful reading of the literature identifies important moderating conditions. Labeling effects are stronger for first-time offenders than for chronic offenders, who have already developed deviant identities and social networks that additional labeling cannot substantially alter. They are stronger in community contexts where the labeled individual has legitimate social bonds that criminal stigma can undermine; they are weaker where those bonds are already absent and where the criminal label consequently forecloses fewer opportunities. And they appear to be stronger for less serious offenses and for younger offenders, where the criminal career is still relatively plastic and where alternative trajectories remain truly available. These moderating conditions suggest that the labeling hypothesis is not uniformly correct but is correct under specifiable conditions—a conclusion that is more theoretically sophisticated and more empirically supported than either the original claims or their wholesale rejection.
The Collateral Consequences Agenda
The collateral consequences of criminal conviction—the legal disabilities and practical disadvantages imposed on individuals with criminal records beyond the formal sentence itself—represent perhaps the most practically significant development within the labeling theory tradition in contemporary criminology. Research by Devah Pager, Bruce Western, and colleagues has documented that criminal records substantially reduce employment prospects, increase housing instability, restrict access to public benefits and professional licenses, and in various ways impose lasting disadvantages on individuals who have completed their formal sentences. Pager’s audit research demonstrating that a criminal record reduced employment callback rates by approximately 50 percent—and that the combination of being Black and having a criminal record was particularly devastating—provided direct experimental evidence of the opportunity-foreclosing consequences that labeling theory had theorized.
The scale of criminal record disadvantage in the United States has grown dramatically with the expansion of incarceration since the 1970s. With approximately 70 million Americans—about 30 percent of the adult population—having arrest or conviction records of some kind, the collateral consequences of criminal records constitute a massive system of civil disability that operates alongside and amplifies the formal criminal justice system’s effects. The legal reform movement to reduce collateral consequences—through automatic expungement, fair chance hiring legislation, and the removal of unjustified occupational licensing barriers—draws explicitly on the labeling theory tradition’s analysis of how criminal records function as permanent stigma that prevents the reintegration that the formal completion of sentences is supposed to enable.
Conclusion
Labeling theory and the social reaction approach have permanently altered criminology’s analytical framework by demonstrating that the processes through which behaviors and persons were defined as criminal were themselves objects of scientific inquiry and that those processes had consequences for subsequent behavior that existing theories had systematically ignored. The specific empirical claims of the original formulation—particularly the claim that official labeling invariably increased subsequent offending—have been qualified by subsequent research that identifies the conditions under which labeling effects are large, small, or negligible. But the fundamental reconceptualization that labeling theory achieved—the shift from asking why people commit deviant acts to asking how certain acts and persons come to be defined as deviant—has proven more durable than any specific empirical prediction.
The practical legacy of the labeling perspective is visible in the diversion programs, restorative justice initiatives, expungement legislation, and collateral consequences reform efforts that explicitly draw on its theoretical framework. Whether these reforms have reduced crime as well as reducing the costs imposed by criminal stigma remains an empirical question that the labeling research tradition continues to investigate. What is not in question is that the labeling perspective fundamentally changed what questions criminologists ask about crime and criminal justice—and that the answers to those questions have had lasting, real consequences for millions of people whose lives have been shaped by criminal justice’s definitional power.
The current era of criminal justice reform—characterized by bipartisan concern about mass incarceration, widespread adoption of ban-the-box hiring policies, expanding expungement availability, growing investment in diversion and restorative justice alternatives, and the emergence of a broad social movement for second chances and criminal record relief—represents the practical expression of the labeling perspective’s theoretical insights at unprecedented scale. The reform coalition spans the political spectrum precisely because the labeling perspective’s core claims—that criminal records impose costs that outlast sentences, that stigma undermines reintegration, and that some criminal justice interventions increase rather than decrease crime—are empirically grounded in ways that both conservative and progressive reformers find compelling. The labeling perspective’s long journey from theoretical innovation to mainstream policy influence illustrates how academic criminological theory, when it identifies genuine social mechanisms and documents genuine social harms, can ultimately reshape the institutions it analyzes—though the journey typically takes far longer and produces more qualified reforms than the theory’s original advocates anticipated. Whether these reforms are understood explicitly in labeling theory terms or not, they operationalize the perspective’s central claims: that official labeling imposes costs that extend well beyond the formal sentence; that criminal records function as permanent stigma that forecloses opportunities and undermines reintegration; and that the criminal justice system’s processing of offenders can increase rather than decrease subsequent criminal behavior. The labeling perspective provided the theoretical vocabulary for understanding why mass incarceration had failed to produce proportional reductions in crime and why the expansion of alternative responses to offending might serve both public safety and justice goals better than continued reliance on formal criminal processing.
References
- Bernburg, J. G., Krohn, M. D., & Rivera, C. J. (2006). Official labeling, criminal embeddedness, and subsequent delinquency. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 43(1), 67–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022427805280068
- Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the sociology of deviance. Free Press.
- Braithwaite, J. (1989). Crime, shame and reintegration. Cambridge University Press.
- Chiricos, T., Barrick, K., Bales, W., & Bontrager, S. (2007). The labeling of convicted felons and its consequences for recidivism. Criminology, 45(3), 547–581. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2007.00089.x
- Cullen, F. T., & Jonson, C. L. (2012). Correctional theory: Context and consequences. SAGE Publications.
- Erickson, K. T. (1962). Notes on the sociology of deviance. Social Problems, 9(4), 307–314. https://doi.org/10.2307/799154
- Garfinkel, H. (1956). Conditions of successful degradation ceremonies. American Journal of Sociology, 61(5), 420–424. https://doi.org/10.1086/221800
- Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. Doubleday.
- Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Prentice Hall.
- Lemert, E. M. (1951). Social pathology. McGraw-Hill.
- Lemert, E. M. (1967). Human deviance, social problems, and social control. Prentice Hall.
- Lofland, J. (1969). Deviance and identity. Prentice Hall.
- Matsueda, R. L. (1992). Reflected appraisals, parental labeling, and delinquency: Specifying a symbolic interactionist theory. American Journal of Sociology, 97(6), 1577–1611. https://doi.org/10.1086/229940
- Paternoster, R., & Iovanni, L. (1989). The labeling perspective and delinquency: An elaboration of the theory and an assessment of the evidence. Justice Quarterly, 6(3), 359–394. https://doi.org/10.1080/07418828900090261
- Pager, D. (2003). The mark of a criminal record. American Journal of Sociology, 108(5), 937–975. https://doi.org/10.1086/374403
- Scheff, T. J. (1966). Being mentally ill: A sociological theory. Aldine.
- Sherman, L. W. (1993). Defiance, deterrence, and irrelevance: A theory of the criminal sanction. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 30(4), 445–473. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022427893030004006
- Steffensmeier, D. J., Ulmer, J., & Kramer, J. (1998). The interaction of race, gender, and age in criminal sentencing: The punishment cost of being young, Black, and male. Criminology, 36(4), 763–797. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1998.tb01265.x
- Tannenbaum, F. (1938). Crime and the community. Ginn and Company.
- Tyler, T. R. (2006). Why people obey the law. Princeton University Press.
- Western, B. (2006). Punishment and inequality in America. Russell Sage Foundation.
- Zehr, H. (2002). The little book of restorative justice. Good Books.