ABSTRACT

The social unrest of the 1960s in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere led to increasing social control efforts by states to criminalize youth subcultures, especially minority youth. Sociologist Howard S. Becker (1963) identified the efforts of “moral entrepreneurs” to label particular individuals and groups as deviants and criminals and to utilize media exposure to pressure the police to exercise their moral authority to crack down on deviants. In response, critical sociologists deconstructed these dynamics of power, arguing that extreme measures of social control, rather than simply responding to deviance, also created it, “by labeling more actions and people” as a threat to the dominant moral order (Cohen 2002: xxiv).