ABSTRACT
The labeling approach (LA) focuses on the processes of becoming deviant, including law making and reactions to deviance (such as labeling people as outsiders). It is shown that exploring these processes does not in any way thwart traditional explanations of crime. They explain acts. Rules that are violated are taken as independent variables. This implies that traditional explanations do not assume that crime is a “quality of the act” (Becker 1963: 8). We reconstruct a sequential model of a criminal career (Figure 7.7.1) which sketches only an extreme case and omits important variables. As a contrasting case we describe large-scale coffee smuggling from Belgium to Germany after World War II that was against the law, in which a large part of the German population was involved and in which “positive labeling” occurred. Based on rational choice theory, we specify conditions when which model holds. We finally apply the social psychological balance theory to formulate some hypotheses specifying when a “deviant identity” develops.
