ABSTRACT
Poverty is a “multi-dimensional” phenomenon, yet there’s something there that all people recognize and “intuitively understand” yet rarely discuss. “This is the social stigma associated with poverty.” Sociologists rarely discuss poverty as a form of deviance—they’ve mostly considered it a major cause of deviant behavior. The reason may be political correctness: nobody wants to be unjustly accused of “blaming the victim”—stigmatizing the poor by attaching a demeaning “deviance” or “deviant” label to them. The stigma of poverty is a class-based form of disrepute that is built into the hegemonic structure of stratification in American society. One of the earliest arguments charging the poor with a moral failing was laid out by Thomas Malthus, in his An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798. David Matza argued that sociologists have ignored the issue of the “disreputable poor” because they did not want to be charged with stigmatizing them; he decided to grapple with the issue.
