Labeling Theory

Criminality is an unfortunate but inevitable component of human society. As much as people would like to believe that there is a way to create a type of community that has no crime, psychologists and other experts in the field of criminology have done research and created various hypotheses which show that criminality is actually an inevitability under any circumstances where large numbers of human beings interact and then create a system of laws. Wherever there is a system of laws, there will be at least a few people who choose to behave in ways antithetical to those laws. Among the many theories that have been explored about the potential reasons for criminality, perhaps the most interesting and most logical is the hypothetical argument which is referred to as the labeling theory.

Labeling is the process by which an individual is identified by the society in which they...
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