I–L: Idealism to Labelling Perspectives

Core idea

The I–L cluster is about how things become criminal. Idealism flags the philosophical claim that criminology may be working with categories rather than realities. Identity describes how persons and groups are sorted into stable types. Ideology names the systems of belief through which the sorting is justified. Intellectual property crime shows how new kinds of property can be invented and then defended by the criminal law. Justice — distributive and corrective — is the normative standard against which the sorting is meant to be evaluated. And labelling perspectives draw all of these together into a single, powerful claim: deviance is not an intrinsic property of an act but a consequence of how that act is interpreted and treated by others.

Read in sequence, the topic is a sustained argument that the criminal law is a social product, and that the proper task of criminology is to understand the processes by which acts and people are classified as deviant.

Why it matters

If labelling is correct, then the most important questions in criminology are not "why do they do it?" but "why does this act, in this place, at this time, get classified as crime — and what happens to the people who carry the label?" That shift has practical consequences. It explains why the same act (cocaine use) can be respectable in 1890 and felonious in 1990. It explains why street crimes attract heavy enforcement and corporate crimes do not. It explains the deviance amplification spiral — how policing creates the very behaviour it claims to suppress.

For a working analyst, the I–L cluster is also a discipline of intellectual humility. Categories are not natural kinds; they are accomplishments. Anyone using them — police officer, judge, journalist, criminologist — is doing constitutive work.

Key takeaways

Mental model

Idealism

The philosophical sense of idealism — that we know only the contents of consciousness, not the external world — has a soft echo in criminology: the worry that some theorists focus on concepts, discourses, and labels at the expense of the material harm crime inflicts. Jock Young's 1975 essay "Working-Class Criminology" levelled this charge at critical criminologists, accusing them of a "theory and practice of voyeurism" — sweeping critiques of capitalism that played down the actual suffering of victims (most of them working-class). The charge was unfair — critical criminologists were doing serious empirical work — but it left a useful term in circulation. Idealism in criminology is the warning label for analyses that disappear into discourse and leave the bruise unspoken.

Identity

Identity, in the social-scientific sense, denotes a person's or group's continuity over time and place — what allows us to identify them as the same. Each person has an individual identity but also a portfolio of social identities: gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, class, religion. None of these are naturally occurring. They are social constructions that attribute common characteristics to those associated with them.

Criminology's interest in identity is overwhelmingly oriented to the production and enforcement of deviant identities. The historical persecution of homosexuals is the textbook case: a social identity (sexual minority) treated as if it were a criminal identity, with the legal apparatus aligned accordingly. The labelling tradition extends this: anyone marked with a deviant identity has their subsequent social, political, and legal treatment shaped by the marking.

Ideology

Ideology is the topic's most ambiguous term. Two senses are in circulation and they should not be confused.

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Thompson (1984) extends the critical sense by locating ideology not in a worked-up system of belief but in language itself — meaning is mobilised, often invisibly, in the interests of particular groups. This view makes ideology a structuring property of discourse rather than a doctrine anyone consciously holds.

Intellectual property crime

Intellectual property crime is a category that scarcely existed a generation ago. Intellectual property (IP) takes the form of ideas, expressions, signs, symbols, designs, and logos — protected by copyright, trademark, patent, industrial design, and trade-secret law. IP crime is unauthorised use of those protected forms: piracy of music, software, and film; counterfeit fashion, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals; unauthorised use of patented formulae and processes.

Three structural drivers explain its rapid growth. First, the information economy has made knowledge and information the locus of value, so the rewards of illegally exploiting them have risen. Second, digital technology has made reproduction and distribution of information goods cheap, instantaneous, and global. Third, economic globalisation has dismantled the borders and trade barriers that once made counterfeit goods harder to move. The combined effect — losses estimated at $200–250 billion annually for the US alone — has driven new criminal sanctions, expanded enforcement, and the rise of private policing by industry groups (music, film, software, fashion).

Justice

Justice, the topic's normative concept, splits cleanly into two halves.

• Distributive justice (also called social justice) is about the fair allocation of social goods — money, property, education, healthcare, housing. Questions of distributive justice ask what individuals are entitled to and what society owes its members. Deprivation through unequal distribution produces social exclusion.
• Corrective justice is about the proportionate distribution of punishments. It asks what kinds and degrees of sanction are appropriate responses to wrongdoing.

The two are connected. Disputes about the appropriate criminal-justice response to a given offence usually rest on prior disputes about the underlying distributive arrangements that produced the offending population in the first place.

Labelling perspectives

Labelling perspectives are the topic's centre of gravity. From the 1930s onward, in deliberate reaction against positivist criminology, labelling theorists argued that crime and deviance are not intrinsic qualities of acts but social constructions — accomplishments achieved by the way societies respond to certain behaviours.

Tannenbaum, Lemert, Becker

Frank Tannenbaum (1938) made the earliest formulation: societal reactions to behaviour play the crucial role in creating deviance. Many people break rules; the vast majority do so without being noticed; in a minority of cases an individual is selectively identified, targeted, and treated according to a negative label. That selective process is what produces a deviant.

Edwin Lemert (1951) distinguished primary deviance (the rule-breaking act itself, often unremarked) from secondary deviance (the life lived once the label has been applied). After labelling, the individual is treated as different, internalises the label, and behaves consistently with it. The result, following Leslie Wilkins (1964), is deviance amplification: making and applying rules incites the very behaviour the rules condemn.

Howard Becker's Outsiders (1963) gave the tradition its canonical statement:

Author's argument: Social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders. From this point of view, deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules or sanctions to an "offender."

Becker added two empirical observations. First, what counts as deviance is historically and culturally variable — narcotics use was normal in the nineteenth century (Freud and Queen Victoria are illustrative), then was reconfigured as dangerous; male homosexuality was once capital, now widely unremarkable. Second, power determines whose behaviour gets successfully labelled. The poor and minorities are more easily labelled and less able to resist; powerful actors escape labelling more often and have more influence in defining what is labelled. The agents who make and apply rules are the moral entrepreneurs — and the resulting structure of deviance reflects the structure of social relations.

Amplification in action

The labelling tradition has been the engine of some of criminology's most consequential later work. Cohen (1972) on moral panics. Hall et al. (1978) on the construction of "mugging" and the racialised "black mugger." Ferrell (1996) on graffiti as cultural practice criminalised by authority. Hayward and Yar (2006) on the antisocial-youth label and its policing consequences. In each case the analytical pattern is the same: a behaviour is selectively identified, labelled, amplified, and then policed in ways that confirm the label.

Two persistent critiques

Critics have always pressed labelling theorists on two points.

1. Over-determination of behaviour. If labels do all the work, individuals become passive — accepting categorisation without resistance. Becker concedes that actors can reject labels, but argues that the label still shapes society's expectations, and those expectations constrain the labelled person's options.
2. Inconsistency about "real" deviance. Labelling theorists hold that deviance only exists after labelling — but they also deploy primary and secret deviance, both of which assume that acts can be deviant before any public label is applied. The contradiction has never been fully resolved within the tradition.

Neither objection has displaced the central insight. Deviance is, at minimum, partly a social accomplishment, and labelling theory remains the standard counterweight to positivist criminology.

Practical application

The topic's concepts are most useful as a reading discipline — a way of approaching any criminological claim with the right interpretive questions on hand.

• Whenever a category is invoked, ask who built it. "Antisocial youth," "career criminal," "high-risk offender" — each is a label, with a history of construction and a set of consequences. Tracking the constructional history is half the analysis.
• Distinguish primary from secondary deviance in the data. Rates of primary rule-breaking are often broadly distributed across the population; rates of secondary deviance (life-as-the-label) are concentrated among the labelled. Conflating the two produces the illusion that some groups are intrinsically more criminal.
• Watch for ideology's two senses in policy debate. A speaker who alternates between the neutral and critical sense in the same paragraph is doing rhetorical work that an analyst should make visible.
• Treat justice as a contested concept, not a settled noun. When someone says "we need justice for the victims," ask: distributive or corrective? Proportional or restorative? The unspoken answer determines the policy.
• Map intellectual-property enforcement against power asymmetries. Industry-funded private enforcement is now a major share of IP policing. The shape of that enforcement reflects which industries can pay for it, not which harms are most serious.

Example

Consider a school district that responds to a series of cafeteria fights by introducing mandatory referral to the juvenile-justice system for any fight, regardless of severity, alongside a new disciplinary database tracking every incident.

A labelling-perspective reading predicts a deviance-amplification spiral. The cafeteria fight is primary deviance — common, often resolved informally, rarely a marker of criminal trajectory. The mandatory referral applies a label — "juvenile offender" — to a wide population. The database institutionalises the label, making it visible to future teachers, future employers, future police officers. The labelled students begin to be treated as juvenile offenders rather than as schoolchildren, internalise the identity, and over time generate the secondary deviance the system claims to suppress.

A moral-entrepreneurs reading would attend to who drove the policy. School-resource officers and a vocal parent group, both with a stake in stricter enforcement, are likely candidates. A justice reading would notice that the policy distributes corrective measures harshly while leaving the distributive arrangements unchanged — the cafeteria fights are downstream of broader inequalities in support, supervision, and resources.

The example uses the I–L concepts in concert. It is not enough to say "the policy is harsh." The analytic point is that the policy manufactures the criminal trajectory it claims to interrupt.

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