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Labelling Theory Of Crime Essay

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It is scenarios such as the ones mentioned earlier that lead to biases being developed by the public, the media, the police, and the criminal justice system itself based off of socioeconomic status. It starts with Lombroso’s positive approach and his ideas about the criminal man and what makes a criminal. He believed that criminals had certain innate characteristics about them that could be identified by the police, creating a bias about who is a criminal based on what they look like (Historical Perspectives, 2018). This gradually led us to labelling theory, which explains why some people are labelled as criminal and some are not (Historical Perspectives, 2018). Once someone commits a deviant act, they start to be seen as an outsider to the …show more content…

Over time, this has eventually grown to where we our know, which the income inequality and biases based off this regarding crime and conviction rates. A good example of this is the Black Lives Matter campaign and their responses to the murder of innocent black men by the police. Many of the lives lost were people of colour who lived in what would be classified as a lower-class neighbourhood. These men are being killed by police because of the mistrust the police have for this social group, based off of these biases that have been developed and reinforced by the criminal justice system as well as the public. Many argue that these situations would not have occurred if the men in the situation had been white or it had occurred in a more upper-class neighbourhood. This demonstrates a clear line of inequality and if it could be erased, and all social groups being treated as equal, there would be no need for this movement, because situations like those would no longer

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