Abstract

Criminality has become a major part of the political debate in recent years. Naturally, this comes with several different solutions from several different people. Our purpose is to examine the theory of labeling, which has been a part of the debate since the 1960´s. There have been many different views of the theory and we aimed to do a literary review on some of the reports that have been written. As expected, the views on the theory differ substantially depending on who has written the report. Many theorists argue that the theory is critical when understanding why people might act deviant and that the theory can be used to prevent juvenile crimes. On the contrary, several people argue that the theory is too vague and that further research has to be done before using the theory in a judicial context. What most reports have in common is that the theory could explain some behavioral patterns but how much weight that should be put on the theory differs. A difficulty we encountered while writing the review is that the critics find the previous studies and data insufficient.

Authors

Elma Fransson & Karla Haglund