Regarding crimes of the powerful, those in power have the privilege to escape stigmatization and consequences of illegal actions. Those in power protect their own through deciding what is illegal or not, and deciding the consequences for illegal actions. These crimes occur in private and are often underreported and under prosecuted, allowing the powerful to escape consequences. Critical analysis will address these dichotomies, challenging theoretical assumptions and criminal justice practices to advocate for structural change.

Labeling Theory

​Background

Labeling theory discusses the structural inequalities within society that explain criminality. It can be traced back to Mead’s theory of symbolic interactionism in 1934, which discusses the importance of language regarding informing social action through processes of constructing, interpreting, and transmitting meaning (Denver et al., 2017, p. 666). From there, labeling theory was further developed with Lemert’s distinction between primary and secondary deviance in 1951, which explained how deviance of an individual begins and continues (Thompson, 2014). Finally, and perhaps most influentially, we have Becker’s labeling theory of deviance in 1963, which is the version of the theory that will be guiding this discussion in the essay (Paternoster & Bachman, 2017). In Becker’s labeling theory, he describes crime as a social construct:

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 a person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an “offender.” The deviant is one to whom that label has been successfully applied; deviance is beha