NCJ Number
90125
Journal
Urban Review Volume: 14 Issue: 1 Dated: (Spring 1982) Pages: 47-63
Date Published
1982
Length
17 pages
Annotation
This paper details how school labels originate and how such labels have negative consequences for adolescent behavior, and it offers a larger and more theoretically integrated view of the relationship between these commonplace labeling processes and crimes in schools.
Abstract
Instead of looking exclusively to particularistic personal characteristics to explain motivations or the reasons why deviant careers may evolve, it might be more productive to examine how the school structure shapes student behavior. The school structure is geared to produce failures, and through a complex of negative self, teacher, peer, and parental expectations, schools also manufacture various forms of school misconduct and crime. As students move through the various school grades, they acquire a reputation in the eyes of their teachers, counselors and peers, and this reputation, once structured, becomes a fixture of a student's being within the school domain. If students are tagged as lacking in ability, as having behavior problems, or as 'misfits,' such labels can become their master status, such that people will thereafter, regardless of the behavior exhibited, respond to the label and not to the person. There may be a time when the labeled student not only accepts the label but may begin to act in accordance with it, such that the student's personal identity meshes with the public identity. The person thus acts in terms of the expectations associated with, his/her low school status, both in the eyes of others and self. Fifty-five references are listed.