... as deviant causes it to be seen as deviant. Becker also found that behaviour could be labelled differently depending on who you are. Whether you're the individual committing the act, policing it, observing it or being a victim of it. And those agents of social control (police, Law, courts etc) have great power in labelling people and making those labels stick. Becker found that the effects of labelling could cause deviancy. He identified 5 steps to this. Firstly an individual is publicly labelled as a deviant and excluded from his neighbourhood, job etc, for example a drug dealer will be labelled as a junkie or a crack-head. This encourages the deviant to become more deviant as the traditional, legitimate routes to a job are blocked, so they will go to steal and mug people. This would lead to them being a convicted criminal; consequently the ex-convict will have great difficulty in finding ...

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