Crime And The Community Neutralization Theory

Throughout the history of criminal justice, theories have been proposed left and right, leaving students like myself to try and figure out which ones still apply in our society today. Two theories that I find particularly interesting would be Sykes and Matza’s (2002) neutralization theory and the theory that stemmed from Frank Tannenbaum’s book, Crime and the Community (1938), the labeling theory. The neutralization theory basically states that criminals know they do wrong and it is not “in their nature” because they try to make excuses due to shame and guilt they feel after committing a criminal act; however, the labeling theory suggests that labeling wrong doers as a criminal “dramatizes evil” and transforms them from a “doer of evil into an evil person” (199). I find these theories to be very …show more content…
While comparing and contrasting these two concepts, I intend to prove which one holds the most prevalence to the criminal justice system in the year 2016. The first theory I want to discuss is the neutralization theory. Although it was first designated as a school of thought roughly 40 years after the labeling theory, I think it is more important to talk about initially. This idea was mainly created to challenge differential association theory’s disastrous attempt to explain why some people do not commit crimes