Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Law - Criminal process, Criminology, Law Enforcement, grade: 57 Punkte = 2,70, University of Portsmouth (Institute of Criminal Justice Studies), language: English, abstract: In the 1960s new deviance theories came up in sociology. One of them was the labelling theory, which offered new explanations of crime and deviant behaviour. This paper will critically assess to what extent the labelling theory can explain societal reactions to deviant behaviour and how these societal reactions work and influence deviant behaviour.