Reprinted with permission from John H. Laub

Criminology in the Making

(Note: This interview is owned and copyrighted by John Laub. Permission to download the interview is granted for personal and educational use only. The document may not be reprinted in any other venue, print, electronic or other, without written permission from John Laub. This document is located at http://www.sonoma.edu/cja/info/emljl.html.)

Interview with

Edwin M. Lemert

March 16, 1979

EDWIN M. LEMERT was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1912. He received his B.A. at Miami University in Ohio and his Ph.D. in sociology and anthropology from Ohio State University. Dr.Lemert, known for his theoretical writings on labeling theory, has done extensive field research in a number of diverse areas including juvenile justice, check forgery, alcohol use, and mental disorders. He has also taught at Kent State, Western Michigan University, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the University of California at Davis. Dr. Lemert is now professor emeritus of sociology at Davis.

Dr. Lemert also served in various capacities in professional organizations. He was the President of the Society for Study of Social Problems and the Pacific Sociological Society. He received the Edwin H. Sutherland Award from the American Society of Criminology in 1974.

His prominent publications include Social Pathology; Social Action and Legal Change; Instead of Court: Diversion in Juvenile Justice; and Human Deviance, Social Problems, and Social Control .


LAUB: Perhaps you could tell me how you got involved in the field of sociology? For example, could you talk about your personal history and some of your early educational experiences?

LEMERT: Well, you might say that I backed into sociology. Originally, I planned to attend college for three years, then enter law school. But during the course of my undergraduate career I changed my mind. At the time I was actually majoring in Spanish, having switched from a political science major. In my junior year I took a course with Fred Cottrell at Miami University which greatly aroused my interest in sociology.¹ Eventually I changed to what was the equivalent of a major in sociology. I took several more courses with Fred and also courses with Read Bain, who was head of the department, a small one, in a small university in a small town, Oxford, Ohio.

After I graduated I spent a year working as a welfare worker in Cincinnati, where I had numerous contacts with a variety of what certainly could be called deviants. Career prospects at that time were not very good so I decided to return to graduate school. I applied and was accepted at Ohio State University in the Department of Sociology. I spent four years there getting my Ph.D. degree, I did not get a master's degree.

During my third year there, John Gillin joined the faculty and he gave interesting courses and seminars in anthropology. He was somewhat exciting and certainly different in his views from the rest of the sociology faculty. So I changed and made my program a joint study of sociology and anthropology.

LAUB: Did you grow up in Ohio?

LEMERT: Yes, I was born in an enclave area of Cincinnati, Norwood, and lived in places such as Columbus, Ohio, Lima, Ohio, and Cincinnati proper.

LAUB: What was your father's occupation?

LEMERT: My father was an insurance man, a self-made businessman who was a high school dropout. My paternal grandfather was an attorney, judge, and the president of a small law school, Ohio Northern, in Ada, Ohio. My father regretted the fact that he hadn't gotten more education, so he insisted that his two sons should by all means be university-educated. His symmetrical idea was that my brother would become a medical doctor and I would become a lawyer. I am afraid I disappointed by father because I went into sociology instead, a subject he could never fathom.

LAUB: One of the things I am interested in is what individuals or events shape one's perspectives on areas of study like deviance. One name that continually comes up in your writing is William F. Cottrell. Could you talk about him?

LEMERT: Well, that's a little misleading. It is true that one of the first courses in social problems I ever had was with Fred Cottrell, but his orientation in the course was certainly not in the direction of deviance. In a broad sense my interests became divided between a kind of macrocosmic orientation to problems of society reflecting the influence of Cottrell on one hand, and on the other hand, a microcosmic interest in problems which became in essence the study of deviance. Those latter concerns developed after I left Miami University and went to Ohio State. At that time, of course, the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago was very influential, particularly for its research on crime and delinquency; also through Mead's social psychology, which was commanding much attention. E.H. Sutherland, who was a University of Chicago product, was the foremost criminologist in the country if not the world, so the best sociology of social problems or sociology of deviance around at that time was pretty much University of Chicago style.

At Ohio State University I taught social problems courses, drawing heavily from Mead, Shaw and McKay, and Sutherland. However, my dissertation, oddly enough, was not in the area of deviance at all.

LAUB: That was my next question. I found a citation to your dissertation in one of your early papers, "Folkways and Social Control."² Could you talk about your dissertation and tell me what you learned from that work?

LEMERT: Again, this reflected the Cottrell side of my interest. While I was at Ohio State I did become interested in social control. The department chairman was F. E. Lumley. He never acquired a great reputation, but he was intensely concerned with social control, and he wrote several books on the subject.³ As I grew interested in social control when it came time to do a dissertation, I decided to pursue the topic. Actually, contingency affected the choice of a topic because I did not have a very long time to finish my graduate work--about three months to complete the dissertation and go into the job market. I discovered some data from the International Labor Office which dealt with labor discipline in the Soviet Union. Those data proved to be very good. So I decided to use them to study the problem of social control in relation to technology, and I developed a thesis which reflected Cottrell's interest in the influence of technology on society. My dissertation was a study of "Social Control and Technological Change in Soviet Russia," focusing on the wage systems and the disciplinary programs or means which were used to try to maintain factory discipline. This was a serious problem in early Soviet Russia because of the conflict between Marxian ideology and productivity needs. There were, of course, problems of deviance involved, such as alcoholism, hooliganism, and withheld effort, but these were not my main interest.

LAUB: In 1951 you wrote Social Pathology. When you wrote that piece did you regard it as a break with the sociological tradition? Or was it more a returning to what you saw as the roots of sociology?

LEMERT: Perhaps we ought to retrace some steps at this point. When I left Ohio State I first moved to Kent State University and taught there for two years. At this time I became closely associated with a clinical psychologist, Charles Van Riper, from whom or with whom I picked up a certain amount of knowledge about clinical psychology, particularly in the area of speech correction. I also did some research on mental disorders in Western Michigan. There was a mental hospital near the town and access to patients and records was relatively easy. Some of my sociopsychological and empirically based interests developed at this time. Subsequently I left Western Michigan to go to UCLA. I was the third sociologist in the new Department of Anthropology and Sociology. The first was Constantine Pannunzio, an Italian. Leonard Broom was the second sociologist, also with a joint degree like mine. When he became established at UCLA, he helped to bring me out west and become part of the department which was genuinely seeking to combine and integrate sociology and anthropology.

Broom had been teaching a course which he called Social Disorganization, and used a book by L. Guy Brown titled Social Pathology: Social and Personal Disorganization. Brown taught at Oberlin College but he was a University of Chicago product. In his writings he emphasized social interaction par excellence; for Brown everything got its meaning from social interaction. Brown must be credited with anticipating or foreshadowing the growth of some of the basic notions that later became part of deviance theory; namely, that there is no fixed difference between the normal and the abnormal and that conventional ideas of causation had to be abandoned in favor of an interactional or process explanation for the emergence of the pathological. He also held that both approved and disapproved behavior could give rise to social or personal disorganization.

I taught the disorganization course using Brown's book, both of which I more or less inherited from Broom. The book certainly had an influence on my thinking, although I grew dissatisfied with it because it was so generalized and repetitive. I felt there was a need to systematize ideas in the field. My decision to write a book was the culmination of dissatisfaction with the existing texts I had used teaching courses in social problems and social disorganization.

Now back to your question: I was not conscious of myself as making any great contribution to sociology at that time. To be exact, the immediate reason for writing Social Pathology was to get tenure at UCLA. I should mention that at that time I had a good deal of support from a young agent-editor from McGraw-Hill books, Alden Paine, who showed a lot of personal interest in the project. He made periodic inquiries, kept me well fed with lunches, encouraged me, and gave the project a lot of TLC. I should add that UCLA at that time was a very receptive environment for young faculty members, for me anyway. There was a lot of help up the academic ladder in the best sense of that term. The faculty were strongly supportive and assumed you would succeed until proven otherwise. Besides this, there was a very interesting and stimulating collection of graduate students around in those days-- Sheldon Messinger, Aaron Cicourel, John Kitsuse, Wendell Bell, Scott Green--all in all, a kind of golden age of UCLA.

LAUB: So at the time you didn't regard Social Pathology as anything all that special or unique?

LEMERT: No, I wasn't at all aware of striking out in exciting new directions--just hoping to make it, career-wise.

LAUB: Was it an attack on positivist thinking in any way?

LEMERT: Not as such, because-- as I have later made clear--there is an inconsistent positivist section of the book in which I wrote about modes of behavior and deviation from them, with the implication that the societal reaction was their product. This was contrary to another part in which I started analysis with the concept of differentiation and reactions. I then believed that it was even possible to measure some of these things because psychologists were struggling to do so--with the J-curve hypothesis, for example. The behavioristic approach of the legal realists, such as Karl Llewellyn, also impressed me. Keep in mind, too, that Read Bain at one time was strongly positivist in his views, some of which I absorbed.

LAUB: One of the more interesting pieces that you wrote was the monograph entitled Alcohol and the Northwest Coast Indian. Was that kind of research unique in sociology at the time, in that the focus was on the values, the symbolic associations, and the meaning of the behavior?

LEMERT: Gosh, I'm trying to think how I got into that. That monograph was published in 1954. In 1953 I took a sabbatical leave. I went up to British Columbia because I liked it there. I wasn't quite sure at the time what to research. I had to decide what to work on after I got there, but I'm not quite sure why I decided to focus in on the drinking behavior of Indians. The other problem I decided to look at was stuttering, particularly to see if there was any stuttering among the Northwest Coast Indians.
It was my first effort at anthropological-style field work, and among the Indians the drinking was so obvious and intrusive that it was hard to ignore it. My data on the drinking behavior was not as rich as I wanted. The Salish Indians, with whom I did most of my interviewing, were hard to get next to, and when you talked about alcohol it was even more difficult to get information from them. Later I began to dip into historical materials and generally used everything I could find to flesh out the monograph. Merton's theories were in the air at that time, so as a point of departure I drew on the then-new theory of functionalism. Following my sabbatical leave I wrote a couple of articles on the drinking behavior and on stuttering.⁴

LAUB: Maybe we could go back to a point you raised earlier. When you look at the range of topics you have researched and written on, the topics are quite diverse-- alcoholism, stuttering, check forgery, and mental illness, for example. However, when you examine closely the themes of your work there seem to be some common threads. You tend to focus on social control, technology, pluralism, and values, and how these concepts relate to deviance and conformity.

LEMERT: Also, I was concerned with some of the possible circular processes in the relationship of society and personality, ideas coming from clinical psychology.

LAUB: The concepts appear even in your book on probation subsidy.⁵ Perhaps, making a simplistic summary of the book, the underlying, fundamental issue is: How is social control best achieved, through positive rewards or negative sanctions?

LEMERT: That study reflected the attempted use of a heuristic, Cottrellian model for examining the interaction of groups. Cottrell has stated his methodology in the introduction to some of his essays (in his book on Energy and Society , for example). He was long interested in technology and the relationship of technology to values and the social structure. This appeared quite early in his M.A. thesis, which was on the Great Basin railroads. He first started studying political science in the area of international relations while he was at Stanford. At first he thought you could explain railroads in terms of their technology, until he discovered that after the Treaty of Versailles some of the Eastern European countries set up their railroads with different gauges. This meant that when a train came up to the border it had to be unloaded and the cargo put on other trains on tracks with different gauges. This impressed him deeply because it revealed the pervasive power of nationalism in determining what people do and the kind of decisions they make. That led him to read Cooley and shifted him over to sociology. He was really more of a social scientist than a sociologist per se. He recognized the importance of values as well as technology; also the importance of social structure, but only as influences, not as determining factors. In later years he began to use the notion of feedback. This allowed him to reject a mechanistic model of causation. He insisted on the importance of models that recognized teleology, not in the older, discredited sense but in the sense that human beings who are studied by social scientists make choices and the choices have variable consequences. Feedback on the consequences becomes a basis for a process of evaluation for new choices, and so on. This, along with values, costs, and structure was part of the interpretative scheme I attempted to use in the study which I and Forrest Dill made of the California Probation Subsidy, although the model was not made highly explicit.

LAUB: So although you have written on a lot of topics the same issues arise each time?

LEMERT: I suppose that when you look at the various pieces of my work they do seem somewhat confusing. However, there are some common underlying ideas running through them, mostly stemming from my early interest in social control.

LAUB: Could you talk about what has come to be known as "The West Coast School of Sociology"?

LEMERT: It so happens that I have actually drafted some of my thoughts on that, which I entitled "Societal Reaction Theory: The View from the West." In my paper, still in my files, I, as others have done, trace the "school" to the symbolic interactionism of Mead and Cooley. To be precise, labeling theory was devised by Howard Becker, and the two theories really were independent developments. At the time neither of us was influenced by Tannenbaum's writings.⁶ The two theories tended to be merged and dubbed the Neo-Chicagoan, West Coast School, or Pacific Seminar. My ideas got started among the faculty and graduate students at UCLA and somewhat later among associates at University of California at Berkeley. At one time there actually was a Pacific Seminar at the Law and Society Center there, a group that included Goffman, Messinger, Matza, occasionally Becker, and myself, plus Phil Selznick, who wasn't too comfortable with the ideas we exchanged. John Kitsuse was the first to state the societal reaction theory in explicit terms. Goffman, of course, did a great deal to popularize labeling theory with his writings on the mental hospital and stigma.⁷

Howard Becker's contribution to the Neo-Chicagoan school is equally well-known.⁸ His editorship of Social Problems made possible a real breakthrough for people who had been doing research and writing along the lines of labeling theory, some of whom had trouble getting their papers published. Becker's ideas of labeling took precedence over mine so far as popular acceptance and recognition were concerned. At the same time his writings seem to have been the target for more criticism than mine. There was very little interaction between me and Becker, although he did make some editorial suggestions for the revision of one of my articles on check forgery.⁹

There has been some speculation about more general factors which might account for the growth of the Neo-Chicagoan school. It has been attributed to urban-liberalism, sophisticated debunkery, and identification with victims of society's control agencies, humanistic criticism of pragmatic intellectualism, and a reaction to oppressive bureaucracies. But all of this is hindsight and I am not sure that those who helped make the school had a great deal in common at the time. An English colleague of mine in 1974 once commented that the symbolic interactionists in America seldom speak to one another.

LAUB: The article I found interesting was your presidential address to the Society for the Study of Social Problems.¹⁰ I have a couple of questions regarding that. First, you write in that article that societal reaction theory was "majestic in decay." Do you still agree with that notion now?

LEMERT: I think the general tenets of the theory are still viable, that is, that we should study the consequences of social control over human beings, and raise questions about the effects of social designations and classifications of human beings devised to administer helping services or treatment of people with troubles or problems. Criticisms are well taken that more attention needs to be directed to studying the macro aspects of deviance, also to developing some theoretical propositions to give more substance to what, up to this time, may have been no more than a perspective.

LAUB: Also in that article you officially broke ties with labeling theory. Why did you fell that was necessary?

LEMERT: Well, my criticism reflected some of the influence of Fred Cottrell, who kept pointing out to me that a lot of sociology had become very subjective and psychological. He didn't think a sociopsychological model was sufficient to account for the kinds of changes taking place in modern society.

LAUB: Was labeling theory "unscientific" in your view?

LEMERT: I wouldn't put it in those terms. Rather it was becoming too psychological. The perspective of labeling theorists and their writing to paradoxes didn't go much beyond a vision of a group of agents with fixed ideas, who label some individuals without much power or resources. The concept of interaction was never fully exploited to show the reciprocal effects of those who are labeled on the labelers. Without looking at this--the way the labeled persons respond, and problems created for the agents of social control by their responses--it is difficult to study changes in patterns of deviance, policy, and social control. This of course is where Cottrell's concept of feedback becomes useful as a way to further specify the pragmatic process of growth which Cooley wrote about.

LAUB: You hint at that in the article, because you also disassociate yourself from radical theory, ethnomethodology, and phenomenology, and you present a group-interaction model. Is this the kind of thing you are talking about with reference to a feedback loop?

LEMERT: Yes, it is. But keep in mind that feedback is not used merely as a descriptive term and that there is no loop in a mechanistic sense; the feedback may reinforce a pattern but it also may result in weakening or destroying a pattern.

LAUB: Doesn't it ultimately get down to a different conception of human nature?

LEMERT: Yes, in that it assumes that human beings make choices which affect the course of social change. It is nonmechanistic so far as assumptions about human nature go.

LAUB: Do you think it is possible to have a theory of deviance that stands without a theory of social control?

LEMERT: I am not sure I fully understand the question. However, I will say No to it. Merton, as I remember, believed that the production of deviance and the societal reaction to it were separate questions. I find this difficult to accept. However, I still find Merton's orientation to theory and research valid, that is, that we should develop or derive theoretical concepts from bodies of data and be careful not to generalize beyond our data. At most we should make small-scale comparisons. Beyond this I would say that functionalism or structural analysis connotes if not denotes a form of mechanistic causation, whereas a social control perspective allows a more dynamic analysis amenable to studying social change and deviance. For this I prefer Cottrell's use of heuristic model, which delineates several factors, such as values, social structures (used in the plural), and costs, and shows how they work together to produce certain outcomes. How things work together is studied with process concepts of interaction, evaluation, choice and feedback.

LAUB: Maybe we can shift the discussion and come up to the present. What are you currently working on?

LEMERT: For some time I have been involved in a cross-cultural study of the social control of youth, primarily a study of juvenile justice in several countries: Japan, Mexico, Italy, and the United States. This study has been slow going and has pointed up the difficulties of doing comparative research in deviance. In addition to this I have been doing some work on bail reform movements and pretrial release projects.

LAUB: Is the youth study looking at different concepts of youth in the various countries or different systems of control--or both?

Lemert: Primarily systems of control, both formal and informal.

LAUB: Does it more or less take off from the ideas in Instead of Court, the monograph you wrote in 1971, then applying it to different countries?

LEMERT: The study has had to evolve from the perspectives of several different researchers from diverse data which varies in richness and quality. I suppose that what we will try to end up with is some idea as to how the juvenile justice systems in these countries really work. Perhaps some kind of typology will emerge.

LAUB: Where do you see the field of the sociology of deviance heading?

LEMERT: Well, it very obviously is in a confused state at the present time. As a number of sociologists have said, there is no commonly accepted perspective on the study of deviance, no dominant paradigm. Labeling theory is less popular and has been subjected to a good deal of criticism. Yet I don't think any substantial replacement theory has surfaced. No acceptable model--or perhaps workable model-- has yet come to the scene in the study of deviance. Deviance study appears to be in the doldrums.

LAUB: At this time are you optimistic about the future of the study of deviance?

LEMERT: My judgment is that the study of deviance is and will continue to be with us, despite the more exuberant radical sociologists who say they are disavowing deviance. They may disavow deviance but the police, courts, and judges certainly are not disavowing it. Much the same can be said in response to those sociologists who say that we no longer have deviance but merely alternative life-styles. The forms of moral disapproval have changed but it has not disappeared; moral ideas and values we still have with us. Nietzsche to the contrary notwithstanding, we're not likely to get beyond good and evil. The highly contrived nature of our society means that we have to look more closely or at different aspects in order to understand the phenomena of acceptance and rejection of human beings in terms of social control.

LAUB: Do you think the level of analysis will change?

LEMERT: Yes, it may, although it is just speculation. For example, there has been quite a move to normalize or to change the definition of excessive drinking to illness, that is alcoholism is a disease. But it is interesting to note some of the articles that have appeared in the nursing journals, showing how nurses strongly resist the conception of alcoholism as illness, likewise doctors, and even alcoholics themselves. Often the nurses have worked in emergency wards of hospitals and had direct contact with alcoholics.

So what are we dealing with here? There may be a subcultural, direct ontological, experiential basis for certain kinds of human rejection. From what nurses say, there is a kind of irrefutable logic about a man who comes in covered with dirt or caked with feces and stinking with urine and you have to get his clothes off. You have to bathe him and medicate him, knowing he's going to die in twenty-four hours anyway. Many of the nurses hate this, don't see any point in it. So they see it in moral rater than medical terms.

Or take the example of living with someone who is mentally unstable. There are certain experiences involved that, regardless of their symbolic designations, assess costs in terms of energies, stress, and lost values. Goffman's seldom cited article, "The Insanity of Place," is a good analysis of this kind of interaction. Instead of taking the view of the underdog, Goffman took the view of the family looking at the underdog. The conclusions come out quite different but it is a justifiable view and mode of analysis. You could take the point of view of the police and analyze what goes on in arrest just as easily as taking the underdog's view. And there you see some very experiential things for the policeman who, day after day, encounters the dregs of society, who are hostile and reject you, or are even ready to attack you without provocation. So what does all of that do to the interaction? There is something universalistic at work that needs exploring and formulation. More generally, these examples suggest that there may be some transcultural aspects of social control. This, of course, may be the anthropological, comparative side of me speaking.

LAUB: Can you assess your effects on the field of sociology?

LEMERT: Well, that's a difficult question. Certainly I get cited frequently whenever deviance or labeling theory is discussed, and quite a few of my articles have been reprinted. Some of my work has been translated into French and Italian; in some ways I am better known abroad than at home. The monograph Instead of Court went out of print very quickly and apparently helped to popularize the diversion idea. Some of the probation officers in California blame me for what has happened to the juvenile court.

LAUB: A number of people put you in the same category as Frank Tannenbaum as one of the creators of the social reaction theory. That is, you were one of the first to systematize such a theory. Are you comfortable with that designation?

LEMERT: Yes, some people call me the grandfather of labeling theory. Of course, I have some mixed feelings about that designation.

Endnotes

1. See William Frederick Cottrell, Energy and Society: The Relation between Energy, Social Change, and Economic Development (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955).

2. "Folkways and Social Control," American Sociological Review 7 (1942):394-399.

3. Means of Social Control (New York: Appleton-Century Co., 1925.)

4. "Alcohol, Values, and Social Control," and "Stuttering among the North Pacific Coastal Indians," in Edwin Lemert, Human Deviance, Social Problems, and Social Control (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967).

5. Offenders in the Community: The Probation Subsidy in California (with Forrest Dill) (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1978).

6. See Frank Tannenbaum, Crime and the Community (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1938).

7. See John Kitsuse, "Notes on the Sociology of Deviance," in Howard S. Becker, ed., The Other Side: Perspectives on Deviance (New York: Free Press, 1964):9-21; and Erving Goffman, Asylums (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1961) and Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963).

8. See Howard Becker, Outsiders (New York: Free Press, 1963).

9. For example, "An Isolation and Closure Theory of Naive Check Forgery"; "The Behavior of the Systematic Check Forger"; and "Role Enactment, Self, and Identity in the Systematic Check Forger," in Edwin Lemert, Human Deviance, Social Problems, and Social Control (1967).

10. "Beyond Mead: The Societal Reaction to Deviance" Social Problems 21 , 4 (1974):457-468.

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