Saints and the Roughnecks
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The Saints and the Roughnecks
The article "The Saints and The Roughnecks, written by William J. Chambliss, was a story told of two different groups he observed over a period of two years. The two groups were The Saints and The Roughnecks. The Saints were made up of eight "promising" teenagers. They were the children of stable, white middle class families, yet were involved in some of the most deviant acts committed in and around their neighborhood. However, The Roughnecks were made up of six not so stable lower class families, who while being just as deviant as the Saints, were the ones always in trouble with the law. This is an example of the labeling theory. This theory explains deviance as the processes by which some people define others as deviant. The labeling theory stresses that we become "deviant" when the label has been applied by others around us. It also focuses on the way people are labeled as deviant not so much the act of deviance...