Deviance :: essays research papers

being tagged and institutionalized as a social degenerate proves to be stigmatizing in life. In Dina Temple-Rastons A Death in Texas, she chronicles the shoot of pile Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas during the summer of 1998. The beginning suggests in Chapters 1-4 that suspected murder Billy King is more than a case study of antidromic psychology and that his fiddleions may be explained as a career flagitious who has been marginalized by society. While most authors fixate on the psychology indoors killers, she also includes the towns historical background and the social circumstance in which the murder took place. Sociologist, Kai Erikson would applaud his style as he postulates that deviant behavior becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Erikson states that once a person commits an figure, they are labeled and treated as deviant and they have little opportunity to act any differently.Billy King was labeled and treated as a deviant this maltreatment had the greatest influence on King. On page 44 of the text, Kylies mother refers to King as an ex-con and does non want her young woman to hang around with someone like that. When labeled as a deviant, people are suspicious of you and begin treating you with a lack of observe and see you as different. Even though he had kept his lift clear, Sheriff Rowles made a mental none when he saw the testify of Bill King (Pg. 45).The prison where Bill King was remanded was at the abate of a wooded road and hidden behind shabby homes and a trailer park. Billy was a man of small stature and had to act with bravado to not be injured while in prison. He was jammed into a facility with 3,00 young toughs (pg 70) who wielded a lethal cabal of intimidation and one upmanship. The men were segregated and survived by making (like) racial alliances. King was called a peckerwoods he would fight but he was not tough enough to fit into the prisons many gangs for protection (pg 71). The author suggests that Kings pound was brok en and that he may have been sodomized.On page 77, the author states that Billy was the adored center of a dysfunctional family and that his step-mother may not of held him accountable for his actions. It may be that Billy felt traumatized by his corporeal mother abandoning him and it put him off stride for life (pg 77).