ABSTRACT
The first level of advocacy was, thus, the appreciation and defemce of subculture; the second was to question the nature of social reaction. This corresponded to the rule of symmetry: that, in order to explain deviant behaviour, it was necessary to explain action and reaction and then, of course, subsequently, the impact of reaction upon action. As such, it invoked a notion of subcultures in collision and the necessity of a ‘fully social theory’ of deviance to explain both, say, the subcultures of youth and those of control, whether the police, journalists, lawyers, etc. But there was, as we have seen, a third level of advocacy, and that concerned the impact of social reaction, namely that secondary deviance was often more severe than primary deviance, secondary harm more of a problem than primary harm. This was the basis of the critique of the whole process of criminalization, of prison as producing the criminal just as the mental hospital constructed madness and treatment clinics produced addicts and alcoholics, etc. Irrationality was, therefore, shifted from the supposedly wanton youth or mindless drugtaker to the agents of control themselves, for the actions of authority through the process of deviancy amplification only made things worse.
