The Professional Ex: The Types Of Deviance

For this paper, I choose substance abuse as the type of deviance. I feel that this type of deviance lends itself to the two articles I have chosen to discuss, J. David Brown’s “The Professional Ex: An Alternative for Exiting the Deviant Career” and Harrison M. Trice and Paul Michael Roman’s “Delabeling and Relabeling, And Alcoholics Anonymous”.

To begin, let’s look at substance abuse as a deviant behavior. Despite having massive amounts of information available, substance abuse remains a prevalent deviance in contemporary society. Googling “substance abuse treatment” results in approximately 70,800,000 articles related to the topic. According to DrugWarFacts.org 46,471 deaths and 1,488,707 arrests annually are drug-related which makes it

When looking at the articles assigned for this module, I felt that Brown’s “The Professional Ex: An Alternative for Exiting the Deviant Career” did the best job of explaining how substance abuse deviance could be successfully transformed. Brown’s professional ex theory is based on an extension of the role-exit theory. Brown states that while role exit requires the disengaging of the previous role central to one’s self-identity and reestablishing a new identity, the professional ex theory allows one to take a history of deviance and transform it into a legitimate career through a four-stage process. The four stages are the emulation of one’s therapist, the call to a counseling career, status-set realignment, and credentialization. I feel that this system affords the greatest chance at recovery. Through the process of becoming a substance abuse counselor the individual is constantly running a self-check to ensure that their addiction is under control.