In The Penguin (HBO, 2024), Sofía Falcone arrives on screen preceded by a name she did not choose: «the Hangman», la Verdugo, the daughter of crime boss Carmine Falcone credited with a string of murders of women in Gotham. That nickname arrives before she does, explains her before she speaks and condemns her before she can defend herself. When we finally learn her story, we discover that much of that account was built about her rather than by her: a criminal family that needed a culprit pointed at her, a father handed her over, an asylum locked her away for ten years. And when she comes out, the woman who returns is no longer quite the one who went in. For Edwin Lemert's theory of primary and secondary deviance, Sofía is not the monstrous exception her legend proclaims: she is the almost textbook example of how a label, repeated long enough and backed by institutions, ends up manufacturing the very thing it claimed to describe.
// The theoryNot the first act, but the reaction that follows it
The sociologist Edwin Lemert, in Social Pathology (1951), made one of criminology's decisive turns: he stopped asking only why someone commits a first offense and began asking what happens afterwards. He distinguished two moments. Primary deviance is the initial act of breaking a norm —isolated, sometimes ambiguous, with causes of every kind— that does not alter the image the person has of themselves. Secondary deviance is what arises when society reacts: when someone is labeled, punished and treated as «a criminal» until they reorganize their identity around that role and make crime a way of life. Lemert's radical turn is that the deviant career —the stable delinquent identity— is not the cause of the social reaction but its product. Society, reacting with stigma and exclusion, does not always discover a criminal: often it manufactures one. It is the seed from which Becker with Outsiders and Goffman with his analysis of stigma would grow. Sofía Falcone reads better against that distinction than against any diagnosis of «innate evil». You can walk through the full framework in our file on primary and secondary deviance.
The label that fulfills itself
The heart of the theory is the step from an act to an identity: in primary deviance the offense is something one does; in secondary deviance, something one is. Sofía illustrates that passage precisely. At first there are ambiguous acts and deaths attributed within a family that lives off crime —perfect material for reasonable doubt—. But onto that ambiguity a machinery of labeling is laid: the media nickname «the Hangman», the father who uses her as a scapegoat to protect the real culprit, and the committal to Arkham that turns suspicion into sentence. Ten years treated as a dangerous killer, marked by a diagnosis and a file, every door to seeing herself otherwise closed. A point comes when taking on the role stops being a betrayal of her identity and becomes her identity: if the whole world has called you the Hangman and treated you as such for a decade, being the Hangman becomes the most coherent response to the treatment received. The label, repeated and backed by institutions, fulfills itself.
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// The subjectThe family that needed a culprit
What is revealing about Sofía's case is that the labeling is not an accident: it is a function within the Falcone clan. A mafia family that produces corpses has to manage blame, and Sofía —a woman, sensitive, «too much» for the organization's patriarchal mold— makes the ideal scapegoat. Here Lemert's theory meets the stigma as institution that Goffman described: it is not enough to point a finger, the label has to be locked away in a place that makes it official. Arkham is that place. The committal corrects nothing; it consecrates the role, turns it into a record, makes it the first fact anyone will ever read about her. And there is a gendered edge impossible to ignore: Sofía is punished for feeling too much, declared mad and dangerous for reactions that in a male heir of the clan would have been read as character or as resolve. The family's patriarchal domination chooses where the label falls, and it chooses the daughter's body. None of this denies her later agency; it does explain why the ground was prepared for secondary deviance to take root. When Sofía leaves Arkham and decides, at last, to take up on her own the name they hung on her —to turn against the family that sold her and claim power by the bloody road—, she is not discovering a latent evil: she is occupying the space they had spent ten years holding for her.
Sofía Falcone
// The flawExplaining the career does not cancel the choice
The flaw with Sofía is twofold, and it is the same one that haunts all of labeling theory. The first is determinism: reading her story as «the family and Arkham made her, she is not responsible». Lemert does not say that. Social reaction pushes toward secondary deviance; it does not impose it. Labeling explains the deviant career and the role of institutions —why the road to the Hangman was so clear—, but it does not erase the decisions Sofía makes afterwards. There are people labeled just as harshly who resist the label and make no career of crime: Derek Vinyard, in American History X, shows that even a consolidated secondary identity can be walked back. That Sofía was unjustly singled out at the start does not make innocent the specific people she chooses to kill at the end. To explain is not to excuse.
The second flaw is the opposite: denying that the label matters, holding that Sofía «was always like that» and that the asylum and the stigma are irrelevant —precisely the version that suits the family that used her—. Decades of research disprove that convenience: stigma, committal and exclusion do increase the likelihood of reoffending and of identity reorganizing around the deviant role. The honest reading holds both things at once. Sofía was the victim of an atrocious labeling —of a father who sold her, of an institution that sealed her, of a patriarchal clan that needed a culprit with a woman's name— and she is responsible for what she chooses to do with the freedom she regains. Between those two truths there is no contradiction: there is a deviant career that a system helped manufacture and acts that remain hers. Memory, as always, is for those who fell along the way, not for the legend of the Hangman.
Careful who we call a monster
Sofía Falcone's case matters because it teaches us to distrust the labels that arrive before the person. The criminology of labeling insists on it: when an institution —a family, a court, a psychiatric ward, a headline— fixes the role of «dangerous» too soon and too hard, it may be producing the very outcome it claims to fear. And the gendered edge makes it worse: historically, women have been pathologized for emotions that in men passed for temperament, locked away where men were given a second chance. The lesson is not to absolve Sofía, but to look at the process that manufactures the Hangmen before applauding her fall: who hung the name, who made it official, who profited by hiding behind it. A decent society is not measured by how well it punishes the villain once formed, but by whether it knew how not to manufacture her —by whether it knew, in time, not to call a monster someone who was not yet one—.
Three key takeaways
- Sofía Falcone (The Penguin, HBO 2024) illustrates Lemert's primary and secondary deviance: some ambiguous initial acts within a criminal family (primary) and a brutal labeling —the nickname «the Hangman», scapegoat, Arkham, stigma— that reorganizes her identity until she takes on the imposed role (secondary).
- The label is not an accident but a function of the clan: stigma as institution (Goffman) —Arkham makes the suspicion official— and a gendered edge —she is punished for «feeling too much» and locked up where a male heir would not have been—.
- To explain is not to excuse: labeling explains the deviant career and the role of institutions, but it does not cancel Sofía's agency or make her innocent of what she chooses to do afterwards. She was the victim of an unjust label and she is responsible for her acts.
Sources · further reading
- Lemert, E. M. (1951). Social Pathology. McGraw-Hill.
- Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. Free Press.
- Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Prentice Hall.
- Chesney-Lind, M. (2006). «Patriarchy, Crime, and Justice». Feminist Criminology, 1(1).
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Sofía Falcone?
Sofía Falcone («La Verdugo») es un villano de The Penguin, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. They called her «the Hangman» before there was a body that was unmistakably hers.
¿Por qué Sofía Falcone (La Verdugo) se convierte en villano?
Sofía Falcone and Lemert's primary and secondary deviance: how labeling —the nickname, the scapegoat, the asylum— reorganizes an identity until the person takes on the role imposed on her. She became what they said she was.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Sofía Falcone?
El caso de Sofía Falcone se analiza desde la Desviación Primaria y Secundaria. The theory of primary and secondary deviance (Edwin Lemert, 1951) distinguishes the isolated lapse from the criminal identity that social reaction ends up manufacturing. Sofía Falcone, from The Penguin (HBO, 2024), is an almost textbook case: some ambiguous first acts and some deaths attributed within a mafia family (primary deviance) trigger a brutal labeling —the nickname «the Hangman», the scapegoat role, the committal to Arkham, the public stigma— that reorganizes her identity until she takes on the imposed role and becomes the killer they said she was. Self-fulfilling prophecy, change of social role and stigma as institution, with a gendered edge: she is punished for «feeling too much» and locked up where a man would not have been locked up.
