Abstract:
It is surprising that sociologists studying crime and deviant behaviour have failed to integrate two of the most prominent foci of current sociological thought, namely the emphasis on logistic pressures in a world of finite resources, and the so-called labelling perspective on social problems. This failure is all the more surprising because it has not been devoid of specific stimuli; Kai Erikson, for example, has explicitly suggested that the detection and treatment of deviants is at least in part a product of the nature of a society's social control apparatus (Erikson, 1966:24):