The influence of logistic pressures on patterns of judicial administration in New Zealand: 1954-1970

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):