Abstract
Any sociological description is an organisation of perspectives which necessarily throws certain ideas out of focus. The sociology of deviance has characteristically ignored one major quality of crime, its capacity to inflict distress upon people. Not all crimes impose suffering, and not all forms of inflicted suffering are illegal, but the criminal law is conventionally held to be concerned with the regulation of damage to the physical or material self. In its neglect of that quality, sociology has distorted its analysis of a number of problems. One such problem, that of motivation, is examined in this paper. It is argued that many deviant acts produce discomfort in others and a description of motives must comprehend how that discomfort is defined and tolerated by the deviant.
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