Social Reaction to Deviance and Its Effects on Crime and Criminal Careers

Abstract

IThe emergence of the social control perspective in the study of crime and criminal careers has accelerated the movement from a conception of criminology as almost exclusively preoccupied with pathogenetic explanations of crime and delinquency to a sociology of deviance which seeks to locate the study of crime and delinquency in a much broader and more complex perspective concerned with the processes whereby different forms of deviance are defined, imputed, acted out and subjected to social control. The propositions most germane to the emergence of this perspective are that (a) deviance is a property conferred upon, rather than inherent in, behaviour, and (b) that we are at present likely to learn much more about crime and delinquency by studying processual characteristics that these phenomena share with forms of deviance which fall outside the scope of the criminal law. The result has been a momentous enlargement and enrichment of the scope of criminology. The issues of defining and enforcing the criminal law are now regarded as in themselves problematic, and not