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various times, enforcement officials may decide to make an all-out attack on some particular kind of
deviance, such as gambling, drug addiction, or homosexuality. It is obviously much more dangerous to
310 engage in one of these activities when a drive is on than at any other time. (In a very interesting study of
crime news in Colorado newspapers, Davis found that the amount of crime reported in Colorado
newspapers showed very little association with actual changes in the amount of crime taking place in
315 Colorado. And, further, that people's estimate of how much increase there had been in crme in Colorado
was associated with the increase in the amount of crime news but not with any increase in the amount of
crime).
(31) The degree to which an act will-be treated as deviant depends also on who commits the act and who
320 feels he has been harmed by it. Rules tend to be applied more to some persons than others. Studies of
juvenile delinquency make the point clearly. Boys from middle-class areas do not get as far in the legal
process when they are apprehended as do boys from slum areas. The middle-class boy is less likely, when
325 picked up by the police, to be taken to the station; less likely when taken to the station to be booked; and it
is extremely unlikely that he will be convicted and sentenced. This variation occurs even though the
original infraction of the rule is the same in the two cases. Similarly, the law is differentially applied to
330 Negroes and whites. It is well known that a Negro believed to have attacked a white woman is much more
likely to be punished than a white man who commits the same offense; it is only slightly less well known
335 that a Negro who murders another Negro is much less likely to be punished than a white man who commits
murder. This, of course, is one of the main points of Sutherland's analysis of white-collar crime: crimes
committed by corporations are almost always prosecuted as civil cases, but the same crime committed by
an individual is ordinarily treated as a criminal offense.
340 (32) Some rules are enforced only when they result in certain consequences. The unmarried mother
furnishes a clear example. Vincent points out that illicit sexual relations seldom result in severe punishment
345 or social censure for the offenders. If, however, a girl becomes pregnant as a result of such activities, the
reaction of others is likely to be severe. (The illicit pregnancy is also an interesting example of the
differential enforcement of rules on different categories of people. Vincent notes that unmarried fathers
escape the severe censure visited on the mother).
350
(33) Why repeat these commonplace observations? Because, taken together, they support the
proposition that deviance is not a simple quality, present in some kinds of behavior and absent in others.
Rather, it is the product of a process which involves responses of other people to the behavior.
355 The same behavior may be an infraction of the rules at one time and not at another; may be an infraction
when committed by one person, but not when committed by another; some rules are broken with impunity,
360 others are not. In short, whether a given act is deviant or not depends in part on the nature of the act (that
is, whether or not it violates some rule) and in part on what other people do about it.
(34) Some people may object that this is merely a terminological quibble, that one can, after all, define
365 terms any way he wants to and that if some people want to speak of rule-breaking behavior as deviant
without reference to the reactions of others,they are free to do so. This, of course, is true. Yet it might be
worthwhile to refer to such behavior as rule-breaking behavior and reserve the term deviant for those
370 labeled as deviant by some segment of society. I do not insist that this usage be followed. But it should be
clear that insofar as a scientist uses «deviant» to refer to any rulebreaking behavior and takes as his subject
of study only those who have been labeled deviant, he will he hampered by the disparities between the two
categories.
375 (35) If we take as the object of our attention behavior which comes to be labeled as deviant, we must
recognize that we cannot know whether a given act will be categorized as deviant until the response of
others has occurred. Deviance is not a quality that lies in behavior itself, but in the interaction between the
person who commits an act and those who respond to it.
From Howard J. Becker, Outsiders, Studies in the Sociology of Deviance, (1963)
STUDENT POWER IN MIDDLE AGES
by Allan B. Cobban
1 Student power is virtually coeval with the emergence of the medieval universities. In southern Europe
it became endemic, in one form or another, for about 200 years. The motives that gave rise to medieval