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On the Sociology of Deviance

The people of a community spend most of their lives in close contact with one another, sharing a common sphere of experience which makes them feel that they belong to a special "kind" and live in a special "place".

In the formal language of sociology, this means that communities are boundary maintaining: each has a specific territory in the world as a whole, not only in the sense that if occupies a defined region of geographical space but also in the sense that it takes over a particular niche in what might be called cultural space and develops it's own "ethos" or "way" within that compass. Both of these dimensions of group space the geographical and the cultural, set the community apart as a special place and an environment point of reference for its members.

The only material found in a society for making boundaries is the behavior of its members - or rather, the networks of interactions which link these members together in regular social relations. And these interactions which do the most effective job of locating and publicizing the groups outer edges would seem to be those which take place between deviant persons on the one side and official agents of the community on the other.