ABSTRACT
A vocal group of criminologists in the United States and Britain have gone a step further in proposing to extrapolate backward from such supposed differences in order to predict and hence pick out in advance those destined to occupy deviant roles. A certain amount of controversy was aroused at the beginning of 1970 when a New York psychiatrist, formerly President Nixon's physician, proposed that psychological tests should be given to ail six-year-olds in the United States to uncover their potential for future criminal behavior. One of the most significant groups in the society responsible for annihilating deviance, in both senses, is the psychiatric profession. If psychological characteristics such as concreteness, extraversion, neuroticism, and the rest are of any meaning at all, they must be related to the processes of becoming a deviant. Another way to emphasize the problematic nature of the concept of deviance is to note that many aspects of deviance are continuous with normal life.
