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Crime and Deviance: Essays and Innovations of Edwin M. Lemert, edited by Charles C. Lemert and Michael F. Winter. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. 310 pp. $85.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-8476-9816-5. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 0-8476-9817-3.
Edwin M. Lemert was the founder of the societal reaction theory of deviant behavior and, as such, was the most important person in the development of what we know as labeling theory. This book was edited by his nephew, Charles C. Lemert, and Michael F. Winter and published in a series on Legacies of Social Thought. It contains some of Edwin Lemert's best known publications, works published in obscure places, and seven previously unpublished papers.
The book opens with a personal introduction by Lemert's nephew. The image of Edwin Lemert presented is that of an iconoclastic scholar whom I would like to have known. As his nephew puts it:
Evil was Ed's game. He meant to explain it-not as a philosopher would but as a hard-bitten old rancher would . . . [E]verything he said, and all that he wrote was fashioned out of years upon years of field work-in prisons, on reservations, in the courts, where he listened to forgers, alcoholics, delinquent children, all others effectively called deviant (p. 13).
The...