I will discuss how individuals are labeled as criminals and others are not. In an article by Erving Goffman he states: “The ruling class tends to dominate the intellectual and ideological life of a society, its notion of true and false, of good and evil” (1993:77). It is the audience, which constitutes the elite class, and not the actor, who determines when a certain behavior is defined as a crime. High-ranking individuals in the ruling class control society and create the rules. Lower class people cannot avoid the deviant label. “As a result, it is often the case that the relatively powerless in a given society, the economically deprived, are more likely to have their behavior characterized as deviant and are less able to resist the charge of deviant than the rich and powerful” (Goode 1993: 103). Individuals with low economic status who commit the same white-collar crimes are targeted as deviants because they lack the power to resist labeling