I will discuss how individuals are labeled as criminals, and others are not. In an article by Erving Goffman, he said: "The ruling class tends to dominate the intellectual and ideological life of a society, its notion of right and wrong, good and evil" (1993: 77). It is the public, who constitute the elite class, and not the actor, who determines when a certain behavior is defined as a crime. High-ranking individuals from the ruling class control society and create the rules. People from the lower classes cannot avoid the label of deviance. “As a result, it is often the case that the relatively powerless people in a given society, the economically deprived, are more likely to have their behavior defined as deviant and are less able to resist an imputation of deviance 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 are powerless to resist being labeled.