Fritz Sack

Fritz Sack is a German sociologist and criminologist best known for introducing the labeling approach (Etikettierungsansatz) to the German-speaking world and for his influential contributions to critical criminology, empirical legal sociology, and the study of power, law, and social control. He held professorships at several German universities, most notably at the University of Hamburg, where he played a major role in establishing critical criminology as an academic field in Germany.

Sack is regarded as one of the central figures of German critical criminology. Drawing on the work of Howard Becker, Edwin Lemert, and other labeling theorists, he emphasized that deviance and criminality are not objective qualities of behavior but the result of social reactions, institutional practices, and power relations. His work focused particularly on the role of police, courts, and legal institutions in defining, producing, and managing deviance.

In contrast to etiological theories that search for the causes of criminal behavior within individuals, Sack examined the processes through which certain groups become criminalized while others avoid social and legal sanctions. He argued that systems of social control disproportionately target marginalized populations and thereby reproduce existing social inequalities. His work has had a lasting influence on debates about selective criminalization, punitiveness, penal populism, and the social construction of deviance.