Course-focused and comprehensive, the Textbook on series provides an accessible overview of the key areas on the law curriculum. This chapter, which summarises the preceding discussions and presents some final thoughts, suggests that we have now entered into a period of substantial change and progress in the field of criminology. Many of the people working in this area are now better equipped to make fuller use of statistical methods. Technological advances—and especially the development of the computer—have also revolutionised both the amount of material that can be collected and, even more, the ways in which it can be analysed and manipulated.
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Andrew Sanders, Richard Young, and Mandy Burton
Course-focused and comprehensive, the Textbook on series provides an accessible overview of the key areas on the law curriculum. This chapter considers psychological explanations for criminality. The discussions cover the constituents of the personality; formation of the super-ego; balancing the id, ego, and super-ego; ‘normal’ criminals; extroversion and neuroticism; criticism of psychoanalytical theories; the normal criminal personality; and assessment of dangerousness and criminality.
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Course-focused and comprehensive, the Textbook on series provides an accessible overview of the key areas on the law curriculum. This chapter examines terrorism and State violence. It addresses two key questions: Is terrorism criminal? What issues are raised by the responses of governments to their sharply heightened perception of terrorism as a significant threat? On the first question, it is argued that while most acts seen as terrorist can fall under, and be dealt with by normal criminal legislation, there are at least two large areas of complication and ambiguity. On the second question of the legislative responses aimed at controlling terrorism, the chapter focuses on the extent to which, both nationally and internationally, it becomes impossible for governments to avoid confronting the crucial issue of balance.
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Course-focused and comprehensive, the Textbook on series provides an accessible overview of the key areas on the law curriculum. This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to introduce students to the broad study of criminology. The study begins at the end of the nineteenth century and considers theories that have gained credence over the past century or so. It then discusses two important aspects to many theories and the policies used by States in addressing crime, over the period studied. First, are offenders acting entirely out of choice or free will, and can thus be blamed and called to account for their actions? Second, are offenders less volitional in that their choices are limited through structural or social factors which tend to exclude or marginalise some groups or individuals? An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
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Matthew Williams and David Wall
This chapter examines the nature of cybercrime and its implications for criminology. It is organized as follows. The first part traces the evolution of the Internet as an environment for the emergence of cybercrime. The second considers the various conflicting definitional problems of cybercrime and offers a method of resolving them. The third part outlines the problems with measuring cybercrime before providing an indication of the scale of the problem. The fourth part briefly explores how those problems are being resolved. The fifth part looks at the governance and regulation of cybercrime, while the final part provides an overview of the various theoretical explanations.
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Steve Tombs
This chapter examines the emergence of the concept of corporate crime, discussing its meaning and reviewing the extent to which it represents a crime problem. It then considers various dimensions of corporate crime—its visibility, causation, and control—questioning society's will to censure and punish company directors and other ‘rogue’ capitalists.
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This chapter considers the debates surrounding the relationships between economic conditions and crime. It examines the links between poverty, inequality, and crime, and discusses concepts such as the underclass and social exclusion. For many, integrating people into work is central to combating social exclusion. At the centre of this debate lie not only matters of power and inequality, but also the need to question the nature of paid work and the position it takes within capitalist society.
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Derek Kirton
This chapter examines youth crime and responses to it. It discusses the key principles around which youth justice has evolved and how the balance between them has changed over time. The chapter considers some of the main theories and models that have been put forward to explain youth crime, including patterns linked to social divisions based on class, ethnicity, and gender. Attention is also given to recent ‘moral panics’, such as young people's use of weapons, gang activity, and involvement in the 2011 riots. Finally, a review of contemporary youth justice policy and debate regarding its future direction is provided.
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Jeff Ferrell and Jonathan Ilan
This chapter focuses on the cultural significance of crime. It examines the way in which crime and culture intertwine within the lived experiences of everyday life, and argues that a host of urban crimes are perpetrated by actors for whom transgression serves a number of purposes. The chapter charts a world of underground graffiti artists, gang members, street muggers, and other ‘outsider’ criminals, whose subcultures are increasingly the subject of media, corporate, and political interest.
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This chapter examines the link between crime and media. It summarizes major themes and debates that have shaped the research agenda, and considers some less well-rehearsed issues such as the changing global communications marketplace, the development of new media technologies, and the significance of these for understanding the connections between crime and media. The chapter is organized as follows. The first section offers some background information and addresses the crucial question of why exploring media images of crime and control is important. The second section considers how scholars have researched crime and media, and presents an overview of the main findings. The third section examines the dominant theoretical and conceptual tools that have been used to understand and explain media representations of crime. The final section considers the evidence for the influence of media representations, both on criminal behaviour and fear of crime.
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Emma Wincup and Peter Traynor
This chapter examines the relationship between crime and drug and alcohol use. The first part focuses on drug use and addresses three key issues: (a) the nature and extent of drug use; (b) the relationship between drug use and crime; and (c) strategies for reducing drug-related crime. The second part explores the same issues in relation to alcohol use.
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Azrini Wahidin
This chapter explores the links between gender and crime, charts the emergence of feminist perspectives within criminology, examines the different kinds of crimes in which men and women are involved, and considers the complex and changing relationship between masculinity(ies), femininity(ies), and crime. It deconstructs how these relations have been typically understood in criminological theory, and looks at the different ways in which men and women are dealt with by the criminal justice system.
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Keith Hayward and Craig Webber
This chapter, which introduces the ways in which psychological research has contributed to the understanding of crime and the criminal justice system. It combines a general review of some of the more prominent psychological explanations of criminal behaviour with some brief examples of how this work came to be employed in criminological theory and practice. At various intervals, the chapter also adopts a more reflexive stance in a bid to develop some critical insights into the way that ‘criminological psychology’ is portrayed and perceived within the popular imagination.
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Course-focused and comprehensive, the Textbook on series provides an accessible overview of the key areas on the law curriculum. This chapter examines the influence of social factors on criminality, considering factors such as ecology, poverty, unemployment, and lower-class culture. It argues that despite a strong statistical connection, it is not possible to prove a causal connection between crime and social factors. In particular, none of the studies can explain why men seem to be so badly affected and women so little affected.
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Course-focused and comprehensive, the Textbook on series provides an accessible overview of the key areas on the law curriculum. This chapter examines theories on female offending, which include biological, hormonal, and psychological theories; learning theories; masculinity/femininity theories; strain theories; and control theories. Traditional mainstream criminology views male criminality as ‘normal’ and something that merely needs to be kept within reasonable bounds. Female criminality is, however, abnormal, unexpected, and portrayed as pathological and irrational. It is argued that mainstream criminology fails to use social explanations of criminality to explain why women offend or are more conforming than their male counterparts. The most promising ideas so far come from control theories and strain theories, so long as these are applied in a gender-neutral manner.
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Andrew Sanders, Richard Young, and Mandy Burton
Course-focused and comprehensive, the Textbook on series provides an accessible overview of the key areas on the law curriculum. This chapter examines, from both an historical and a contemporary perspective, the assertion that there are biological explanations for crime. It first discusses the birth of positivism and new ideas in biological positivism, and then considers the genetic basis of crime and criminality, covering family studies, twin studies, and adoption studies.
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Course-focused and comprehensive, the Textbook on series provides an accessible overview of the key areas on the law curriculum. This chapter examines the way in which society might persuade individuals to be law abiding. It looks at the social structures that may help law-abiding behaviour: by implication if they are absent, criminality might well arise. The discussions cover early control theories; individual control; sociological control theories; control balance; facilitating and choosing criminality; community-based origins of conformity; official or institutional control agents; and evaluation of control theories.
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This chapter discusses how theories from biology and psychology can help in understanding crime. It studies individual positivism: that is, those aspects of positivist criminological explanations that look for differences between criminal and non-criminal populations. Biological and psychological positivists believe that by measuring biological and psychological differences between offenders and non-offenders they will discover a clear explanation of criminal behaviour, a truth that explains criminal actions. When researchers discovered physical or biological differences between offenders and non-offenders they tended to assume that those characteristics were causative and explained the behaviour. However, there is a big jump between finding differences and assuming that the difference explains the behaviour. The chapter traces the journey of biological and psychological positivist thinking from its roots in the 19th century through to the approaches in the 21st century where these biological and psychological traits are merely seen as one factor which may increase the likelihood of criminality rather than causing it.
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This chapter discusses what crime is. No matter how universally its ideas and regulations are accepted, it is important to understand and not lose sight of the fact that crime is a social construct. Because crime is socially constructed, ideas of unacceptable and criminal behaviour alter across cultures and over time. Many suggest that what is known as the ‘harm principle’ might be the best standard by which we should decide whether an activity should be criminal. This principle holds that if conduct is not harmful to others it should not be criminal, even if others strongly dislike it. The chapter also looks at the concept of deviance and identifies: what kinds of activities are disapproved of (seen as deviant) and why; which of these are criminalised and why; what the criminal law may reveal about society and what matters to it.
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This chapter examines the rehabilitation of offenders. Much discussion of crime and criminality focuses on the culpability of the offender, the management and control of crime, and the nature and legitimacy of punishment. However, there is another strand of criminological inquiry (and practice) which is more concerned with understanding offenders, appreciating ‘what makes them tick’, and seeking out tools and methods for reintegrating them into society as conventional law-abiding citizens. In effect, such approaches are concerned with identifying the causes and consequences of criminal behaviour and developing interventions which will enable offenders to change their behaviours and thought processes to enable them to take advantage of legitimate opportunities and to live decent lives. The chapter explores some of the beliefs and assumptions which underlie this kind of approach to crime and criminality. It considers some of the implications in terms of criminal justice practices and evaluates the outcomes of rehabilitative approaches. Finally, the chapter reflects on some of the limitations of this perspective on crime, both empirically and theoretically.
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