The questions that animate this collection of essays concern the challenges that are posed for criminology by the economic, cultural, and political transformations that have marked late 20th century social life.
Paul Knepper discusses the difference social policy makes, or can make, in any response to crime. He also considers the contribution of criminology to the debates on major social policy areas, such as housing, education, employment, health and family.
From a look at classics like Psycho and Double Indemnity to recent films like Traffic and Thelma & Louise, Nicole Rafter and Michelle Brown show that criminological theory is produced not only in the academy, through scholarly research, but also in popular culture, through film. Criminology Goes to the Movies connects with ways in which students are already thinking criminologically through engagements with popular culture, encouraging them to use the everyday world as a vehicle for theorizing and understanding both crime and perceptions of criminality. The first work to bring a systematic and sophisticated criminological perspective to bear on crime films, Rafter and Brown's book provides a fresh way of looking at cinema, using the concepts and analytical tools of criminology to uncover previously unnoticed meanings in film, ultimately making the study of criminological theory more engaging and effective for students while simultaneously demonstrating how theories of crime circulate in our mass-mediated worlds. The result is an illuminating new way of seeing movies and a delightful way of learning about criminology.
Criminal Justice Theory, Second Edition is the first and only text, edited by U.S. criminal justice educators, on the theoretical foundations of criminal justice, not criminological theory. This new edition includes entirely new chapters as well as revisions to all others, with an eye to accessibility and coherence for upper division undergraduate and beginning graduate students in the field.
For courses in Introduction to Criminology and Crime and Society. Taking a sociological perspective, this book offers award-winning coverage of criminology and highlights issues of race, ethnicity, gender and social class throughout. Designed in a four-color format, this edition includes a new chapter on classical and neoclassical theories, over 160 recent references and unique chapters on political crime and public opinion, crime and the media. Moving beyond simple “get tough” approaches, the book emphasizes the need to understand social causes of criminal behavior in order to significantly reduce it.
Social learning theory has been called the dominant theory of crime and delinquency in the United States, yet it is often misrepresented. This latest volume in the distinguished Advances in Criminological Theory series explores the impact of this theory. Some equate it with differential association theory. Others depict it as little more than a micro-level appendage to cultural deviance theories. There have been earlier attempts to clarify the theory's unique features in comparison to other theories, and others have applied it to broader issues. These efforts are extended in this volume, which focuses on developing, applying, and testing the theory on a variety of criminal and delinquent behavior. It applies the theory to treatment and prevention, moving social learning into a global context for the twenty-first century. This comprehensive volume includes the latest work, tests, and theoretical advances in social learning theory and will be particularly helpful to criminologists, sociologists, and psychologists. It may also be of interest to those concerned with current issues relating to delinquency, drug use/abuse, and drinking/alcohol abuse.
The Encyclopedia of Social Theory contains over 500 entries varying from concise definitions of key terms and short biographies of key theorists to comprehensive surveys of leading concepts, debates, themes and schools. The object of the Encyclopedia has been to give thorough coverage of the central topics in theoretical sociology as well as terms