Pioneers in Contemporary Criminology – serie

Building Modern Criminology collects four decades of theoretical essays and research papers by David Greenberg, a sociologist pulled away by his political experiences during the Vietnam War from a career in theoretical high energy physics into criminology. The papers take up critical questions in the study of crime, including the explanation of group differences, the nature of criminal careers, and historical trends in violence. Other papers address the historical development of criminal prohibitions, modes of punishment, and the effectiveness of sanctions in preventing crime. These seminal efforts have helped to build a logically coherent, empirically grounded criminology that understands the criminal law, patterns of crime and social responses to it in their historically-specific, social contexts. This volume is indispensable for students, teachers and working criminological researchers engaging with cutting-edge issues in contemporary criminology.

David Downes' early work on delinquency in East London made an original contribution to the comparative study of anomie and subcultural theory, and social policy on education and employment. His research and writing went on to include the study of gambling, drugs policy and the state of criminological theory. His later work broke new ground in detailed, cross-national, comparative analysis of criminal justice and penal policy, in particular in relation to England and the Netherlands. A related endeavour was to contribute (with Rod Morgan) to the burgeoning study of the politics of crime control. He was a founding member of the National Deviancy Conference in 1968 and of the Mannheim Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice at the LSE in 1989. He edited the British Journal of Criminology from 1985 until 1990. His most recent work (with Tim Newburn and Paul Rock) has been on the official history of criminal justice policy in England and Wales 1960-1997.

Thinking about Punishment pulls together the key writings by Michael Tonry on penal policy trends in western countries, racial and ethnic disparities, and sentencing policies, practices, and theories. Recent research in the past few decades shows that these topics are inextricably interrelated. Tonry argues that the distinct historical and cultural characteristics of a country offer the best explanation of national patterns of punishment at any one time, and over time. More general theories and models fall apart when applied to individual national experiences. In the United States, the key factors explaining both penal policy trends and sentencing patterns and policies include historical patterns of race relations, obsolete constitutional arrangements, moral attitudes related to the continental expansion of the United States and the country's fundamentalist Protestant religious origins. Comparable - but different - characteristics explain other countries' experiences. This excellent collection of Michael Tonry's work is essential reading for anyone interested in penal policy and criminal justice.

A Criminological Imagination contains a selection of key articles from Pat Carlen's research studies of magistrates' courts and women's imprisonment together with a range of other articles on social control, discourse analysis, ideology, punishment, criminology and critique. They are all informed by an assumption that while criminal justice must remain imaginary in societies based upon unequal and exploitative social relations, one task of a criminological imagination might be to suggest why this is so, and how things could be otherwise. This is an invaluable collection for anyone interested in crime, justice and injustice and the social, political and academic contexts in which knowledge of them is constructed.

Criminology lost a world leader with the untimely death of Richard Ericson in 2007. Ericson was one of the most prolific, influential and widely cited criminologists of his generation, producing monumental and pathbreaking works on how the criminal justice system and other key institutions attempt to control crime, manage risk and produce security. This volume, edited by three of Professor Ericson's colleagues and co-authors, presents a sampling of Ericson's acclaimed work on such topics as juvenile justice, policing, the courts, the media, the insurance industry, and national security. The book is required reading for scholars interested in understanding the dynamics of crime, risk and security and for those eager to learn more about one of the field's most important and innovative researchers and scholars.

Building Modern Criminology collects four decades of theoretical essays and research papers by David Greenberg, a sociologist pulled away by his political experiences during the Vietnam War from a career in theoretical high energy physics into criminology. The papers take up critical questions in the study of crime, including the explanation of group differences, the nature of criminal careers, and historical trends in violence. Other papers address the historical development of criminal prohibitions, modes of punishment, and the effectiveness of sanctions in preventing crime. These seminal efforts have helped to build a logically coherent, empirically grounded criminology that understands the criminal law, patterns of crime and social responses to it in their historically-specific, social contexts. This volume is indispensable for students, teachers and working criminological researchers engaging with cutting-edge issues in contemporary criminology.

David Downes' early work on delinquency in East London made an original contribution to the comparative study of anomie and subcultural theory, and social policy on education and employment. His research and writing went on to include the study of gambling, drugs policy and the state of criminological theory. His later work broke new ground in detailed, cross-national, comparative analysis of criminal justice and penal policy, in particular in relation to England and the Netherlands. A related endeavour was to contribute (with Rod Morgan) to the burgeoning study of the politics of crime control. He was a founding member of the National Deviancy Conference in 1968 and of the Mannheim Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice at the LSE in 1989. He edited the British Journal of Criminology from 1985 until 1990. His most recent work (with Tim Newburn and Paul Rock) has been on the official history of criminal justice policy in England and Wales 1960-1997.

Thinking about Punishment pulls together the key writings by Michael Tonry on penal policy trends in western countries, racial and ethnic disparities, and sentencing policies, practices, and theories. Recent research in the past few decades shows that these topics are inextricably interrelated. Tonry argues that the distinct historical and cultural characteristics of a country offer the best explanation of national patterns of punishment at any one time, and over time. More general theories and models fall apart when applied to individual national experiences. In the United States, the key factors explaining both penal policy trends and sentencing patterns and policies include historical patterns of race relations, obsolete constitutional arrangements, moral attitudes related to the continental expansion of the United States and the country's fundamentalist Protestant religious origins. Comparable - but different - characteristics explain other countries' experiences. This excellent collection of Michael Tonry's work is essential reading for anyone interested in penal policy and criminal justice.

Paul Rock began studying sociological criminology in 1961 and his intellectual history has run parallel to and in conversation with the evolution of the discipline over that long period. He became a professional scholar when symbolic interactionism, sociological phenomenology and 'labelling theory' were taking form within criminology, and it is to those ways of viewing the social world that he still clings, although he has sought also to reflect critically upon them as time went by. Having completed a DPhil dissertation on debt collection as a moral career, and largely as a matter of serendipity, he was to take to empirical research just as policies for victims of crime were being developed by governments across the developed world and, finding himself embedded as a visitor in a Canadian federal criminal justice ministry when a federal-provincial task force was being mooted, he was able to embark on the first of a sequence of field studies of policy-making centred chiefly on victims. Those two interlaced preoccupations, theoretical and empirical, continually informed much, if not all, of his subsequent work, contributing to what has been, in effect, a running series of comparative ethnographies of government decision-making about the role of the victim in and around the criminal justice system.

A Criminological Imagination contains a selection of key articles from Pat Carlen's research studies of magistrates' courts and women's imprisonment together with a range of other articles on social control, discourse analysis, ideology, punishment, criminology and critique. They are all informed by an assumption that while criminal justice must remain imaginary in societies based upon unequal and exploitative social relations, one task of a criminological imagination might be to suggest why this is so, and how things could be otherwise. This is an invaluable collection for anyone interested in crime, justice and injustice and the social, political and academic contexts in which knowledge of them is constructed.

Criminology lost a world leader with the untimely death of Richard Ericson in 2007. Ericson was one of the most prolific, influential and widely cited criminologists of his generation, producing monumental and pathbreaking works on how the criminal justice system and other key institutions attempt to control crime, manage risk and produce security. This volume, edited by three of Professor Ericson's colleagues and co-authors, presents a sampling of Ericson's acclaimed work on such topics as juvenile justice, policing, the courts, the media, the insurance industry, and national security. The book is required reading for scholars interested in understanding the dynamics of crime, risk and security and for those eager to learn more about one of the field's most important and innovative researchers and scholars.

Malcolm Feeley’s work is well-known to scholars around the world and has influenced two generations of criminologists and legal scholars. He has written extensively on crime and the legal process and has published numerous articles in law, history, social science and philosophy journals; two of his books, The Process is the Punishment and Court Reform on Trials, have won awards. This volume brings together many of his better-known articles and essays, as well as some of his lesser-known but nevertheless important contributions, all of which share the common theme of the value of the rule of law, albeit a more sophisticated concept than is commonly embraced. The selections also reveal the full range of his interests and the way in which his research interests have developed.

Stanley Cohen (1942-2013) has proven to be one of the most influential figures in the field of criminology and human rights within the last 40 years. His prolific work contributes not only to the study of crime, deviance and control but also to human rights. This volume brings together a broad selection of Cohen’s published works which collectively testify to his lasting contribution to criminology and to the wide variety of themes with which Cohen was involved. Topics included in the collection are: reactions to deviance - including moral panics (from the late 1960s till the mid-1970s); punishment and social control (from the early 1970s till the late 1980s); and reactions to human rights violations - including denial (from the late 1980s onwards). In addition, the volume contains a biographical memoir written by Paul Rock which offers essential contextual information on Cohen’s personal and professional background as well as a complete bibliography of Cohen’s published works from 1966-2014.

This collection of essays on transnational crime and policing covers a broad range of themes: the relationship between global policing and the transnational-state-system; the impact of advanced technologies on policing practice; the changing morphology of occupational policing subculture; and the transnational practices of police agencies. The essays include case studies and are based on empirical fieldwork that began in the early 1990s and continued for over a decade well into the post 9-11 period. This collection also provides valuable accounts of the 'secret social world' of transnational police, demonstrates that the developmental trajectory of transnational practices was already established prior to the 'age of Homeland Security' and addresses the controversial issue of how transnational policing in all of its complex manifestations might be made politically accountable in the interests of the general global commonwealth.

Paul Rock began studying sociological criminology in 1961 and his intellectual history has run parallel to and in conversation with the evolution of the discipline over that long period. He became a professional scholar when symbolic interactionism, sociological phenomenology and 'labelling theory' were taking form within criminology, and it is to those ways of viewing the social world that he still clings, although he has sought also to reflect critically upon them as time went by. Having completed a DPhil dissertation on debt collection as a moral career, and largely as a matter of serendipity, he was to take to empirical research just as policies for victims of crime were being developed by governments across the developed world and, finding himself embedded as a visitor in a Canadian federal criminal justice ministry when a federal-provincial task force was being mooted, he was able to embark on the first of a sequence of field studies of policy-making centred chiefly on victims. Those two interlaced preoccupations, theoretical and empirical, continually informed much, if not all, of his subsequent work, contributing to what has been, in effect, a running series of comparative ethnographies of government decision-making about the role of the victim in and around the criminal justice system.