What is meant by crime, crime prevention and crime control? Who defines the acts which are deemed as criminal? Who devises the sanctions and who acts as agents of social control? This timely and challenging book brings together a group of leading international criminologists from all sides of the political spectrum. They first examine the formation and implementation of official crime prevention and control policies. In the second part they look at a range of critical perspectives which explore the definition of crime and discuss proposals for its prevention and control.

What is meant by crime, crime prevention and crime control? Who defines the acts which are deemed as criminal? Who devises the sanctions and who acts as agents of social control? This timely and challenging book brings together a group of leading international criminologists from all sides of the political spectrum. They first examine the formation and implementation of official crime prevention and control policies. In the second part they look at a range of critical perspectives which explore the definition of crime and discuss proposals for its prevention and control.

Crime control has risen rapidly up the social and political agendas to become a central feature of western societies. As inequalities in society have increased, so the actual and perceived risks of crime and other social ills have grown rapidly for all sections of society. Crime has become a central issue to governments, and no longer just a technical operation of law enforcement and adjudication. This book is concerned with issues arising from these developments. Top criminologists from Britain, the USA and Australia explore the links between crime and risk through a range of themes, from the depiction of crime in the media to the dilemmas of policing, to the new punitiveness of criminal justice systems and the custodial warehousing of the poor and excluded. Crime, Risk and Justice will be of interest to students, academics and practitioners with an interest in crime and crime control and the place they have in modern society.

Community-based crime control has become one of the principal policy responses to crime and disorder across western societies, and is regarded now as one of the keys to successful crime prevention and reduction. The aim of this book is to bring together findings from case studies of community-based crime control in England as a means of examining the prospects for this approach, its evolving relationship with criminal justice and social policies, and to assess the lessons internationally that can be drawn from this in the theory, research methods, politics and practice of crime control. At the same time the book advances an important new conceptual framework for understanding community-based crime control, focusing on an understanding of the diversity of control and preventative strategies, the locally particular conditions in which they are conducted, and the degree of choices open to local political actors involved in their conduct. Understanding diversity in this way is central to drawing lessons about the transferability of crime control theory and practice from one social context to another, avoiding the naïve emulation of practices in different contexts.

This book is a collection of pathbreaking essays by the foremost criminologists currently working in the UK. It contains up-to-the-moment essays on New Labour and crime control, the changing face of the East End of London, developments in restorative justice, and current controversies over the legal justification for torture. The contributors include Stanley Cohen (Folk Devils and Moral Panics; States of Denial); Robert Reiner (The Politics of the Police); Frances Heidensohn (Women and Crime); Nicola 978-0-19-920840-1HLA Hart); and Rod Morgan (Oxford Handbook of Criminology).

This book is a comprehensive account of crime prevention policy in England and Wales. It examines crime prevention policy under the Conservative Government and examines the direction that the newly elected Labour administration is taking. Particular attention is paid to the years 1995 to 1997. The book goes beyond the Home Office and examines the roles of the Police, Probation, Crime Concern, NACRO, the Local Government Association and the role of the national Community Safety Network in national crime prevention policy making. It examines how some agencies influence policy and how others have struggled to have a voice. The methods used to conduct the research include interviewing key persons involved in national crime prevention policy making; distributing questionnaires to police and probation officers of all ranks in Boroughville; and analyzing documents from various organizations such as the Police Probationer Training manual and minutes to the Association of Chief Police Officers sub-committee on crime prevention from their inaugural meeting in September 1986 until May 1995.

The editors examine politics, crime, and criminal justice in the US against a background of attempts to re-establish political accountability for the criminal justice process. Most of the articles are based on original field research across a large number of jurisdictions and approaches. 'Politics' is here defined as the relations of power and influence that occur between those who are professionally involved in the criminal justice system, and those who are part of the political apparatus.

An important understanding of the role public opinion plays in crime prevention policy "Defund the police.” This slogan became a rallying cry among Black Lives Matter protesters following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020. These three words evoke a fundamental question about America’s policy priorities: should the nation rely predominantly upon the branches of the criminal justice system to arrest, prosecute, and imprison offenders, or should the nation prioritize fixing structural causes of crime by investing more heavily in the infrastructure and institutions of disadvantaged communities? To put it simply, do Americans actually prefer punishment over crime prevention? The Politics of Crime Prevention examines American public opinion about crime prevention in the twenty-first century with a particular focus on how average citizens would choose to prioritize resources between the criminal justice system and community-based institutions. Kevin H. Wozniak analyzes differences of opinion across lines of race, social class, and political partisanship, and investigates whether people’s willingness to invest in communities depends upon the kind of communities that would receive money. This book moves beyond criminologists’ typical focus on public opinion about punishment that follows acts of crime to instead examine public attitudes toward crime prevention. In this brilliant and compelling study, Wozniak reveals that politicians profoundly underestimate the American public’s desire to prioritize community investment and that it is long past time to help communities thrive instead of turning to the criminal justice system to respond to every social problem.

The underlying theme of the book is that a qualitative change has taken place in the politics of crime control in the UK since the early 1990s. It provides an overview of recent government initiatives in the field of crime and punishment, reviewing both the policies themselves, the perceived problems and issues they seek to address, and the broader social and political context in which this is taking place.

Foundational and renowned study of how politicians and others use crime rates -- and most of all the public perception of street crime, whether or not it is accurate -- for their own purposes. Dr. Scheingold also provides a theoretical and historical basis for his views. The follow-up to the landmark book The Politics of Rights, this text is both supported in research and accessible and interesting to readers everywhere. Features new 2010 Foreword by Berkeley law professor Malcolm Feeley. A work that is both "timely and timeless," writes Feeley, it "is important for what it says -- and how it says it -- about American crime and crime policy, as well as American political culture. It speaks truth to power today as much as it did when it was first published." As recently noted by Amherst College's Austin Sarat, Scheingold "was quite simply one of the world's leading commentators on law and politics."