Questioning Crime and Criminology

This is a text for criminology students designed to take them to the heart of the contradictions, confusions and blurred boundaries around the subject of crime - about what crime is, about social regulation and control, and about social responsibility. It focuses on the key questions and issues underpinning them in contemporary definitions, representations and explanations of crime. It aims to question the platitudes and cliches surrounding public discussion of crime, by acknowledging the individual, social and political frameworks within which we explore crime and criminality. At the same time this book seeks to explore the nature of criminology as a discipline in order to better understand the key issues explored in the book. It assumes that for students to understand crime and criminology they need to understand the wider societal and sociological implications of all crime related phenomena, and not just explore individual, psychological meanings. The key issues selected for examination are this seen as essential to this wider framework which those concerned with crime require in order to interpret information about crime, as well as to make more intelligent sense of individual crimes and criminals.