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This chapter provides an overview of the longevity and popular appeal of the crime genre and its relevance to the field of criminology. In our discussion we include such media as novels, television programs, and films that present fictionalized stories about crime, its investigation, and its solutions. We offer a brief history of the crime genre, indicators of its popularity, and a review of expert opinions explaining its appeal. Then we discuss evidence from conversations and surveys that we conducted with academics and other professionals as well as with students about their views of and engagement with crime genre productions. Our data suggest the myriad ways in which audiences actively engage crime fiction.

This essay suggests that activist rhetoric and imprecise language should be discarded when studying gender and violence. Violence against women should be compared to violence against men and not studied in isolation. It should be studied primarily as violence not sexism, based on well-established principles from the social psychology of aggression. Such an approach emphasizes the violent actor’s point of view and the role of interpersonal conflict, self-presentation, grievance, and retribution. Power and control may play a role in violence against men and women, but other motives are also important. In addition, theorizing should consider well-known sex differences in physical size, sexuality, and emotion. Men’s stronger bodies and sexual interests, and women’s greater tendency to get angry, have important implications. Finally, chivalry should be an important element in any discussion of violence against women. Violence against women occurs despite (not because of) societal norms.

Numerous studies carried out over the past two decades suggest that several biological risk factors significantly increase the likelihood for people to commit crime and violence across the lifespan. Researchers trying to understand the relationship between biology and crime have focused on criminal offenders, individuals who display high rates of violent or aggressive behaviors, and those with psychiatric disorders with a strong correlation to criminal behavior, such as psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder. This article summarizes research findings linking neurobiological risk factors with a predisposition to crime, focusing on six domains: genetics, neuroimaging, neuropsychology, psychophysiology, endocrinology and neurotransmitters, and early health risks.

This chapter explores how integrating the science of criminal decision making and contemporary biosocial criminology can benefit our understanding of why people make criminal action decisions and the role of biological factors. It reviews relevant biosocial findings but argues that efforts to link them to criminal decision making are limited by the lack of a strong model of the action process. It then compares how key components of this process—motivation, perception, and choice—are portrayed in models of criminal decision making with what is currently known about their biomechanics. It concludes that models of criminal decision making would benefit from the integration of evidence from the biological sciences and that some common assumptions may need to be reconsidered. It argues that biosocial criminology would benefit from a stronger, more biologically informed model of criminal decision making, which could better explain the role of biological factors in crime causation.

Over the past twenty years, the developmental, life-course framework has emerged as an important means of understanding crime and delinquency. A number of studies tend to focus more on factors that contribute to onset and continuance of criminal careers than their stoppage. Some argue that criminology has fixated too much on trying to elucidate longitudinal offending patterns as series of preordained events playing out over time based on exogenous individual differences. Research has identified a good deal of stability in antisocial behavior and its underlying causes across portions of offenders' lives, along with a fair degree of within-individual change. In 2001, John H. Laub and Robert J. Sampson suggested that desistance, the primary indicator of change in criminal behavior, is the modal pattern in individual offending careers. That observation has become the basis for an empirical benchmark used to evaluate theoretical explanations for offending over the life course. This article highlights ways that developmental, life-course criminologists might enhance their understanding of change.

People who commit burglary, robbery, carjacking, and other serious predatory street crimes are disproportionately young, poor, and male. Notwithstanding the strong link between these demographic characteristics and street crime, not all young, poor, males commit street crimes and not all street criminals are young, poor, or male. No one can tell based on demographic information on criminals why an individual who has no intention of committing a crime one minute suddenly is determined to do so the next. This article describes the socio-emotional context underlying street criminals' decision to move from an unmotivated state to a motivated one. It also examines why someone chooses to commit a particular type of street crime over other possible licit or illicit courses of action. The article concludes by assessing the implications of its findings for criminological theory and criminal justice policy.

In Western countries such as the United States, crime is viewed as chosen behavior. This assumption emerged as the dominant theoretical underpinning of crime control policy-making in the decades encompassing the dawn of the twenty-first century. Routine activity theory is a good example of how contemporary criminological scholars have been drawn to choice models of criminal behavior. The notion of crime as choice also underlies many, if not most, contemporary interpretations of white-collar crime. For instance, theoretical explanations in which the causal importance of variation in criminal opportunities is stressed are based on choice models. Crime-as-choice theory overlaps but is not coextensive with rational choice theory; it differs mainly from the latter by not incorporating an assumption a priori that criminal choices are rational. This article applies the concepts and logic of crime-as-choice theory to explain variation in white-collar crime.

High rates of violence are characteristic of many urban drug markets because the individuals therein abide by a set of informal rules known as the code of the street. This code governs interpersonal conduct that emerges from the social circumstances found in various communities in America. Drug market participants who subscribe to this code view violence as a means to earn respect, status, and security. Not all drug markets are urban, how or exhibit high rates of violence, however. This is probably the reason why researchers have focused disproportionately on violent, inner-city drug markets to account for the conditions that facilitate violence in such environments. This article examines why there is a dearth of violence in drug markets in suburbs, focusing on the cultural context in which such markets operate. It first describes a study of twenty-five young suburban drug dealers before looking at the code of the suburb. It also assesses the code's impact on drug dealing, especially in relation to handling victimization, and concludes by highlighting the relevance of peace for understanding violence.

This article explores the link between coercion and crime and how this link has evolved. It also presents five propositions relating coercion to crime. First, coercion is a primary mechanism in the social reproduction process of class society. Second, coercive messages from the larger culture help to enhance the coercive nature of this process. Third, economic conditions help shape the coerciveness of society. Fourth, long-term changes in crime rates are influenced by shifts in impersonal coercive forces related to economic and cultural changes. Fifth, the ratio of coercion to social support within a society is correlated with the shifting balance of power between capital and labor in continuing class struggles under capitalism.

Using Robert J. Bursik and Harold G. Grasmick's re-specification of social disorganization theory as systemic theory, Dina R. Rose and Todd R. Clear showed how high levels of incarceration, concentrated in poor places, would be expected to have a “tipping point” at which the incarceration would cause crime to go up rather than down. The Rose and Clear model, later called the coercive mobility thesis, treats the removal of residents for incarceration as a major source of instability in poor neighborhoods. Rose and Clear argue that the same sorts of destabilizing and norm-weakening effects that Clifford Shaw and Henry D. McKay originally attributed to residential mobility, would also occur when the cause of the outward migration is incarceration by the state. The coercive mobility thesis assumes that the cycling of people into and out of prison constitutes an important and distinct form of mobility which can harm the communities that are hardest hit by both crime and, perhaps ironically, crime control policies.

One of the most exciting developments in the field of criminology is the emergence of studies that seek to explain variation in crime rates across aggregate social communities. These studies have an underlying theoretical theme: crime rates across communities are strongly correlated with structural inequality, or the stratification of communities on several key socioeconomic dimensions. This article reviews the current state of knowledge on the link between structural inequality and crime rates across communities. Specifically, it looks at theory and research that examines whether and how structural inequality affects crime rates in macro-level social communities such as cities, metropolitan areas, counties, and neighborhoods. It also discusses the notion that dimensions of structural inequality increase crime rates by increasing criminal motivation among those individuals who directly experience deprivation, and that such inequality contributes to crime by creating community-level differences in the extent of collective informal social control.

In recent years, the field of social simulation has been dominated by the individual, or agent-based, computational model (ABM). ABMs provide unique means to explore complex social systems by allowing researchers to construct explicit models of the individual actors and interactions that make them up - people, peer groups, companies, nations, trade, reproduction, victimization, and so on, This chapter aims to provide the reader with a primer in the social simulation method and in particular the application of ABM in the field of environmental criminology. It begins by discussing the rationale behind the ABM approach. Subsequently, drawing on two illustrative simulations, it summarizes fundamental processes involved in designing, constructing, verifying, calibrating, validating, and utilizing ABM. It concludes by discussing some of the overarching strengths and limitations of the approach, and by discussing several areas of research that might aid in furthering the use of ABM within the field of environmental criminology.

Conservation criminology emerges from the environmental movement and the development of green criminology as a subfield within criminology. Conservation criminology builds on this foundation and calls for interdisciplinary theory and methods for addressing legally defined harms as well as risks to human health, wildlife, ecosystems, and the environment. Conservation criminology complements and contributes to the green criminology perspective by integrating theory and methods drawn from criminology, natural resource management, and risk and decision sciences. This essay reviews the development of green and conservation criminology and compares and contrasts the perspectives. The essay then applies these perspectives to the issue of climate change. Conservation criminology, grounded in criminology, natural resource management, and risk perception and decision making, offers systematic tools for assessing and characterizing harm; analyzing risks; weighing costs and benefits; integrating and balancing technical, scientific, and lay perspectives; and informing governance at local and global levels.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, research on gangs was ethnographic in nature, with a strong journalistic approach. However, there has been a shift in the ethnographic study of gangs from serious fieldwork in America to the European setting. This article focuses on the state of contemporary gang ethnography by analyzing three periods of ethnographic research on gangs: the classic era, the “interstitial” period, and the contemporary period. It traces the evolution of the ethnographic approach to the study of youth behavior in the United States over the past century. It also looks at the interstitial period to provide a contrast to the state of gang ethnography in Europe.

This article provides an outline of the history of crime museums, monuments, and crime memorials and suggests how these can be understood as historical, social, and cultural phenomena. First, some common characteristics of crime museums, monuments, and memorials are set out. Second, a short historical outline of the rise of the (crime) museum from the Renaissance period until the twenty-first century is provided, followed by a consideration of crime museums, crime monuments, and memorials as separate categories and objects of study. A selection of examples of crime museums, monuments, and memorials is presented with the aim of showing some particular perspectives on and approaches to the study of crime museums, monuments, and memorials, and their relevance to criminological research.

The Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917 initiated a major transformation of the position of women in Russian society as a result of its stress on universal contribution to economic production. As expectations for women shifted, anxieties about the nature of society and relationships increased. Soviet criminologists addressed these anxieties and helped to reinforce women’s traditional position in Soviet society by emphasizing the backwardness of women and the influence of female physiology on their criminal activity. This chapter traces the ways that Russian and Soviet criminologists adapted European ideas and created new criminological institutions to suit the political, ideological, and environmental conditions in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It then explores how those ideas were applied to explain female criminal deviance, arguing that criminologists remained committed to physiological explanations of female offending even as they embraced sociological interpretations of crime.

This chapter explores crimes affecting the natural environment. Drawing on insights from green criminology—the study by criminologists of environmental harms, laws, and regulation—the chapter examines the impact of environmental crime on the natural environment. It begins with an overview of the theoretical and conceptual lens offered by green criminology in the study of eco-crime and the natural environment before turning to a discussion of natural resources crimes such as illegal logging and wildlife trade. It then considers pollution offenses and the contamination of air, land, and water, along with issues of illegal waste disposal. It also emphasizes the importance of having the right kinds of laws and regulatory mechanisms, as well as the right kinds of environmental law enforcement practices and procedures, in responding to eco-crime. The chapter concludes with an analysis of overarching trends and the challenges involved in confronting environmental crime.

Every research enterprise takes place in a context, political, economic, and technological context. So it is with policing research. This chapter begins by sketching out where the practice of policing is heading, and what we need to do differently, so as to arrive at a roughly envisioned future ethically and in good order. A police presence at all places at all times being impossible, the practical issue is where and when to place officers or their technological surrogates. The chapter considers optimized distribution of effort and resource, given the central aim of fairness in the distribution of crime harm. It illustrates current levels of inequality of victimization, and claims that reducing the current concentration at individual and area levels should be an explicit underpinning vision for policing. It also briefly reviews the relevant literature and its implications.

This chapter explores the ways that historians of crime go about their research. Although many historians are wary, disinterested, or even completely uninterested in describing and discussing the methods of inquiry that have preceded their analysis and have ultimately produced their final research findings, the approaches they take are clearly critical. The chapter therefore explores in detail some of the reasons why historians have kept their methods and underlying philosophies somewhat hidden, and raises a number of interesting methodological questions that ultimately examine the integrity and utility of our everyday practices as crime historians. In particular it explores the techniques utilized in digital research and biographical research which has helped to shape new directions in crime history over the last twenty years.

When asked whether they can predict where crime will occur, most police officers say no. However, most police officers can identify a particular neighborhood where one can possibly be mugged. In the first case, the police officers are asked about crime in general and in an unspecified area, for an undefined purpose. In the second case, they are asked about the risk of a specific crime in very small areas, for the purposes of prevention. Specificity is a key factor in crime prevention, and is evident in places which are very specific geographic locations. This article explores why crime levels are extraordinarily high in some places but low or totally absent in most places, and how place management accounts for this disparity. In particular, it reviews empirical studies and associated theory related to crime at places (that is, addresses, buildings, and land parcels) and the management of these locations. It also discusses extensions of routine activity theory, as well as displacement, diffusion of benefits, and neighborhood effects.