Criminology and Criminal Justice

The Oxford Handbook of Crime and Justice provides a comprehensive introduction to and an overview of the operation of the American criminal justice system. It is divided into five sections covering the purposes and functions of the system, its problems and priorities, and its main institutionspolice and policing, prosecution and sentencing, and community and institutional corrections. This text brings together a mix of established, senior scholars and up-and-coming writers to provide authoritative contributions on hot-button topics, from the justice system's handling of immigration and terrorism to racial profiling, parole, and re-entry, as well as bread-and-butter issues like incapacitation, jails, drugs, and police strategy. As countries vary substantially in the detailed operation of some agencies and few scholars have detailed knowledge of the operation of two or more countries' systems, the focus is principally, though not exclusively, on the American justice system.

The Oxford Handbook of Crime and Public Policy offers a comprehensive examination of crimes as public policy subjects. Much of the scholarly literature and principal books on criminal justice and crime control policy take the operations of the criminal justice system, the causes of crime and delinquency, theories about crime and justice, and crime prevention as the central topics for study and policy analysis. But law enforcement and public officials create policy responses to specific crimes, not broad categories of offenses. In order to develop the most effective policies, one needs to understand why particular crimes occur and what approaches might best prevent them or minimize the harm they cause. Each article in this book explains why crimes happen, how often, and what we know about efforts to prevent or control them. The book presents a wide-ranging overview and analysis of violent and sexual crimes, property crimes, transactional crimes, transnational crimes, and crimes against morality. The crimes investigated range from often-discussed offenses (homicide, auto theft, sexual violence) to those that only recently began to receive attention (child abuse, domestic violence, environmental crimes); it includes new crimes (identity theft, cybercrime) as well as age-old crimes (drug abuse, gambling, prostitution).

How can a society prevent—not deter, not punish—but prevent crime? Criminal justice prevention, commonly called crime control, aims to prevent crime after an initial offence has been committed through anything from an arrest to a death penalty sentence. These traditional means have been frequently examined and their efficacy just as frequently questioned. Promising new forms of crime prevention have emerged and expanded as important components of an overall strategy to reduce crime. Crime prevention today has developed along three lines: interventions to improve the life chances of children and prevent them from embarking on a life of crime; programs and policies designed to ameliorate the social conditions and institutions that influence offending; and the modification or manipulation of the physical environment, products, or systems to reduce everyday opportunities for crime. Each strategy aims at preventing crime or criminal offending in the first instance—before the act has been committed. Each, importantly, takes place outside of the formal criminal justice system, representing an alternative, perhaps even socially progressive way to reduce crime. This comprehensive publication reviews up-to-date research on crime prevention. Bringing together top scholars in criminology, public policy, psychology, and sociology, the volume includes critical reviews of the main theories that form the basis of crime prevention, evidence-based assessments of the effectiveness of the most important interventions, and cross-cutting essays that examine implementation, evaluation methodology, and public policy.

This book deals with criminological theory, criminology, and criminal justice. It addresses a wide range of topics relevant to criminology, including socioeconomic factors that contribute to crime such as biology, community and inequality, emotions, immigration, social institutions, social learning, social support, parenting, peer networks, street culture, and market economy. It also examines the developmental criminology perspective and the developmental risk factors for crime and delinquency across five key risk domains (individuals, family, peers, schools, and community). Moreover, it reviews criminological research that ascribes criminal behavior to the interaction between individuals and street culture; Cesare Lombroso's views about the causes and correlates of crime as delineated in his book, Criminal Man ; the state of contemporary gang ethnography; Travis Hirschi's major contributions to the methods of analysis in criminology; the role of gender in delinquency; the link between coercion and crime; the psychology of criminal conduct; violence in drug markets in suburbs and the code of the suburb; the impact of imprisonment on reoffending; green criminology; and 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. The book also looks at a variety of theories on criminology, including the rational choice theory, the theory of target search, Robert Agnew's general strain theory, the “Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential” theory developed by David Farrington, routine activity theory, and crime-as-choice theory.

Developmental studies in criminology focus on psychological factors that influence the onset and persistence of criminal behavior, while life-course studies analyze how changes in social arrangements, like marriage, education, or employment, can lead to changes in offending. Though both perspectives are clearly concerned with patterns of offending and problem behavior over time, the literature on each is spread across various disciplines, including criminology and criminal justice, psychology, and sociology. This book offers the first comprehensive review of these two approaches. It aims to be the most authoritative resource on all issues germane to developmental and life-course criminologists. The book provides in-depth critical reviews of the development of offending, developmental and life-course theories, developmental correlates and risk/protective factors, life transitions and turning points, and viable developmental interventions.

The study of how the environment, local geography, and physical locations influence crime has a long history that stretches across a number of research traditions. These include the neighborhood-effects approach developed by the Chicago school of sociology in the 1920s; modern environmental criminology that explains the geographic distribution of crime; the criminology of place, which focuses on crime rates at specific places over time; and a newer approach that attends to the perception of crime and disorder in communities. Aided by new mobile and digital technologies as well as improved data reporting in recent decades, research in environmental criminology has developed at a rapid pace within each of these approaches. Despite these advances, research in the subfield of environmental criminology remains fragmented, and competing theories are often kept apart. This book takes a different approach and integrates the subfield as a whole. It covers the core theoretical and empirical issues of how and why the environment influences the emergence of crime and how crime can affect the environment. The chapters reflect the diversity in research and theory from all over the Western world. In addition to covering traditional criminological research, the book probes how well current theories of environmental criminology contribute to our understanding of new problems and how well theories travel to other areas, such as West Africa, in which cultural differences might lead to different patterns in offending.

The interrelationships among race, ethnicity, and crime have long been the subject of extensive research and considerable debate. Crime problems and disorder have often been attributed to immigrants and oppressed ethnic minorities, including the African Americans in the United States, Afro-Caribbeans in England and Wales, and indigenous populations of Australia, New Zealand, and North America. This handbook explores the links among ethnicity, crime, and immigration in various countries such as the United States, Japan, Canada, France, Italy, Norway, England and Wales, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, and Guatemala. It reviews the extant research on crime committed by and against immigrants, examines the myth of immigrants’ tendency to commit crime, and looks at the historic and contemporary role of race in debates about punishment. It also discusses the interconnected nature of race, crime, and American politics over the past half century, criminal justice systems for indigenous peoples, racial and ethnic patterns in criminality and victimization, the relationship between crime and the law of immigration, the link between race and drugs, the racialization of Latinos in the United States, and racial disparities in prosecution, sentencing, and punishment.

Research on gender, sex, and crime today remains focused on topics that have been a mainstay of the field for several decades, but it has also recently expanded to include studies from a variety of disciplines, a growing number of countries, and on a wider range of crimes. The Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Crime reflects this growing diversity and provides authoritative overviews of current research and theory on how gender and sex shape crime and criminal justice responses to it.  The editors, Rosemary Gartner and Bill McCarthy, have assembled a diverse cast of criminologists, historians, legal scholars, psychologists, and sociologists from a number of countries to discuss key concepts and debates central to the field. The Handbook includes examinations of the historical and contemporary patterns of women's and men's involvement in crime; as well as biological, psychological, and social science perspectives on gender, sex, and crimal activity. Several essays discuss the ways in which sex and gender influence legal and popular reactions to crime. An important theme throughoutThe Handbook is the intersection of sex and gender with ethnicity, class, age, peer groups, and community as influences on crime and justice. Individual chapters investigate both conventional topics - such as domestic abuse and sexual violence - and topics that have only recently drawn the attention of scholars - such as human trafficking, honor killing, gender violence during war, state rape, and genocide. The Oxford Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Crime offers an unparalleled and comprehensive view of the connections among gender, sex, and crime in the United States and in many other countries. Its insights illuminate both traditional areas of study in the field and pathways for developing cutting-edge research questions.

Over the last two decades, researchers have made significant discoveries about the causes and origins of delinquency. Specifically, they have learned a great deal about adolescent development and its relationship to decision-making, about multiple factors that contribute to delinquency, and about the processes and contexts associated with the course of delinquent careers. Over the same period, public officials have made sweeping jurisprudential, jurisdictional, and procedural changes in our juvenile justice systems. The Oxford Handbook of Juvenile Crime and Juvenile Justice presents a compilation of critical reviews of knowledge about causes of delinquency and their significance for justice policy, and about developments in the juvenile justice system to prevent and control youth crime. The first half of the text focuses on juvenile crime and examines trends and patterns in delinquency and victimization, explores causes of delinquency—at the individual, micro-social, and macro-social levels, and from natural and social science perspectives—and their implications for structuring a youth justice system. The second half of the book concentrates on juvenile justice and examines a range of issues—including the historical origins and re-invention of the juvenile court; juvenile offenders' mental health status and considerations of trial competence and culpability; intake, diversion, detention, and juvenile courts; and transfer/waiver strategies—and considers how the juvenile justice system itself influences delinquency.

How offenders make decisions that lead to criminal conduct is a core element of virtually every discussion about crime and law enforcement. What type of information can deter a potential offender? For whom is the prospect of a sanction effective? How can emotions facilitate or impede crime? How does the availability of guns affect behavior in violent conflicts? Do offenders learn to commit crime from the experiences of others? Is crime perpetrated by juveniles always the result of impulsive decisions? How do offenders choose crime targets and locations? The Oxford Handbook of Offender Decision Making covers and integrates contemporary theoretical, methodological, and empirical knowledge about the role of human decision making as it relates to criminal behavior. It provides state-of-the art reviews of the main paradigms in offender decision making, such as rational choice theory and deterrence, but also includes recent approaches such as dual-process models of decision making. It contains up-to-date reviews of empirical research on a wide range of decision types, from criminal initiation and desistance to choice of location, time, target, victim, and modus operandi. It also contains reviews of decision making regarding specific types of crime, including homicide, sexual crime, burglary, and white-collar and organized crime. In addition, it includes comprehensive in-depth treatments of the principal research methods used to study offender decision making, such as experimental designs, observation studies, surveys, offender interviews, and simulations.

This handbook explores organized crime, which it divides into two main concepts and types: the first is a set of stable organizations illegal per se or whose members systematically engage in crime, and the second is a set of serious criminal activities that are typically carried out for monetary gain. The book consists of four parts, the first of which introduces the reader to the concept of organized crime, related theories, history, and research methods. The second part looks at some of the world’s most infamous criminal organizations, including the Italian mafia, the Italian-American mafia, the Russian mafia, the Japanese Yakuza, Mexican drug cartels, the Triads and other forms of Chinese organized crime. The extent to which urban and youth gangs can be considered a form of organized crime is also analyzed, along with the opportunistic structures of organized crime, how state authorities become an actor or even a form of organized crime, and the role of women in organized crime groups and activities. The third part of the handbook focuses on the criminal activities most often associated with organized crime, from extortion and illegal gambling to money laundering, arms trafficking, human trafficking, cybercrime, organized fraud, the provision of illegal goods and services, and exploitation in the sex industry. In the fourth and final part of the handbook, the policies to control organized crime are discussed, focusing on countries such as the United States, Australia and New Zealand, as well as those in Asia and the European Union.

This handbook shows how local police organizations in the United States have been the focus of reform efforts, especially due to a new crisis in the policing environment—terrorism. The problem of terrorism has raised a host of questions about how police should respond to this new threat, and this handbook aims to address these questions. It also discusses the social ill that is the drug market, which is often associated with violence and often occurs in disadvantaged urban communities. Alternative approaches are presented that can be used to address drug crime in these areas, such as problem-oriented policing, which calls for the identification of recurring crime problems; order maintenance policing, which defines and regulates the fair use of public spaces; and community policing, which is considered “a philosophy, not a program.” The rise of zero-tolerance policies in policing has shifted the focus from the problem-solving model to aggressive order-maintenance enforcement. This has led to a call for anti-authoritarian policing; police are urged to use discretion to support their own longstanding institutional interest in plural governance.

The Oxford Handbook on Prisons and Imprisonment provides a rich source of information on institutional corrections around the world, covering the most critical issues facing both inmates and prison staff. The contributors offer theoretically informed and critical discussions of these issues that facilitate more objective and realistic assessments of related problems and their possible solutions. The handbook is the first original volume on prisons and prisoners to cover topics relevant to both the social and behavioral sciences with equal depth paid to each area. Focusing on the impact of these issues on the philosophies of incarceration (retribution, general and specific deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation) is also unique to a single volume, providing a larger picture of their implications. Included are updated discussions of the always popular topics such as conditions of confinement and prisoner subcultures and topics that have taken or are destined to take greater priority in the field such as inmate victimization, special offender populations, prison programs, prisoner re-entry, and privatization. The handbook is divided into six sections corresponding to topic areas identified as major focal points of discussion and research in the field. As such, it provides a single source that bridges social and behavioral science perspectives, providing students with a comprehensive understanding of these topics while providing academics with a knowledge base that will more effectively inform their own research. For practitioners, particularly those in the treatment sector, the book provides an excellent overview of best program practices that are empirically based and research-driven.

It is no secret that America's sentencing and corrections systems are in crisis, and neither system can be understood or repaired fully without careful consideration of the other. This book examines the intertwined and multi-layered fields of American sentencing and corrections from global and historical viewpoints, from theoretical and policy perspectives, and with close attention to many problem-specific arenas. The book brings together a group of preeminent scholars to present state-of-the art research, investigate current practices, and explore the implications of new and varied approaches wherever possible. The volume's contributions bridge the gap between research and policy across a range of topics including an overview of mass incarceration and its collateral effects, explorations of sentencing theories and their applications, analyses of the full spectrum of correctional options, and first-hand accounts of life inside of and outside of prison. Individual articles reflect expertise and source materials from multiple fields including criminology, law, sociology, psychology, public policy, economics, political science, and history. Proving that the problems of sentencing and corrections cannot be addressed effectively or comprehensively within the confines of any one discipline, this volume relates the two central components of America's on-going experiment in mass incarceration.

There has been a significant increase in the focus on sex offending in recent years. This has occurred in both the academic and the public spheres. In attempting to understand sexual offending, this collection recognizes two different discourses that currently operate in relation to sex crime. At the public level there is an explicit focus on regulation and control. At the same time there has been a less public but equally fervent discourse centered on the importance of the assessment and treatment of sexual offenders. The Handbook moves from theoretical explanations to a dissection of who the offenders are, who the victims are, and how offenders are treated and managed; it then proceeds onward, using a sociological lens to examine the social and cultural contexts in which crimes and sexual activities take place. The authors have been encouraged not to give a complete literature review of the topic in hand but rather to tease out the key debates, challenges, and controversies that are pertinent today. These essays can of course be read as standalone pieces for a comprehensive and detailed walk through that topic, but for those wanting a complete introductory journey through the sub-discipline, the 30 essays will provide immense detail and an enriching experience of the state of the discipline in the 21st century.

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice brings together researchers who work on crime and criminal justice in the past with an emphasis on the interaction between history and social sciences. Although working on similar subject matters historians and social scientists are often motivated by different intellectual concerns. Historians seek knowledge about crime and criminal justice to better understand the past. In contrast, social scientists draw on past experiences to build sociological, criminological, or socio-legal knowledge. Nevertheless, researchers from both fields have a shared interest in social theory, in the use of social science techniques for analysis, and in a critical outlook in examining perceptions of the past that shape popular myths and justify criminal justice policies in the present. The Handbook is intended as a guide for both current researchers and newcomers to orient themselves on key aspects of current research from both fields. The Handbook includes thirty-four essays covering theory and methods; forms of crime; crime, gender, and ethnicities; cultural representations of crime; the rise of criminology; law enforcement and policing; law, courts, and criminal justice; and punishment and prisons. The essays concentrate on the Atlantic world, particularly Europe and the United States, during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. All of the authors situate their topic within the wider historiography.

This Handbook brings together the accumulated wisdom of a diverse group of leading scholars on white-collar crime and corporate crime. It begins with an overview of the core themes in the study of white-collar crime. Ensuing chapters explicate the definition of white-collar crime, illuminate the distinguishing demographic, social, and psychological characteristics of white-collar offenders, and carefully dissect the social and economic costs of this form of crime. International in focus, the volume includes incisive analyses of a broad range of white-collar crimes and represents a major advance in white-collar criminology. Cutting-edge criminological theories, ranging from rational choice and opportunity to culture and the life-course perspective, are applied. The political dimensions of white-collar crime are explored through a review of research on public opinion on white-collar crime and punishment and through analyses of the politics of regulation and the difficulties of securing corporate compliance. The theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence regarding alternative white-collar crime control policies are analyzed. These policies that range from responsive regulation to deterrence through criminal sanctioning. Overall, this volume presents a sophisticated analysis of the multifaceted problem of white-collar crime and white-collar crime control, as well as a comprehensive overview of theory and empirical research in this area.