Criminology A Sociological Understanding

PREFACE Welcome to this sociological introduction to the field of criminology! The successful first edition of this book emphasized the need to understand the social causes of crime in order to be able to significantly reduce crime. I liken this approach to that followed by the field of public health. If crime were a disease like cancer, we would naturally try to determine what was causing it so that we could prevent people from getting it. Although it's important to treat people who already have cancer, there will always be more cancer patients unless we discover its causes and then do something about these causes. The analogy to crime is clear: Unless we discover the causes of crime and do something about them, there will always be more criminals. Unfortunately, this is not the approach the United States has taken during the past few decades. Instead it has relied on a "get tough" approach to the crime problem that relies on more intensive policing, longer and more certain prison terms, and the building of more and more prisons. The nation's prison and jail population soared and reached 2 million as the new century began. Although crime did decline during the 1990s, criminologists dispute whether this decline stemmed from this "get tough" approach or, instead, from an improved economy, a decline in illegal drug trafficking, and other factors. As the 1990s ended, many criminologists even began to warn that the surge in prisoners could be setting the stage for a crime increase down the line, as almost all of these prisoners, penniless and without jobs and embittered by their incarceration, will one day be returned to their communities. In offering a sociological understanding of crime, this book suggests that the "get tough" approach is short-sighted since it ignores the roots of crime in the social structure and social inequality of society. To reduce crime, we must address these structural conditions and appreciate the role that factors such as race and ethnicity, gender, and social class play in criminal behavior. For criminology courses like my own, housed in sociology departments, it is especially important that criminology students acquire the sociological understanding that this book offers. But this understanding is also important for criminology students in courses housed in criminal justice departments. If crime cannot be fully understood without appreciating its structural context, then students in both sociology and criminal justice departments who do not develop this appreciation have only an incomplete understanding of the reasons for crime and of the most effective strategies to reduce it. In presenting a sociological perspective on crime and criminal justice, this book highlights issues of race and ethnicity, gender, and social class in every chapter and emphasizes the criminogenic effects of the social and physical features of urban neighborhoods. This second edition continues to include certain chapters that remain uncommon in other criminology texts, including Chapter 2 on "Public Opinion, the News Media, and the Crime Problem," Chapter 13 on "Political Crime," and Chapter 17 on "How Can We Reduce Crime?" In addition, the book's criminal justice chapters, Chapter 15 on "Policing: Dilemmas of Law Enforcement in Democratic Society" and Chapter 16 on "Prosecution and Punishment," continue to address two central themes in the sociological understanding of crime and criminal justice: (1) the degree to which race and ethnicity, gender, and social class affect the operation of the criminal justice system, and (2) the extent to which reliance on the criminal justice system can reduce the amount of crime. These two themes in turn reflect two more general sociological issues: the degree to which inequality affects the dynamics of social institutions, and the extent to which formal sanctions affect human behavior. The second edition of this book has been thoroughly revised. It iBarkan, Steven E. is the author of 'Criminology A Sociological Understanding', published 2000 under ISBN 9780130896438 and ISBN 0130896438.