From prison interviews with violent offenders and a wealth of experience and research, an Australian psychologist explores the complex interaction between crime and culture. Fifteen convicted adult male violent offenders explain their understanding, motivations and rationalisations for their actions in relation to values. This nuanced understanding adds significantly to criminological theory, as well as providing suggestions for better policing, offender management, and rehabilitation.

Saney cogently argues that in the absence of adequate support within social and legal norms, a heavy burden is placed upon the criminal justice system, a burden that it cannot carry. Criminal law and the courts fail to provide for either swiftness or certainty of punishment; police have failed to overcome the basic American distrust of authority to gain the comparable support enjoyed by police in other countries; and the penal system operates under contradictory goals, isolated from public view or support. The final chapter presents a succinct set of proposals for changing the justice system to one that would be humane and more just. Choice This thought-provoking study of the crime problem in America provides an in-depth look at the sociological forces that are dominant in today's society and examines the possible influence of certain contemporary values and perceptions on criminal activity, the quality of justice in the American courts, and the attitude of the general public. The author discusses the various factors that can affect or encourage criminal behavior and relates these directly to the way people feel and respond to the incidence of crime and its punishment, and to a growing lack of confidence in the criminal justice system. Crime in America is first presented in a factual context, followed by a discussion of its cultural influences, and finally with a consideration of its criminal law aspects.

A compelling case can be made that violent crime, especially after the 1960s, was one of the most significant domestic issues in the United States. Indeed, few issues had as profound an effect on American life in the last third of the twentieth century. After 1965, crime rose to such levels that it frightened virtually all Americans and prompted significant alterations in everyday behaviors and even lifestyles. The risk of being mugged was a concern when Americans chose places to live and schools for their children, selected commuter routes to work, and planned their leisure activities. In some locales, people were afraid to leave their dwellings at any time, day or night, even to go to the market. In the worst of the post-1960s crime wave, Americans spent part of each day literally looking back over their shoulders. The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America is the first book to comprehensively examine this important phenomenon over the entire postwar era. It combines a social history of the United States with the insights of criminology and examines the relationship between rising and falling crime and such historical developments as the postwar economic boom, suburbanization and the rise of the middle class, baby booms and busts, war and antiwar protest, the urbanization of minorities, and more.

This book is a comparative quantitative analysis of the administration of justice across four English and three Welsh counties between 1760 and 1830. Drawing on a dataset of over 22,000 indictments, the book explores the similarities and differences between how the so-called Bloody Code was administered between, on the one hand, England and Wales, and, on the other, individual English and Welsh counties. The book is structured in two sections that trace the criminal justice process in England and Wales respectively. The first chapter in each section examines the pattern of indictments in the respective counties, and explores the crimes for which men and women were indicted, the verdicts handed down, and the sentences passed. The second chapter then explores patterns of sentences of death, executions and pardons for those capitally convicted of serious crimes against the person and forms of property offences.

There is no journalistic work more deserving of the designation “story” than news of crime. From antiquity, the culture of crime has been about the human condition, and whether information comes from Homer, Hollywood, or the city desk, it is a bottom about the human capacity for cruelty and suffering, about desperation and fear, about sex, race, and public morals. Facts are important to the telling of a crime story, but ultimately less so than the often apocryphal narratives we derive from them. The Culture of Crime is hence about the most common and least studies staple of news. Its prominence dates at least to the 1830s, when the urban penny press employed violence, sex, and scandal to build dizzying high levels of circulation and begin the modern age of mass media. In its coverage of crime, in particular, the popular press represented a new kind of journalism, if not a new definition of news, that made available for public consumption whole areas of social and private life that the mercantile, elite, and political press earlier ignored. This legacy has continued unabated for 150 years. The book explores new wrinkles in the study of crime and as a mass cultural activity—from exploring the private lives of public officials to dangers posed by constraints to a free press. The volume is prepared with the rigor of a scholarly brief but also the excitement of actual crime stories as such. Throughout, the reader is reminded that crime stories are both news and drama, and to ignore either is to diminish the other. The work delves deeply into current problems without either sentimental or trivial pursuits. It will be a volume of great interest to people in communications research, the social sciences, criminologists, and not least, the broad public which must endure the punishment of crime and the thrill of the crime story alike.

Why do we know every gory crime scene detail about such victims as Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. and yet almost nothing about the vast majority of other hate crime victims? Now that federal anti-hate-crimes laws have been passed, why has the number of these crimes not declined significantly? To answer such questions, Clara S. Lewis challenges us to reconsider our understanding of hate crimes. In doing so, she raises startling issues about the trajectory of civil and minority rights. Tough on Hate is the first book to examine the cultural politics of hate crimes both within and beyond the law. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including personal interviews, unarchived documents, television news broadcasts, legislative debates, and presidential speeches—the book calls attention to a disturbing irony: the sympathetic attention paid to certain shocking hate crime murders further legitimizes an already pervasive unwillingness to act on the urgent civil rights issues of our time. Worse still, it reveals the widespread acceptance of ideas about difference, tolerance, and crime that work against future progress on behalf of historically marginalized communities.

Unsparing and important. . . . An informative, clearheaded and sobering book.—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post (1999 Critic's Choice) Inner-city black America is often stereotyped as a place of random violence, but in fact, violence in the inner city is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. This unwritten set of rules—based largely on an individual's ability to command respect—is a powerful and pervasive form of etiquette, governing the way in which people learn to negotiate public spaces. Elijah Anderson's incisive book delineates the code and examines it as a response to the lack of jobs that pay a living wage, to the stigma of race, to rampant drug use, to alienation and lack of hope.