Author: Carrabine, Cox, Fussey, Hobbs, South, Thiel and Turton
ISBN No: 978-0-415-64080-0
Review date: 05/12/2025
No of pages: 587
Publisher: Routledge
Publisher URL:
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415640800/
Year of publication: 14/04/2014
Brief:
Criminology: A sociological introduction
price
£32.99
Heavy – in weight and in the tone of writing – is a new edition of an introduction to criminology.
In fairness this book has far more ground to cover; for instance it has only room for one chapter of 22 pages on ‘crime and the media’. This book, too, is up to date enough to include Edward Snowden, though it’s aimed at a student audience, judging by the splatterings of citations of authors. If you want to pick up a book about the subject to learn a bit, or to see whether a master’s course is for you, this is not that book. Instead, this book is to buy if you have signed up to a course, and want something to fall back on when you come to study, though if you really want a show-off textbook, one to file on your shelf at work facing visitors, you want the hardback of Criminology by Tim Newburn, reviewed in September 2013. This will score pretty high in the show-off stakes, however, especially if you insert bookmarks (towards the back of the book – a bookmark at the front will suggest that you haven’t got very far).
Green crime?
One quibble that crops up with other criminologists is that they seem to want to widen their remit for instance by claiming that the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger was ‘state-initiated corporate crime’. Wasn’t it just an accident, albeit one that showed up safety failings? And how useful is the branch of ‘green criminology’ or crimes against the enviornment, that gets a whole chapter to itself? To the book’s credit it does ask whether we really need a ‘green criminology’ and indeed asks whether it’s in fact part of white-collar crime, as waste dumping for instance may well involve bribes and corruption.
Criminology: A sociological introduction by Carrabine, Cox, Fussey, Hobbs, South, Thiel and Turton. Third edition, published 2014 by Routledge, paperback, 587 pages, £32.99, ISBN 978-0-415-64080-0. Visit www.routledge.com.
