Author: Edited by Rowland Atkinson
ISBN No: 978-0-415-73323-6
Review date: 16/12/2025
No of pages: 254
Publisher: Routledge
Publisher URL:
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415733236/
Year of publication: 18/07/2014
Brief:
Shades of Deviance: A Primer on Crime, Deviance and Social Harm, edited by Rowland Atkinson. Published 2014 by Routledge. Visit www.routledge.com. Ppaerback, 254 pages, ISBN 978-0-415-73323-6.
price
£16.99
The Handbook of Security, the magisterial collection of thinking on private security and crime prevention, is about to come out in a second edition. If it’s too heavy (literally or intellectually) or too pricey, you can try Shades of Deviance as its sort of little brother.
The idea behind the book is neat – 56 very short chapters on ‘crime, deviance and social harm’ topics. If you are one of those people or are at one of those times in your life where you fret that you are not doing something to improve yourself each day, three minutes first thing in the morning or last thing at night will be enough to take in a chapter. The disadvantage of such a treatment is that each author has hardly any room to develop an arguement. Mark Monaghan, for instance, in his chapter on corporate crime, has space only for some remarks on definitions, and can you guess which famous case he names? Some readers may object that Monaghan like others in academia seems to treat business or certainly big corporates as near-criminal (or ’a blurred distinction between illegality and legality’ as he puts it). Likewise the chapter on white-collar crime barely has room to say anything beyond it’s a crime difficult to pin it down. The answer incidentally to the famous case is: Nick Leeson.
Thus it’s the chapters on smaller subjects such as jaywalking (crossing the road where you are not supposed to) that are more suited to this brief treatment. Some chapters may infuriate; such as the one on protest by a sociologist that seems to suggest the rioters around England of August 2011 were protesters rather than looters.
A neat touch is that each chapter offers, besides a few references for further reading, a film or documentary to watch. In fairness, the editor Rowland Atkinson closes the book (mainly by UK university criminologists) by describing it, rightly, as ‘only a starting point’, whether it’s for teenage students, or workers for whom the study of crime is a vocation. One of the many uses of this book for the private security reader is that it will provoke thought on what is and what isn’t the business of someone in private security – sexting and cyber-bullying? Tattoos? Cheating? Loitering? Nudity? Begging?
Visit http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415733236/
