The Problem of Crime

This second edition of The Problem of Crime offers a comprehensive analysis of some of the most important developments in the study of crime. The book considers how the criminological gaze has shifted its focus from a preoccupation with ′crimes of the streets′ to examining also the serious social harms and injuries associated with crime in the city, child abuse, domestic violence, organized crime, corporate crime, political violence, hate crime and crimes of the state. The book also emphasizes the necessity of studying the staging and representation of crime in the news media and popular culture. In doing so The Problem of Crime highlights the ways that criminologists are currently challenging and reformulating the concept of crime.

Drawing on a wide range of explanatory and illustrative material, the contributors interrogate the proposition that there are universally agreed conceptions of what constitutes the crime problem. A persistent and widespread public concern with crime suggests that everyone knows what it is. However, each chapter in this book shows that ′crime′ carries a range of meanings and understandings that are open to disputation, and which shift historically and culturally.

Ranging over a wide variety of issues, this fully revised and updated edition will be essential reading for students of criminology, criminal justice, socio-legal studies, social policy and sociology, and also for readers with a general interest in crime.

The Problem of Crime is a course text for the Open University course, Crime, Order and Social Control (D315).

 

John Muncie is Emeritus Professor of Criminology at the Open University, UK. He is the author of Youth and Crime (5th edition, Sage, 2021), and he has published widely on issues in comparative youth justice and children’s rights, including the co-edited companion volumes Youth Crime and Justice and Comparative Youth Justice (Sage, 2006). He has produced numerous Open University texts and readers, including Crime: Local and Global (Willan, 2010), Criminal Justice: Local and Global (Willan, 2010), The Problem of Crime (2nd edition, Sage, 2001), Crime Prevention and Community Safety (Sage, 2001) and Imprisonment: European Perspectives (Harvester, 1991). He has also contributed nine volumes to the The Sage Library of Criminology (Sage, 2007–2009). He is co-editor of the Sage journal Youth Justice: An International Journal.

Eugene McLaughlin is Professor of Criminology and co-director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Research. He is also a member of the Centre for Law Justice and Journalism. He completed his postgraduate criminology studies at the University of Cambridge and the University of Sheffield. Eugene has held various academic appointments including at the University of Hong Kong, the Open University and the University of Southampton. He has also been Visiting Professor at the Department of Sociology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, the Department of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. He is an associate editor of Crime, Media and Cultureand is on the editorial board of Criminal Justice Matters. He has served on the editorial boards of the British Journal of Criminology, Critical Social Policy, the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice and was co-editor of Theoretical Criminology.