Understanding Deviance : A Guide to the Sociology of Crime and Rule-Breaking

Downes and Rock's popular textbook, Understanding Deviance, provides the reader with an indispensable guide to criminological theory. It sympathetically outlines the principal theories of crime and rule-breaking, discussing them chronologically, and placing them in their North American and European contexts, confronting major criticisms that have been voiced against them, and constructing defences where appropriate.

The book has been thoroughly revised and brought up-to-date to include new issues of crime, deviance, and theory in the early twenty-first century. It includes new studies in the areas of gang and subcultural theory, further discussion of post-modernism and the "risk society", and assessment of how different approaches address the lengthy fall in crime rate across most democratic and developed societies.

David Downes is Professor Emeritus of Social Administration at the London School of Economics. He is currently working on the causes, character, and consequences of mass imprisonment in the US, and on comparative trends in crime, inequality, the regulation of drug use, welfare services, and criminal justice.

Paul Rock is Professor of Social Institutions in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics. His interests focus on the development of criminal justice policies, particularly for victims of crime, but he has also published articles on criminological theory and the history of crime.