NCJ Number
209893
Date Published
2005
Length
200 pages
Annotation
This book provides an overview of street crime, offering a detailed and accessible account of the phenomenon, placing it in its historical, theoretical, and political context.
Abstract
In exploring the phenomenon of street crime, this book provides historical context in which to situate contemporary concerns about street robbery, reviewing how different traditions in criminology have sought to account for the problem, and developing a framework of analysis that will attempt to explain street crime’s contemporary rise in British society. The book is divided into three sections. The first section contextualizes the problem of street robbery by examining the history of the street robber as he evolved and developed in British society since the Middle Ages. In the second section, how street robbery has been studied is examined with an alternative framework of analysis developed. In the third and last section, this revised or alternative model is applied to account for the contemporary rise in street crime. In conclusion, the book argues against a social response that criminalizes young people for an offense intimately connected with the rise of a consumer society into whose values the young are ruthlessly socialized, but denies many the capacities to consume legitimately. A socially just response is one predicated upon a politics designed to incorporate them. References and index