Understanding Criminology: Current Theoretical Debates

• NCJ Number: 184714
• Author(s): Sandra Walklate
• Date Published: 1998
• Length: 162 pages
• Sale Source: Open University Press
• Publication Format: Book (Softbound)
• Publication Type: Historical Overview
• Language: English
• Country: United Kingdom
• Note: Crime and Justice Series

Annotation

This text, intended for undergraduates in criminology and criminal justice, provides a critical overview of the criminological enterprise over the past 20 years.

Abstract

The introductory chapter outlines the key features of criminology, noting that it is a discipline unified by a concern with crime and is multidisciplinary, prompting disagreement and varying emphases. Chapter 2 offers a brief introduction to criminology and the competing theoretical perspectives within criminology prior to the mid-1970's, with the remainder of the chapters focusing on theory that emerged after this time. Chapter 3 considers varieties of "conservative criminology," which can be found in different ways in right- wing thinking about crime. Chapter 4 considers the emergence of "left realism" as a response to these ideas. Each of these various ways of theorizing crime displays criminology's continued attachment to the modernist project and to the production of an associated policy agenda. Some of the most insightful criticism of "left realism" has emerged from those working within a post-modernist framework; Chapter 4 considers some of the features of this critique. Chapter 5 outlines the various ways in which the issue of gender has been rendered more or less visible within the criminological enterprise and identifies the questions that remain unanswered for a criminology that does not have a gendered perspective. The view of Chapters 6 and 7 is that there is much left to be addressed within a criminology with a modernist core. These chapters argue for a criminology that has at its center a concern with social justice. They suggest the extent to which debates about the underclass, for example, or repeat victimization might be better formulated by a criminology so informed. In conclusion, Chapter 8 offers one way of furthering the conceptual apparatus of a criminology that is willing to engage in a self-reflexive critique of its modernist and gendered presumptions. 200 references, a glossary, and a subject index