Download or read book The Myth of the Crime Decline written by Justin Kotzé and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-20 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Myth of the ‘Crime Decline’ seeks to critically interrogate the supposed statistical decline of crime rates, thought to have occurred in a number of predominantly Western countries over the past two decades. Whilst this trend of declining crime rates seems profound, serious questions need to be asked. Data sources need to be critically interrogated and context needs to be provided. This book seeks to do just that. This book examines the wider socio-economic and politico-cultural context within which this decline in crime is said to have occurred, highlighting the changing nature and landscape of crime and its ever deepening resistance to precise measurement. By drawing upon original qualitative research and cutting edge criminological theory, this book offers an alternative view of the reality of crime and harm. In doing so it seeks to reframe the ‘crime decline’ discourse and provide a more accurate account of this puzzling contemporary phenomenon. Additionally, utilising a new theoretical framework developed by the author, this book begins to explain why the ‘crime decline’ discourse has been so readily accepted. Written in an accessible yet theoretical and informed manner, this book is a must-read for academics and students in the fields of criminology, sociology, social policy, and the philosophy of social sciences.
Download or read book The Great American Crime Decline written by Franklin E. Zimring and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-05 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many theories--from the routine to the bizarre--have been offered up to explain the crime decline of the 1990s. Was it record levels of imprisonment? An abatement of the crack cocaine epidemic? More police using better tactics? Or even the effects of legalized abortion? And what can we expect from crime rates in the future? Franklin E. Zimring here takes on the experts, and counters with the first in-depth portrait of the decline and its true significance. The major lesson from the 1990s is that relatively superficial changes in the character of urban life can be associated with up to 75% drops in the crime rate. Crime can drop even if there is no major change in the population, the economy or the schools. Offering the most reliable data available, Zimring documents the decline as the longest and largest since World War II. It ranges across both violent and non-violent offenses, all regions, and every demographic. All Americans, whether they live in cities or suburbs, whether rich or poor, are safer today. Casting a critical and unerring eye on current explanations, this book demonstrates that both long-standing theories of crime prevention and recently generated theories fall far short of explaining the 1990s drop. A careful study of Canadian crime trends reveals that imprisonment and economic factors may not have played the role in the U.S. crime drop that many have suggested. There was no magic bullet but instead a combination of factors working in concert rather than a single cause that produced the decline. Further--and happily for future progress, it is clear that declines in the crime rate do not require fundamental social or structural changes. Smaller shifts in policy can make large differences. The significant reductions in crime rates, especially in New York, where crime dropped twice the national average, suggests that there is room for other cities to repeat this astounding success. In this definitive look at the great American crime decline, Franklin E. Zimring finds no pat answers but evidence that even lower crime rates might be in store.
Download or read book Uneasy Peace written by Patrick Sharkey and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the late ’90s to the mid-2010s, American cities experienced an astonishing drop in violent crime, dramatically changing urban life. In many cases, places once characterized by decay and abandonment are now thriving, the fear of death by gunshot wound replaced by concern about skyrocketing rents. In Uneasy Peace, Patrick Sharkey, “the leading young scholar of urban crime and concentrated poverty” (Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The New Urban Crisis) reveals the striking effects: improved school test scores, because children are better able to learn when not traumatized by nearby violence; better chances that poor children will rise into the middle class; and a marked increase in the life expectancy of African American men. Some of the forces that brought about safer streets—such as the intensive efforts made by local organizations to confront violence in their own communities—have been positive, Sharkey explains. But the drop in violent crime has also come at the high cost of aggressive policing and mass incarceration. From Harlem to South Los Angeles, Sharkey draws on original data and textured accounts of neighborhoods across the country to document the most successful proven strategies for combating violent crime and to lay out innovative and necessary approaches to the problem of violence. At a time when crime is rising again, the issue of police brutality has taken center stage, and powerful political forces seek to disinvest in cities, the insights in this book are indispensable.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America written by Barry Latzer and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2017-06-27 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling case can be made that violent crime, especially after the 1960s, was one of the most significant domestic issues in the United States. Indeed, few issues had as profound an effect on American life in the last third of the twentieth century. After 1965, crime rose to such levels that it frightened virtually all Americans and prompted significant alterations in everyday behaviors and even lifestyles. The risk of being mugged was a concern when Americans chose places to live and schools for their children, selected commuter routes to work, and planned their leisure activities. In some locales, people were afraid to leave their dwellings at any time, day or night, even to go to the market. In the worst of the post-1960s crime wave, Americans spent part of each day literally looking back over their shoulders. The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America is the first book to comprehensively examine this important phenomenon over the entire postwar era. It combines a social history of the United States with the insights of criminology and examines the relationship between rising and falling crime and such historical developments as the postwar economic boom, suburbanization and the rise of the middle class, baby booms and busts, war and antiwar protest, the urbanization of minorities, and more.
Download or read book The City That Became Safe written by Franklin E. Zimring and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-11 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses many of the ways that New York City dropped its crime rate between the years of 1991 and 2000.
Download or read book Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 written by United States and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Illusion of Order written by Bernard E. Harcourt and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2005-02-15 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to challenge the broken-windows theory of crime, which argues that permitting minor misdemeanors, such as loitering and vagrancy, to go unpunished only encourages more serious crime. The theory has revolutionized policing in the United States and abroad, with its emphasis on policies that crack down on disorderly conduct and aggressively enforce misdemeanor laws. The problem, argues Bernard Harcourt, is that although the broken-windows theory has been around for nearly thirty years, it has never been empirically verified. Indeed, existing data suggest that it is false. Conceptually, it rests on unexamined categories of law abiders and disorderly people and of order and disorder, which have no intrinsic reality, independent of the techniques of punishment that we implement in our society. How did the new order-maintenance approach to criminal justice--a theory without solid empirical support, a theory that is conceptually flawed and results in aggressive detentions of tens of thousands of our fellow citizens--come to be one of the leading criminal justice theories embraced by progressive reformers, policymakers, and academics throughout the world? This book explores the reasons why. It also presents a new, more thoughtful vision of criminal justice.
Download or read book The Myth of America s Decline Politics Economics and a Half Century of False Prophecies written by Josef Joffe and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "While it may be catnip for the media to play up America as a has-been, Josef Joffe, a ... German commentator and Stanford University academic, [proposes] that Declinism is not a cold-eyed diagnosis but a device in the style of the ancient prophets ... Gloom is a prophecy that must be believed so that it will turn out wrong. Joffe [posits that] 'economic miracles' that propelled the rising tide of challengers flounder against their own limits. Hardly confined to Europe alone, Declinism has also been an especially nifty career builder for American politicians, among them Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan, who all rode into the White House by hawking 'the end is near'"--Dust jacket flap.
Download or read book The Better Angels of Our Nature written by Steven Pinker and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 834 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think this is the most violent age ever seen. Yet as bestselling author Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true.
Download or read book The End of Policing written by Alex S. Vitale and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The massive uprising following the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020--by some estimates the largest protests in US history--thrust the argument to defund the police to the forefront of international politics. It also made The End of Policing a bestseller and Alex Vitale, its author, a leading figure in the urgent public discussion over police and racial justice. As the writer Rachel Kushner put it in an article called "Things I Can't Live Without", this book explains that "unfortunately, no increased diversity on police forces, nor body cameras, nor better training, has made any seeming difference" in reducing police killings and abuse. "We need to restructure our society and put resources into communities themselves, an argument Alex Vitale makes very persuasively." The problem, Vitale demonstrates, is policing itself-the dramatic expansion of the police role over the last forty years. Drawing on first-hand research from across the globe, The End of Policing describes how the implementation of alternatives to policing, like drug legalization, regulation, and harm reduction instead of the policing of drugs, has led to reductions in crime, spending, and injustice. This edition includes a new introduction that takes stock of the renewed movement to challenge police impunity and shows how we move forward, evaluating protest, policy, and the political situation.
Download or read book Crime Prevention written by Adam Sutton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crime Prevention: Principles, Perspectives and Practices introduces readers to the theory and practice of crime prevention. Now in its third edition, this book argues for a combination of social and situational/environmental crime prevention strategies as more effective alternatives to policing, criminal justice and 'law and order' approaches. Contending that the principles of prevention can be applied to persistent crime problems such as alcohol-related violence and family and domestic violence, the book explores the prevention of other broad societal harms including terrorism, cybercrime and threats to the environment. The book features useful pedagogy such as case studies, discussion questions and extension topics, as well as new chapters on environmental crime and counter-terrorism. Written by a team of experts in the field of criminology, Crime Prevention remains an authoritative introduction to crime prevention in Australia, and is an invaluable resource for criminology students.
Download or read book Mass Incarceration on Trial written by Jonathan Simon and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mass Incarceration on Trial examines a series of landmark decisions about prison conditions-culminating in Brown v. Plata, decided in May 2011 by the U.S. Supreme Court-that has opened an unexpected escape route from this trap of "tough on crime" politics. This set of rulings points toward values that could restore legitimate order to American prisons and, ultimately, lead to the demise of mass incarceration. This book offers a provocative and brilliant reading to the end of mass incarceration.
Download or read book Crime Harm and Consumerism written by Steve Hall and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-01-08 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a collection of cutting-edge essays on the relationship between crime, harm and consumer culture. Although consumer culture has been addressed across the social sciences, it has yet to be fully explored in criminology. The editors bring together an impressive list of authors with original ideas and a fresh perspective to this field. The collection first introduces the reader to three sets of ideas which will be especially useful to students and researchers piecing together theoretical frameworks for their studies. New concepts such as pseudo-pacification, the materialist libertine and the commodification of abstinence can be used as foundation stones for new explanatory criminological analyses in the 21st century. The collection then moves on to present case studies based on rigorous empirical work in the fields of consumption and debt, ‘outlaw’ gangs, illegal drug markets, gambling, the mentality that drives investment fraudsters and the relationship between social media and state surveillance. These case studies showcase the strength of the research skills and knowledge these scholars offer to the field of criminology. Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars in criminology, sociology, cultural studies, social theory and those interested in learning about the effects of consumer culture in modern society.
Download or read book The Mismeasure of Crime written by Clayton J. Mosher and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique look at the problems in measuring crime both historically and internationally Filled with real world examples derived from media reports on crime trends and other sources, this fully updated Second Edition analyzes the specific errors that can occur in the three most common methods used to report crime—official crime data, self report, and victimization studies. For each method, the authors examine strengths and weaknesses, the fundamental issues surrounding accuracy, and the method′s application to theoretical and policy research. Throughout the book, the authors demonstrate the factors that underlie crime data and illustrate the fundamental links between theory, policy, and data measurement.
Download or read book America s Teenagers Myths and Realities written by Sharon L. Nichols and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-07-19 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The media's presentation suggests that American teenage culture today is the most violent, sexual, and amoral youth culture in history. In this book, Nichols and Good deconstruct the negative images held by large numbers of adults. Recognizing that many teenagers are left by adults to socialize themselves and the consequences of this "careless indifference," the authors' goal is to influence a more positive view leading to stronger social policies and better services, resources, and programs to meet the needs of America's youth. Unique features of America's Teenagers--Myths and Realities: Media Images, Schooling, and the Social Costs of Careless Indifference include: *powerful analytic lenses used to revisit typical depictions of youth; *a wealth of information brought to bear on understanding teenagers' behavior; and *consideration of a broad range of adolescent behaviors across critical socializing settings. The book begins with a discussion of the continuing myth of adolescence--how and why youth are devalued, and an overview of current beliefs about youth drawn from two 1990s Public Agenda Polls. This is followed by chapters on youth and the media, and the pressures that youth face in various dimensions of their lives. Topics include youth violence; the sex lives of teenagers; tobacco, alcohol, drugs, and teens; healthy living and decision making; working teens; and youth and education. The concluding chapter pulls together themes generated throughout the book and provides examples of policies that would underscore the value of viewing youth as a social investment. General guidelines are provided for teachers, parents, policymakers, and citizens to facilitate responding to youth in meaningful, proactive ways that improve the quality of life for teenagers and the broader society.
Download or read book The Harms of Work written by Lloyd, Anthony and published by Bristol University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-09 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the percentage of people working in the service economy continues to rise, there is a need to examine workplace harm within low-paid, insecure, flexible and short-term forms of ‘affective labour’. This is the first book to discuss harm through an ultra-realist lens and examines the connection between individuals, their working conditions and management culture. Using data from a long-term ethnographic study of the service economy, it investigates the reorganisation of labour markets and the shift from security to flexibility, a central function of consumer capitalism. It highlights working conditions and organisational practices which employees experience as normal and routine but within which multiple harms occur. Challenging current thinking within sociology and policy analysis, it reconnects ideology and political economy with workplace studies and uses examples of legal and illegal activity to demonstrate the multiple harms within the service economy.
Download or read book Theorizing Criminality and Policing in the Digital Media Age written by Julie B. Wiest and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-25 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sponsored by the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (CITAMS),this volume in Emerald Studies in Media and Communications features social science research on criminality, policing, and mass media in the digital age.
