Crime and Society

This book offers a wide-ranging, international exploration of the many different ways in which crime impacts on social processes. It draws on a wide range of countries and cultures including India, Israel, Nigeria, Turkey, the USA, and Britain and Ireland. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Social Science.

Much of a society’s resources are devoted to dealing with, or preparing for the possibility of, crime. The dominance of concerns about crime also hint at the broader implications that offending has for many different facets of society. They suggest that rather than being an outlawed subset of social activity, crime is an integrated aspect of societal processes. This book reviews some of the direct and indirect social impacts of criminality, proposing that this is worthwhile, not just in terms of understanding crime, but also because of how it elucidates more general social considerations.

A range of studies that examine the interactions between crime and society are brought together, drawing on a wide range of countries and cultures including India, Israel, Nigeria, Turkey, and the USA, as well as the UK and Ireland. They include contributions from many different social science disciplines, which, taken together, demonstrate that the implicit and direct impact of crime is very widespread indeed.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Social Science.