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EIGHTH EDITION
CRIMINOLOGY
A Sociological Understanding
Steven E. Barkan
University of Maine
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Barkan, Steven E., author.
Title: Criminology : a sociological understanding / Steven E Barkan.
Description: Eighth Edition. | Hoboken, NJ : Pearson, [2023] | Revised
edition of the author’s Criminology, [2018] | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022011386 (print) | LCCN 2022011387 (ebook) | ISBN
9780137636181 (paperback) | ISBN 9780137636136 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Crime—Sociological aspects. | Criminology.
Classification: LCC HV6025 .B278 2023 (print) | LCC HV6025 (ebook) | DDC
364—dc23/eng/20220425
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022011386
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022011387
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ISBN 10: 0-13-763618-0

ISBN 13: 978-0-13-763618-1
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Dedication
To Barb,
Dave,
and Joe,
and in memory of my parents
v
▼
Brief Contents
Preface xxi
PART 1
Understanding Crime and Victimization
Chapter 1 Criminology and the Sociological Perspective 1
Chapter 2 Public Opinion, the News Media, and the Crime Problem 17
Chapter 3 The Measurement and Patterning of Criminal Behavior 38
Chapter 4 Victims and Victimization 67
PART 2
Explaining Crime
Chapter 5 Classical and Neoclassical Perspectives 92
Chapter 6 Biological and Psychological Explanations 108
Chapter 7 Sociological Theories: Emphasis on Social Structure 130
Chapter 8 Sociological Theories: Emphasis on Social Process 151
Chapter 9 Sociological Theories: Critical Perspectives 174
PART 3
Criminal Behaviors
Chapter 10 Violent Crime: Homicide, Aggravated Assault, and Robbery 193
Chapter 11 Violence Against Women 223
Chapter 12 Property Crime and Fraud 242
Chapter 13 White-Collar and Organized Crime 260
Chapter 14 Political Crime 286
Chapter 15 Consensual Crime 305
PART 4
Controlling and Preventing Crime
Chapter 16 Policing: Dilemmas of Crime Control in a Democratic Society 327
Chapter 17 Prosecution and Punishment 347
Chapter 18 Conclusion: How Can We Reduce Crime? 367
vi
▼
Contents
NEW TO THIS EDITION XIX

PREFACE XXI
PART 1
Understanding Crime and Victimization
Chapter 1 Criminology and the Sociological Perspective 1
The Sociological Perspective 3
The Mutual Relevance of Sociology and Criminology 4
The Rise of Sociological Criminology 5
Criminal Law: Theoretical Underpinnings and Goals 7
Consensus and Conflict in the Creation of Criminal Law 8
Goals of Criminal Law 9
Criminal Law: Origins, Types of Crime, and Criminal Liability 9
Origins of Criminal Law 9
Types of Crime 10
Criminal Liability 10
Research Methods in Criminology 11
Surveys 11
Experiments 12
Qualitative Research: Observing and Intensive Interviewing 13
Research Using Existing Data 14
Comparative and Historical Research 14
Conclusion 14
Summary 15
Key Terms 15
What Would You Do? 16
Chapter 2 Public Opinion, the News Media, and the Crime Problem 17
Public Opinion about Crime: Laying the Groundwork 19
A Brief Look Back 19
Public Opinion and Crime Policy 19
Overdramatization of Crime by the News Media 20
Crime Waves 21
Overreporting of Violent Crime 22
Violence in the Popular Media 22
Other Problems with Media Coverage 23
People of Color 23
Youths 24
vii
▼
Virtuous Victims 24
Additional Problems in Media Coverage 24
Effects of Media Coverage 25
Public Ignorance 25
Crime and Controversy Should the News Media
Disclose the Names of People Who Report a Rape? 25
Public Fear and Concern 26
Obscuring Underlying Forces 26
Diversion from White-Collar Crime 26
International Focus Crime Is Down in Scotland, but
Many Scots Think Otherwise 26
Racial and Ethnic Stereotyping 27
Research on Public Beliefs about Crime and
Punitiveness 27
Fear of Crime 27
Anger about Crime 31
Seriousness of Crime 32
Punitiveness 33
Research on Views about Criminal Justice 34
Views about the Police 34
Perceptions of Criminal Injustice 35
Views about Crime and Criminal Justice Spending 35
A Final Word on Public Beliefs 35
Conclusion 36
Summary 36
Key Terms 37
Chapter 3 The Measurement and Patterning of Criminal Behavior 38

The Uniform Crime Report and the National Incident-Based
Reporting System 40
How a Crime Becomes Official 40
Critiques of the UCR’s SRS Data and of Two
Alternatives 42
SRS Data 42
NIBRS 44
Calls to Police 44
National Crime Victimization Survey 45
Evaluating NCVS Data 46
Self-Report Studies 47
Critiques of Self-Report Studies 48
Assessing UCR, NCVS, and Self-Report Data 48
Recent Trends in U.S. Crime Rates 49
Geographical, Seasonal, and Climatological Patterning
of Criminal Behavior 50
Geographical Patterns 51
Crime and Controversy Why Did the Crime Rate Drop
After the Early 1990s? 52
International Focus Measuring Crime in Other Nations 52
Seasonal and Climatological Variations 53
Contents viii
▼
Social Patterns of Criminal Behavior 55
Gender and Crime 55
Race, Ethnicity, and Crime 58
Social Class and Crime 61
Age and Crime 62
Conclusion 64
Summary 65
Key Terms 66
Chapter 4 Victims and Victimization 67

Geographical Patterns and Crime Characteristics
of Victimization 69
Some Conceptual Issues 69
Geographical Patterns 70
Crime Characteristics 71
Social Patterns of Victimization 72
Gender, Race, and Ethnicity 73
International Focus The International Crime Victim
Survey 74
Age 75
Household Income 75
Race, Gender, and Age Combined 76
LGBTQ Status 76
Victim–Offender Characteristics 77
The Victim–Offender Relationship: Strangers versus
Nonstrangers 77
The Intraracial Nature of Victimization 78
Understanding Victimization: Situational Explanations 79
Lifestyle and Routine Activities Theories 80
Deviant Lifestyles and Victimization 80
Crime and Controversy Victim Precipitation 81
Physical Proximity and Victimization 82
Understanding Victimization: Individual Traits 82
Low Self-Control and Lack of Prosocial Relationships 82
Childhood Problems 82
Mental Disorder 83
Puberty 83
Repeat Victimization 83
Explaining Sociodemographic Variation in Victimization 83
Victimization of College Students and of People without
Housing 84
Costs and Consequences of Victimization 86
Economic and Medical Costs and Consequences 86
Psychological Consequences 86
Social and Behavioral Consequences 87
Victimization by White-Collar Crime 88
Victims in the Criminal Justice System 88
Victims and Criminal Case Outcomes 89
Contents ix
▼
Conclusion 89
Summary 90
Key Terms 91
PART 2
Explaining Crime
Chapter 5 Classical and Neoclassical Perspectives 92
Understanding Theories of Crime 93
From Theology to Science 94
God and Demons as Causes of Crime and Deviance 95
The Age of Reason 95
The Classical School of Criminology 96
The Rise of Positivism 97
Neoclassical Perspectives 98
Rational Choice Theory 98
Evaluating Rational Choice Theory 99
Deterrence Theory 99
Types of Deterrence 100
Taking a Closer Look at Deterrence 100
International Focus Mandatory Penalties and General
Deterrence in International Perspective 101
Research on Deterrence 102
Crime and Controversy Three-Strikes Laws Strike Out 102
Routine Activities Theory 103
Evaluating Routine Activities Theory 104
Theory and Policy: Classical and Neoclassical
Perspectives 105
Conclusion 105
Summary 106
Key Terms 107
Chapter 6 Biological and Psychological Explanations 108

Biological Explanations 109
Early Biological Explanations 110
Franz Gall: Phrenology 110
Cesare Lombroso: Atavism 110
Earnest Hooton: Biological Inferiority 111
William Sheldon: Body Shapes 112
Contemporary Biological Explanations: Heredity
and Genes 113
Early Research 113
Twin Studies 113
Adoption Studies 114
Molecular Genetics 114
Contents x
▼
Evolutionary Biology 115
Chromosomal Abnormalities 115
Contemporary Biological Explanations: Brain
Abnormalities, Body Chemistry, Nutrition, and Perinatal
and Childhood Problems 115
Brain Abnormalities 115
Neurochemical Factors 116
Neurotransmitters 117
Nutrition and Diet 118
Perinatal Problems 118
Adverse Childhood Experiences 118
Lead and Other Toxins 119
Early Puberty 119
Evaluation of Biological Explanations 119
Crime and Controversy Does Abortion Lower the Crime
Rate? 120
The Value of Research on Maternal and Childhood
Problems 121
Psychological Explanations 121
Psychoanalytic Explanations 122
Moral Development, Intelligence, and Personality 123
Moral Development and Crime 123
Intelligence and Crime 124
Personality and Crime 124
International Focus Psychological Research in New
Zealand 125
Evaluation of Psychological Explanations 126
Abnormality or Normality? 126
Theory and Policy: Biological and Psychological
Explanations 127
Conclusion 128
Summary 128
Key Terms 129
Chapter 7 Sociological Theories: Emphasis on Social Structure 130

The Legacy of Durkheim 131
Social Disorganization and Social Ecology 133
Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay 134
Critiques of Social Disorganization Theory 134
The Revival of Social Disorganization Theory 135
Other Ecological Work 135
Crime and Controversy Closing the Window on
Crime? 136
Anomie Theory and Strain Theory 138
Evaluation of Anomie Theory 139
Defense and Extension of Anomie Theory 139
General Strain Theory 140
International Focus Strain, Immigration, and Rioting in
Europe 141
Contents xi
▼
Subcultural Theories 142
Albert K. Cohen: School Failure and Delinquent
Subcultures 142
Walter B. Miller: Focal Concerns 143
Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin: Differential
Opportunity Theory 144
Marvin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti: The Subculture
of Violence 145
Elijah Anderson: The Code of the Street 146
Prospects for Subcultural Explanations 146
Structural Theories and Gender 146
Theory and Policy: Structural Theories 147
Conclusion 148
Summary 149
Key Terms 150
Chapter 8 Sociological Theories: Emphasis on Social Process 151

Learning Theories 152
Edwin H. Sutherland: Differential Association Theory 154
Other Learning Theories 156
Evaluation of Learning Theories 157
Control Theories 157
Walter Reckless: Containment Theory 157
Gresham M. Sykes and David Matza: Neutralization
and Drift Theory 158
Travis Hirschi: Social Bonding Theory 159
International Focus Social Bonding in Japan 161
Crime and Controversy Does Dropping Out of School
Promote or Reduce Delinquency? 163
Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi: Self-Control
Theory 164
Charles R. Tittle: Control Balance Theory 165
Mark Colvin and Francis T. Cullen: Differential Social
Support and Coercion Theory 165
Life-Course Theories 166
Specific Life-Course Theories 167
The Promise and Problem of Theoretical Integration 169
Theory and Policy: Social Process Theories 170
Conclusion 171
Summary 172
Key Terms 173
Chapter 9 Sociological Theories: Critical Perspectives 174

Labeling Theory 176
The Relativist Definition of Crime and Deviance 176
The Imposition of the Deviant Label 177
The Negative Consequences of Labeling 178
Contents xii
▼
Evaluation of Labeling Theory 179
Crime and Controversy How Should We Deal with
Juveniles in Trouble with the Law? 180
Conflict Theory 181
Consensus and Conflict Perspectives in Sociology 181
Conflict Perspectives in Criminology 181
Evaluation of Conflict Theory 182
Radical Theory 182
Marx and Engels on Crime and Law 182
Willem Bonger: Capitalism, Egoism, and Crime 183
International Focus Crime and the Economy in China,
Vietnam, and Russia 183
Jerome Hall: The Law of Theft 184
William Chambliss: The Law of Vagrancy 184
Contemporary Radical Views on Crime and Law 184
Evaluation of Radical Criminology 185
Left Realism and Peacemaking Criminology 186
Feminist Theories 186
An Overview of Feminist Perspectives in Criminology 186
The Scope of Feminist Theory and Research 187
A Final Word on Feminism 190
Theory and Policy: Critical Perspectives 190
Conclusion 191
Summary 191
Key Terms 192
PART 3
Criminal Behaviors
Chapter 10 Violent Crime: Homicide, Aggravated Assault,
and Robbery 193
Homicide 195
Defining Homicide 195
Patterning and Social Dynamics of Homicide 196
Trends in U.S. Homicide Rates 200
Aggravated Assault 201
Major Aspects of Aggravated Assault 202
Explaining Homicide and Aggravated Assault 202
Why Does the United States Have a Higher Homicide Rate
than Other Wealthy Democracies? 202
Why Are U.S. Homicides and Aggravated Assaults More
Common in Urban Areas than Elsewhere? 203
Why Do Men Commit Almost All Homicides and
Aggravated Assaults? 203
International Focus Lethal Violence in Mexico 204
Why Do Black Americans and Certain Other People of
Color Have Higher Rates of Homicide and Aggravated
Assault? 204
Contents xiii
▼
Robbery 205
Defining Robbery 205
Extent and Patterning of Robbery 205
Types of Robbers 207
Explaining Robbery 207
Special Topics in Violent Crime 208
Violence by Women 208
Workplace Violence 209
Mass Murder and Serial Killing 209
Hate Crime 212
Child Abuse and Elder Abuse 214
Mass Media and Violence 216
Firearms, Crime, and Violence 217
Crime and Controversy Do “Stand Your Ground” Laws
Make Sense? 218
Reducing Violent Crime 220
What History Tells Us 220
Conclusion 221
Summary 221
Key Terms 222
Chapter 11 Violence Against Women 223

Overview: The Gendered Nature of Violent Crime 224
An International Problem 225
Defining Rape and Sexual Assault and Intimate Partner
Violence 225
Extent of Violence Against Women 226
Rape and Sexual Assault 226
Intimate Partner Violence 227
Stalking 228
Crime and Controversy “All I See Is Blood”: Rape and
Sexual Assault in the Military 229
Social Patterning of Intimate Partner Violence Against
Women 229
Age 230
Social Class 230
Race and Ethnicity 230
Explaining Violence Against Women 232
International Focus The Nordic Paradox: Sexual
Violence in the Nordic Nations 232
Gender, Economic, and Racial Inequality 233
Cultural Myths Supporting Violence Against Women 234
Other Factors and Perspectives 236
Reducing Violence Against Women 237
Arresting Batterers: Deterrence or Escalation? 238
Conclusion 240
Summary 240
Key Terms 240
Contents xiv
▼
Chapter 12 Property Crime and Fraud 242
Types, Extent, and Patterning of Property Crime 243
Extent of Property Crime 244
Patterning of Property Crime 244
Social Organization of Property Crime 246
Burglary 246
International Focus Global Motor Vehicle Theft 248
Explaining Property Crime 249
Cultural Emphasis on Economic Success 249
Techniques of Neutralization 250
Unemployment 250
Routine Activities and Social Process Factors 251
Property Crime for Thrills 251
A Look at Shoplifting 251
Reducing Property Crime 252
The Criminal Justice System 252
Situational Crime Prevention 252
Crime and Controversy Vicious Dogs and Property
Crime 253
Fraud 254
Identity Theft 255
Tax Fraud 255
Insurance Fraud 256
Cybercrime 257
The Cost of Fraud 257
Conclusion 258
Summary 258
Key Terms 259
Chapter 13 White-Collar and Organized Crime 260

Understanding White-Collar Crime 262
Edwin Sutherland and White-Collar Crime 262
Defining White-Collar Crime 262
Occupational Crime: Law Breaking for Personal Gain 263
Employee Theft: Pilferage and Embezzlement 263
Professional Fraud: Focus on Health Care 264
Unnecessary Surgery 265
Financial Fraud 265
Police and Political Corruption: Violations of Public
Trust 266
Organizational Criminality and Corporate Crime 266
Corporate Financial Crime 267
Corporate Violence: Threats to Health and Safety 269
Crime and Controversy Harvest of Shame: Pesticide
Poisoning of Farm Workers 270
Economic and Human Costs of White-Collar Crime 274
Economic Cost 274
Human Cost 274
Contents xv
▼
Explaining White-Collar Crime 275
Similarities to Street Crime 275
Differences from Street Crime 276
Cultural and Social Context of White-Collar Crime 276
Reducing White-Collar Crime 278
Organized Crime 279
History of Organized Crime 279
Alien Conspiracy Model and Myth 280
International Focus Yakuza: Organized Crime
in Japan 281
Controlling Organized Crime 282
Conclusion 282
Summary 283
Key Terms 284
Chapter 14 Political Crime 286

Understanding Political Crime 287
Major Categories of Political Crime 288
Crime by Government 288
Political Repression and Human Rights Violations 288
Unethical or Illegal Experimentation 292
Crime and Controversy Civil Liberties in the Age
of Terrorism 292
State–Corporate Crime 293
International Focus Arrests of Russians for Protesting
the Invasion of Ukraine 293
Political Corruption 294
Crime Against Government 295
Mass Political Violence: Rebellion, Riots, Terrorism 295
Civil Disobedience 298
Espionage and Treason 299
Explaining and Reducing Political Crime 299
The Social Patterning of Political Crime 300
Reducing Political Crime 301
Conclusion 302
Summary 302
Key Terms 303
Chapter 15 Consensual Crime 305

Illicit Drug Use 307
Drug Use in History 307
Contemporary U.S. Drug Use 308
Explaining Illicit Drug Use 310
The Drugs–Crime Connection 311
The Decriminalization Debate 312
Contents xvi
▼
International Focus What Happened After Portugal
Decriminalized Drug Possession? 316
Harm Reduction and Drug Courts 316
Crime and Controversy The Early Impact of
Decriminalizing Drugs in Oregon 317
Sexual Offenses: Sex Work and Pornography 318
Sex Work 318
Pornography 320
Gambling 322
The Growth of Gambling 323
The Gambling Debate 323
Reducing Consensual Crime 324
Conclusion 325
Summary 325
Key Terms 326
PART 4
Controlling and Preventing Crime
Chapter 16 Policing: Dilemmas of Crime Control in a Democratic
Society 327
Crime Control in a Democratic Society 328
The Ideal of Blind Justice 329
A Preview of the Discussion 329
Development of Modern Police Departments 330
Police Departments in the United States 330
Working Personality and Police Behavior 330
Police Misconduct: Brutality 332
Police Misconduct: Corruption 334
Police Discretion: To Arrest or Not to Arrest? 335
Race, Ethnicity, and Arrest 336
Crime and Controversy Racial Profiling in Traffic Stops 336
Gender and Arrest 338
International Focus Police and Policing in Japan 339
Impact of Policing on Crime 339
Do Additional Police Reduce Crime? 339
How Police Are Used 340
Does Arrest Make a Difference? 341
Community Policing 341
Legal Technicalities and Police Effectiveness 342
Impact of Policing on Crime Revisited 342
Women and People of Color in Police Departments 343
Female Officers of Color 344
Conclusion 344
Summary 344
Key Terms 345
Contents xvii
▼
Chapter 17 Prosecution and Punishment 347
Criminal Courts and the Adversary System 348
Normal Crimes 349
Prosecutors, the Courtroom Work Group, and Plea
Bargaining 349
Punishment, Social Structure, and Inequality 350
Economic Conditions and Punishment 351
Crime and Controversy Should Felons Lose the Right
to Vote? 351
Social Class and Legal Outcomes 352
Impact of Race and Ethnicity 353
Gender and Sentencing 356
Impact of Punishment on Crime 356
Evidence Against a Deterrent Effect 357
Evidence Against an Incapacitation Effect 358
International Focus Punishing Criminals in Denmark
and the Netherlands 359
The Death Penalty Debate 360
Cost of the Death Penalty 360
General Deterrence and the Death Penalty 361
Arbitrariness and Racial Discrimination in the
Application of the Death Penalty 361
Quality of Legal Representation of Capital
Defendants 362
Wrongful Executions 363
Conclusion 364
Summary 365
Key Terms 365
Chapter 18 Conclusion: How Can We Reduce Crime? 367

The Criminal Justice System Funnel 368
A Sociological Prescription for Crime Reduction 371
Social, Cultural, and Community Crime Prevention
(Primary Prevention) 371
Developmental Crime Prevention (Secondary
Prevention) 374
Criminal Justice Approaches (Tertiary Prevention) 375
Conclusion 378
Summary 378
Key Terms 379
GLOSSARY 380
REFERENCES 385
NAME INDEX 421
SUBJECT INDEX 430
Contents xviii
▼
New to this Edition
This eighth edition has been thoroughly revised. It includes the • New discussion of hierarchy rule
latest crime and criminal justice statistics available as the book • Expanded discussion of the Uniform Crime Report’s under-
went to production, and it discusses the latest research on crime estimation of crime
and criminal justice issues that had appeared by that time, with
• Expanded discussion of the National Incident-Based Report-
dozens of new references added and older ones deleted. This
ing System
eighth edition continues the popular features of the previous one,
including the chapter-opening Crime in the News vignettes • New discussion of rise in homicides and shootings beginning
ripped from the headlines (all new from 2021 and 2022), which in mid-2020
engage students’ attention and demonstrate the text’s relevance to • Expanded discussion of the seasonality of crime
real-life events and issues; the Crime and Controversy and Inter-
national Focus boxes, several of them new or revised for this
edition, which highlight crime and justice issues within, respec- Chapter 4. Victims and Victimization
tively, the United States and abroad; and the What Would You • New Crime in the News story
Do? feature at the end of each chapter, which presents hypotheti- • New discussion of people who become ill from corporate air
cal scenarios on real-world situations faced by criminal justice pollution not being considered crime victims
professionals and average citizens alike.
• New discussion of victimization rates and prevalence rates
Major changes or additions to specific chapters include the
following: • Expanded discussion of victimization rates in rural areas
• New discussion of Asian Americans’ victimization
Chapter 1. Criminology and the • New section on higher victimization rates of LGBTQ persons
Sociological Perspective • New section on higher violent victimization rates of people
• New Crime in the News story with disabilities
• New mention of public criminology • New section on intraracial nature of victimization
• Revised and updated discussion of victimization of college
students
Chapter 2. Public Opinion, the News Media,
and the Crime Problem
Chapter 5. Classical and Neoclassical
• New Crime in the News story
Perspectives
• New discussion of the news media’s portrayal of immigrants
and criminality • New Crime in the News story
• New discussion of violence in the popular media • Updated discussion of deterrence research based on recent
literature reviews
• Updated fear of crime survey data
• New International Focus box
Chapter 6. Biological and Psychological
• New presentation of survey data on Asian Americans’ fear of
crime Explanations
• New section on anger about crime • New Crime in the News story
• Revised discussion of punitiveness • New discussion of lead and other toxins
• New discussion of increased public perceptions of injustice • New discussion of adverse childhood experiences
after the murder of George Floyd • Expanded discussion of biological explanations
• New What Would You Do? scenario
Chapter 7. Sociological Theories: Emphasis
Chapter 3. The Measurement and on Social Structure
Patterning of Criminal Behavior • New Crime in the News story
• New Crime in the News story • Revised and updated International Focus box
• Updated crime and victimization data • Expanded discussion of research testing general strain theory
xix
▼
Chapter 8. Sociological Theories: Emphasis Chapter 14. Political Crime
on Social Process • New Crime in the News story
• New Crime in the News story • Updated examples of political crime
• Expanded discussion of the marriage effect • Expanded history of civil disobedience
Chapter 9. Sociological Theories: Critical • New discussion of efforts by Donald Trump and several of
Perspectives his allies to overturn the 2020 election
• New Crime in the News Story • Revised and updated discussion of explaining and reducing
political crime
Chapter 10. Violent Crime: Homicide,

Chapter 15. Consensual Crime
Aggravated Assault, and Robbery
• Updated data on illicit drug use
• Updated homicide data
• Revised introductory discussion of illicit drug use
• New discussion of possible reasons for homicide jump in 2020
• New discussion of illicit opioid use
• New Crime and Controversy box
• New discussion of gender inequality and the South’s homi-
cide rate
• New graph on gender differences in physical fighting during Chapter 16. Policing: Dilemmas of Crime
high school Control in a Democratic Society
• Revised and expanded discussion of mass murder • New Crime in the News story
• Expanded discussion of serial murder • Revised and updated discussion of police use of force
• Revised and updated discussion of workplace violence • Revised and updated discussion of race, ethnicity, and
• Expanded discussion of hate crime, including updated exam- arrest
ples and new discussion of its increase during the pandemic • Updated Crime and Controversy box
• Updated child abuse and elder abuse data • Expanded discussion of impact on crime of additional
• New Crime and Controversy box police
Chapter 11. Violence Against Women Chapter 17. Prosecution and Punishment
• New Crime in the News story • New Crime in the News story
• Updated violence against women data • Updated data throughout
• New discussion of increase in violence against women after • New discussion of effects of skin tone and Afrocentric fea-
the COVID-19 pandemic began tures on sentencing
• New International Focus box • New discussion of different perceptions by news media and
politicians as the opioid crisis developed compared to when
• Updated and revised discussion of stalking the war on drugs developed
• New example of wrongful execution
Chapter 12. Property Crime and Fraud
• New Crime in the News story Chapter 18. Conclusion: How Can We
• Updated property crime data Reduce Crime?
• Updated cost data if bottom of criminal of justice funnel
Chapter 13. White-Collar and Organized Crime could be widened
• Updated Crime in the News story
• Updated white-collar crime data and examples
• Revised and updated International Focus box
New to this Edition xx

▼
Preface
introduction to the field of criminology! This standing. But this understanding is also important for students in
Welcome book emphasizes the need to understand the courses in criminal justice or criminology departments. If crime
to this social causes of criminal behavior in order cannot be fully understood without appreciating its structural
sociological to be able to significantly reduce crime. context, students in these departments who do not develop this
This emphasis echoes the approach fol- appreciation have only an incomplete understanding of the rea-
lowed in the field of public health, which sons for crime and of the most effective strategies to reduce it.
tries to determine what causes a disease like Although street crime has declined since the early 1990s, it
cancer so that we can prevent people from remains a national problem, as the residents of high-crime neigh-
becoming ill with cancer. Although it is obviously important to borhoods know all too well, and homicides and serious assaults
treat cancer patients, there will always be more cancer patients increased in 2020 and 2021. Meanwhile, white-collar crime con-
unless we discover its causes and then do something about these tinues to cost tens of billions of dollars and thousands of lives
causes. The analogy to crime is clear: Unless we discover the annually, even as it receives far less attention than mass murder,
causes of crime and do something about them, there will always terrorism, and everyday violent and property crime.
be more criminals. In presenting a sociological perspective on crime and crimi-
Unfortunately, this is not the approach the United States has nal justice, this book highlights issues of race and ethnicity, gen-
taken during the past few decades. Instead, it has relied on a der, and social class in every chapter and emphasizes the
“get-tough” approach to the crime problem that relies on more criminogenic effects of the social and physical features of urban
aggressive policing, longer and more certain prison terms, and neighborhoods. This eighth edition continues to include certain
the building of more and more prisons. The nation’s prison and chapters that remain uncommon in other criminology texts,
jail population has soared and has reached some 1.8 million per- including Chapter 2: Public Opinion, the News Media, and the
sons despite a decline during the past decade. Many criminolo- Crime Problem; Chapter 11 : Violence Against Women;
gists warn that this development of mass incarceration has had Chapter 14: Political Crime; and Chapter 18: Conclusion: How
serious collateral consequences for the people incarcerated, their Can We Reduce Crime? In addition, the book’s criminal justice
families, and their communities and that it has cost tens of bil- chapters, Chapter 16: Policing: Dilemmas of Crime Control in a
lions of dollars while reducing crime only to a small degree. Democratic Society and Chapter 17: Prosecution and Punish-
In offering a sociological understanding of crime, this book ment, continue to address two central themes in the sociological
suggests that the “get-tough” approach is shortsighted because it understanding of crime and criminal justice: (1) the degree to
ignores the roots of crime in the social structure and social which social inequalities affect the operation of the criminal jus-
inequality of society. To reduce crime, we must address these tice system and (2) the extent to which reliance on the criminal
structural conditions and appreciate the role that factors such as justice system can reduce crime. These two themes, in turn,
race and ethnicity, gender, and social class play in criminal reflect two more general sociological issues: the degree to which
behavior. Students in criminology courses in sociology depart- inequality affects the dynamics of social institutions, and the
ments will especially benefit from this book’s sociological under- extent to which formal sanctions affect human behavior.
Instructor Supplements
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xxi
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Revel Criminology, by Barkan
Designed for how you want to teach—and how your students
want to learn
Revel is an interactive learning environment that engages

students and helps them prepare for your class. Reimagin-
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apply, and learn about criminal justice—from you and from
each other.
Revel seamlessly combines the full content of Pearson’s
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class.
Author Explanatory Videos Student Survey Questions

Short (2- to 3-minute) Author Explanatory Videos, embedded in Student Survey Questions appear within the narrative, asking
the narrative, provide students with a verbal explanation of an students to respond to questions about controversial topics and
important topic or concept and illuminating the concept with ad- important concepts. Students then see their response versus the
ditional examples. responses of all other students who have answered the question,
in the form of a bar chart.
Point/CounterPoint Videos
Instead of simply reading about criminal justice, students are
Current Events Bulletins
empowered to think critically about key topics through Point/ Bring currency into your classroom with author-written articles
Counterpoint videos that explore different views on controversial that are updated each semester to help connect core concepts
issues such as privacy, search and seizure, Miranda rights, prison with real-life current events. Society changes quickly, and Cur-
privatization, prisoner rights, the PATRIOT Act, and many other rent Events Bulletins are one way to avoid a narrative that seems
topics. dated. Students can follow the trajectory of criminology issues in
the context of the criminal justice field.
Criminal Justice Simulations

In our introduction to Criminal Justice Revel etexts, there are simula-
tions that ask the student to evaluate scenarios and make decisions
regarding CJ issues or procedures. In this title we have included the
Extent of Crime simulation that allows students to compare the differ-
ence between the statistics of the FBI Uniform Crime Report (UCR)
and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) as well as
Social Explorer Criminal Justice Data Maps learn about the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS).
Social Explorer Maps integrated into the narrative ask students

to examine crime and corrections data correlated with socioeco- Track Time-on-Task throughout the Course
nomic and other criminal justice data. Maps also show differences
in state statutes on major issues such as marijuana legalization, The Performance Dashboard allows you to see how much time
the death penalty, and the distribution of hate organizations the class or individual students have spent reading a section or
across the United States. doing an assignment, as well as points earned per assignment.
Preface xxii
▼
This information helps correlate study time with performance The Revel App
and provides a window into where students may be having dif-
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anywhere, anytime, on any device. Content is available both
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Pearson provides Blackboard Learn™, Canvas™, Brightspace between phone, tablet, and laptop as they move through their day.
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Alternate Versions
eBooks. This text is also available in multiple eBook formats. online, print out reading assignments that incorporate lecture
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money. As an alternative to purchasing the printed textbook, stu- more information, visit your favorite online eBook reseller or
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With an eTextbook, students can search the text, make notes
Acknowledgments
stated my personal and intellectual debt to social inequality to understanding crime and other contempo-
The first Norman Miller and Forrest Dill, and I continue rary issues.
edition to acknowledge how much I owe them. I also wish to thank the editorial, production, and market-
Norman Miller was my first undergraduate ing staff at Pearson for their help on all aspects of the book’s
of this sociology professor and quickly helped me revision, and Holly Shufeldt for her continued faith in the
book fall in love with the discipline. He forced me to vision underlying the book.
ask questions about society that I probably still Finally, as in my first seven editions, I acknowledge with
haven’t answered. I and the many other students he heartfelt gratitude the love and support that my wife, Barbara
influenced can offer only an inadequate “thank you” for caring Tennent, and our sons, Dave and Joe, bring to my life. They put
so much about us and, to paraphrase a verse from a great book, up with my need to write and with my reactions to the success
for training us in the way we should go. Forrest Dill was my and failure of our favorite sports teams more than any husband
mentor in graduate school and introduced me to criminology, the and father has a right to expect.
sociology of law, and the craft of scholarship. His untimely death The eighth edition of this book is again dedicated to my late
when I was beginning my career continues to leave a deep void. parents, Morry and Sylvia Barkan, who instilled in me respect
My professional home since graduate school has been the for learning and sympathy for those less fortunate than I. As
Sociology Department at the University of Maine. I continue to I continue to think about them after so many years, I can only
owe my colleagues there an intellectual debt for sharing and hope that somewhere they are smiling with pride over this latest
reaffirming my sense of the importance of social structure and evidence of their legacy.
About the Author

Steven E. Barkan is professor emeritus of sociology at the Problems and had previously served as a member of the SSSP
University of Maine. His teaching and research interests Board of Directors, as chair of its Law and Society Division
include criminology, sociology of law, and social movements. and Editorial and Publications Committee, and as an advisory
He is a past president of the Society for the Study of Social editor of its journal, Social Problems . He also previously
Preface xxiii
▼
served as a member of the council of the Sociology of Law racism and socioeconomic status as fundamental causes of
Section of the American Sociological Association and served street criminality, views on police brutality, political trials, and
on its student paper award committee as well as that of the feminist and anti-hunger activism. These articles have appeared
ASA Crime, Law, and Deviance Section. He also served on the in the American Sociological Review, Critical Criminology,
council of Alpha Kappa Delta, the sociology honor society, and Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Journal of Crime
is a past president of the Textbook and Academic Authors and Justice, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency,
Association. An earlier edition of this book was awarded the Justice Quarterly, Social Forces, Social Problems, Sociological
Textbook Excellence Award for Humanities/Social Sciences Forum, Sociological Inquiry, Sociological Perspectives, and
from this association. other journals.
Professor Barkan has written many journal articles dealing Professor Barkan welcomes comments from students and fac-
with topics such as racial prejudice and death penalty attitudes, ulty about this book; they may email him at barkan@maine.edu.
Timeline of Major Criminological Theories
Chapter 5
1764 Classical Theory (Utilitarianism) Cesare Beccaria
Neoclassical Theories
1968 Rational Choice Theory Gary Becker
1985 Derek B. Cornish
Year
Ronald V. Clarke
1970s Deterrence Theory
1979 Routine Activities Theory Lawrence E. Cohen

Marcus Felson
Chapter 6
1796 Phrenology Franz Gall

1876 Atavism Cesare Lombroso
Year
1939 Biological Inferiority Earnest Hooton

1949 Body Shapes (Somatology) William Sheldon
1960s–1970s Contemporary Explanations
Chapter 7
1942 Social Disorganization Theory Clifford R. Shaw

Henry D. McKay
1987 Deviant Places Theory Rodney Stark
1938 Anomie Theory Robert K. Merton
1992 General Strain Theory Robert Agnew
1955 Status Frustration Theory Albert K. Cohen
Year
1958 Focal Concerns Theory Walter B. Miller

1960 Differential Opportunity Theory Richard Cloward
Lloyd Ohlin
1958, 1967 Subculture of Violence Theory Marvin Wolfgang
Franco Ferracuti
1999 Code of the Street Theory Elijah Anderson
Preface xxiv
▼
Chapter 8
1939 Differential Association Theory Edwin H. Sutherland

1956 Differential Identification Theory Daniel Glaser
1973, 1977 Social Learning Theory Albert Bandura
1966 Differential Reinforcement Theory Robert L. Burgess
Ronald L. Akers
1956, 1961 Containment Theory Walter Reckless
1957 Neutralization and Drift Theory Gresham M. Sykes
David Matza
1969 Social Bonding Theory Travis Hirschi
Year
1990 Self-Control Theory Michael Gottfredson

Travis Hirschi
2004 Control Balance Theory Charles R. Tittle
2002 Coercive Control and Social Support Theory Mark Colvin
Francis T. Cullen
1979 Integrated Strain-Control Theory Delbert S. Elliott
1987 Interactional Theory Terence P. Thornberry
1993 Life-Course-Persistent Theory Terrie E. Moffitt
1993 Age-Graded Theory Robert J. Sampson
John H. Laub
Chapter 9
1951 Edwin Lemert

Labeling Theory Howard S. Becker
1963
1938 Thorsten Sellin
1958 Conflict Theory George Vold
1969 Austin T. Turk
1916 Willem Bonger
Year
1952 Jerome Hall

Radical Theory
1964 William Chambliss
1974 Richard Quinney
1988 Kathleen Daly
Feminist Theories Meda Chesney-Lind
1989 Sally S. Simpson
Preface xxv
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Lightfield Studios/Shutterstock
1 Criminology and the

Sociological Perspective
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
❶ Explain the sociological perspective and describe its relevance for criminology.
❷ Describe the contributions of the social scientists who developed the field of criminology.
❸ Identify the implications of consensus and conflict theories for understanding crime.
❹ Describe the elements of criminal liability and legal defenses to such liability.
❺ Explain the advantages and disadvantages of quantitative and qualitative research, respectively.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
The Sociological Perspective
The Mutual Relevance of Sociology and Criminology
The Rise of Sociological Criminology
Criminal Law: Theoretical Underpinnings and Goals
Consensus and Conflict in the Creation of Criminal Law
Goals of Criminal Law
Criminal Law: Origins, Types of Crime, and Criminal Liability
Origins of Criminal Law
Types of Crime
Criminal Liability
Research Methods in Criminology
Surveys
Experiments
Qualitative Research: Observing and Intensive Interviewing
Research Using Existing Data
Comparative and Historical Research
Conclusion
1
▼
Crime in the News
Homicides and nonfatal shootings increased in many U.S. cities in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic in early
2020 and continued to climb during the early months of 2021. New York was one of these cities. As just one of
many examples, a 17-year-old youth was fatally shot in front of his Brooklyn school at the end of the school day
on April 29, 2021. His mother later recalled her son smiling and saying he loved her on the morning of the day
that he later died. “It needs to stop because it’s taking away so much,” she said. “Nobody should have to bury
their kid. They’re supposed to bury us.”
Source: Closson 2021.
T
his mother’s tragic experience reminds us that violence and other street crimes continue
to trouble people across the nation. Although the U.S. crime rate has actually declined
since the early 1990s, violent and property crimes continue to victimize millions of
Americans annually. The U.S. prison and jail populations stood at nearly 1.8 million in spring
2021 (Kang-Brown et al. 2021), the highest rate of incarceration in the Western world. The crim-
inal justice system costs more than $300 billion annually (Hayes 2020) compared to only
$36 billion in the early 1980s. Why do we have so much violence and other crimes? Why did
homicide and nonfatal shootings seemingly rise after the pandemic arose? What can we do to
reduce our crime rate? What difference do police and prisons make? Could we spend our law
enforcement dollars more wisely? How serious is white-collar crime? Is the war on drugs work-
ing? What roles do race and ethnicity, social class, and gender play in criminal behavior and in
the response of the criminal justice system to such behavior? These are just a few of the ques-
tions this book tries to answer.
The rationale for the book is simple: Crime is one of our most important social problems but
also one of the least understood. Most of our knowledge about crime comes from what we read in
newspapers or see on TV or the Internet. From these sources, we get a distorted picture of crime
and hear about solutions to the crime problem that ultimately will do little to reduce it. These are
harsh accusations, to be sure, but they are ones with which most criminologists probably agree.
A major reason crime is so misunderstood is that the popular sources of our knowledge about
crime say little about crime’s social roots. Crime is not only an individual phenomenon but also
a social one. Individuals commit crimes, but their social backgrounds profoundly shape their
likelihood of doing so. In this sense, crime is no different from other behaviors sociologists
study. This basic sociological understanding of crime has an important social policy implication:
If crime is rooted in the way our society is organized, then crime-reduction efforts will succeed
only to the extent that they address the structural roots of criminality.
This book presents a sociological understanding of crime and criminal justice, an approach
commonly called sociological criminology (Cao 2020). As we will see later, for most of its his-
tory, virtually all criminology was sociological criminology, and this two-word term would have
been redundant. This view of criminology gave explicit attention to issues of poverty and race
and ethnicity, as well as to the structure of communities and social relationships. As John Hagan
(1994), a former president of the American Society of Criminology, once observed, a sociologi-
cal criminology is thus a structural criminology. It takes into account the social and physical
characteristics of communities and the profound influences of race and ethnicity, social class,
and gender.
In the past few decades, criminology has moved away from this structural focus toward indi-
vidualistic explanations, with the fields of biology and psychology vying with sociology for
prominence in the study of crime. These fields enliven the discipline and have expanded crimi-
nology’s interdisciplinary focus. However, they ultimately fail to answer three of the most central
questions in criminology: (1) Why do crime rates differ across locations and over time? (2) Why
do crime rates differ according to the key dimensions of structured social inequality: race and
ethnicity, social class, and gender? (3) How and why is the legal response to crime shaped by
race and ethnicity, social class, and gender and by other extralegal variables? Only a sociological
criminology can begin to answer these questions, which must be answered if we are to have any
hope of seriously reducing crime and of achieving a just legal system.
chapter 1 Criminology and the Sociological Perspective 2

▼
A sociological criminology is not only a structural criminology. To be true to the sociological
perspective, it should also be a criminology that debunks incorrect perceptions about crime and
false claims about the effectiveness of various crime-control strategies. In addition, it should
expose possible injustice in the application (arrest, conviction, punishment) of the criminal label.
These are all important aims of the public criminology movement, which aims to bring crimino-
logical insights and findings to the attention of the general public and to influence crime and
criminal justice policymaking (Henne and Shah 2020).
These themes appear throughout the book. Part 1, Understanding Crime and Victimiza-
tion, introduces the sociological perspective and discusses public beliefs about crime and
criminal justice. It also discusses what is known about the amount and social patterning of
crime and victimization. Part 2, Explaining Crime, critically reviews the major explanations
of crime and criminality and discusses their implications for crime reduction. These expla-
nations are integrated into the chapters contained in Part 3, Criminal Behaviors. These
chapters discuss the major forms of crime and the ways of reducing them. The fourth and
final part of the book, Controlling and Preventing Crime, explores, among other things, two
important issues for a sociological understanding of the criminal justice system: (1) To what
degree do race and ethnicity, class, and gender unjustly affect the chances of arrest, convic-
tion, and imprisonment? (2) To what degree do arrest and punishment reduce criminal
behavior? The concluding chapter of the book presents a sociological prescription for crime
reduction.
Our sociological journey into crime and criminal justice begins by reviewing the sociological
perspective and discussing the mutual relevance of sociology and criminology. We look briefly
at the development of sociological criminology and at its approaches to crime and criminal jus-
tice and review some key legal terms and concepts.
c The Sociological Perspective

Above all else, the sociological perspective stresses that people are social beings rather than
mere individuals. This means that society profoundly shapes people’s behaviors, attitudes, and
life outcomes. People growing up in societies with different cultures tend to act and think dif-
ferently from one another. People within a given society growing up in various locations and
under diverse socioeconomic circumstances also tend to act and think differently. We cannot
understand why people think and behave as they do without understanding their many social
backgrounds.
This perspective derives from the work of Émile ▼ The sociological perspective emphasizes that people are
Durkheim (1858–1917), a French sociologist and a social beings more than they are individuals. This means that
founder of the discipline, who stressed that social forces society shapes our behaviors, attitudes, and life outcomes.
influence our behavior and attitudes. In perhaps his
most famous study, Durkheim (1952 [1897]) found that
even suicide, normally regarded as the most individual-
istic act possible, has social roots. Examining data in
France and elsewhere, he found that suicide rates varied
across locations and across different kinds of people.
Protestants, for example, had higher suicide rates than
did Catholics. Durkheim explained these differences by
focusing on structural characteristics, in particular the
level of social integration among the locations and peo-
Brandon Bourdages/Shutterstock
ple he studied. People in groups with high social inte-

gration, or strong bonds to others within their group,
have lower suicide rates. His analysis remains a classic
study of the influence of social structure on individual
behavior such as suicide.
What exactly is social structure? Briefly, social
structure refers to how a society is organized in terms
of social relationships and social interactions. It is both

▼
horizontal and vertical. Horizontal social structure refers to the social and physi-
cal characteristics of communities and the networks of social relationships to
which an individual belongs. Vertical social structure is more commonly called
social inequality and refers to how a society ranks different groups of people. In
U.S. society, social class, race and ethnicity, and gender are key characteristics
that help determine where people rank and whether some people are “more
equal” than others.
Sociologist C. Wright Mills (1959) emphasized that social structure lies at the
anyaberkut/123RF
root of private troubles. If only a few individuals, he wrote, are unemployed, then
their private troubles are their own fault. But if masses of individuals are unem-
ployed, structural forces must account for their bad fortune. What people may
define as private troubles are thus more accurately described as public issues,
▲ A job-seeker holds a sign indicat- wrote Mills. Their personal troubles result from the intersection of their personal
ing his need for a job. C. Wright biographies with historical and social conditions. Mills referred to the ability to
Mills considered unemployment a understand the structural and historical basis for personal troubles as the
public issue that results from struc- sociological imagination. Once people acquire a sociological imagination, they are
tural problems in society. better able both to understand and to change the social forces underlying their
private troubles.
As Mills’s comments suggest, sociology’s emphasis on the structural basis for individual
behavior and personal troubles often leads it to challenge conventional wisdom. Max Weber
(1864–1920), another founder of sociology, echoed this theme when he noted that one of sociol-
ogy’s most important goals is to uncover “inconvenient facts” (Gerth and Mills 1946). As Peter
Berger (1963) observed in his classic book Invitation to Sociology, the “first wisdom” of sociol-
ogy is that things are not always what they seem: Sociological research often exposes false
claims about reality and taken-for-granted assumptions about social life and social institutions.
Berger referred to this sociological tendency as the debunking motif.
Review and Discuss

What do we mean by the sociological perspective? How does this perspective help us to
understand the origins of crime and the possible ways of reducing crime?
The Mutual Relevance of Sociology and Criminology

With this brief discussion of the sociological perspective in mind, the continuing relevance of
sociology for criminology immediately becomes clear. Perhaps most importantly, crime, victim-
ization, and criminal justice cannot be understood fully without appreciating their structural con-
text. Using Mills’s terminology, crime and victimization are public issues rather than private
troubles. They are rooted in the social and physical characteristics of communities, in the net-
work of relationships in which people interact, and in the structured social inequalities of race
and ethnicity, social class, and gender. Reflecting this point, many of criminology’s important
concepts, including anomie, relative deprivation, and social conflict, draw from concepts origi-
nally developed in the larger body of sociology. Moreover, research methodology originating in
sociology provides the basis for much criminological research.
Criminology is just as relevant for its parent field of sociology because of the structural basis of
criminality. If crime and victimization derive from community characteristics, social relationships,
and inequality, criminological insights both reinforce and advance sociological understanding of
all these areas. Crime, victimization, and legal punishment are certainly important negative life
outcomes for people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. More than most other subfields in
sociology, criminology shows us how and why social inequality is, as Elliott Currie (1985:160)
once put it, “enormously destructive of human personality and of social order.” By the same token,
positions at the top of the socioeconomic ladder contribute to a greater probability of white-collar
crime that results in little or no punishment. Again, perhaps more than most other sociological
subfields, criminology illuminates the privileges of those at the top of the social hierarchy.
Another major dimension of inequality, gender, also has important consequences for criminal-
ity and victimization and, perhaps, legal punishment. Criminological findings have contributed to

▼
the larger body of sociological knowledge about the importance of gender (Belknap 2021). More
generally, the study of crime has furthered the understanding of many standard sociological con-
cepts such as alienation, community, inequality, organization, and social control (Short 2007).
Intersectionality
An exciting development in the social sciences called intersectionality manifests and reinforces
the mutual relevance of criminology and sociology. Intersectionality refers to the ways in which
people’s race and ethnicity, social class, and gender interact to produce outcomes reflecting the
combined influence of these backgrounds, often to an individual’s disadvantage. In criminology,
intersectionality-based theory and research examine the combined impact of all these sociode-
mographic factors on offending, victimization, and contact with the criminal justice system
(Durfee 2021; Kruttschnitt and Kang 2021; Potter 2015). This work has shed new light on the
importance of race and ethnicity, social class, and gender for both criminology and sociology and
promises to continue doing so for years to come.
Review and Discuss

In what ways are the disciplines of sociology and criminology relevant for each other?
The Rise of Sociological Criminology

Many of the themes just discussed shaped the rise of sociological criminology in the United States
during the twentieth century. Because Part 2 discusses the development of criminological theory in
greater detail, here we simply sketch this history to underscore the intellectual connection between
criminology and sociology. Before we do so, it will be helpful to review some basic concepts.
All societies have social norms or standards of behavior. Behavior that violates these norms
and arouses negative social reactions is called deviance. In most traditional societies studied by
anthropologists, the norms remain unwritten and informal and are called customs. These customs
are enforced through informal social control (society’s restraint of norm-violating behavior) such
as ostracism and ridicule. People obey customs because they believe in them and because they
fear the society’s informal sanctions. In large, modern societies, many norms tend to be more
formal because they are written and codified. These formal norms are called laws. Social control
is also more formal and takes the shape of specialized groups of people (legislators, police offi-
cers, judges, and corrections officials) who create laws, interpret them, and apprehend and pun-
ish law violators. With these concepts in mind, we now trace the rise of sociological criminology.
For much of recorded history, people attributed crime and deviance to religious forces. Indi-
viduals were said to commit these behaviors because God or gods were punishing or testing them.
During the Middle Ages, Europeans blamed deviance on the devil. In the eighteenth century, the
classical school of criminology stressed that criminals rationally choose to commit crimes after
deciding that the potential rewards outweigh the risks. In view of this, classical scholars said, legal
punishment needs to be only severe enough to deter potential criminals from breaking the law.
During the nineteenth century, scholars began to investigate through scientific means the
causes of criminal behavior. Perhaps the first such scholar was Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874), a
Belgian astronomer and mathematician who gathered and analyzed crime data in France. He
found that French crime rates remained fairly stable over time, that they were higher for young
adults than for older adults, and that they were higher among men and the poor than among
women and the nonpoor.
Later in that century, Émile Durkheim began providing his major contributions. He stressed
the primacy of social structure over the individual and thus established the sociological paradigm.
He also observed that deviance will always exist because social norms are never strong enough to
prevent all rule breaking. Even in a “society of saints,” he said, such as a monastery, rules will be
broken and negative social reactions aroused. Because Durkheim (1962 [1895]) thought deviance
is inevitable, he considered it a normal part of every healthy society and stressed its functions for
social stability. The punishment of deviance, he said, clarifies social norms and reinforces social
ties among those doing or observing the punishing. Durkheim further argued that deviance is
necessary for social change to take place. A society without deviance, he said, would be one with

▼
no freedom of thought; hence, social change would not be possible. A society, thus, cannot have
social change without also having deviance.
At about the same time, White physicians and other researchers began to investigate the bio-
logical basis of criminal behavior. Although their methodology was seriously flawed and many
of their views were racist, their perspective influenced public and scholarly thinking about crime.
The recent rise of biological explanations of crime indicates their continuing popularity for
understanding criminal behavior.
At the end of the nineteenth century, famed Black American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois (1899)
disputed a biological basis for crime in his renowned book The Philadelphia Negro, in which he
attributed the relatively high crime rates of Black Americans to negative social conditions rather
than to biological problems. His analysis of crime in Philadelphia is today regarded as an early,
classic study of sociological criminology (Gabbidon and Greene 2019). Du Bois was also one of
the first social scientists to write about possible racial discrimination in arrests and sentencing.
Another Black American scholar, Ida B. Wells-Barnett (2002), documented perhaps the most
extreme use of law in this regard in an 1892 pamphlet titled Southern Horrors, an indictment of
lynch law. She wrote the pamphlet after three of her friends were lynched in Memphis, Tennes-
see, where Wells-Barnett co-owned a newspaper named Free Speech. After she editorialized
against these and other lynchings, White people threatened to lynch her and other Free Speech
staff and forced the newspaper to shut down.
The sociological study of crime advanced further at the University of Chicago after the turn of
the twentieth century. Scholars there noticed that high crime rates in Chicago’s inner-city neighbor-
hoods remained stable from one year to the next, even as certain immigrant groups moved out and
others moved in. They attributed these crime rates to certain social and physical conditions of the
neighborhoods (including their stark poverty and residential instability) that reflected a breakdown
in conventional social institutions, which they termed social disorganization.
One student of the Chicago sociologists was Edwin Sutherland, who soon became a towering
figure in the development of sociological criminology. Sensitive to the criminogenic (crime-causing)
conditions of urban neighborhoods, Sutherland was especially interested in how and why these
conditions promote criminality and emphasized the importance of peer influences in his famous
differential association theory. He further developed the concept of white-collar crime and was
sharply critical of the illegal and harmful practices of the nation’s biggest corporations. At the
heart of his sociological criminology was a concern for issues of race, poverty, and political and
economic power.
At about the same time, Robert K. Merton, a Columbia
▼ This photo shows a section of the Vietnam War Memorial in University sociologist, developed his anomie theory of
Washington, DC. Protests against this war were significant in deviance. Borrowing heavily from Durkheim, Merton
the turbulent era of the 1960s and early 1970s that stimulated attributed deviance to the poor’s inability to achieve eco-
the use of labeling and conflict theories in the study of crime nomic success in a society that highly values such success.
and deviance. His theory was perhaps the most “macro” of all the early
structural theories of crime and remains influential today.
During the 1970s, a new social control or social
bonding theory of criminal behavior rose to prominence.
Drawing on Durkheim, this theory emphasized the
criminogenic effects of weak bonds to social institu-
tions. Although this theory focused on social relation-
ships, it was less of a macrostructural theory than its
social disorganization and anomie forebears.
The 1960s and early 1970s were also turbulent eras
Richard Cummins/Alamy Stock Photo
marked by intellectual upheaval in several academic dis-

ciplines, perhaps most of all sociology. Some sociologists
asserted that society is rooted in conflict between the
“haves” and the “have-nots” in society. In the study of
crime and deviance, labeling and conflict theories empha-
sized bias and discrimination in the application of crimi-
nal labels and in the development of criminal laws.
Shortly thereafter, new feminist understandings of gender
and society began to make their way into criminology, as

▼
feminists criticized the male bias of traditional criminological theories and called attention to the
gendered nature of crime and victimization.
Today, all of these sociological approaches inform the study of crime and criminal justice. As
this textbook will indicate, sociological criminology’s emphasis on the structural origins of crime
and on the impact of race/ethnicity and poverty continues to guide much contemporary theory
and research. To aid your understanding of sociological perspectives on crime, we now discuss
some important concepts in the study of crime and deviance.
c Criminal Law: Theoretical Underpinnings

and Goals
Edwin Sutherland (1947) defined criminology as the study of the making of criminal laws, of the
breaking of these laws, and of society’s reaction to the breaking of these laws. Put another way,
criminology is the scientific study of the creation of criminal law, of the causes and dynamics of
criminal behavior, and of society’s attempts through the criminal justice system and other efforts to
punish, control, and prevent crime. Note that criminology as a social science differs from crime-scene
investigation, or forensic science, which is featured on many TV shows.
As Sutherland’s definition of criminology implies, students of criminology should become
familiar with criminal law. In this and the next section, we thus briefly discuss several aspects of
criminal law. Before doing so, though, we should first comment on the concept of crime to help
set the stage for this discussion.
The term crime has already appeared many times in this chapter, but what actually is crime?
Most simply, crime is behavior that is considered so harmful that it is banned by a criminal law.
This straightforward definition begs some important questions: For example, how harmful must
a behavior be before it is banned by a criminal law? Is it possible for a behavior to be harmful but
not banned? Is it possible for a behavior to be banned but not very harmful? Who decides what is
or is not harmful? What factors affect such decisions?
As these questions indicate, the definition of crime is not very straightforward after all. Instead,
it is problematic. In sociology, this view of crime derives from the larger study of deviant behavior,
of which crime is obviously one very important type. Recall that deviance is a behavior that violates
social norms and arouses negative social reactions. Durkheim’s monastery example, given earlier,
raises an interesting point: Behavior considered deviant in a monastery, such as talking, would be
perfectly acceptable elsewhere. This illustrates that deviance is a relative concept: Whether a given
behavior is judged deviant depends not on the behavior itself
but on the circumstances under which it occurs. Consider mur- ▼ Killing in wartime is considered necessary and even
der, the most serious of interpersonal crimes. As a behavior, heroic, but killing in most other circumstances is consid-
murder involves killing someone. We consider this act so hor- ered a crime (homicide).
rible that sometimes we execute people for it. Yet if soldiers kill
someone in wartime, they are doing their job, and if they kill
several people in a particularly heroic fashion, they may receive
a medal. The behavior itself, killing, is the same, but the cir-
cumstances surrounding it determine whether we punish the
killer or award them a medal.
Whether a given behavior is considered deviant also
depends on where it occurs, as the monastery example
reminds us. What is considered deviant in one society may be
considered acceptable in another. Another way of saying this
is that deviance is relative in space. As just one example,
anthropologists have found that sexual acts condemned in
some societies are often practiced in others (Goode 2019).
Itsuo Inouye/AP Images
Deviance is also relative in time: Within the same society,

what is considered deviant in one time period may not be con-
sidered deviant in a later period, and vice versa. For example,
the use of cocaine and opium was very common (and legal) in
the United States in the late nineteenth century even though

▼
both drugs are illegal today. Many over-the-counter medicines for such prob-
lems as depression, insomnia, and various aches and pains contained opium.
Many over-the-counter products, including Coca-Cola, contained cocaine.
Coke was popular when it hit the market in 1894 because it made people feel
so good when they drank it (Goode 2019)!
By saying that deviance is a relative concept, we emphasize that deviance
is not a quality of a behavior itself but, rather, the result of what other people
think about the behavior. This was a central insight of sociologist Howard S.
Becker (1963:9), who famously wrote that “deviance is not a quality of the act
the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of
rules or sanctions to an ‘offender.’ The deviant is one to whom that label has
been successfully applied; deviant behavior is behavior that people so label.”
Becker’s observation alerts us to two possibilities. First, some harmful
behaviors, such as white-collar crimes, may not be considered deviant
because “respectable” people do them, because they occur secretly, or
because people know about them but do not deem them harmful. Second,
some less harmful behaviors, such as sex work, may still be considered devi-
ant because people are morally opposed to them or do not like the kinds of
Archive Images/Alamy Stock Photo
people (low-income, etc.) who are doing them.
Consensus and Conflict in the Creation of

Criminal Law
The previous discussion raises two related questions about criminal laws:
(1) Why do criminal laws get established? (2) Whom do criminal laws benefit?
In criminology, consensus and conflict theories of crime, law, and society try
to answer these questions. These views derive from related perspectives in
▲ When Coca-Cola was first manufac- the larger field of sociology.
tured in 1894, it contained cocaine, con- Consensus theory originates in Durkheim’s work. It assumes a consensus
tributing in no small measure to its among people from all walks of life on what the social norms of behavior are
instant popularity. and should be. Formal norms, or laws, represent the interests of all segments
of the public. People obey laws not because they fear being punished but because they believe the
norms are appropriate to obey. Crime and deviance violate these widely accepted norms, and
punishment of this behavior is necessary to ensure continuing social stability.
Conflict theory (discussed further in Chapter 9) derives from the work of Karl Marx and Fried-
rich Engels and is generally the opposite of consensus theory. It assumes that members of the pub-
lic disagree on many social norms, with this disagreement reflecting people’s disparate positions
based on their inequalities of wealth and power. Laws represent the views of the powerful and help
them to stay at the top of society’s hierarchy and to keep the powerless at the bottom. Behavior
labeled criminal by laws is conduct by the poor that threatens the interests of the powerful. The
powerful may commit very harmful behaviors, but because they determine which laws are created,
their behaviors are often legal, or at least not harshly punished even if they are illegal.
These two theories have important implications for how we define and understand crime. In
consensus theory, “crime” is defined simply as any behavior that violates a criminal law, to recall
our earlier straightforward definition. Criminal law in turn is thought to both represent and pro-
tect the interests of all members of society. In conflict theory, the definition of “crime” is more
problematic: It is just as important to consider why some behaviors do not become illegal as to
consider why others are illegal. A conflict view of crime, law, and society thus defines “crime”
more broadly than does a consensus view. In particular, the former is willing to consider behav-
iors as crimes in the larger sense of the word if they are harmful, even if they are not illegal.
Both theories have their merits. The greatest support for consensus theory comes from crimi-
nal laws banning the criminal behaviors we call street crime, which all segments of society con-
demn and which victimizes the poor more than the wealthy. Although the historical roots of
some of these laws lie in the conflict between the rich and the poor, today they cannot be said to
exist for the protection of the wealthy and powerful. The greatest evidence for conflict theory
perhaps comes from corporate misconduct, which is arguably more socially harmful than street
crime but is less severely punished. Both kinds of behavior are discussed in the chapters ahead.

▼
Goals of Criminal Law
Criminal law in the United States and other
Western democracies ideally tries to
achieve several goals. Because criminal law
is obviously an essential component of the
criminal justice system, perhaps its most
important goal is to help keep the public
safe from crime and criminals or, to put it
another way, to prevent and control crime
and criminal behavior.
A second goal of criminal law is to
articulate a society’s moral values and con-
cerns, a goal that consensus theory empha-
sizes. Ideally, criminal law bans behaviors
that our society considers immoral or
Washington Post/Getty Images

wrong for other reasons. Murder is an obvi-
ous example here. More controversially,
criminal law also bans the use of certain
drugs, prostitution, and some other behav-
iors that people voluntarily commit and for
which there may be no unwilling victims.
We call these behaviors consensual or vic-
timless crimes, and critics say that society’s
▲ Reports of abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees by U.S. personnel aroused
efforts to ban them amount to “legislating
much controversy, in part because critics said these incidents violated inter-
morality” and may in fact do more harm
national law.
than good (Hart 2021).
A third goal of criminal law and the criminal justice system is to protect the rights and free-
doms of the nation’s citizenry by protecting them from potential governmental abuses of power.
This is what is meant by the rule of law that is so fundamental to a democracy. This consideration
helps us to understand why reports of torture and abuse by U.S. personnel of persons captured in
the Iraq War some two decades ago aroused so much concern: The alleged abuse was committed
by personnel of a democratic nation and violated the rules of international law governing the
treatment of military prisoners and detainees (Cole 2009).
c Criminal Law: Origins, Types of Crime, and

Criminal Liability
We turn now from this basic understanding of criminal law to its origins and current aspects.
Origins of Criminal Law

Law in the United States has its origins in English common law, which began during the reign of
Henry II in the twelfth century. Over the centuries, England developed a complex system of laws
that specified the types of illegal behaviors, the punishment for these behaviors, and the elements
that had to be proved for someone to be found guilty of a crime. English judges had great powers
to interpret the laws and in effect to make new case law. As a result, much of English law derived
from judges’ rulings rather than from legislatures’ statutes.
During this time, the jury was developed to replace ordeals as the chief way to determine a
defendant’s guilt or innocence. However, the jury’s power was limited because jurors could be
punished if they found a defendant innocent. Its power and importance grew considerably in
1670 after William Penn was arrested and tried for preaching about Quakerism. When the jurors
refused to convict him, the judge imprisoned and starved them. In response, an English court
ruled that juries could not be punished for their verdicts. This ruling allowed juries to acquit
defendants with impunity and strengthened their historic role as protectors of defendants against
arbitrary state power (Barkan 1983).

▼
When the Pilgrims and other English colonists came to the New World, they naturally brought
with them English common law. Several grievances that led to the Revolutionary War centered
on England’s denial of jury trials for colonial defendants, its search and seizure of colonial homes
and property, and its arbitrary use of legal punishment. After the Revolution, the new nation’s
leaders included protections from these and other legal abuses in the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights.
Types of Crime
Most U.S. jurisdictions still retain common law concepts of the types of crimes and the elements
of criminal law violation that must be proved for a defendant to be found guilty. One distinction
concerns mala in se crimes and mala prohibita crimes, with the former considered more serious
than the latter. Mala in se (evil in themselves) crimes refer to behaviors that violate traditional
norms and morality. This category includes the violent and property crimes that most concern the
public. Mala prohibita (wrong only because prohibited by law) crimes refer to behaviors that
violate contemporary standards only; examples include illegal drug use and many white-collar
crimes (Schmalleger 2022).
Another distinction concerns felonies and misdemeanors. Felonies are crimes punishable by
more than one year in prison, and misdemeanors are crimes punishable by less than one year.
Most people convicted of felonies and then incarcerated are sent to state prisons (or, if convicted
of a federal crime, to federal prisons), whereas most people convicted of misdemeanors and then
incarcerated serve their sentences in local jails, which also hold people awaiting trial.
Criminal Liability
For a criminal defendant to be found guilty, the key elements that must be proved are actus reus and
mens rea. Actus reus (actual act) refers to the specific criminal act of which the defendant is
accused. For a defendant to be found guilty, the evidence must indicate beyond a reasonable doubt
that he or she committed a criminal act. Mens rea (guilty mind) refers to criminal intent. This means
that the state must show that the defendant intended to commit the act. Although the concept of
criminal intent is complex, it generally means that the defendant committed a criminal act know-
ingly. If the defendant is too young or mentally incapable of understanding the nature and conse-
quences of the crime, criminal intent is difficult to prove. By the same token, the defendant must
have also broken the law willingly. This generally means that the defendant was not in fear of their
life or safety at the time of the crime. If someone holds a gun to your head and forces you to shoplift
(admittedly an unlikely scenario), you do not have criminal intent.
The concept of mens rea also covers behaviors in which someone acts recklessly or negli-
gently and injures someone else, even though he or she did not mean the injury to happen. If you
accidentally leave an infant inside a car on a hot day and the infant becomes ill or dies, you can
be found guilty of a crime even though you did not intend the infant to suffer. If you try to injure
someone but end up accidentally hurting someone else instead, you can still be found guilty of a
crime even though you did not intend to hurt that person.
Legal Defenses to Criminal Liability

Defendants may offer several types of excuses or justifications as defenses against criminal accu-
sations (Schmalleger 2022).
Accident or Mistake One possible defense is that the defendant committed the act by accident
or mistake. If you are driving a car in the winter at a safe speed but skid on the ice and hit a
pedestrian, your act is tragic but probably not criminal. If, however, you were driving too quickly
for the icy conditions and then skid and hit a pedestrian, you might very well be held responsible.
Ignorance Another defense is that the defendant committed a criminal act out of ignorance.
Here, it is generally true, as the popular slogan says, that “ignorance of the law is no excuse”
because people are normally assumed to be aware of the law. However, the law does exempt
mistakes of fact that occur when someone engages in an illegal activity without being aware it is
illegal. If someone gives you a package to mail that, unknown to you, contains illegal drugs, you
commit a mistake of fact when you mail the package and are not criminally liable.

▼
Duress Another defense to criminal prosecution is duress, which is usually narrowly defined to
mean fear for one’s life or safety. During the Vietnam War, several antiwar protesters arrested for
civil disobedience claimed in their trials that they were acting under duress of their consciences.
However, judges almost always excluded this defense from the jury’s consideration (Barkan 1983).
Self-Defense A common defense to prosecution is self-defense to prevent an offender from

harming you or someone nearby. However, if you injure your would-be attacker more than legit-
imate self-defense would reasonably have required, you may be held liable.
The issue of self-defense has arisen in cases of abused women who kill their husbands or
male partners (Lemon 2018). Often, such a killing occurs when the husband or partner is sleep-
ing or otherwise not threatening the woman at that instant. Several women who killed their bat-
terers in this manner have claimed they were acting out of self-defense even though they were
not afraid for their lives at that moment. Traditionally, the law of self-defense does not apply to
this situation, and many judges still refuse to permit this defense. However, some courts have
expanded the self-defense concept to cover these circumstances.
Entrapment Another possible defense is entrapment, which generally refers to a situation in

which someone commits a crime only because law-enforcement agents induced the offender to
do so. For example, suppose you are living in a dormitory and have never used marijuana. A new
resident of the dorm offers you a joint, but you turn him down. Over the next couple weeks, he
repeatedly tries to get you to smoke marijuana, and finally you give in and take a joint. As you
begin to smoke it, your friend, who in fact is an undercover narcotics officer, arrests you for ille-
gal drug use. Because you had no history of marijuana use and agreed to try some only after
repeated pleas by the undercover officer, you may have a good chance of winning your case,
assuming a prosecutor goes forward with it, with an entrapment defense.
Insanity A final, very controversial defense is the insanity defense. (“Insanity” and “insane”
remain legal terms but otherwise have fallen out of favor because they may be considered offen-
sive.) Despite the attention it receives, few criminal defendants plead insanity, diminished capac-
ity, or related mental and emotional states, and abolition of the insanity defense would not affect
the operation or effectiveness of the criminal justice system (Walker 2015). This issue aside, if a
defendant does not have the capacity (e.g., the ability to know right from wrong) to have criminal
intent at the time they commit a criminal act, the person is not assumed to have the necessary
mens rea, or guilty mind, for criminal liability.
Review and Discuss

What are three legal defenses to criminal liability? Do you think these defenses should exist,
or do you think they have been exploited by criminal defendants?
c Research Methods in Criminology

Like any natural, physical, or social science, theory and research lie at the heart of criminology.
Theories and hypotheses must be developed and then tested. Again like the other social and natural
sciences, criminological research often asks whether one variable (e.g., attachment to one’s par-
ents) influences another variable (e.g., delinquency). The variable that does the influencing is
called the independent variable, and the variable that is influenced is called the dependent variable.
Research typically tests whether the independent variable is associated with the dependent variable
(e.g., whether the degree of adolescents’ attachment to their parents is related to the extent of their
delinquency). This book discusses the latest criminological research findings in every chapter. To
help understand how crime is studied, we now review the major types of research in criminology.
Surveys
One of the most important types of research in criminology (and sociology) is survey research.
A survey involves the administration of a questionnaire to respondents who are interviewed
face to face in their homes or elsewhere, or instead by telephone, online, or through the mail.

▼
However a survey is conducted, it enables
a researcher to gather much information
Atstock Productions/Shutterstock
about the respondents, even though this
information is often relatively superficial.
Often respondents represent a random
sample of an entire population in a par-
ticular location, such as the whole nation,
a state, a city, or perhaps a campus. The
process of selecting a random sample is
very complex but is functionally equiva-
▲ Telephone surveys have become very commonly used in criminology and lent to flipping a coin or rolling two dice
other social sciences. to determine who is in, and who is not in,
the sample. The familiar Gallup poll is a random sample of the adult population of the
United States. Even if the size of a national random sample like this poll might be as small
as 400 adults, its results will accurately reflect the opinions and behaviors of all U.S. adults,
if we could ever measure all of them. This means that we can generalize the results of a ran-
dom sample to the entire population with only a small margin of error.
Other surveys are carried out with nonrandom samples. For example, a researcher might
hand out a questionnaire to a class of high school seniors or first-year college students. Although
we cannot safely generalize from these results to the population, some very well-known studies
in criminology rely on such convenience samples.
In criminology, surveys are used primarily to gather three kinds of information: The first
kind involves public opinion on crime and the criminal justice system. Depending on the sur-
vey, respondents may be asked about their views on several issues, including the death penalty,
spending to reduce crime, their satisfaction with the local police, or the reasons they believe
people commit crimes. The second kind of information gathered involves self-report data, pri-
marily from adolescents, on crime and delinquency. Respondents in this case are asked to
indicate, among other things, how many times in the past they have committed various kinds
of offenses. The third kind of information concerns criminal victimization. Respondents are
asked whether they have been victimized by various crimes and, if so, are further asked about
certain details about their victimization. We will discuss all these types of information in the
chapters ahead.
Review and Discuss

What three kinds of information do criminological surveys gather?
Experiments
Experiments are very common in psychology but are less so in criminology and sociology.
Subjects typically are assigned randomly either to an experimental group, which is subjected
to an experimental condition, or to a control group for comparison. Many experiments take
place in the laboratory. A common laboratory experiment with criminological implications
concerns the effects of violent videos. After random assignment, an experimental group of
subjects may watch violent videos, while a control group watches nonviolent videos. Research-
ers then ask both groups to read hypothetical scenarios in which someone resolved an interper-
sonal dispute violently and to indicate for each scenario whether they approve the use of this
violence. If those in the experimental group are more likely than those in the control group to
indicate such approval, researchers can reasonably conclude that watching the violent videos
films yielded this difference.
Certain problems exist with the conclusions drawn from such laboratory experiments, however.
First, even if an experimental effect is found, it might be only a short-term effect rather than a long-
term effect. Second, an effect found in the artificial setting of a laboratory will not necessarily be
found in a real-world setting. Third, most subjects in laboratory experiments conducted by social
scientists are college students, typically in lower-level classes. Because college students are younger

▼
than most people not in college and differ in many other ways, experimental results found among
college students may not necessarily pertain to other people.
Some experiments, called randomized field experiments or randomized field trials, occur
outside a laboratory. Such experiments in criminology go back to the 1950s, and there is growing
interest in what is called experimental criminology (Farrington et al. 2020; Koehler and Smith
2021). Randomized field experiments have been used to test the effectiveness of various treat-
ment and prevention programs, and they have also been used to help understand the causes of
crime. As just one example of such experiments, police have increased their foot patrol in ran-
domly selected high-crime areas. Subsequent crime rates in these areas were then found to be
lower than rates in other high-crime areas in which foot patrol did not increase. The randomized
nature of these studies permits the conclusion that the increased foot patrol did, in fact, reduce
criminal behavior (Haberman and Stiver 2020).
Qualitative Research: Observing and Intensive Interviewing

Much research in criminology and sociology involves observing and/or interviewing members of
various groups (Katz 2019). These studies are called field studies or ethnographies. Two of the
most famous such accounts in sociology are the late Elliott Liebow’s Tally’s Corner (1967), a
study of urban Black men, and Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women (1993),
which provides a rich account of urban women living on the streets. A classic field study in
criminology was William Foote Whyte’s (1943) Street Corner Society, a study of leadership in a
Chicago gang. Gangs remain the subject of many qualitative studies in criminology (Deuchar
et al. 2020; Miller 2008; Przemieniecki et al. 2020)
Criminologists have also observed the police. Typically, trained researchers ride in police
cars and observe the police as they deal with suspects, victims, witnesses, and other people (Dab-
ney et al. 2017). These studies illuminate police behavior and provide important data on several
issues, including why police decide to arrest or not to arrest suspects and the extent to which
police officers use excessive force. One potential problem with these and other observational
studies is that the people being observed—in this case, the police—may change their typical
behaviors when they know they are being watched.
Another type of qualitative research in criminology involves intensive interviewing of crimi-
nal offenders (Topalli et al. 2020). Some studies interview convicted offenders who are either
still imprisoned or on probation or parole (Pyrooz et al. 2021; Ricciardelli 2018). Other interview
studies involve offenders who are still on the streets, as in the gang studies just mentioned. As
you might expect, this type of study poses several difficulties: Active criminals might not want to
cooperate because they fear the interviewer might be an undercover police officer or might report
what is heard to the police; interviewers may also face a legal or ethical obligation to report seri-
ous crimes. Some offenders may also pose a danger to the interviewer. Nonetheless, criminolo-
gists have published several fascinating studies of active robbers, burglars, carjackers, drug
dealers and users, gang members, and other types of offenders (Holt and French 2020; Jacobs
2012; Miller 2008; Roy et al. 2018).
Increasingly, intensive interviewing has been combined with surveying in longitudinal studies,
in which the same people are studied over time (Blagden and Wilson 2020; Giordano et al. 2020).
Criminology has a growing number of investigations in specific cities or across the whole nation
in which researchers interview children or teenagers and their parents and then re-interview them
periodically for one or two decades or even longer. Juvenile and criminal police and court records
are often also consulted. Longitudinal studies have greatly contributed to the understanding of
crime over the life course (see Chapter 8) and are invaluable for the testing of many theories of
crime and delinquency.
Criminal offenders have been interviewed at great length, and so have criminal victims.
Heart-rending accounts of the experiences of women survivors of rape, sexual assault, and
domestic violence helped bring these crimes to public attention beginning in the 1970s.
Since that time, victims of these and other types of crimes have been interviewed at length
(e.g., LoCascio et al. 2021). In a related type of study, interviews of urban residents have
helped to illuminate their complex concerns about crime and incivility and have yielded a
poignant picture of how the threat of crime and the prospect of being arrested affect their
daily lives. Qualitative research, whether in the form of observing or intensive interviewing,

▼
cannot readily be generalized to other segments of the population, but this type of research
has nonetheless provided richer accounts of the motivations, lives, and behaviors of crimi-
nals than any other research method has yielded. Several ethnographic studies of urban
areas, such as Elijah Anderson’s (1999) sensitive account of urban culture, may not touch on
crime directly, but they still provide important perspectives that help us understand why
street crime may be common in these areas.
Research Using Existing Data

Criminologists often analyze data that have been recorded or gathered by government agencies
and other sources. For example, criminologists may code data from the case files of criminal
defendants to determine whether defendants’ race or ethnicity, social class, or gender affects
their likelihood of conviction and imprisonment. They also often combine Census data with
government-produced crime and victimization statistics to assess how the social characteristics
of neighborhoods, cities, and counties affect crime and victimization (Hollis 2018); some studies
also use Census data to determine how the social characteristics of states or counties affect
imprisonment rates, the number of executions, and other criminal justice responses to crime
(Brown 2020).
Comparative and Historical Research

Two final types of research that combine several of the kinds already mentioned are comparative
and historical research. Comparative research refers to cross-cultural or international research.
Different nations’ varying rates of crime and imprisonment reflect differences in the nations’
social structures and cultures (Chon 2013). By examining other nations’ experiences, we can bet-
ter understand our own situation. International Focus boxes throughout this book highlight this
comparative approach.
Historical research is also important. Much of the work of the three key founders of
sociology—Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx—is historical. Societies change over
time, as do their rates of criminal and other behaviors. For example, murder rates in Western
nations were much higher a few centuries ago than they are now. By looking at crime in history,
we can better understand our own situation today and the possibilities for change. Most chapters
in this book discuss historical research.
c Conclusion
Viewed from a sociological perspective, crime is a public issue rooted in the way society is
organized, not a private trouble rooted in the personal failures of individuals. Accordingly,
sociological criminology highlights the role played by social structure, broadly defined, in
criminal behavior, victimization, and the legal response to crime. It emphasizes the crimino-
genic social and physical conditions of communities and stresses the impact of social inequal-
ities based on race and ethnicity, social class, and gender. It also challenges commonsense
perceptions of crime and the legal order and offers solutions for dealing with crime that address
its structural roots.
This book’s primary aim is to develop your sociological imagination so that you can perceive,
perhaps a little more than you do right now, the structural bases for crime, victimization, and criminal
justice. As you develop your sociological imagination, perhaps you will also understand yourself, or
at least your friends and loved ones, a little better than you do now. As C. Wright Mills (1959:5)
observed some 50 years ago, the idea that individuals can understand their own experiences only by
first understanding the structural and historical forces affecting them is “in many ways a terrible les-
son [and] in many ways a magnificent one.” It is terrible because it makes us realize that forces affect-
ing our behavior and life chances are often beyond our control; it is magnificent because it enables us
to recognize what these forces are and, perhaps, therefore to change them.
Welcome to the world of sociological criminology. Enjoy the journey you are about to make!

▼
Summary
1. The popular sources of our knowledge about crime say little about its social roots. A socio-
logical understanding of crime and criminal justice emphasizes the need to address the
structural roots of crime for crime-reduction efforts to succeed.
2. The sociological perspective states that our social backgrounds influence our attitudes, behav-
iors, and life chances. Sociologist C. Wright Mills stressed that people’s private troubles are
rooted in the social structure. A sociological approach often challenges conventional wisdom
by exposing false claims about reality and taken-for-granted assumptions about social life and
social institutions.
3. Criminology and sociology are mutually relevant. Criminology grew largely out of sociol-
ogy, and today, each discipline addresses concepts and theories and uses methodologies that
are all relevant to the other discipline.
4. Sociological criminology arose from the writings of Émile Durkheim in France in the late
nineteenth century, from the efforts of W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells-Barnett in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and from the work of social scientists at the Univer-
sity of Chicago in the early twentieth century. Somewhat later in the twentieth century, the
pioneering efforts of Edwin Sutherland contributed further to the prominence of sociological
criminology. Today, several sociological theories of crime vie for scholarly popularity.
5. A sociological approach suggests that the definition of “crime” is problematic because some
behaviors may be harmful but not criminal, and others may be criminal but not very harm-
ful. This view of crime derives from the larger study of deviant behavior, which sociologists
consider relative in time and space, given that whether a behavior is considered deviant
depends on the circumstances under which it occurs.
6. Consensus and conflict theories of criminal law try to answer two related questions:
(1) Why do criminal laws get established? and (2) Whom do criminal laws benefit? Consen-
sus theory assumes that laws represent the interests of all segments of the public, whereas
conflict theory assumes that laws represent the views of the powerful and help the powerful
stay at the top of society’s hierarchy and keep the powerless at the bottom.
7. For a defendant to be found guilty of a crime, criminal intent, among other things, must be
proved. This means that the defendant must have committed a criminal behavior knowingly
and willingly. Legal defenses to criminal liability include accident or mistake, ignorance,
duress, self-defense, entrapment, and insanity.
8. Research methods in criminology include surveys, experiments, observing and intensive
interviewing, the use of existing data, and comparative and historical research.
Key Terms
actus reus 10 duress 11 private troubles 4
common law 9 felonies 10 public criminology 3
conflict 8 generalize 12 public issues 4
consensus 8 independent variable 11 self-defense 11
crime 7 intersectionality 5 social control 5
criminal intent 10 laws 5 social inequality 4
criminogenic 6 longitudinal studies 13 social structure 3
criminology 7 mala in se 10 sociological criminology 2
customs 5 mala prohibita 10 sociological imagination 4
debunking motif 4 mens rea 10 sociological perspective 3
dependent variable 11 misdemeanor 10 survey 11
deviance 5 norms 5

▼
What Would You Do?
1. Suppose you are a single parent with two young chil- 2. Suppose you are the college student described in this
dren and are living in a large city. Like many urban chapter who smokes your first marijuana joint only
residents, you and your neighbors are very concerned after repeated appeals by another dormitory student
about the crime and drug trafficking you see in your who turns out to be an undercover police officer. You
neighborhood. Some of your neighbors have moved know you were entrapped, but you also realize that if
out of the city, but most have stayed, and some have you decide not to plead guilty and take the case to trial,
even joined a neighborhood watch group. You can your entrapment defense might not work, and you will
afford to move out of the city, but it would be a severe face harsher punishment than if you plead guilty.
financial strain to do so. Do you think you would Would you plead guilty, or would you plead not guilty
decide to move out of the city, or would you stay? and argue that the officer entrapped you? Explain your
Explain your response. If you stayed, would you join response.
the neighborhood watch group? Why or why not?

▼
ARENA Creative/Shutterstock
2 Public Opinion, the News

Media, and the Crime
Problem
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
❶ Explain why the historical concern over crime might challenge democratic theory if this
concern at least partly arises from misleading media coverage.
❷ Explain how the news media overdramatize crime.
❸ Describe the different kinds of crime myths generated by the news media.
❹ List the effects of news media coverage of crime.
❺ Explain the structural factors and individual characteristics that relate to fear of crime, anger
about crime, and views on the seriousness of crime.
❻ Describe the role played by racial prejudice in punitiveness.
❼ Summarize racial differences in views about the police, in perceptions of criminal injustice,
and in views about criminal justice spending.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
Public Opinion about Crime: Laying the Groundwork
A Brief Look Back
Public Opinion and Crime Policy
Overdramatization of Crime by the News Media
Crime Waves
Overreporting of Violent Crime
Violence in the Popular Media
Other Problems with Media Coverage
People of Color
Youths
17
▼
Virtuous Victims
Additional Problems in Media Coverage
Effects of Media Coverage
Public Ignorance
Crime and Controversy: Should the News Media Disclose the Names of People Who Report a
Rape?
Public Fear and Concern
Obscuring Underlying Forces
Diversion from White-Collar Crime
International Focus: Crime Is Down in Scotland, but Many Scots Think Otherwise
Racial and Ethnic Stereotyping
Research on Public Beliefs about Crime and Punitiveness
Fear of Crime
Anger about Crime
Seriousness of Crime
Punitiveness
Research on Views about Criminal Justice
Views about the Police
Perceptions of Criminal Injustice
Views about Crime and Criminal Justice Spending
A Final Word on Public Beliefs
Conclusion
Crime in the News

It was the end of April 2021, and the residents of the South Ozone Park neighborhood in the New York City
borough of Queens were reacting to the nonfatal shootings of two young men late one night on a street corner.
A neighbor who had heard several shots said, “Who didn’t hear shots? You hear shots around here all the time.”
Another neighbor said she had quit her restaurant job to avoid having to walk home alone at night. “It’s very
bad news that this kind of situation is happening,” she said. “We live just a little over there, and we’re very
afraid.”
Source: Kriegstein and Tracy 2021.
T
hink about why you are taking this criminology course. If you are like many students, you
may be taking it simply because it fits into your schedule. Or, you might be interested in
becoming a probation officer, a juvenile caseworker, a police officer, or a victim-witness
advocate. Perhaps you even want an academic career in criminology. Some students may be tak-
ing the course because they are crime victims or are friends or relatives of crime victims. Still
others may simply be interested in and even fascinated by crime and criminals. A final group
may consider crime a serious social problem and want to know why crime occurs and what can
be done about it.
Now think about why you have taken courses in other subject areas: math, biology, English
literature, or even many of the social sciences. It may have been to fulfill general education or
major requirements, to prepare you for a career, to help you learn more about an interesting
topic, or—be honest—to fill a time slot in your schedule.
You probably did not take these courses because you were concerned about their subject matter
or because you were worried about the subject matter somehow affecting you. A criminology
course differs in this sense because its subject matter is very real to students: They hear about crime
from the news media and see many crimes portrayed in TV programs and the movies. They come
into their criminology courses with real concerns about crime and even fears that they or their
friends and relatives will become crime victims. Like the residents of the South Ozone Park neigh-
borhood in which the late-might shootings occurred, they worry about being unsafe.
chapter 2 Public Opinion, the News Media, and the Crime Problem 18
▼
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
head, and a spider that has lost half its legs, are not worth a place in
a cabinet.
To get together even a small cabinet of objects in natural history,
takes time, care, and patience. I knew a girl who was carefully
collecting and mounting beetles. In a whole summer she got only
twenty-five. But each one was perfect, different from the rest, nicely
fastened in place, and had its name written beside it. So her
collection was of real value.
After you have secured a nice little cabinet, the trouble will be to
keep it safe, and in order. Specimens must be taken care of. All
specimens of plants, and insects, are very liable to be destroyed by
little bugs. Only the things kept in alcohol are really safe from being
eaten.
Camphor and red pepper are of some use to keep out these
enemies. Your teachers will know, or can easily learn, how to
prepare the specimens with poisons, which will kill the mites and not
harm you or the specimens. You must leave it to them.
It is nice to have a case with glass doors. If you cannot have that,
arrange as many of the objects as you can in boxes with panes of
glass laid over them. For open cabinets it is well to have a piece of
fine gauze to lay over each shelf, or over the whole set of shelves,
when the cabinet is not in immediate use.
Dust makes a cabinet look very ugly. But you cannot clean off
beetles and butterflies with a dusting cloth or brush. It would ruin
such delicate things.
You can gently move the boxes and specimens, and wipe off the
shelves, and the sides of the boxes. Then blow, or fan, the dust from
the specimens. Even minerals should have the dust blown from
them, not wiped off. It is easy to rub the bloom and the little fine
points, and edges, from a mineral specimen.
When you have made up your minds to have a cabinet in your
school, look about and see what your friends have to give you for it.
Many people have a few natural history curiosities, for which they do
not really care. Such persons would gladly give their treasures to a
school cabinet. But there should be some bright little lad or lass to
say: “Oh, we have a cabinet at our school. Would you not be willing
to send these things there?”
Correct pictures of birds, fish, insects, and flowers, are useful in a
cabinet, but you must be sure that they are correct before you give
them a place. You must not put the pictures into your cabinet merely
because they are pretty. If they are wrong they will give you false
ideas. I have seen colored pictures of insects with some of the legs
set upon the hinder part of the body instead of all upon the chest
part. Such a picture is of no use.
Keen eyes to see what comes in your own way, and keen wits to
suggest to other people what they can do for you, will steadily help to
build up the school cabinet.
LESSON XVI.
THE OLD MAN OF THE MEADOW.
THE OLD MAN AND HIS FAMILY.

When I was about seven years old, I caught a grasshopper and put
him into a bottle.
Then I sat down outside the bottle, and looked at the grasshopper.
He sat inside the bottle, and looked at me.
It began to grow upon my mind that the grasshopper looked much
like an old man. His face, with the big, solemn eyes, and straight
mouth, was like an old man’s face.
He wore a gray coat, like a loose duster. He had a wrinkled greenish
vest. He wore knee-breeches and long red stockings.
The more I looked at him, the more he looked like a little, grave, old-
time man who came to visit my aged grandfather.
I had a cousin who at dusk would sit with me in a corner of the big
sofa, and repeat to me a poem, called the “Prisoner of Chillon.” That
sad poem had made me feel very sorry for all prisoners. I thought my
grasshopper in the bottle felt like a prisoner. I said, “Now you may
go, my Old Man of the Meadow.”
I took the cork out of the bottle. The grasshopper at once leaped up,
and sat on the rim of the bottle. Then a strange thing happened! The
Old Man of the Meadow spread out two wide brown wings. They had
a broad, lemon-colored band on them. They were gay as the wings
of a butterfly! On them he sailed away!
I could hardly believe my eyes. I ran after him to a tall stalk of
golden-rod. There he sat a plain, gray-green old man. But again he
spread out the wide wings, and was gone!
My Old Man of the Meadow had then this splendid dress-coat under
his sober overcoat! Seated at rest, he looked plain and quiet,—a
creature of the earth. Lifted into the air, he was nearly as fine as a
butterfly.
Do you not wish to know something more of this Old Man of the
Meadow, the grasshopper? The name of this insect at once tells you
something about him. He lives much in the grass, and his chief
motion is in hops, or long jumps. He has another name, “the
murmurer.” This is given because of the noise or song he makes. He
sings to Mrs. Grasshopper. His song is loud and shrill. It is made by
rubbing his wings one upon the other.
He has a little piece of skin like a tight drum-head set in each wing.
As he moves his wings, this tiny drum vibrates, or trembles, and
makes the shrill sound.
Mrs. Grasshopper does not have this drum in her wings. She has,
however, at the end of her body, a nice little sword. The French call
her “the jumper with the sword.” Is her sword to fight with? No. This
little sword opens into several blades. She uses it to place her eggs
snugly in the ground. The sword blades open, and the eggs slide
safely down between them, into the little earth-bed. There they lie
until the young grasshoppers hatch out.
You will find as we study about grasshoppers, that they do not all live
in the grass. Some spend most of their time in trees.
Let us take a closer look at the grasshopper. As he is an insect,[13]
he should have a body made in rings, in three parts, with four wings
and six legs set on the second, or chest part.
Just here let us say, that if you will look closely you will see that the
head of an insect is made of four rings, and its chest is made of
three rings. They are rings grown wider than the rest.
Our Old Man of the Meadow does not lack any of the parts which a
proper insect should have.
The order which he belongs to is called the straight-wings, because
the insects belonging to it do not fold their wings crosswise.
The grasshopper family is called the family of “the murmurers,” from
their music.
There are six families of the straight-wings. In this book we shall
study a little about three of them,—the grasshoppers, the crickets,
and the locusts. If you wish, also, to learn about their cousin, the
cockroach, suppose you, who live in city houses, go down to the
kitchen, and catch him about the water pipes, and study him for
yourselves!
The order of straight-wings is often divided in this way: The runners,
—as the cockroach; the snatchers, a kind which have their fore-feet
something like hands, to snatch with; the walkers, who seldom fly or
jump; and the jumpers. The grasshopper is one of the jumpers.
If you look well at the grasshopper, you will see that his front pair of
legs is shorter than the others. This hinders him in walking over a
level surface. But it helps him in walking up a tree, or small plant, or
a wall.
See the hind legs! They are more than twice as long as the others.
The thigh, or upper part, is very long and strong. By means of these
big legs, the grasshopper is a famous jumper.
Now, if you have a grasshopper to look at, you will see that the feet
have four parts. The part of the leg between the foot and the thigh
has sharp points like the teeth of a comb.
The hind part of the body is long and slender, and, being made of
rings, can bend easily. In the great, green grasshopper all the body
is of a fine green tint.
Let us look at the wings. The upper pair, or wing-covers, are large
and long. Notice two things about the wings; they lap at the tips, and
are high in the middle. When they are shut, they have a shape like a
slanting roof. The upper ones are longer than the lower ones.
These wing-cases have large veins. Lift up a wing-case and pull out
a lower wing. It is folded very closely, in lengthwise plaits. Where
these wings join Mr. Grasshopper’s body, you will find his drum-plate
for making music. One kind of grasshopper has very short wing-
covers. In that kind, both Mr. and Mrs. Grasshopper make music.
There is also one grasshopper, a little, green fellow, that has no
drum; he is silent.
The upper side of the grasshopper’s chest is shaped like a large,
horny collar. The head is large, and has two big, glossy eyes. There
is, also, a knob on the forehead. Between the eyes, are set the
feelers. They are very long; even longer than all the body.
The mouth of the grasshopper is wide, and it has strong jaws. But
they are not so strong as those of his cousin, the cricket.
Grasshoppers prefer vegetable food. They will sometimes eat animal
food. When shut up in a box, they will fight, and the one which gets
killed will be eaten by the victor.
A grasshopper which lost its leg while being put into a box, ate its
leg. Like the other winged creatures, grasshoppers lose their legs
easily, and do not seem to mind it.
If you could look inside the grasshopper’s body, you would see that
he has a gizzard, much like that of a chicken. It is made of little
bands set with fine teeth. These teeth chew up into a pulp the leaves
which the grasshopper has eaten.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] See Nature Reader, No. 2, Lessons 1-4.
LESSON XVII.
THE LIFE OF THE OLD MAN OF THE MEADOW.
Many years ago, a great poet wrote a song to the grasshopper. The
poet said the grasshopper was the happiest of living things. It did
nothing but dance and sing. It ate fresh leaves, and drank cool dew.
When the glad summer of its life was done, it died. It did not live to
be sick, or hungry, or cold.
This poet called the grasshopper “the earth-born,” and said that it
was man’s little brother.
Yes, the grasshopper is earth-born. The mother grasshopper makes,
with the sword of which I told you, a hole in the ground. In that she
lays her eggs, in a case made of something like glue. Then she
closes up the hole, and the eggs lie all winter, safe in the ground.
In the spring, the larvæ hatch from the egg, and creep out of the
ground. They are very small, but shaped much like the parent, only
they have no wings. They molt, or change their skins several times.
At first, the little ones are all alike, but after several changes of skin,
the larvæ become pupæ. Then you can see the coming wings under
a little sheath. You can also see Mrs. Grasshopper’s sword growing.
About six or eight weeks, after hatching, the final change is made.
The perfect insect comes out of its last-shed skin. It has now two
pairs of wings. Mr. Grasshopper plays on his new drum, and Mrs.
Grasshopper marches about with her new sword.
The young grasshoppers are very greedy while larvæ and pupæ.
They eat all the time. When they are grown, they do not give all their
time to eating. Mr. Grasshopper must sing, and he does not do this
while either flying or eating.
He stands quite still, fixes himself firmly by his fore-feet, and presses
his body downward. There is a little quiver through all his body as
long as the sound lasts.
The people of Italy call him “the screamer,” or “the squealer,” from
his shrill noise.
The grasshopper has a very odd habit. After he has eaten for a long
time, he sits quite still. He looks as if he were doing some serious
thinking. Sometimes when he sits in this way, he moves his mouth
as if chewing. From this action, people used to think that he chewed
the cud, as cows and sheep do.
But he does not chew the cud. If you watch him well, in these silent
times, you will see him gravely licking his long feelers, and his lips.
He seems to be cleaning them.
To do this, he runs out a long, limber tongue, shaped much like
yours. You remember that the ants have this habit of cleaning and
dressing themselves, after eating.[14]
The great, green grasshopper, which lives on the trees, has wings of
a gray-green. He has a little bronze, or russet color, on his feet, and
on the under part of his body. The rest of his body is a fine leaf-
green.
The color in the grasshopper does not seem to be laid on the surface
of his coat, as on that of the beetle. It is not put on in plumes and
scales, as the butterfly has it. But it is dyed through and through the
wings and body.
The wing-cases of the grasshopper, and the rings of the body, are
not hard, and like horn or shell, as in the beetle tribe. They are of a
tough skin, and are dyed with the color.
Let us have a look at some of these fine fellows. Although the color
of the great, green grasshopper is so gay, it will be hard to find him.
His coat is just the tint of the leaves he likes to live among. You can
scarcely see him even if you look straight at him.
You will find in the grass a smaller, lighter-green hopper that is very
easily caught, because in his hurry to get away he flies right up in
your face, when he hears you coming.
The grasshoppers are a very timid family, and are very sensitive to
sound. Some say that their long feelers serve them for ears. But that
is not true.
The garden grasshopper has very small wings. Its color is brownish
gray. It likes to live in the garden walls or under the leaves in the
borders. Both Mr. and Mrs. Grasshopper sing in this garden family.
They keep up fine music for those who like to hear them, as one
answers the song of the other.
I think we most of us like the cry of the grasshopper. It brings to our
mind the warm, dry, sunny days, the time of flowers.
Out in the meadow you will find our Old Man, the common great,
gray hopper. As the great, green one in the trees is hidden by his
color, so is the great, gray one hidden in the grass. His coat is the
hue of the half-dry grass, with little tinges of green along it.
He seems a very plain insect at first. But watch him and notice the
light red and yellowish bands on his legs. He has spots of soot color
on his wing cases. When he spreads his wide wings, note the brown
and yellow stripes. He is fine enough after all.
In the woods, among the pine and fir trees, you will find a light-green,
small, slim grasshopper a deal like the garden singer.
There is a very handsome, large grasshopper called the wart-biter.
The boys in Sweden give him this name, because they think he can
cure warts. They think that if he bites a wart, and puts some dark
brown juice on it, the wart will go away.
The wart-biter is nearly two inches long. It is a green-gray with
reddish legs and feet. It lays its eggs in little balls in the earth.
In South America there are very large and splendid grasshoppers.
Their wings are so gay that when they fly they look much like
butterflies. The wings, in flight, cover most of the body.
But when you see the large, long legs stretched out behind, and the
very long feelers waving to the tips of the wings, you will know that
this is a grasshopper. All this brown and black and crimson splendor
is the Old Man of the Meadow, with a very fine coat.
The grasshopper is not migratory. It does not change its home. It
dies near where it was born. Frost and cold kill it. It does not outlive
the winter, as butterflies, bees, and wasps do.
Grasshoppers appear in great numbers, but they do not go in
swarms as locusts do.
Each grasshopper lives alone. He does nothing for his neighbor, and
his neighbor does nothing for him.
When grasshoppers are numerous they damage the grass and the
young crops.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] See Nature Reader, No. 2. Lessons on Ants.
LESSON XVIII.
THE ROBBER COUSIN.
The Old Man of the Meadow is, in his way, like a quiet country
gentleman. He roams about the fields, and likes to sing, and is fond
of moonlight. He likes the shade, and the cool, still places under the
green herbs.
He has a fierce cousin, who is a great robber, a kind of land pirate.
His name is locust.
I asked a class of boys, “What is a locust?” One said: “It is a great,
big grasshopper.”
Another said: “It is a greedy grasshopper that eats everything.”
A third said: “A locust is a grasshopper that travels in swarms.”
Now these were pretty good answers. Each had some truth in it. A
locust is not a grasshopper. But it is much like a grasshopper. It is his
very near relative.
The locust is not always larger than the grasshopper. The great
green, or the wart-biter grasshopper, is larger than the Rocky
Mountain locust. That locust is called “the hateful,” because he does
so much harm.
The locust is generally larger than the grasshopper, and one very big
locust is much larger than any grasshopper that ever was known.
And, too, the locust is much more greedy.
The locust destroys all plants that come in its way. It will eat the bark
off the trees.
Locusts live and move in swarms. Instead of living and dying in the
places where they were born, they are given to travel. They migrate
like the birds you will read of in this book.
It is not quite surely known what is the motive for their journeys.
Probably it is to get food. The locust is the child of hot lands. His first
home was, no doubt, in the great sandy plains of Asia. He is very
common in Africa. In Europe and the eastern part of the United
States he is not very common. In the Western States he has done
much damage.
If you take up a locust to examine, you will at once notice that his
feelers are much shorter than those of the grasshopper. Mrs. Locust
also is without the sword for placing her eggs. She lays them in the
earth in long tubes.
The front of the locust’s head is harder and thicker than the
grasshoppers. The hind legs are also much thicker and stronger than
even the big strong ones of the grasshopper.
The locust’s coat is of light brown or sand color. There is a delicate
green tinge on the wings. The breast has a soft vest of down. The
legs are often striped in bands of brown and yellow.
The locust does not make his music as the grasshopper does. When
he wishes to sing, Mr. Locust stands on his two front pairs of legs.
Then he lifts his hind legs, and draws them one by one, or both
together, over his wings.
The inner side of the hind legs has rough file-like edges. The wings
have thick veins, which stand like cords above the wing surface.
The file parts of the legs rub on these cords, and produce the sound.
The sound takes different tones, as one or both legs are used at a
time in making it. Sometimes the sound is very loud, sometimes it is
very low.
In the latter part of the summer, Mrs. Locust lays her eggs, fifty or
one hundred together, in a tube hidden in the earth. In places where
locusts do much harm, rewards are given for baskets full of these
tubes. Many boys make a living by digging them from the earth, and
selling them to be destroyed.
For you must know that locusts being very greedy, and very
numerous, do much harm. They move quickly, and in great swarms.
Though they live in swarms they have no queen as the bees have,
and they do no work as bees and ants do.
Probably there is no living thing seen in such numbers as the
locusts. We can scarcely believe or understand what we are told
about the multitudes of these insects which appear in the East.
They fill the sky like a great cloud, so that the day is darkened. When
they see a green place, they settle to feed. In a few minutes the
green is all gone. The place is as brown and bare as if a fire had
swept over it.
People hear with terror that the locusts are coming. They know the
crops will be eaten up. Then food will be scarce, and the people will
be poor.
If by chance a swarm is destroyed by other means than by fire, all
the air for miles will be filled with the bad smell of the decaying
bodies.
The only good that poor people can get from the locusts is by eating
them. They pull off the wings, and legs, and dry the bodies. They eat
them fried in oil and salt, or ground into meal, after roasting.
The locusts cannot fly against the wind. They go with the wind. It
brings them, and if it changes, it sweeps them away. Sometimes the
wind drives them out to sea. If they become too weary to fly, they
drop into the waves and are drowned. This often happens. Then the
water washes their bodies ashore. The coast of Africa has been
found covered thick with them, for the space of fifty miles.
But they do not always drop into the sea. They are very strong on
the wing. A great swarm of locusts was met by a ship, twelve
hundred miles from shore. They surrounded the ship, and hid the
sun.
As their flight is so strong, locusts can go from one country to
another. They pass from Africa to the south of Europe. They go from
the mainland to the islands.
Usually the locusts fly during the day, while the air is hot and dry.
Late in the day they settle to feed, and where they stop they stay
until all green things are eaten up. Of course they do not feed when
on the wing. They run along the ground to eat.
People try many ways of killing locusts. Sometimes deep trenches
are cut, and filled with water, so that the young unwinged locusts, as
they run along the ground, will fall in and be drowned. But the locusts
are in such numbers that the drowned ones soon fill the trenches.
The others run safely over the dead bodies.
Sometimes great fires are lit across their path. Then the hordes of
locusts crowd on, and at last, the fires are put out by the burned
bodies. After that, the others pass on unhurt.
You must know that the young locust is quite as greedy, and as great
a terror as his parents. In the larval and pupal states, they migrate as
well as when they have wings. They seem born to eat and to travel.
At this stage they go by walking. They march in a solid column like
soldiers. They move straight on, nothing turning them aside. Is a
house in the way? Over it and into it they go. You know some ants
move in swarms in this way.[15]
The locust, being larger, more numerous, and more greedy than the
ants, do much harm. If they find a town in their path, through it they
go. Countless numbers may be killed, but there are countless
numbers to follow. Is a river in the way? Into it they tumble, and
when enough dead bodies lie on the water to make a raft, the other
locusts pass safely over.
One great trouble about the locust is, that when a full-grown swarm
passes through a place the ground is left full of eggs. The next year
these hatch, and the larvæ and pupæ eat up all that has grown since
their parents ravaged the land.
Famines of two or three years duration have been caused in this
way. You will not wonder at the strength of locusts and the amount of
food they need, when I tell you that one kind is quite a foot broad
from tip to tip of the wings.
The great foreign locusts are very splendid to look at. They are
dressed like soldiers in crimson and blue. Their fierce eyes shine,
and the rush of their wings makes a sound like the coming of an
army.
Did I not give this locust a good name, when I called him the robber
cousin?
FOOTNOTES:
[15] See Nature Reader, No. 2. Lessons on Ants.
LESSON XIX.
THE MERRY COUSINS.
You have heard about the robber cousin of the Old Man of the
Meadow. Now you shall hear about a very happy and harmless little
cousin. Here he is!
Did you ever meet him in your walks? Did he ever come creeping out
of a hole in the wall, or from a chink in the bricks in the hearth, and
sit down by you before the fire?
Did you notice how he waved his long feelers gently in the heat, and
seemed to bask in the glow as pussy does? If you were very still,
perhaps all at once he burst into a shrill, gay little song.
Did you notice what a shining, dark-brown coat he had? Did you see
that his tail had two long, stiff hairs, or bristles, spread out from each
other? Did you think that they were like the long tail hairs of the
bright and dainty May-fly?[16]
When you saw all this did you know your little friend well? Did you
call him by his name, “How are you, Mr. Cricket”?
Ah, the cricket is a right-jolly little fellow; let us take a good look at
him.
There are three kinds of crickets which we shall talk about. The
house cricket, the field cricket, the mole cricket.
The body of the cricket is not so slender as that of the grasshopper,
it is short and thick. It is much the shape of the first joint of your
thumb. The color is a dark, glossy brown, sometimes almost black.
The feelers are very long, longer than the whole body. The eyes are
large and round. The under wings are very large, much larger than
the wing-cases. When they are folded up, they reach out beyond the
covers and the body, in a long needle-like roll. It looks as if Mr.
Cricket were carrying home something under his arm.
Near where the wing cover joins his body, Mr. Cricket has a little, thin
drum-head for his music. He is very fond of making a noise. The
French call him “Cri-cri”[17] from the sound he makes. We call him
“cricket” for the same reason.
The cricket has strong jaws, sharp teeth, and a thick round tongue.
His feet are not broad and thick, like the grasshopper’s. He does not
run up plants as the grasshopper does. The cricket runs about the
ground. He has sharp, thin feet. Sometimes they have stiff hairs on
them.
As he runs about the ground, his long feelers warn him of any
danger in front. What do you think he has to tell him of danger
behind? He has that pair of long, stiff tail hairs, which look so much
like feelers.
Mrs. Cricket does not sing. It is Mr. Cricket that makes all the noise.
How does he make it? He has three strong veins under his left wing
cover. The largest of these is rough, like a file. This vein he uses as
a man uses the bow of a violin.
When the rough vein is drawn across the right wing cover, all the
cover trembles, or quivers, and gives out a sound, as when the bow
is drawn over the strings of a violin.
The field cricket will sing all day. The house and mole crickets sing
only at night.
Field crickets and house crickets are very much alike. The field
cricket is darker than the house cricket. He is also noisy by day. In
the winter he creeps into the earth and is torpid, unless the early cold
kills him.
I think house crickets are field crickets that have taken to living in
doors. So, in course of time, they have changed a little. But they
were all field crickets once.
Crickets are fond of moisture. They are thirsty creatures. They will
drink any liquid left in their way. They drink water, milk, soup, tea,
beer, vinegar, yeast. I have known them to come to my ink bottle to
try to drink the ink! But that killed them!
Crickets eat vegetables. They like potato. They are greedy, and will
eat whatever is in their way. They eat bread crumbs, soft grease, and
are very fond of meat. They catch and eat small insects. They eat
leather. Also they will eat woollen cloth, stockings, clothes.
Once our cook laid upon the grass a large piece of woollen blanket,
on which she had spilled some bread sponge. She left it there thirty-
six hours. When she went for it, the crickets had eaten nearly all of it.
It was so full of holes it was like a net. There were more holes than
there was blanket.
Crickets do not like to change their homes. They prefer to stay near
where they were born. If you carry them away they will use their big
wings to get home. Unless they fly to move from home to home, they
do not use their big wings very much. They walk, or hop.
The poets and story-tellers are very fond of crickets. Many people
think it is lucky to have them sing in the hearth. But there is no luck
about it. It is very pleasant and cheery to hear them sing.
In hot weather the house cricket sometimes goes into the garden to
live. In October he comes in, and finds a home in the house-wall. He
likes new houses where the mortar is not too hard for him to pull
some of it out and make his little home. He chooses the kitchen and
other well-warmed rooms to live in.
If the house is shut up and without fires for some days the cricket
becomes torpid. What do you suppose these little fellows did before
they found men to build houses for them?
In houses they keep quiet all day. They are timid things. Perhaps
they sleep. At night they come out. One wise old man who wrote
about crickets said that the tiny, new crickets came out on the
hearth-stone by hundreds. They were about the size of fleas. He
found all sizes at the same time. So he thought that they hatch at
any time if they live in a warm place.
The field cricket makes his house in the earth. He seeks a hot, sunny
spot. Then he digs out a hole with his strong jaws. This hole is often
from six to twelve inches deep.
The cricket is very timid and runs into his hole if any one comes by.
But if he is not afraid, he sits in the door of his house to catch insects
that come near. He also eats leaves and grass, that grow about his
door.
Little French children fish for crickets by tying an ant to a thread and
dropping it into the hole. You can also make Mr. Cricket come out, by
poking a blade of grass into his hole. He runs up to see what is the
matter.
Down in the bottom of the hole, Mrs. Cricket lays her eggs. They are
fastened to each other, and to the ground by a kind of glue. She lays
about three hundred eggs each year. She does not put them all in
one place.
As soon as the larvæ come out of the eggs, they run up to the top of
the ground. Each one then begins to dig a new burrow. Now and
then they get tired of a burrow, and go off to make a new one.
The little crickets in the larva and pupa state look much like the
grown ones, only they have no wings. When they are about half-
grown, they hop about, and look, and act, much like tiny toads. If the
crickets come out of the egg in July, they will reach the perfect state
the next May.
When they are full grown, they have wings, and can play a tune.
They like that. They sit in their doors and sing.
In Spain, the people like the cricket’s song so much that they keep
crickets in little cages, to sing for them. If they have plenty to eat and
drink, they will sing and be happy.
Each cricket will need a cage all for himself. Two crickets shut up
together will fight, until one is killed. Crickets always live alone.
FOOTNOTES:
[16] See Nature Reader, No. 2. “Child of an Hour.”

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Criminology: a sociological

understanding 8th Edition Steven E

ISBN 10: 0-13-763618-0

Pearson is dedicated to creating bias-free content that reflects the diversity,

Our ambition is to purposefully contribute to a world where

NEW TO THIS EDITION XIX

Chapter 3 The Measurement and Patterning of Criminal Behavior 38

Chapter 4 Victims and Victimization 67

Chapter 6 Biological and Psychological Explanations 108

Chapter 7 Sociological Theories: Emphasis on Social Structure 130

Chapter 8 Sociological Theories: Emphasis on Social Process 151

Chapter 9 Sociological Theories: Critical Perspectives 174

Chapter 11 Violence Against Women 223

Chapter 13 White-Collar and Organized Crime 260

Chapter 14 Political Crime 286

Chapter 15 Consensual Crime 305

Chapter 18 Conclusion: How Can We Reduce Crime? 367

NAME INDEX 421

SUBJECT INDEX 430

• Revised discussion of punitiveness • New discussion of lead and other toxins

Chapter 10. Violent Crime: Homicide,

• Updated violence against women data • Updated data throughout

New to this Edition xx

Revel is an interactive learning environment that engages

Author Explanatory Videos Student Survey Questions

Criminal Justice Simulations

Social Explorer Maps integrated into the narrative ask students

About the Author

Timeline of Major Criminological Theories

1764 Classical Theory (Utilitarianism) Cesare Beccaria

1979 Routine Activities Theory Lawrence E. Cohen

1796 Phrenology Franz Gall

1939 Biological Inferiority Earnest Hooton

1942 Social Disorganization Theory Clifford R. Shaw

1958 Focal Concerns Theory Walter B. Miller

1939 Differential Association Theory Edwin H. Sutherland

1990 Self-Control Theory Michael Gottfredson

1951 Edwin Lemert

1952 Jerome Hall

1 Criminology and the

chapter 1 Criminology and the Sociological Perspective 2

c The Sociological Perspective

ple he studied. People in groups with high social inte-

chapter 1 Criminology and the Sociological Perspective 3

Review and Discuss

The Mutual Relevance of Sociology and Criminology

chapter 1 Criminology and the Sociological Perspective 4

Review and Discuss

The Rise of Sociological Criminology

chapter 1 Criminology and the Sociological Perspective 5

marked by intellectual upheaval in several academic dis-

chapter 1 Criminology and the Sociological Perspective 6

c Criminal Law: Theoretical Underpinnings

Deviance is also relative in time: Within the same society,

chapter 1 Criminology and the Sociological Perspective 7

people (low-income, etc.) who are doing them.

Consensus and Conflict in the Creation of

chapter 1 Criminology and the Sociological Perspective 8

Washington Post/Getty Images

c Criminal Law: Origins, Types of Crime, and

Origins of Criminal Law

chapter 1 Criminology and the Sociological Perspective 9

Legal Defenses to Criminal Liability