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459 books match the query 'Criminology' and 11 start with o

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Of Men and Monsters

Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer

Richard Tithecott

University of Wisconsin Press, 1998

Of Men and Monsters examines the serial killer as an American cultural icon, one that both attracts and repels. Richard Tithecott suggests that the stories we tell and the images we conjure of serial killers—real and fictional—reveal as much about mainstream culture and its values, desires, and anxieties as they do about the killers themselves.

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On Gangs

Scott H. Decker, David C. Pyrooz, and James A. Densley

Temple University Press, 2022

Gangs are multifaceted and varied, so any attempt to understand them cannot be restricted to a singular approach. On Gangs provides a diverse and comprehensive survey of the available theories for understanding this social issue as well as the broad range of responses to it. The authors look at the many influences on gangs’ operation, growth, prevention, and enforcement.

The authors provide different criminological, psychological, and sociological approaches to gang studies, including interviews with past and current gang members. On Gangs presents the core issues for understanding gangs, including emerging topics like prison gangs, gender and gangs, and international gangs. There is also a focus on policing, legislation, and punishment. Weaving together research and policy findings to address the causes, contexts, and consequences of gangs, the authors address topics including joining, resisting, and leaving gangs, and how gangs operate in communities and institutions.

An authoritative and sweeping tour of gang scholarship, On Gangs showcases the critical evidence-based solutions in prevention, enforcement, legislation, and intervention. The authors seek to answer the question: How do we effectively deal with gangs and gang membership?

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On the Outside

Prisoner Reentry and Reintegration

David J. Harding, Jeffrey D. Morenoff, and Jessica J. B. Wyse

University of Chicago Press, 2019

One of the Vera Institute of Justice’s Best Criminal Justice Books of 2019

America’s high incarceration rates are a well-known facet of contemporary political conversations. Mentioned far less often is what happens to the nearly 700,000 former prisoners who rejoin society each year. On the Outside examines the lives of twenty-two people—varied in race and gender but united by their time in the criminal justice system—as they pass out of the prison gates and back into the world. The book takes a clear-eyed look at the challenges faced by formerly incarcerated citizens as they try to find work, housing, and stable communities. Standing alongside these individual portraits is a quantitative study conducted by the authors that followed every state prisoner in Michigan who was released on parole in 2003 (roughly 11,000 individuals) for the next seven years, providing a comprehensive view of their postprison neighborhoods, families, employment, and contact with the parole system. On the Outside delivers a powerful combination of hard data and personal narrative that shows why our country continues to struggle with the social and economic reintegration of the formerly incarcerated.

For further information, including an instructor guide and slide deck, please visit: http://ontheoutsidebook.us/home/instructors

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On the Run

Fugitive Life in an American City

Alice Goffman

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Forty years in, the War on Drugs has done almost nothing to prevent drugs from being sold or used, but it has nonetheless created a little-known surveillance state in America’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Arrest quotas and high-tech surveillance techniques criminalize entire blocks, and transform the very associations that should stabilize young lives—family, relationships, jobs—into liabilities, as the police use such relationships to track down suspects, demand information, and threaten consequences.

Alice Goffman spent six years living in one such neighborhood in Philadelphia, and her close observations and often harrowing stories reveal the pernicious effects of this pervasive policing. Goffman introduces us to an unforgettable cast of young African American men who are caught up in this web of warrants and surveillance—some of them small-time drug dealers, others just ordinary guys dealing with limited choices. All find the web of presumed criminality, built as it is on the very associations and friendships that make up a life, nearly impossible to escape. We watch as the pleasures of summer-evening stoop-sitting are shattered by the arrival of a carful of cops looking to serve a warrant; we watch—and can’t help but be shocked—as teenagers teach their younger siblings and cousins how to run from the police (and, crucially, to keep away from friends and family so they can stay hidden); and we see, over and over, the relentless toll that the presumption of criminality takes on families—and futures.

While not denying the problems of the drug trade, and the violence that often accompanies it, through her gripping accounts of daily life in the forgotten neighborhoods of America's cities, Goffman makes it impossible for us to ignore the very real human costs of our failed response—the blighting of entire neighborhoods, and the needless sacrifice of whole generations.

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Operation Fly Trap

L. A. Gangs, Drugs, and the Law

Susan A. Phillips

University of Chicago Press, 2012

In 2003, an FBI-led task force known as Operation Fly Trap attempted to dismantle a significant drug network in two Bloods-controlled, African American neighborhoods in Los Angeles. The operation would soon be considered an enormous success, noted for the precision with which the task force targeted and removed gang members otherwise entrenched in larger communities. In Operation Fly Trap, Susan A. Phillips questions both the success of this operation and the methods used to conduct it. Based on in-depth ethnographic research with Fly Trap participants, Phillips’s work brings together police narratives, crime statistics, gang cultural histories, and extensive public policy analysis to examine the relationship between state persecution and the genesis of violent social systems.

Crucial to Phillips’s contribution is the presentation of the voices and perspectives of both the people living in impoverished communities and the agents that police them. Phillips positions law enforcement surveillance and suppression as a critical point of contact between citizen and state. She tracks the bureaucratic workings of police and FBI agencies and the language, ideologies, and methods that prevail within them, and shows how gangs have adapted, seeking out new locations, learning to operate without hierarchies, and moving their activities more deeply underground. Additionally, she shows how the targeted efforts of task forces such as Fly Trap wreak sweeping, sustained damage on family members and the community at large. Balancing her roles as even-handed reporter and public scholar, Phillips presents multiple flaws within the US criminal justice system and builds a powerful argument that many law enforcement policies in fact nurture, rather than prevent, violence in American society.

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Opium in the Balkans

Cultivation, Processing, and Trade during the Interwar Period

Vladan Jovanović

Central European University Press, 2025

Macedonian raw opium was a highly sought-after pharmaceutical raw material. This book focuses on its cultivation and production, and the trafficking of opium-based narcotics. Vladan Jovanović offers fresh insight into a neglected and marginalized subject, tracing and contextualizing both the licit and the illicit processing and trade of opium alkaloids from the Western Balkans through Turkey, and on to the rest of the world between the two World Wars.

His approach is to explore the subject both from the top down, involving the League of Nations and politicians and diplomats, as well as from the bottom up, through the analysis of the activities of smugglers, police, and ordinary people who participated in the production and distribution of opium. The author describes the process of relocating the illegal processing industry from Turkey and Bulgaria to Yugoslavia. He insightfully shows the implicit continuity of relations between the former Ottoman Empire and the newly constituted Yugoslav state in the form of bilateral political agreements.

He pays special attention to the illegal activities within the legal pharmaceutical industry and also exposes the role of criminal networks, which he situates in the appropriate political and social context. The exploration of this sensitive historical subject extends to other Balkan countries, along with Turkey, Western Europe, and the United States.

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Oral History and Delinquency

The Rhetoric of Criminology

James Bennett

University of Chicago Press, 1981

From Henry Mayhew's classic study of Victorian slums to Studs Terkel's presentations of ordinary people in modern America, oral history has been used to call attention to social conditions. By analyzing the nature and circumstances of the production of such histories of delinquency, James Bennett argues that oral history is a rhetorical device, consciously chosen as such, and is to be understood in terms of its persuasive powers and aims. Bennett shows how oral or life histories of juvenile delinquents have been crucial in communicating the human traits of offenders within their social context, to attract interest in resources for programs to prevent delinquency. Although life history helped to establish the discipline of sociology, Bennett suggests concepts for understanding oral histories generated in many fields.

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Ordinary and Extraordinary Harms in the City

A Green Criminological Analysis

Kajsa Lundberg

Rutgers University Press, 2026

This book, based on original research in Melbourne, Australia, explores the spatial politics of urban expansion both upwards and outwards as the city continues to colonize non-urban areas around its fringes. The everyday decisions and tools bound up in urban growth accelerate a malign colonization of land, resources, air and water, thereby exacerbating a broad variety of social and environmental harms. In addition to the quotidian nature of urban growth, this book also explores the ‘crisis’ in the form of extreme fire events in urban areas. Moving between local planning and national and international climate change mitigation policies and approaches, this book highlights various 'necropolicies’ - policies causing harm and death to more-than-human populations. Such death-bound policies are the result of neoliberal urban development, fueled by state-corporate relations and prosperity concerns. In sum, this book connects green and urban criminology, urban studies and planning to reveal how ordinary and extraordinary challenges are entangled in urban design, harm and, most importantly, imagining alternative futures and cities.

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