A Primer in the Sociology of Crime

With depth, clarity and erudition, this primer covers all the classic theory and research on the sociology of crime. Written in the 1990s one might think that things have changes and this book is no longer relevant. But things change very slowly in sociology, even though there are mountains of research filling gigabytes of hard disks. There is a lot of stuff to read, but very few new ideas, especially in sociology. So, read this book, or better still, require your students to read it and you and they will have acquired a solid basis of the social theory that purports to explain crime. References.

This primer covers all the classic theory and research on the sociology of crime. CONTENTS: 1. Criminology and Social Deviance. 2. Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Criminology. 3. Ecological Theories of Crime and Delinquency. 4. Anomie and Social Deviance: Strain Theories. 5. Differential Association and its Progeny. 6. Control Theories of Crime and Delinquency. 7. Social Reaction to Crime: Stigma and Interaction. 8. Conflict and Radical Perspectives on Crime. 9. Recent Developments in the Sociology of Crime. References. RECOMMENDED: Excellent text for upper division undergraduate classes, or beginning graduate classes. Strongly recommended as a substitute for those expensive, superficial introductory textbooks!

Prof. Shlomo Giora Shoham was born in Lithuania in 1929 and immigrated to the Land of Israel in 1935. During Israel's War of Independence he served in the Nebi Daniel Convoy which was called in to help the Gush Etzion settlements. The bloc surrendered and he was captured by the Jordanians. Upon his release he started studying law at the Hebrew University and was among the first class to graduate from the Faculty of Law. He was later also the first to receive a PhD in law from the Faculty. He then went on to study criminology at Cambridge University in England, and upon his return to Israel founded the Institute of Criminology at the Bar-Ilan University. A decade later he founded the Department of Criminology at the Tel-Aviv University and is a teacher and scholar at the Faculty of Law.