Subjects:

Criminology

Contents:

1. Confusion and Diversity

2. Sources of Knowledge about Deviance

3. The University of Chicago Sociology Department

4. Functionalism, Deviance, and Control

5. Anomie

6. Culture and Subculture

7. Symbolic Interactionism

8. Phenomenology

9. Control Theories

10. Radical Criminology

11. Feminist Criminology

12. Deviance Theories and Social Policy

13. The Metamorphosis of Deviance?

Downes and Rock's popular textbook, Understanding Deviance provides the reader with an indispensable guide to criminological theory. It sympathetically outlines the principal theories of crime and rule-breaking,discussing them chronologically, and placing them in their European and North American contexts, confronting major criticisms that have been voiced against them, and constructing defences where appropriate.

The book has been thoroughly revised and brought up to date to include new issues of crime, deviance and theory in the early twenty-first century, and includes summaries of cultural criminology and new assessments of the contribution made by Gottfredson and Hirschi to control theory.

New to this edition:-

• Fully revised to offer up-to-date coverage of the issues of crime, deviance and theory in the early twenty-first century including additional commentary on post-modernist approaches, summaries of cultural criminology and more substantial assessments of contributions made by such authors as Laub and Sampson, and Gottfredson and Hirschi, to anomie, strain and control theories, and their implications for social policy.