Building on our reputation for publishing high quality student textbooks, and cutting-edge work by leading authors, we are pleased to introduce a Polity’s new collection of criminology titles.
Following in the Polity tradition, our textbooks are not only lively and accessible, but also provide intellectually rigorous introductions to core themes in contemporary criminology. Alongside these student-oriented texts, we’re pleased to present some groundbreaking work by world-ranking authors, which set out an exciting agenda for the criminology of tomorrow.
Visit our highlights page for more information on our new and forthcoming general interest titles.
David Wall: Cybercrime - The Transformation of Crime in the Information Age
"David Wall’s Cybercrime is a refreshing look at new forms of crime. Rather than “decent” desperate nineteenth-century street crime that sends minorities to prison, cybercrime is virtually new; a risky frontier for the middle classes. These new forms find the police ill suited and untrained for their investigation, businesses ready to exploit them, academics fretting – and few, other than David Wall, writing about them with clarity, honesty and detail. Shut down your computer and have a look at this book."
Peter K. Manning, Northeastern University
David Lyon: Surveillance Studies
In this overview, David Lyon, one of the pioneers of Surveillance Studies, fuses with aplomb classical debates and contemporary examples to provide the most accessible and up to date introduction to surveillance available. The book takes in Surveillance Studies in all its breadth, from local face-to-face oversight through technical developments in CCTV, RFID and biometrics to global trends that integrate surveillance systems internationally. This book is the perfect introduction for anyone wanting to understand surveillance as a phenomenon and the tools for analysing it further, and will be essential reading for students and scholars alike.
James Chriss: Social Control
This book provides a comprehensive guide to historical debates and more recent controversies, examining in detail the criminal justice system, medicine, everyday life, and national security. Assuming no specialist knowledge on the part of readers, he uses a rich range of contemporary examples to illustrate the ways in which social control is exerted and maintained. Social control: an introduction will be essential reading for students taking courses in deviance and social control, and will also appeal to those studying criminology, the sociology of law, and medical sociology.
Soothill, Peelo & Taylor: Making Sense of Criminology
"I enjoyed reading Making Sense of Criminology. It is an interesting, accessible, wide-ranging and thoroughly up to date introduction to criminology that should find its way onto many reading lists. Students and teachers alike will find it a valuable resource."
Simon Holdaway, Sheffield University
The book explores the key issues, philosophies and debates in criminology, making use of a variety of writers and texts to illuminate recurring themes and tensions in the field. Students are encouraged to become aware of what constitutes data in criminology and to recognize the uses of theory in evaluating criminological problems. In a ground plan of the subject, the history of criminology is set alongside current information about the justice system and awareness of current trends in research.
Loïc Wacquant: Urban Outcasts
Urban Outcasts casts new light on the explosive conjunction of mounting misery and stupendous affluence evident in the cities of advanced and advancing countries throughout the globe. By specifying the different causal mechanisms, social modalities and experiential forms assumed by relegation in the American and the French metropolis, this bold book offers indispensable tools for rethinking urban marginality and for reinvigorating the public debate about social polarization and urban inequality at century’s dawn.
Richard Ericson: Crime in an Insecure World
"Crime in an Insecure World demonstrates all the virtues of clarity and scholarship that we have come to expect in Ericson’s work. In this timely statement these are joined with a more urgent, morally engaged, even prophetic voice. Ericson urges us to see more clearly that our yearning for an impossible security may yet prove ruinous for our legal order, our civil society and indeed the very safety that we so crave. This powerful and cogent analysis deserves the widest possible audience."
Robert Reiner: Law and Order
‘This is a timely, well-organized and coherent treatment of an important topic. It is characterized throughout by the author’s trademark ability to distill a large of amount of factual material and criminological theory and research into a lively, thought-provoking and accessible narrative.’
Ian Loader, University of Oxford
Stanley Cohen: States of Denial
Winner of the American Society of Criminology's International Division Award for outstanding publication, 2000-2001
“Sociologist Stanley Cohen's timely book about how people and societies deny information which is too disturbing or threatening serves as a brilliant corrective ... This is how scholarship should be - zesty, engaged, witty, and always accessible.”
The Observer
States of Denial is the first comprehensive study of both the personal and political ways in which uncomfortable realities are avoided and evaded. It ranges from clinical studies of depression, to media images of suffering, to explanations of the 'passive bystander' and 'compassion fatigue'. The book shows how organized atrocities - the Holocaust and other genocides, torture, and political massacres - are denied by perpetrators and by bystanders, those who stand by and do nothing.
Stanley Cohen: Visions of Social Control
"A major achievement ... in range and in analysis it is quite the best thing to have appeared in the area for many years."
Sociological Review
Stanley Cohen has produced an entirely original synthesis of the original literature as well as an introductory guide to the major theoreticians of social control, such as David Rothman and Michael Foucault. This is not just a book for the specialist in criminology, social problems and the sociology of deviance but raises a whole range of issues of much wider interest to the social sciences. A concluding chapter on the practical and policy implications of the analysis is of special relevance to social workers and other practitioners.
