Building modern criminology : forays and skirmishes / David Greenberg.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Part I Causes of Crime: Delinquency and the age structure of society; The gendering of crime in Marxist theory; Time series analysis of crime rates; Long-term trends in crimes of violence; Modeling criminal careers. Part II The Effects of the Criminal Justice System: The effect of arrests on crime: a multivariate panel analysis; The incapacitative effect of imprisonment: some estimates. Part III Understanding the Criminal Law and Criminal Justice System: The dialectics of crime control (with Drew Humphries); The dynamics of oscillatory punishment processes; The prison as a lawless agency (with Fay Stender); Punishment, division of labor, and social solidarity; State prison populations and their growth, 1971{u2013}1991 (with Valerie West); Siting the death penalty internationally (with Valerie West).

Building Modern Criminology collects four decades of theoretical essays and research papers by David Greenberg, a sociologist pulled away by his political experiences during the Vietnam War from a career in theoretical high energy physics into criminology. The papers take up critical questions in the study of crime, including the explanation of group differences, the nature of criminal careers, and historical trends in violence. Other papers address the historical development of criminal prohibitions, modes of punishment, and the effectiveness of sanctions in preventing crime. These seminal efforts have helped to build a logically coherent, empirically grounded criminology that understands the criminal law, patterns of crime and social responses to it in their historically-specific, social contexts. This volume is indispensable for students, teachers and working criminological researchers engaging with cutting-edge issues in contemporary criminology.