Crime
Chapter 14 Summary

This chapter shows how sociologists have dealt with the phenomenon of crime. It examines the diversity of sociological explanations of crime by focusing on a number of the most important theoretical contributions to sociological criminology and by comparing them along a number of different dimensions. It identifies the theoretical bases and political contexts of the explanations, and how they are influenced by social and political events and circumstances. It also highlights the practical prescriptions and policy solutions that they advocate for dealing with the crime problem. In doing this, the chapter identifies some of the key differences between these approaches.

It also shows that these approaches have a shared commitment to the 'modernist project' - that is, to a belief in the possibility of constructing a valid explanation of crime and, hence, of developing strategies for doing something about it. It also introduces the reader to the postmodernist critique of criminology. Just as postmodernists generally have rejected the possibility of constructing 'meta-narratives' - large-scale theoretical interpretations of universal application - so, too, critics of modernist criminology have questioned the legitimacy of such an enterprise with regard to crime.