As I was reading through this book preview it was hard to understand and did not make itself clear to me as it was a difficult read and hard to follow. However, through what I gathered I managed to pick out a few familiar sociologists and theories. Such as Durkheim and social order, the labelling theory and status frustration, Merton's anomie theory and also Lombroso and Eysenk's biological and psychological theories. There was also a section on how crime is a social problem to which I recognised Reid and his view of understanding criminal behaviour to help prevent it.
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Nicola
4/24/2013 12:21:17 am
I found this book a bit hard to follow and get in to, this may have been because not all pages are shown online. However, some of it I managed to understand, such as Spector and Kitsuse describing social and sociological problems of crime.
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Neelam
4/24/2013 04:05:10 am
I have also found this book a hard read, however I did understand some of it such as the social problems of crime by spector and kitsuse, also how pfohl has shown that only in the early 1960's child abuse became recognised as a problem and how robbing with violence became known as mugging in the early 1970's.
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Sam Bates
4/24/2013 05:57:32 am
The book gives a great insight into how social problems are defined and researched in our society, and also realises the context and changes of the severity of crime and its consequences over time. For example children being abused or beaten before the 1960’s was not recognised as a crime but during the present day it is as seen with the Jimmy Savile cases, this illustrates that the definition of crime can change over time. There are many theories in this book, however the most popular one is Durkheim’s concept of Anomie a lack of moral regulation brought by rapid social change, this is supported by Merton and he employed Anomie in linking deviant behaviour with the disjunction between institutional aspirations and the availability of access to legitimate opportunity structures.
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Abi
4/24/2013 06:40:09 am
Without the whole book it's difficult to get the full picture of what they're trying to put across but I think they make some good points. I think the exploration of the difference between theoretical criminology and practical 'correctional' criminology sounds interesting. & I like the way they bring together lots of different theories to explain, compare and contrast them.
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