Criminology Tim Newburn, Second Edition.

Criminology Tim Newburn, Second Edition

Pensum bok i kriminologi.

Pris: 200,-

Om boka:

The second edition of a monster of a textbook about criminology.

While aimed at university students, it’s an obvious choice of book if you want to buy just one to use while you are taking a masters degree in security management. It’s assumed in the book that you have access to a university library, of print or online material. At more than an inch thick and roughly 400,000 words, and 1600 works cited in the bibliography, Criminology by Prof Tim Newburn is a whopper. It could easily have been hard to digest, but is well laid out and the writer appreciates the need (as a common courtesy) to write clearly - which as he admits some criminologists do not. Of the 37 chapters, the last couple on ‘doing criminology’ might be most helpful to readers who are returning to academic study and are unsure of how to proceed. A 30-page chapter on white-collar and corporate crime will be of most use to corporate security readers. To whizz through some of the points, Newburn quotes from classic research that fiddling from customers may be winked at by managers (a sub-culture of legitimate commerce) but fiddling the company is not. As for explaining fraud: “In parts of the business world there is evidence that the characteristics found in successful, legitimate entrepreneurial activity are also those that may be found in the characters of those engaged in high level fraud ...’ Likewise, corrupt coppers might be good detectives, he suggests, which undermines any argument that a corrupt person is a ‘bad apple’ - in an otherwise good barrel, it’s usually implied. As a textbook writer, Newburn is putting theories forward and the points against, neutrally. However you might query whether criminology is trying to grab territory that doesn’t belong to it - are ‘harms’ such as oil platform and space shuttle explosions really corporate, or state-corporate crimes? Newburn goes on to the Corporate Manslaughter Act - can we truly establish that a corporation has criminal guilt, rather than people doing a paid job? Even (to quote from the Act) ‘controlling minds’ of a company, who may then be guilty of ‘corporate manslaughter’? Masters students can find the further reading and websites at the end of each chapter useful too - or they may want to skip buying the book altogether and get the reading lists from the publisher’s website: www.routledge.com/cw/newburn. While some politically-motivated criminologists appear to want to damn all businesses as ‘crimogenic’ that are out to swindle and harm people, Newburn does seek to answer real problems; with the Guardian newspaper he looked into the August 2011 rioting. My only quibble with this major work is cosmetic; the cover of the paperback may well soon become tatty, which would be a shame - and at £135 the more sturdy hardback is beyond most pockets.