Key Concepts in Crime and Society

Abstract

The challenge of the Key Concepts series is to decide on which concepts to include and any group of authors would make some different choices. Enclosed in this book are the ones that we made. There are' classic' issues that could barely be avoided, such as definitions around 'crime' and 'deviance', but also less obvious others (to some authors perhaps) such as Researching crime, Normalisation or Environmental crime and green criminology. Forty interconnected but also relatively disparate concepts can be organised in a range of ways. We chose to order the book into three different sections: 1. Understanding Crime and Criminality; 2. Types of Crime and Criminality; and 3. Responses to Crime. In this way, we try to provide insight into how crime has been understood in the ways it has; what types of crime are prominent and why; followed by consideration of how and why crime has been responded to in the ways that it has.