Handbook on Crime

Book excerpt: The Handbook on Crime is a comprehensive edited volume that contains analysis and explanation of the nature, extent, patterns and causes of over 40 different forms of crime, in each case drawing attention to key contemporary debates and social and criminal justice responses to them. It also challenges many popular and official conceptions of crime. This book is one of the few criminological texts that takes as its starting point a range of specific types of criminal activity. It addresses not only 'conventional' offences such as shoplifting, burglary, robbery, and vehicle crime, but many other forms of criminal behaviour - often an amalgamation of different legal offences - which attract contemporary media, public and policy concern. These include crimes committed not only by individuals, but by organised criminal groups, corporations and governments. There are chapters on, for example, gang violence, hate crime, elder abuse, animal abuse, cyber crime, identity theft, money-laundering, eco crimes, drug trafficking, human trafficking, genocide, and global terrorism. Many of these topics receive surprisingly little attention in the criminological literature. The Handbook on Crime will be a unique text of lasting value to students, researchers, academics, practitioners, policy makers, journalists and all others involved in understanding and preventing criminal behaviour.