An introduction to crime and criminology

Crime evokes a wide variety of reactions in people: fear, anger, fascination, excitement, curiosity. An introduction to crime and criminology, considers the relatively common-place problem of vandalism in the form of graffiti as one example through which to explore your own views about an everyday sort of crime.

This ebook considers how social scientists and criminologists, in particular, study and seek to understand problems of crime, and invites you to develop what can be called your ‘criminological imagination’.

After reading this ebook, you should will be able to: provide a basic definition of ‘crime’; demonstrate that ideas about what a crime is and what it is not are often contested; provide a definition of what criminology is and the subject matter it pertains to; understand what criminologists ‘do’; and develop and use criminological imagination to think about problems of crime and justice in new ways, going beyond everyday understandings.

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