Crime And Political Economy

Drawing on the work of Allan Schnaiberg, this book returns political economy to green criminology and examines how the expansion of capitalism shapes environmental law, crime and justice. The book is organized around crimes of ecological withdrawals and ecological additions. The Treadmill of Crime is written by acclaimed experts on the subject of green criminology and examines issues such as the crime in the energy sector as well as the release of toxic waste into the environment and its impact on ecosystems. This book also sets a new research agenda by highlighting problems of ecological disorganization for animal abuse and social disorganization. This book will be of interest to students, researchers and academics in the fields of criminology, political science, environmental sociology, and natural resources.

The Wild East bridges political economy and anthropology to examine a variety of il/legal economic sectors and businesses such as red sanders, coal, fire, oil, sand, air spectrum, land, water, real estate, procurement and industrial labour. The 11 case studies, based across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, explore how state regulative law is often ignored and/or selectively manipulated. The emerging collective narrative shows the workings of regulated criminal economic systems where criminal formations, politicians, police, judges and bureaucrats are deeply intertwined. By pioneering the field-study of the politicisation of economic crime, and disrupting the wider literature on South Asia’s informal economy, The Wild East aims to influence future research agendas through its case for the study of mafia-enterprises and their engagement with governance in South Asia and outside. Its empirical and theoretical contribution to debates about economic crimes in democratic regimes will be of critical value to researchers in Economics, Anthropology, Sociology, Comparative Politics, Political Science and International Relations, Criminologists and Development Studies, as well as to those inside and outside academia interested in current affairs and the relationship between crime, politics and mafia enterprises.

Drugs, Crime and Public Health provides an accessible but critical discussion of recent policy on illicit drugs. Using a comparative approach - centred on the UK, but with insights and complementary data gathered from the USA and other countries - it discusses theoretical perspectives and provides new empirical evidence which challenges prevalent ways of thinking about illicit drugs. It argues that problematic drug use can only be understood in the social context in which it takes place, a context which it shares with other problems of crime and public health. The book demonstrates the social and spatial overlap of these problems, examining the focus of contemporary drug policy on crime reduction. This focus, Alex Stevens contends, has made it less, rather than more, likely that long-term solutions will be produced for drugs, crime and health inequalities. And he concludes, through examining competing visions for the future of drug policy, with an argument for social solutions to these social problems.

Drawing on the work of Allan Schnaiberg, this book returns political economy to green criminology and examines how the expansion of capitalism shapes environmental law, crime and justice. The book is organized around crimes of ecological withdrawals and ecological additions. The Treadmill of Crime is written by acclaimed experts on the subject of green criminology and examines issues such as the crime in the energy sector as well as the release of toxic waste into the environment and its impact on ecosystems. This book also sets a new research agenda by highlighting problems of ecological disorganization for animal abuse and social disorganization. This book will be of interest to students, researchers and academics in the fields of criminology, political science, environmental sociology, and natural resources.

Over the last fifteen years, the analytical field of punishment and society has witnessed an increase of research developing the connection between economic processes and the evolution of penality from different standpoints, focusing particularly on the increase of rates of incarceration in relation to the transformations of neoliberal capitalism. Bringing together leading researchers from diverse geographical contexts, this book reframes the theoretical field of the political economy of punishment, analysing penality within the current economic situation and connecting contemporary penal changes with political and cultural processes. It challenges the traditional and common sense understanding of imprisonment as 'exclusion' and posits a more promising concept of imprisonment as a 'differential' or 'subordinate' form of 'inclusion'. This groundbreaking book will be a key text for scholars who are working in the field of punishment and society as well as reaching a broader audience within law, sociology, economics, criminology and criminal justice studies.

The International library of Criminology, Criminal Justice and Penology is an important publishing initiative that brings together the most significant contemporary published journal essays in current criminology, criminal justice and penology. The series makes available to researchers, academics and students of criminology an extensive range of essays which are indispensable for obtaining an overview of the latest theories and findings in this fast developing field.

Explores the complex ways in which state and societal actors are both challenged by and complicit in the expansion of criminal activities on a global scale.

Economists have often paid visits to the field of criminology, examining the rational logic of offending. When economists examine criminal activity, they imply that offenders should be treated like any other social actor making rational choices. In The Crimes of the Economy, Vincenzo Ruggiero turns the tables by examining a variety of economic schools of thought from a criminological perspective. Each one of these schools, he argues, justifies or even encourages harm produced by economic initiative. He investigates – among others – John Locke’s notion of private property, Mercantilism, the Physiocrats and Malthus, and the arguments of Adam Smith, Marshall, Keynes and neoliberalism. In each of these, the author identifies the potential justification of different forms of ‘crimes of the economy’ and victimisation. This book re-examines the history of economic thought, assessing it as the history of a discipline which, while attempting to gain scientific status, in reality seeks to make the social harm caused by economics acceptable. The book will be interesting and relevant to students and scholars of social theory, criminology, economics, philosophy and politics.