Crime Grime Fear And Decline

In Breaking Away from Broken Windows Ralph Taylor uses data on recent Baltimore crime-reduction efforts to attack the 'broken windows' thesis--that is, the currently fashionable notion that by reducing or eliminating superficial signs of disorder (dilapidated buildings, graffiti, incivil behavior by teenagers, etc.), urban police deparments can make significant and lasting reductions in crime. Taylor argues that such measures, while useful, are only a partial solution to the problem at hand. His data supports a materialist view: changes in levels of physical decay, superficial social disorder, and racial composition do not lead to higher crime, while economic decline does. He contends that the Baltimore example shows that in order to make real, long-term reductions in crime, urban politicians, businesses, and community leaders must work together to improve the economic fortunes of those living in high-crime areas.

The Routledge International Handbook on Fear of Crime brings together original and international state of the art contributions of theoretical, empirical, policy-related scholarship on the intersection of perceptions of crime, victimisation, vulnerability and risk. This is timely as fear of crime has now been a focus of scholarly and policy interest for some fifty years and shows little sign of abating. Research on fear of crime is demonstrative of the inter-disciplinarity of criminology, drawing in the disciplines of sociology, psychology, political science, history, cultural studies, gender studies, planning and architecture, philosophy and human geography. This collection draws in many of these interdisciplinary themes. This collections also extends the boundaries of fear of crime research. It does this both methodologically and conceptually, but perhaps more importantly it moves us beyond some of the often repeated debates in this field to focus on novel topics from unique perspectives. The book begins by plotting the history of fear of crime’s development, then moves on to investigate the methodological and theoretical debates that have ensued and the policy transfer that occurred across jurisdictions. Key elements in debates and research on fear of crime concerning gender, race and ethnicity are covered, as are contemporary themes in fear of crime research, such as regulation, security, risk and the fear of terrorism, the mapping of fear of crime and fear of crime beyond urban landscapes. The final sections of the book explore geographies of fear and future and unique directions for this research.

Snapshots of Research: Readings in Criminology and Criminal Justice is a comprehensive, cutting-edge text that provides an introductory overview of the main research methods used in the fields of criminology and criminal justice. This text/reader offers a wide range of modern research examples, as well as several classic articles, including a broad range of readings from the four major branches of the criminal justice system—policing, courts/law, juvenile justice, and corrections—that are relevant to career paths students may be interested in pursuing.

This informative reference volume features the key papers in the growing field of quantitative criminology. The papers provide examples of the importation of statistical methods from other fields to criminology, the adaptation of such methods to special criminological problems through introspection, and the development of new innovative statistical approaches. The volume illustrates the growing sophistication and maturation of quantitative methods in this field. Divided into five parts: research design, sampling, issues in measurement, descriptive analysis and causal analysis, it will be of interest to anyone concerned with criminology and criminal justice, as well as those with specialized interests in quantitative methods.

Based on a 16-year longitudinal study of crime in Seattle, Washington.

This book explores multi-year community-based crime prevention initiatives in the United States, from their design and implementation, through 5-year follow ups. It provides an overview of programs of various sizes, affecting diverse communities from urban to rural environments, larger and smaller populations, with a range of site-specific problems. The research is based on a United States federally-funded program called the Byrne Criminal Justice Initiative (BJCI) which began in 2012, and has funded programs in 65 communities, across 28 states and 61 cities. This book serves to document the process, challenges, and lessons learned from the design and implementation of this innovative program. It covers researcher-practitioner partnerships, crime prevention planning processes, programming implementation, and issues related to sustainability of community-policing initiatives that transcend institutional barriers and leadership turnover. Through researcher partnerships at each site, it provides a rich dataset for understanding and comparing the social and economic problems that contribute to criminality, as well as the conditions where prosocial behavior and collective efficacy thrive. It also examines the future of this federally-funded program going forward in a new Presidential administration. This work will be of interest to researchers in criminology and criminal justice, particularly with an interest in translational/applied criminology and crime prevention, as well as related fields such as public policy, urban planning, and sociology.