Why do some conflicts escalate into violence while others dissipate harmlessly? Under what circumstances will people kill, and why?While homicide has been viewed largely in the pathological terms of "crime" and "deviance," violence, Mark Cooney contends, is a naturally-occurring form of conflict found throughout history and across cultures under certain social conditions. Cooney has analyzed the social control of homicide within and across over 30 societies and interviewed several d...

Legal decisions continue to mystify: why was this person sentenced to 20 years in prison, but that person to just 10 years for the same crime? Why did one person sue for civil damages, but another let the matter drop? Legal rules are supposed to answer these questions, but their answers are radically incomplete. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a theory that predicted and explained legal decisions?Drawing on Donald Black’s theoretical ideas, Geometrical Justice: The Death Penal...

Across many parts of the world, violence inflicted in the name of family honor is attracting an increasing amount of attention. Family honor violence, otherwise known as honor-based violence, is physical force inflicted primarily on women for conduct defined as dishonorable. This book explores these conflicts of honor, how they are triggered, how they are handled, and why some lead to death.Drawing on a range of case studies and employing Donald Black’s concept of social geometry, ...

"Thou shalt not kill" is arguably the most basic moral and legal principle in any society. Yet while some killers are pilloried and punished, others are absolved and acquitted, and still others are lauded and lionized. Why? The traditional answer is that how killers are treated depends on the nature of their killing, whether it was aggressive or defensive, intentional or accidental. But those factors cannot explain the enormous variation in legal officials' and citizens' responses to real-...

This classic has been the most authoritative text in the field since 1924. The thoroughly revised Eleventh Edition continues to provide a sound, sophisticated, sociological treatment of the principal issues in criminology.

First published in 1995. One of the most pervasive forms of social control in our society is the mass media. The public learns from television, newspapers, magazines, movies, and books what is happening in the world and how to interpret it. The problem, however, is that full or complete interpretations of reality are not presented. In short, reality itself, clear and unadorned, is not to be found in the information provided by the media. Instead, media presentations consist of those variou...

The first comprehensive book on rape since Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will and Susan Estrich's Real Rape, this volume probes every aspect of rape law and the discrepancies between ideal law (on the books) and real law (in action). Susan Caringella canvasses the success and failure of reform in the United States, as well as Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand, and assesses alternative perspectives on rape reform, making use of theoretical models, court cases a...

While crime, law, and punishment are subjects that have everyday meanings not very far from their academic representations, "social control" is one of those terms that appear in the sociological discourse without any corresponding everyday usage. This concept has a rather mixed lineage. "After September 11" has become a slogan that conveys all things to all people but carries some very specific implications on interrogation and civil liberties for the future of punishment and social contro...

Richard Quinney's The Social Reality of Crime remains an eloquent and important statement on crime, law, and justice. At the time of its appearance in 1970, Quinney's theory not only liberated the field from a recitation of the practices of the police, courts, and corrections, it also represented a marked departure from traditional analysis which viewed criminal behavior as pathological. Quinney not only advanced criminological thought, he inspired scores of students of crime and criminal ...

The incarcerated in America's cultural imagination.The Cultural Prison brings a new dimension to the study of prisoners and punishment by focusing on how the punishment of American offenders is represented and shaped in the mass media through public arguments. The study is based on an analysis of 642 articles collected by the author from American popular journals and magazines, as well as newspaper accounts, films, and public speeches, spanning the years 1...

The murder of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin and the subsequent trial and acquittal of his assailant, George Zimmerman, sparked a passionate national debate about race and criminal justice in America that involved everyone from bloggers to mayoral candidates to President Obama himself. With increased attention to these causes, from St. Louis to Los Angeles, intense outrage at New York City’s Stop and Frisk program and escalating anger over the effect of mass incarceration on the nation’s ...

The American homicide rate remains dramatically higher than that in other Western nations. News of a murder has become a routine event. How do we explain such high levels of lethal violence in the world's leading democracy?Echoing Durkheim's Suicide, this book focuses on one important phenomenon to explain larger currents in American society. Leonard Beeghley examines the historical and cross-national dimensions of homicides and evaluates previous attempts to explain it. H...