The notion of the fear of crime has become as important as crime itself. This book analyses the emergence of the fear of crime as a meaningful concept in both social enquiry and governmental and political discourse particularly in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, and North America.

Over the past four decades the fear of crime has become an increasingly significant concern for criminologists, victimologists, policy makers, politicians, police, the media and the general public. For many practitioners reducing fear of crime has become almost as important an issue as reducing crime itself. The identification of fear of crime as a serious policy problem has given rise to a massive amount of research activity, political discussion and intellectual debate. Despite this activity, actually reducing levels of fear of crime has proved difficult. Even in recent years when many western nations have experienced reductions in the levels of reported crime, fear of crime has often proven intractable. The result has been the development of what amounts to a fear of crime industry. Previous studies have identified conceptual challenges, theoretical cul-de-sacs and methodological problems with the use of the concept fear of crime. Yet it has endured as both an organizing principal for a body of research and a term to describe a social malady. This provocative, wide ranging book asks how and why fear of crime retains this cultural, political and social scientific currency despite concerted criticism of its utility? It subjects the concept to rigorous critical scrutiny taking examples from the UK, North America and Australia. Part One of Inventing Fear of Crime traces the historical emergence of the fear of crime concept, while Part Two addresses the issue of fear of crime and political rationality, and analyses fear of crime as a tactic or technique of government. This book will be essential reading on one of the key issues in government and politics in contemporary society.

The creative use of fear by news media and social control organizations has produced a "discurse of fear" - the awareness and expection that danger and risk are lurking everywhere. Case studies illustrates how certain organizations and social institutions benefit from the explotation of such fear construction. One social impact is a manipulated public empathy: We now have more "victims" than at any time in our prior history. Another, more troubling resutl is the role we have ceded to law enforcement and punishment: we turn ever more readily to the state and formal control to protect us from what we fear. This book attempts through the marshalling of significant data to interrupt that vicious cycle of fear discourse.

This book explores the societal construction of "black-on-black" referring to the 1980s when violence among African American perpetrators and victims increased. Massive job losses, debased identities, and rampant physical decay made American blacks seem ripe for explosive behavior. Many people blamed black lifestyle, values, and culture. David Wilson shows how America imbued a process of violence with race and accepted it as one of the country's most vexing ills during the Reagan era and afterward. Based on statistics, ethnographies, anecdotal accounts, and national reportage the findings are hard to dispute. Wilson tells of prominent conservative and liberal writers, reporters and politicians who collectively nurtured this issue, then parlayed it into "truth" in the public mind. Mixing memoirs, critical geographical studies, and race theory, the book shows how vulnerable groups of society can become pawns in an acute process of racial demonization. And how, in America, this allowed blacks to be marginalized.

Why is fear of crime so rife in society today? The government and media have ploughed money and resources into surveys and initiatives to find out. As a concept, 'fear of crime' has produced considerable academic debate, and this book brings together a collection of new and cutting edge articles from key scholars in criminology which question the orthodoxy of 'fear of crime' models.

Here is a book about the practical design of communities and housing in which people can enjoy a good quality of life, free from crime and fear of crime. Recognising that crime, vandalism and anti-social behaviour are issues of high public concern, and that the driving forces behind crime are numerous, this book argues that good design can help tackle many of these issues. It shows how, through integrating simple crime prevention principles in the design process, it is possible, almost without notice, to make residential environments much safer. Written from the perspective of an architect and town planner, this book offers practical design guidelines through a set of accessible case studies drawn from the UK, USA, The Netherlands and Scandinavia. Each example illustrates how success comes when design solutions reflect local characteristics and where communities are truly sustainable; where residents feel they belong, and where crime is dealt with as part of the bigger picture of urban design.

This textbook reader examines the concept of flawed policies in the criminal justice arena. The authors address the costs of bad criminal justice policy and offer suggestions for the creation of good, sound, evidence-based policy. Specific topics highlighted include: * The War on Drugs * Immigration Laws * The Patriot Act and Terrorist Laws * Sentencing Guidelines * Three Strikes Laws * Capital Punishment * Sex Offender Laws * "Get Tough" Juvenile Policy * Zero Tolerance in Schools * Policies for Mental Health Offenders * Policies with Pregnant Offenders Courses appropriate for this textbook reader include upper level undergraduate and graduate level criminal justice courses dealing at least in part with public policies, the media impact on law making, public fear of crime and the legislative response. Other disciplines will also find this book an excellent supplement to their courses in Psychology, Political Science, Public Administration and Policy. "As a policy-oriented coursebook in the social science arena, Flawed Criminal Justice Policies by Reddington and Bonham is unparalleled. The authors' proficiency in examining unsustainable criminal justice policies, the misguided public perception and the capricious nature of the media's portrayal of crime compels students to reexamine our nation's crime problem from a much more common sense approach. My students described the textbook as 'practical, real world and thought provoking'. I highly recommend this text and many of my colleagues have also adopted it. It will truly engage your students and elicit great debates and classroom discussion." -- Professor Joanne C. Metzger J.D, Temple University, Department of Criminal Justice The Teacher's Manual is available as a pdf via email or on a CD. Please contact Beth Hall at [email protected] to request a copy. PowerPoint slides are available upon adoption. Sample slides from the full, 153-slide presentation are available to view here. Email [email protected] for more information.

Across America today gated communities sprawl out from urban centers, employers enforce mandatory drug testing, and schools screen students with metal detectors. Social problems ranging from welfare dependency to educational inequality have been reconceptualized as crimes, with an attendant focus on assigning fault and imposing consequences. Even before the recent terrorist attacks, non-citizen residents had become subject to an increasingly harsh regime of detention and deportation, and prospective employees subjected to background checks. How and when did our everyday world become dominated by fear, every citizen treated as a potential criminal? In this startlingly original work, Jonathan Simon traces this pattern back to the collapse of the New Deal approach to governing during the 1960s when declining confidence in expert-guided government policies sent political leaders searching for new models of governance. The War on Crime offered a ready solution to their problem: politicians set agendas by drawing analogies to crime and redefined the ideal citizen as a crime victim, one whose vulnerabilities opened the door to overweening government intervention. By the 1980s, this transformation of the core powers of government had spilled over into the institutions that govern daily life. Soon our schools, our families, our workplaces, and our residential communities were being governed through crime. This powerful work concludes with a call for passive citizens to become engaged partners in the management of risk and the treatment of social ills. Only by coming together to produce security, can we free ourselves from a logic of domination by others, and from the fear that currently rules our everyday life.

In a major new theory of criminal behavior, Mark Colvin argues that chronic criminals emerge from a developmental process characterized by recurring, erratic episodes of coercion. Colvin's differential coercion theory, which integrates several existing criminological perspectives, lays out a compelling argument that coercive forces create social and psychological dynamics that lead to chronic criminal behavior. While Colvin's presentation focuses primarily on chronic street criminals, the theory is also applied to exploratory offenders and white-collar criminals. In addition, Colvin presents a critique of current crime control measures, which rely heavily on coercion, and offers in their place a comprehensive crime reduction program based on consistent, non-coercive practices.

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.