Reflecting a diversity of thought and intellectual power, this unique volume provides undergraduate students with an important historical context and demonstrates the continuity of many issues in the fields of criminology and criminal justice. Commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the American Society of Criminology, this volume contains previously published articles by the society's president-many of whom are the leading thinkers in the field. Articles examine the philosophy of punishment, policing, the politics of crime and crime control, criminological theory, drug use, white-collar crime, female crime, the study of deviance, parole, prediction studies, and criminal justice policy.

Reflecting a diversity of thought and intellectual power, this unique volume provides undergraduate students with an important historical context and demonstrates the continuity of many issues in the fields of criminology and criminal justice. Commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the American Society of Criminology, this volume contains previously published articles by the society's president-many of whom are the leading thinkers in the field. Articles examine the philosophy of punishment, policing, the politics of crime and crime control, criminological theory, drug use, white-collar crime, female crime, the study of deviance, parole, prediction studies, and criminal justice policy.

This book analyzes newly collected data on crime and social development up to age 70 for 500 men who were remanded to reform school in the 1940s. Born in Boston in the late 1920s and early 1930s, these men were the subjects of the classic study "Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency" by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck (1950). Updating their lives at the close of the twentieth century, and connecting their adult experiences to childhood, this book is arguably the longest longitudinal study of age, crime, and the life course to date.

John Laub and Robert Sampson's long-term data, combined with in-depth interviews, defy the conventional wisdom that links individual traits such as poor verbal skills, limited self-control, and difficult temperament to long-term trajectories of offending. The authors reject the idea of categorizing offenders to reveal etiologies of offending--rather, they connect variability in behavior to social context. They find that men who desisted from crime were rooted in structural routines and had strong social ties to family and community.

By uniting life-history narratives with rigorous data analysis, the authors shed new light on long-term trajectories of crime and current policies of crime control.

This new theory of crime over the life course provides an important foundation for rethinking criminal justice policy. It is based on the reanalysis of a classic set of data: Sheldon and Eleanor Gluecks' mid-century study of 500 delinquents and 500 nondelinquents from childhood to adulthood. Several years ago, Robert Sampson and John Laub dusted off sixty cartons of the Gleucks' data that had been stored in the basement of the Harvard Law School and undertook a lengthy process of recoding, computerizing, and reanalyzing it. On the basis of their findings, they developed a theory of informal social control that acknowledges the importance of childhood behavior but rejects the implication that adult social factors have little relevance. This theory accounts for both stability and change in crime and deviance throughout the life course.