Criminology - All titles

The first authoritative volume to look back on the last 50 years of The Open University providing higher education to those in prison, this unique book gives voice to ex-prisoners whose lives have been transformed by the education they received, offering vivid personal testimonies, reflective vignettes and academic analysis of education in prison.

This book examines the ‘defund the police’ movement from historical and contemporary perspectives. Against the backdrop of abolition and the failure of police reform, it uses international case studies to reimagine community safety beyond policing and imprisonment.

With fascinating ethnographic and interview data, James Alexander explores the disappearance of localised relationships and the rise in youth violence in a South London housing estate. Evaluating the effectiveness of youth work programmes, he considers the impact of the gradual move from neighbourly to professional support for young people.

This book analyses male violence against women and children, and the mechanisms society develops to push it out of sight.

Using vivid testimonies and images, Briggs and Monge document the stories and situations of the people who live in Valdemingómez , placing them in a political, economic and social context.

This book uses dark tourism case studies to explore the unique considerations and constraints of tourism within rural and regional Australia, and how such sites contribute to Australia’s national identity.

The governance of illegal drug use is often subject to polarized debate, with political preferences seemingly driven by the need to appeal to populist fears. Based upon research with ‘elite’ insiders, David Brewster explores global cannabis policy approaches and offers future directions for policy making and comparative criminology.

Drawing on research from the Women, Family, Crime and Justice research network, this collection sheds new light on the experiences of women and families who encounter the UK criminal justice system. Contributions demonstrate how these groups are often ignored, oppressed and victimised, and offer insights and practical recommendations for change.

This is a critical analysis of our understanding of police leadership and a bold new conceptualisation of the subject. Drawing on criminology, sociology and leadership studies and critical theory, leading authors Davis and Silvestri provide a critique of police leadership as a product of social, institutional and historical processes.

Establishing a new interdisciplinary methodology, ‘criminological criticism’, Rafe McGregor proposes a model for collaboration between literary studies and critical criminology that is beneficial to the humanities, the social sciences and society.

In this book, the authors seek to question if a ‘criminology of war’ is possible, whilst providing an implicit critique of mainstream criminology. They also examine how this seemingly ‘new horizon’ of the discipline might be usefully informed by sociology.

Including novel case studies, this multi-disciplinary book assembles a rich collection of policing and security frontiers both geographical (e.g. the margins of cities) and conceptual (dispersion and credentialism) not seen or acknowledged previously, pushing criminology to the edge of its current understanding.