Criminal Justice

A comprehensive A to Z source of information on the legal, social and political history and present status of capital punishment in the nation.

Articles on legal, political, and historical relationship of crime to society; including crime prevention, crime causation, and violence in the family, etc.

An authoritative, multidisciplinary overview of traditional and contemporary topics in the field of criminology

A comprehensive work in the field of criminology and sociology. Covers historical, conceptual, and theoretical issues, crime and juvenile delinquency, sexual deviance and self destructive behaviors and disvalue indentity.

Essays on all aspects of law enforcement ranging from analyses of historical events to future trends.

Entries include topics on American police, citizen complaints, youth gangs, terrorism and the war on drugs. Includes bibliographies.

Information on all the different types of penal facilities, a broad focus on prison, and statistics and academic research.

The first section, examines the classical tradition. Included here are critical discussions of Comte, Spencer, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, Mead, Freud, Mannheim and classical feminist thought, demonstrating not only the critical significance of classical writings, but also their continuing relevance. The second section moves on to examine the terrain of contemporary social theory. The contributors discuss the significance and strengths and weaknesses of structural functionalism, recent Marxian theory, critical theory, symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, exchange theory, contemporary feminism, ethnomethodology, rational choice theory, figurational sociology, the thought of Foucault, multiculturalism and postmodernism. The final section looks at the key debates in current social theory. Questions relating to the body, sexuality, globalism, nationalism, socialism, knowledge, norms, ethics, positivism, post-structuralism, consumption, metatheorizing and cultural studies are fully discussed.

Classic reference has been updated to reflect many changes in society and in the field of sociology in recent years. Articles covering core issues such as race, poverty, violence, economics, pregnancy and abortion in addition to articles topics such as the Internet, privacy and epidemiology.