Author: Edited by Beth M. Huebner and Timothy S. Bynum
ISBN No: 978-1-118-86878-2
Review date: 16/04/2024
No of pages: 600
Publisher: Wiley
Publisher URL:
http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118868781.html
Year of publication: 22/08/2016
Brief:
Handbook of Measurement Issues in Criminology and Criminal Justice; edited by Beth M. Huebner and Timothy S. Bynum. ISBN: 978-1-118-86878-2, hardback, 600 pages, published 2016, by Wiley-Blackwell.
price
£130
As the editors put it in an introduction, the Handbook of Measurement Issues in Criminology and Criminal Justice is indeed a definitive reference book for professionals in the field, researchers, and students.
We can agree how important and basic it is whether studying or seeking to act on crime or in any other field of social policy, to measure your subject. To use the business saying, if it don’t get measured, it don’t get done; people will put their time and resources and reputation in what they do have a handle on. Here is the dilemma for anyone writing about or working on measured crime – how much doesn’t get reported, or noticed? And noticed by whom? The last two weekends I have seen urination in public – first one Sunday afternoon at the entrance to a public park in Worcester, well within sight of the bridge over the River Severn; and once at 8am on Sunday in an alley in Bristol beside a convenience store, again hardly less than public as it was one of the main roads out of the city. But if it wasn’t recorded or reported to police, officially it didn’t happen.
Yet in branch after branch of crime – in schools, by gangs, human trafficking, cyber, corporate – to name only some of the 30 or more chapters – response by law enforcers and private security practitioners, and public policy, rests on knowing how big the problem is; whether it’s growing; how organised and serious the criminals are; and, if we don’t know how much of a sort of crime is going on, at least an estimate of how much is going unrelated. All so that policy-makers can judge which is relatively more serious and needs prioritising. How else can a country balance the various crimes against it – terrorism, the drug trade, crime over the internet – without measuring it, to make rational decisions? And to know ‘what works’, to use a UK police term? If a prisoner is rehabilitated, or whether ‘prison works’ (and if so, what sort of regime) for example? And yet criminals are hardly going to co-operate. And to make it yet more complicated, even assuming that you define the crimes properly, and everyone reports crime accurately, it’s changing so fast, both as crimes migrate online and adapt to new online devices, as the authorities struggle to catch up – the UK’s official crime survey only last year began asking about online fraud specifically, and found it to be one of the most widespread crimes.
This book is by North American academics, who admittedly from the outset admit all this; as the editors put it, ‘there are challenges in finding the appropriate measurement of even the most basic concepts’. The various authors draw on decades of studies. This work, then, is a useful and important rounding-up of where we stand. The authors are frank. For instance, we don’t have a definition of what is a gang. And for instance, on human trafficking it’s admitted that ‘few victims have been officially identified and many of the elements of human trafficking needed to develop sound estimates are not known’. Yet as security managers attending the ASIS Europe conference in London in 2016, featured in the August 2016 print issue of Professional Security magazine, human trafficking affects many unconnected parts of life – hotels (trafficked people may be kept in hotels near airports and ports on their journeys; and hotels may be one of the sectors where they are forced into labour) and businesses generally (and still in the power of the gangs that they paid to reach western Europe?) besides the sex trade (again, where hotels may be hired for use by traffickers-owners). Without data, we don’t know where to deploy, and we lack stories to rouse public opinion against the crime.
Handbook of Measurement Issues in Criminology and Criminal Justice contents
Notes on Contributors vii
Introduction 1
Beth M. Huebner and Timothy S. Bynum
Part I Measurement of Criminal Typologies 7
1 Violent Crime 9
Nicholas Corsaro
2 Cybercrime 29
Thomas J. Holt
3 Juvenile Crime and Bullying 49
Sean P. Varano and Joseph M. McKenna
4 Rape and Other Sexual Offending Behaviors 69
Wesley G. Jennings and Bryanna Hahn Fox
5 White Collar and Corporate Crime 92
Michael L. Benson, Jay Kennedy, and Matthew Logan
6 Human Trafficking 111
Amy Farrell and Katherine Bright
7 Challenges in Measuring and Understanding Hate Crime 131
Jack McDevitt and Janice A. Iwama
Part II Offenders, Offending, and Victimization 157
8 Gangs and Gang Crime 159
Chris Melde
9 Gendered Pathways to Crime 181
Julie Yingling
10 Mental Health and Physical Studies 202
Daryl G. Kroner and Maranda Quillen
11 Rehabilitation and Treatment Programming 223
Faye S. Taxman and Brandy L. Blasko
12 Measuring Victimization: Issues and New Directions 249
Leah E. Daigle, Jamie A. Snyder, and Bonnie S. Fisher
Part III Criminal Justice Organizations and Outcomes 277
13 Community Policing and Police Interventions 279
Michael J. Kyle and Joseph A. Schafer
14 Measurement Issues in Criminal Case Processing and Court Decision Making Research 303
Brian D. Johnson and Christina D. Stewart
15 Sentencing Outcomes and Disparity 328
Jared M. Ellison and Pauline K. Brennan
16 Correctional Interventions and Outcomes 351
Eric Grommon and Jason Rydberg
17 How Theory Guides Measurement: Public Attitudes toward Crime and Policing 377
Jonathan Jackson and Jouni Kuha
18 Measuring the Cost of Crime 416
Matt DeLisi
19 School Crime and Safety 434
Thomas Mowen, John Brent, and Aaron Kupchik
20 Traffic Stops, Race, and Measurement 452
Kyle Mclean and Jeff Rojek
Part IV Specialized Measurement Techniques 473
21 Self Reported Crime and Delinquency 475
Scott Menard, Lisa C. Bowman ]Bowen, and Yi Fen Lu
22 Crime and the Life Course 496
Lee Ann Slocum
23 Conducting Qualitative Interviews in Prison: Challenges and Lessons Learned 517
Kristin Carbone ]Lopez
24 Spatial Analysis of Crime 535
Steven M. Radil
25 Network Analysis 555
Owen Gallupe
