Abstract
This chapter focuses on the contribution that social scientific research has made to our understanding of crime and its control. As a British criminologist, my focus is on Anglophone criminology, which means — largely but not entirely — Anglo-American work. I have attempted not to be parochial in drawing solely on the British experience. As a discipline (or perhaps a sub-discipline, or a multi-disciplinary fusion of the sociology of deviance, the psychology of offending and criminal law) criminology is a fairly recent invention, which can be dated to the 1950s in the UK and the US. I shall argue that its impact on academic understanding of the issues has been substantial. Until the immediate post-war period, the police, prosecutors and judiciary in industrialised countries were hidden effectively from research scrutiny. I shall summarise developments since then in three areas of criminological research:
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crime trends and social indicators of crime
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police work and the impact of the police on crime
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the role of normative compliance in explaining conformity with the law.
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Hough, M. (2015). Crime, Policing and Compliance with the Law. In: Michie, J., Cooper, C.L. (eds) Why the Social Sciences Matter. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137269928_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137269928_10
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