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Book Review: Crime in Canadian Society

Book Review: Crime in Canadian Society AUST & NZ JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY (June 1976) 9 BOOK REVIEWS Crime in Canadian Society. Robert A Silverman and James J Teevan; Toronto: 'Butterworth and Co (Canada) Ltd (1975); 455 pp; $7.95 This is the age of instant books and there is no reason to expect that the field of criminology should be exempt from their incursion. Crime in Canadian Society bears all the hallmarks of such a production: bright, dramatically eye-catching cover (guns, chains, police, prison hars, money and haunted eyes); cheap forrnat (in this book the entire text is typewritten except for a few hand-written symbols - p 97 - which, presumably, were not to be found on the typist's machine); and heavy reliance on the reproduced writings of others. It is described as a reader with a text, but the text which precedes each section totals a mere 38 of the 455 pages of the volume and ranges from a relatively competent but potted summary of theories of crime and delinquency, through a fair discussion of measuring crime and delinquency and a mediocre examination of legal and sociological definitions of delinquency, down to a positively useless one page comment on "Selected Research on Canadian Criminology". The compilers' avowed aim is to introduce students to the general field of criminology and "to bring together a disparate literature of criminological research and theory as it specifically relates to Canada". While they certainly have brought together and reprinted in their compilation a nice selection of some 19 pieces of Canadian criminological writing (an additional three are from American sources), the collection remains disparate and the additional text makes no real attempt to integrate the research findings into broader theoretical settings or to extract from them any suggestion that the problems of crime in Canadian society are in any way different from those elsewhere in industrialised Western communities. Canadian teachers seeking a modestly priced, more analytical introductory text in crirninology might be happier with Explaining Crime by Gwynn Nettler of the University of Alberta, (Mcflraw-Hill, 1974) and Australian teachers will have little use for Crime in Canadian Society, except as a source of quick access to the Canadian criminological research scene. RICHARD G Fox http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology SAGE

Book Review: Crime in Canadian Society

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Publisher
SAGE
Copyright
Copyright © by SAGE Publications
ISSN
0004-8658
eISSN
1837-9273
DOI
10.1177/000486587600900208
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

AUST & NZ JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY (June 1976) 9 BOOK REVIEWS Crime in Canadian Society. Robert A Silverman and James J Teevan; Toronto: 'Butterworth and Co (Canada) Ltd (1975); 455 pp; $7.95 This is the age of instant books and there is no reason to expect that the field of criminology should be exempt from their incursion. Crime in Canadian Society bears all the hallmarks of such a production: bright, dramatically eye-catching cover (guns, chains, police, prison hars, money and haunted eyes); cheap forrnat (in this book the entire text is typewritten except for a few hand-written symbols - p 97 - which, presumably, were not to be found on the typist's machine); and heavy reliance on the reproduced writings of others. It is described as a reader with a text, but the text which precedes each section totals a mere 38 of the 455 pages of the volume and ranges from a relatively competent but potted summary of theories of crime and delinquency, through a fair discussion of measuring crime and delinquency and a mediocre examination of legal and sociological definitions of delinquency, down to a positively useless one page comment on "Selected Research on Canadian Criminology". The compilers' avowed aim is to introduce students to the general field of criminology and "to bring together a disparate literature of criminological research and theory as it specifically relates to Canada". While they certainly have brought together and reprinted in their compilation a nice selection of some 19 pieces of Canadian criminological writing (an additional three are from American sources), the collection remains disparate and the additional text makes no real attempt to integrate the research findings into broader theoretical settings or to extract from them any suggestion that the problems of crime in Canadian society are in any way different from those elsewhere in industrialised Western communities. Canadian teachers seeking a modestly priced, more analytical introductory text in crirninology might be happier with Explaining Crime by Gwynn Nettler of the University of Alberta, (Mcflraw-Hill, 1974) and Australian teachers will have little use for Crime in Canadian Society, except as a source of quick access to the Canadian criminological research scene. RICHARD G Fox

Journal

Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology – SAGE

Published: Jun 1, 1976

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