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Mark M. Lanier and Stuart Henry. Essential Criminology (3rd edition). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. 2010. 488 pp. $48.00.
Essential Criminology is a pretty bold title. It suggests that the authors, Mark Lanier and Stuart Henry, have produced a text that provides all a student needs to understand crime (or at least lays the essential foundation for the understanding of crime). After reading this innovative text, I am convinced that the authors made good on their title.
This is a unique criminology text, and the authors make that clear from the start of Essential Criminology. Does anyone read the preface and acknowledgements sections of books? I am guilty of impatiently skimming over the preliminary sections marked with tiny roman numerals in order to get to the pages with the "real" numbers. Having agreed to read and review Essential Criminology, however, I decided to scrutinize the book cover to cover. And it's a good thing, too. Lanier and Henry had me questioning my own criminological imagination by page xi. In the initial paragraph, the authors start to build an argument about the need to globalize our approach to crime. While I have a healthy appreciation for the need to expand our disciplines beyond our borders, it never occurred to me that my criminology course needed to "go global." Most of us (i.e., criminologists) take pride in the fact that our criminology courses look beyond American street crime to white-collar crime, to corporate crime, and to political and elite deviance. But do we need to go global too? Lanier and Henry believe that we do:
Since we first wrote this book in 1 997 and the second edition in 2003, the world has certainly changed. It has become increasingly globalized, and we appear more interconnected with others. That change also includes the nature of crime: environmental and financial harms from multinational corporations and investment bankers, global political terrorism, and violence at home, work, and school, all of which have become more significant, in terms of the seriousness and extent of harm...