Rule-breaking and the systems built to respond.
11 topics · 12 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Broken Windows
James Q. Wilson & George L. Kelling · 1982
Argues that visible disorder, a broken window left unrepaired, signals that no one is watching and invites further crime, so policing should target…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
On Crimes and Punishments
Cesare Beccaria · 1764
Argues that deterrence comes from the certainty and swiftness of punishment rather than its severity, and that torture and the death penalty fail on…
+6 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Social Structure and Anomie
Robert K. Merton · 1938
Argues that crime rises where a culture prizes success but blocks legitimate means of reaching it, making deviance a predictable response to…
+3 more at this level
12 works
James Q. Wilson & George L. Kelling
Argues that visible disorder, a broken window left unrepaired, signals that no one is watching and invites further crime, so policing should target minor disorder and not only serious offences.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Cesare Beccaria
Argues that deterrence comes from the certainty and swiftness of punishment rather than its severity, and that torture and the death penalty fail on their own terms.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John Howard
Documents squalid, disease-ridden conditions across English and Welsh gaols from first-hand inspection and argues that prisons should reform rather than merely warehouse the accused, founding the modern prison-reform movement.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Adolphe Quetelet
Applies statistical regularity to crime and other social facts, arguing that aggregate rates reveal lawlike social causes invisible in any single case, and founding quantitative criminology.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Cesare Lombroso
Argues that some offenders are 'born criminals' identifiable by inherited physical traits, founding criminology's positivist school though its biological claims did not survive later scrutiny.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Frederic M. Thrasher
Maps 1,313 Chicago gangs from direct observation and argues that gangs form spontaneously among boys in the social disorganisation of the slum, filling needs for status and belonging that conventional institutions fail to meet.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robert Martinson
Surveys rehabilitation programmes and concludes that, with few exceptions, none reliably reduce reoffending, the 'nothing works' claim that reshaped penal policy toward incapacitation for a generation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Global Commission on Drug Policy
Argues that decades of criminalising drug production and use have failed to reduce supply or consumption while causing severe harms, and calls for treating drug use as a health issue rather than a crime.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robert K. Merton
Argues that crime rises where a culture prizes success but blocks legitimate means of reaching it, making deviance a predictable response to structural strain rather than individual pathology.
Edwin H. Sutherland
Argues that crime committed by respectable people in the course of their occupations is as real and as damaging as street crime, and that criminology's focus on poverty had simply been looking in the wrong place.
John Braithwaite
Argues that shaming offenders reduces crime only when it is reintegrative, aimed at the act and followed by forgiveness and readmission to the community, while stigmatising shame instead pushes offenders toward criminal subcultures.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Manuel Eisner
Assembles homicide records across five centuries of Europe to show a sustained decline in interpersonal violence, and argues the drop tracks the same civilising processes Norbert Elias described rather than any single cause.
link checked 17 Sept 2026