With depth, clarity and erudition, this primer covers all the classic theory and research on the sociology of crime. Written in the 1990s one might think that things have changes and this book is no longer relevant. But things change very slowly in sociology, even though there are mountains of research filling gigabytes of hard disks. There is a lot of stuff to read, but very few new ideas, especially in sociology. So, read this book, or better still, require your students to read it and you and they will have acquired a solid basis of the social theory that purports to explain crime. References.