By articulating a general theory of crime and related behaviour, the authors present a new and comprehensive statement of what the criminological enterprise should be about. They argue that prevalent academic criminology - whether sociological, psychological, biological, or economic - has been unable to provide believable explanations of criminal behaviour. The authors explore the essential nature of crime, finding that scientific and popular conceptions of crime are misleading, and they assess the truth of disciplinary claims about crime, concluding that such claims are contrary to the nature of crime and, interestingly enough, to the data produced by the disciplines themselves. They then put forward their own theory of crime and apply their theory to the persistent problems of criminology. Why are men, adolescents, and minorities more likely than their counterparts to commit criminal acts? What is the role of the school in the causation of delinquency? To what extent could crime be reduced by providing meaningful work? Why do some societies have much lower crime rates than others? Does white-collar crime require its own theory? Is there such a thing as organized crime? In all cases, the theory forces fundamental reconsideration of the conventional wisdom of academicians and criminal justice practitioners.

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