ABSTRACT
When we looked at the historical context for crime (Chapter 1), the extent and range of criminal behaviour was emphasized, along with its massive influence on everyday life. Having looked at theoretical explanations from biological and psychological perspectives in the previous two chapters, here we will turn to explanations from sociological perspectives. And as we will see, the divisions between the different ‘subjects’ of biology, psychology and sociology are by no means obvious or rigid. However, while not seeing non-sociological theories as necessarily ‘wrong’, sociologists would consider them to offer only partial explanations at best. The emphasis in sociological theorizing is on the social context in which crime takes place – crime and criminals can only be fully understood in relation to the social structure, to specific social conditions and processes. Of course within this broad argument that criminal behaviour can only be explained by social factors, there are a wide variety of specific theoretical positions. As Rock (2007) put it in his recent review of sociological theories of crime: ‘sociological theories … are wide-reaching: they extend, for example, from an examination of the smallest detail of street encounters between adolescents and the police to comparative analyses of very large movements in nations’ aggregate rates of crime over centuries.’
