Book Review: Crime in Canadian Society
| Author | Richard G Fox |
| Published date | 01 June 1976 |
| Date | 01 June 1976 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/000486587600900208 |
AUST &NZ
JOURNAL
OF
CRIMINOLOGY
(June 1976) 9
BOOK
REVIEWS
123
Crime
in
Canadian
Society.
Robert
ASilverman
and
James
JTeevan; Toronto:
'Butterworth
and
Co (Canada)
Ltd
(1975); 455
pp;
$7.95
This is the age of instant books
and
there
is no reason to expect that
the
field
of criminology should
be
exempt
from their incursion. Crime in Canadian
Society bears all the hallmarks of such a production: bright, dramatically
eye-catching cover (guns, chains, police, prison hars,
money
and
haunted
eyes);
cheap
forrnat (in this
book
the entire text is
typewritten
except for a
few
hand-written
symbols - p 97 - which, presumably,
were
not to
be
found
on
the typist's machine);
and
heavy
reliance on the
reproduced
writings of others.
It is
described
as a
reader
with
a text,
but
the text
which
precedes
each section
totals a
mere
38 of the 455
pages
of
the
volume
and
ranges from arelatively
competent
but
potted
summary
of theories of
crime
and
delinquency, through a
fair discussion of measuring
crime
and
delinquency
and
amediocre examination
of legal
and
sociological definitions of delinquency,
down
to a positively useless
one
page
comment
on "Selected Research on
Canadian
Criminology".
The
compilers'
avowed
aim
is to introduce students to the general field of
criminology
and
"to
bring
together
adisparate literature of criminological
research
and
theory as it specifically relates to
Canada".
While they certainly
have
brought
together
and
reprinted
in their compilation a nice selection of
some
19 pieces of Canadian criminological writing (an additional three
are
from
American sources), the collection remains
disparate
and
the additional text
makes no real
attempt
to integrate the research findings into
broader
theoretical
settings or to extract
from
them
any suggestion that
the
problems of
crime
in
Canadian
society are in any
way
different
from
those elsewhere in industrialised
Western communities.
Canadian
teachers seeking amodestly priced,
more
analytical
introductory
text in crirninology
might
be
happier
with Explaining Crime
by
Gwynn
Nettler
of
the
University of Alberta, (Mcflraw-Hill, 1974)
and
Australian teachers will
have
little use for
Crime
in Canadian Society,
except
as a source of quick access
to
the
Canadian
criminological research scene.
RICHARD
G
Fox
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