Book review: Crime: The Mystery of the Common Sense Concept

Published date01 July 2017
Date01 July 2017
DOI10.1177/1748895817702034
Subject MatterBook reviews
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Criminology & Criminal Justice 17(3)
Robert Reiner, Crime: The Mystery of the Common Sense Concept, Polity: Cambridge, 2016; 272
pp.: 9780745660301, £50.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Lindsay Farmer, University of Glasgow, UK
It is surprising, as Reiner points out at the start of his new book, that there has been no
full length treatment of the concept of crime before now. The concept is foundational to
disciplines such as criminal law and criminology, and the control or management of
crime is central to the practices of modern government. However, the student or ‘honest
citizen’ seeking a brief or systematic account of the concept cannot easily find one. This
may be because we all think we already know what crime is, such that it has a certain
taken-for-granted quality, but may also be because the exercise of seeking to define
crime is so complex. As different disciplinary perspectives have developed, the meaning
of ‘crime’ has become increasingly fragmented. As Reiner puts it, ‘crime’ is a concept
that is simultaneously essentially contested and uncontested. It is uncontested because its
meaning is frequently taken to be self-evident (p. 3); but it is contested because it is a
normative concept and at a disciplinary or institutional level there are many different
definitions of crime which are put to different uses.
Much of the book is essentially introductory, providing a lucid and readable overview
of the way that the concept of crime is used in a range of different disciplines or institu-
tions. This is done in the kind of clear and concise manner that will be familiar to readers
of Reiner’s earlier work. This moves from legal and moral conceptions of crime (Chapters
1 and 2), to social conceptions (Chapter 3), to the way that crime is constructed in the
criminal justice system (Chapter 5), the media (Chapter 6) and finally in the discipline of
criminology (Chapter 7, also containing a lengthy discussion of crime statistics).
However, running...

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