Book review: Toward a Unified Criminology: Integrating Assumptions about Crime, People, and Society
| Author | Avi Brisman |
| Published date | 01 November 2012 |
| Date | 01 November 2012 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1362480612454161 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
525
either focus on rap’s violence or its revolutionary potential, Bogazianos instead con-
ceptualizes rap as a commercially bound social practice that creatively works in
complex and contradictory ways. Grounded in personal experience and thick engage-
ment with diverse materials, 5 Grams provides a deft and eloquent cultural analysis
of a clearly important relationship that, until now, has gone largely unexamined and
under-theorized.
References
Alexander M (2010) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
New York: The New Press.
Brown M (2009) The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society and Spectacle. New York: New York
University Press.
Garland D (2001) Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.
Russell-Brown K (2009) The Color of Crime. New York: New York University Press.
Williams R (1977) Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Robert Agnew, Toward a Unified Criminology: Integrating Assumptions about Crime, People, and
Society, New York University Press: New York and London, 2011; x + 254 pp.: 9780814705094,
US$28.00
Reviewed by: Avi Brisman, Eastern Kentucky University, USA
Ten years ago, Gregg Barak (2003: 219) observed that there is rarely ‘any type of integra-
tion or accommodation between establishment and anti-establishment criminologies’—a
phenomenon that he attributed, in part, to ‘the fact that both inside and outside the
academy, most criminologists—establishment and anti-establishment—have always
experienced a relative sense of insecurity and marginality regarding their value, place, or
relevance in society’. More recently, Walter DeKeseredy (2011: 57) remarked that ‘[c]
riminology is fragmented and academic criminology is under siege’. When one considers
declarations from within the discipline that ‘[m]ainstream criminology is an abject failure’
(Ferrell et al., 2008: 204), one can begin to understand assertions...
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