The Mismeasure of Crime (Key Questions for Criminal Justice). Questo articolo non è disponibile.The Mismeasure of Crime (Key Questions for Criminal Justice)

After a decade of steady decline, the appearance of conflicting reports regarding crime statistics has led many to call into question the accuracy of the current methods used to compile these statistics. Because the measurement of social phenomena involves human decisions, there are inevitably errors made. This book aims to identify and examine the nature of these errors so that social scientists, legislators, and the general public will be able to conduct a healthy dialogue on the topic in order to remedy some of the problems.

Before the book goes into much contemporary detail, historical measures of crime are given an overview. The authors then follow with chapters on the three most common methods used to report crime. Official data, self report, and victimization studies are analyzed in depth in order to discuss the specific errors that can occur in each type of measurement. The final chapter of the book describes ways that these measures can be applied to specific situations. The end result is the formation of a clearer picture of the impact these measures can have on the formation of crime prevention and control policies.

Clayton Mosher received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Toronto, and is currently a Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Sociology at Washington State University Vancouver. He is the author of several books and articles in the areas of inequality in criminal justice system processing, drugs and drug policies, and the impact of prison construction on employment. Besides co-authoring the Second Edition of Drugs and Drug Policy, he co-authored the Second Edition of The Mismeasure of Crime (SAGE, 2012) with Terance Miethe and Timothy Hart.

Terance Miethe received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Washington State University, and is currently a Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. He is the author of several books and research articles in the areas of criminal victimization, theories of crime, and criminal processing.

Dretha M. Phillips is Senior Research Associate in the Social and Economic Sciences Research Center at Washington State University, Vancouver. Her criminal justice/criminology research experience is wide-ranging. It includes conducting face-to-face interviews with arrestees in jails, evaluating in-prison substance abuse treatment programs and community diversion initiatives for convicted offenders, and designing and analyzing data from public surveys on sex offender community notification laws.