Crime and the American Dream

Rating:
Summary: How True It Is
Review: I was privileged to have Dr. Rosenfeld as a professor while majoring in criminology. I found his course and his research fascinating. This book is very well written and an interesting theory. Having recently become a public defender representing indigents charged with felony offenses, Dr. Rosenfeld's theory is right on the mark. American crime is a serious problem, with its roots deep in american culture and expectations. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding the true roots of american crime.

Rating:
Summary: How True It Is
Review: I was privileged to have Dr. Rosenfeld as a professor while majoring in criminology. I found his course and his research fascinating. This book is very well written and an interesting theory. Having recently become a public defender representing indigents charged with felony offenses, Dr. Rosenfeld's theory is right on the mark. American crime is a serious problem, with its roots deep in american culture and expectations. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding the true roots of american crime.

Rating:
Summary: Intriguing hypothesis
Review: This is certainly a worth-reading book. Its application of Durkheim's and Merton's anomie theory to the crime dynamics of American society is tightly reasoned and very appealing. The thesis that unusually high crime rates in the US are the dark side of the success promoted by the American ethos seems to account for many of the observed facts. The book follows an excellent logical development and provides appealing explanations for the etiology of the main American nightmare. Unfortunately, it lacks a truly comparative perspective, since it practically ignores crime in the underdeveloped countries. Compariong with Western Europe is hardly enough. And the last ten pages, where the authors provide their recipe for combatting crime, are, to say the least disappointing. By proposing actions which are obviously non-viable, the authors transform their whole argument into an interesting, even fascinating, but useless academic exercise. One final point: The tendency of the authors to add "political correctness" to citations is unforgivable. What an author said anywhere between 150 and 80 years ago, should be cited as he/she wrote. Thus, in page 105, the introduction of a "her" in a citation of Marx is unnecessary and smacks of opportunism. The same can be said of the citation of James Truslow Adams in page 106, where the authors introduce a "and women". And before I forget, the table on page 103 places Australia and New Zealand low in homicide but also low on decommodification (monstruous word!), whereas Finland is higher in decommodification than the UK, but also higher in homicide. Don't these contradictions fatally weaken the argument of this chapter?

Rating:
Summary: Interesting application of Anomie theory
Review: This was a textbook in my university criminology class, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It applies the theory of anomic strain to the United States as a whole and proposes that it is the cause for crime and deviance. Many of the ideas and themes presented in it ring true with sentiments of Americans today, with the gap between the upper and lower class growing larger and larger.