Criminology: The Key Concepts

What this book is

A pocket reference to contemporary criminology, organised A-to-Z. O'Brien and Yar — both established criminologists writing for the Routledge Key Concepts series — pick eighty-nine of the discipline's load-bearing terms, define each in a tight 600–1500 word entry, and cross-reference them so the reader can navigate the field laterally rather than top-down.

It is not a textbook. There is no narrative arc, no introductory topic on "what crime is," no concluding plea for reform. It is a working vocabulary: the words you need before you can read anything else in the field without flipping back to ask what labelling, hegemony, or peace-making criminology actually mean.

The shape of the discipline

Read together, the 89 entries fall into five families. The book itself doesn't impose this grouping — but it is the cleanest way to navigate the alphabetical topics that follow.

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Executive summary

Modern criminology is not one discipline. It is a federation of overlapping traditions, each with its own founding figures, its own answers to "what causes crime?", and its own political stakes. The book's structure — neutral, A-to-Z, descriptive — masks just how contested the field is. Three through-lines make sense of the noise.

The three-fold shift the field is still working through

1. From causes to responses. Classical and positivist criminology asked why do people commit crime? Labelling theory and the critical traditions (1960s onward) reframed the question: why does society respond the way it does? This is the move from offender-centred to system-centred analysis.

2. From state to society to risk. Early criminology was a science of state action — prisons, sentences, policing. Postwar sociology pulled the lens back to society — class, subculture, media. Late-modern criminology pulls it back further to risk as the master frame: actuarial justice, surveillance, prevention, governance through fear.

3. From singular crime to crime types. "Crime" used to mean street crime, almost by default. The discipline now catalogues corporate, environmental, state, hate, cyber, and white-collar crime as fully theorised categories — not afterthoughts. Many of the most consequential harms are not in the old syllabus.

Three commitments that survive every shift

1. Crime is a social construction and a real act. Pretending it is only one or the other produces bad theory. The labelling tradition shows how official categories shape what counts as crime; the critical tradition asks who gets harmed and who decides; the empirical tradition still has to count things in the world.

2. No single theory will do. Every chapter you read will look like it dissolves the previous one. It doesn't. The mature working criminologist holds five lenses simultaneously: rational choice for opportunistic property crime, labelling for deviance amplification, strain/anomie for inequality-driven violence, cultural criminology for expressive crime, critical criminology for state and corporate harm.

3. The political stakes are visible. Criminology is unusual among social sciences in that policy uptake is immediate. A "neutral" risk-assessment tool can put a person in prison; a re-definition of "antisocial behaviour" can change what police do tomorrow. The discipline knows this — and you should read every concept with that in mind.

Who this is for

Topic index

The 89 alphabetical entries are packed into 18 topics at concept boundaries. Each chapter covers 2–9 adjacent concepts, weighted to read in about 12–20 minutes.

How to read these summaries

Each chapter walks the alphabetical group from first concept to last, with a short framing of the family the cluster belongs to. Concepts that recur — moral panic in Cohen's original 1972 form, returning in topics on cybercrime, hate crime, and youth crime — get promoted to standalone concept pages you can navigate to from any chapter.

Concept companions