Criminology

Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age (2007) is one of the key works by Bernard E. Harcourt and a foundational analysis of contemporary actuarial justice. Harcourt critiques the growing reliance on statistical risk assessment in criminal justice—particularly through police profiling, predictive policing, and risk-based sentencing. The book is a sharp critique

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Thinking About Crime, published in 2004 by American criminologist Michael Tonry, offers a scathing critique of punitive crime control policies in the United States. Building on decades of policy analysis and empirical research, Tonry dismantles the assumptions underpinning the “tough on crime” agenda and argues for a more rational, evidence-based approach to criminal justice. The

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In her book Security (2009), British legal scholar and criminologist Lucia Zedner offers a normatively sensitive, interdisciplinary, and conceptually precise analysis of the notion of security. She shows that “security” is not an objective or neutral good, but rather a complex social construction that is mobilized differently in politics, criminal law, and society. Zedner’s work

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The Viewer Society, written by the Norwegian sociologist and criminologist Thomas Mathiesen, presents one of the most influential extensions of Michel Foucault’s panopticism. In an age of accelerating video surveillance, mass media, and digital communication, Mathiesen proposes a shift in perspective: instead of focusing solely on the few who watch the many, we must also

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The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice (1968) by Aaron V. Cicourel is a groundbreaking study that reveals how juvenile delinquency is socially constructed within the everyday practices of legal and welfare institutions. Rooted in the traditions of ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism, Cicourel demonstrates that youth crime is not an objective reality but the product of

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Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates by Erving Goffman is one of the most influential sociological works of the 20th century. Originally published in 1961, the book presents a powerful analysis of psychiatric hospitals and similar institutions, which Goffman defines as total institutions. These settings, according to Goffman, profoundly

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