The most recommended criminology books

Malcom Gladwell is undoubtedly the best translator of social science research writing these days. 

What the Dog Saw is a compendium of New Yorker essays penned by Gladwell, several of which have a direct link to managing people. Two of my favorites are “Late Bloomers” – an essay on the fallacy of inherent talent, and “Most Likely to Succeed”.

These essays say a lot about employee selection and development, challenging the assumptions held by too many managers that good staff are born, not made, and that selecting top talent is the key to competitive advantage. Gladwell goes with the evidence, but does so in a super-engaging manner. 

Berg’s groundbreaking study of Peter Kürten, a blood-drinking serial killer with a diverse variety of victims in Düsseldorf, Germany, became a classic criminology text during the 1940s. Because Berg, a pathologist, had performed the autopsies, he had a privileged perspective on the murders. He noticed the use of different weapons and did his own research as he hypothesized how the assaults were linked. Going beyond mere case analysis, Berg offered a means for other professionals to consider the psychological details in the development of extreme sexual cruelty. When Kürten was arrested, Berg spent many hours face-to-face with him in his cell, watching his excited manner as he recounted his deeds. The Sadist is one of the earliest attempts to penetrate the deviant mind of a repeat offender, told by the person with the most accurate knowledge of how the killer had treated each victim.

The baseball writer and analyst Bill James sets out to trace the path of a serial ax murderer who left a bloody trail across the US in the early 20th century. Starting with the well-chronicled deaths of eight people in Villisca, Iowa, in 1912, he reveals the signature connections between this crime and dozens of others committed over a period of 15 years from Washington State to Florida, crimes for which innocent people were put to death. A mind-boggling feat of research.

We are brought up to think of racism as a matter of individual attitudes and biases. If only it were that simple. Stuart Hall and his colleagues taught me that understanding how racism worked required much deeper thinking. First published in 1978, Policing the Crisis argued that race is a key constituent of Britain’s social and economic structures. It presented a picture of Britain in the 1970s as caught in a crisis of authority. Society was fracturing, giving rise to new authoritarianism in response. A moral panic about black crime was the surface justification for new “law and order” policies. But in a strange way, the country was using black people to work through its own anxieties. This was Thatcherism in embryo. The same processes continue to shape our lives today. There is no better book on how politics in Britain has functioned in the last fifty years.

Hull House was the famous settlement house on the West Side of Chicago where a group of mostly women attempted to change the lives of their immigrant neighbors by living among them.

Although the work brought cultural and artistic opportunities to the poor, the women also began to work on political and legal issues. Changes to juvenile justice and occupational health laws as well as labor laws came out of the work of women who couldn’t even vote at the time.

That they were able to have such influence is intriguing.

The Nutshell Studies are now located in Maryland at the medical examiner’s office.

Goldfarb worked there and his book provides information on how Frances Glessner Lee became involved in the work of her brother’s old friend Dr. George Meredith Magrath who was medical examiner in Boston (Suffolk County).

His work demonstrated the need for a technically proficient medical examiner system to replace the old coroner system and for police detectives to be trained to deal with a crime scene. Called Legal Medicine at the time, this was the beginning of forensics as we know it now.

It’s fascinating how one woman used her money and influence to establish training for law enforcement officials even after her mentor Dr. Magrath died.

This is another book that cuts through the hype, helping to define the often sensationalized connections between mafiosi in Italy and the United States.

Historian Salvatore Lupo, a Sicilian, brings a perspective often missing in American books on the Mafia. His meticulous research knocks down the idea that the American Mafia was ever some giant “alien conspiracy” with Sicilian overlords, but it does examine whatever interconnections and parallels exist in real life between the two Mafias.

Much like the Critchley book, this is for those who want the facts, facts, facts. And Italian experts have a lot to contribute to the story of the American Mafia.

This book applies economic theory and econometric methods to problems in criminology.

It is divided into three parts. Part I discusses models of criminal recidivism. Part II describes the economic model of crime. Part III estimates cost functions for prisons.

Specific chapters cover statistical analysis of qualitative outcomes; analysis of two measures of criminal activity – the arrest rate and the conviction rate; and long-run estimates of cost functions for a group of Federal Correctional Institutions. 

When I first started out, there were very few books ever written about the study of art crime. Tijhuis was one of the few authorities, approaching it from a criminological perspective. This is a really strong academic survey of the phenomenon, perfect for those interested in the intersection of criminology and art.

This book opens our eyes to the sordid history of drug use in the US and elsewhere and why it’s become such a problem. I was appalled at the things our country did and continue to do that has created this problem, and deeply dismayed at the barbaric way we continue to deal with this, especially since and there are three countries in the world that have resolved the drug problem in their country that should be role models for us.