This widely used book, first published in 1987, examines changes in crime and the criminal justice system against the larger changes in an industrialising society. Challenging the simplistic view of crime as the work of a criminal class, and changes in the justice system as solely due to humanitarian reformers, it also takes issue with analyses which explain crime patterns wholly in terms of the economic cycle. Recent growth in women's history has helped shift interest from property crime to violent crime, and a main feature of this extensively reworked Second Edition is an entirely new chapter on crime and gender.