Imagining Crime

An innovative and challenging book, Imagining Crime explores the inability of the so-called criminal-legal complex--criminology, criminal law, the media, and ordinary, everyday experiences--to solve the problem of crime, criminality, and the ways in which crime can be imagined. Using a novel framework that provides insights into the social construct of crime, author Alison Young examines how we conceptualize crime by critiquing a number of events that have been taken to represent a definitive aspect of crime. The crisis within the criminal-legal tradition is embodied within each event, which the author shapes through her discussion of criminology's resistance to feminist intervention, the ambiguities of victimization in relation to social justice in the city, conjugal homicide and illegal immigration, the pleasures of reading about crime in detective fiction, the discovery of the limits of representation of crime when children kill children, the spectacle of HIV/AIDS in criminal justice policies, and more. Written by one of the newest exciting and original thinkers in criminology and sociolegal studies, Imagining Crime offers undergraduates, graduates, and scholars a unique approach to crime that integrates issues in criminology, criminal justice, and criminal law with feminist theory, sociolegal studies, and cultural studies.