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Leonidas K. Cheliotis and Sappho Xenakis, editors. Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Greece: International Comparative Perspectives. Oxford: Verlag Peter Lang. 2011. Pp. xx + 615. 12 figures, 8 tables. Paperback $86.95.
The collection edited by Leonidas K. Cheliotis and Sappho Xenakis, the first such English- language volume of its kind, aims at bringing together the criminological work of Greek scholars and subject matter specialists from other Western countries in order to impart a comprehensive picture on crime and criminal justice in Greece. Drawing on a rich variety of approaches, the book principally aims, as stated in the Introduction to the volume by Cheliotis and Xenakis, to fill in an important gap in the literature by providing a systematic, but not necessarily exhaustive, introduction to issues of crime and punishment in contemporary Greece. To this effect, the editors choose an extremely useful comparative methodology. Topics are first discussed by specialists on Greece and then commented upon by international experts. The chosen methodology allows for an in-depth analysis of the interaction between the national and the global and, by placing the Greek criminal system in the context of much wider international and global trends, provides a much needed corrective to stereotypical discourses that insist one-sidedly on a real or imaginary "Greek exceptionalism."
The collection is divided into three sections. The first deals with the experience of crime, the second with topical crime issues, and the third with reactions to crime. Overall, it comprises fifteen primary chapters and accompanying commentaries. The contributions to the collection are diverse and of high quality. Opening Part I, Cheliotis and Xenakis introduce a number of core themes on crime, fear of crime, and punitiveness, and propose a theoretical framework in which to understand them. In their commentary, Jonathan Jackson, Monica Gerber,...