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BOOK REVIEWS 175al Prison presents a compelling and exhaustive account of how the American
public relies on popular journals to understand the meaning and implications
of discipline for prisoners. The connections revealed by Sloops rhetorical
approach to the study of crime and punishment make it a valuable contribution to scholars concerned with the intersection between discourse, morality
and punishment.Penn State University Anne Teresa DemoJack Katz, Seductions of Crime (New York: Basic Books, 1988, 1990 second
edn.).Jack Katz argues that much criminological theorizing is flawed by criminologists lack of first-hand knowledge of crime. This ignorance has left
criminologists trying to explain the demographic and social correlates of
crime on the basis of misconceptions about crime itself.Katz attempts to overcome this misdirection of inquiry by beginning with a
phenomenological study of the foreground of crime a close description of
the criminal event, the lifestyle of the perpetrators, and the thought processes
and emotions immediately preceding and following a crime. Using analytic
induction, Katz considers many cases in an attempt to obtain relatively homogeneous crime categories (which may not coincide with legal categories), and
moves back and forth between theory and data as he develops a grounded
theory, until every case is explained.With the exception of accounts of shoplifting expeditions written by his
UCLA students, Katz relies on autobiographies, ethnographies and nonfiction novels for data. Sensibly, he does not try to deal with every type of
crime, but deals with a range that are relevant to contemporary American
society: righteous slaughter (in which the killer is defending a conception
of the Good); adolescent shoplifting; the badass (not a type of crime but a
social role whose enactment prominently features robbery and violence); and
senseless homicides that occur in the course of a robbery.In these analyses, Katz focuses not only on cognition, but on such emotions
as humiliation, rage and existential dizziness. Here Katz makes a contribution
that is valuable and original. Once one reads his book, it seems remarkable
how little attention has been paid to emotions in criminological theory.The neglect of emotion in models of crime causation reflects what some
might consider an exaggerated assumption of rationality in much criminological theory, most conspicuously in the utility-maximizing analyses of the
economists who commonly assume the goals of crime...