The aim of this book is to provide a text that is both readable and interesting for students. To that end, the authors have incorporated a wide variety of sources: everything from newspapers and popular magazines to official government data to scholarly research and studies. The authors have tried to select panels, as well as statistics, graphs, tables and other visual materials that are informative, insightful, thought provoking, and timely. The book seeks to address not only the basic and traditional topics normally covered in an introductory criminology course, but also the ones that are emerging as especially important in the 1980s. Unlike other criminology texts, entire chapters have been devoted to each of six different kinds of crime - street, white-collar, victimless, organized, corporate and political - expanding the discussion well beyond the limits of the more usual criminological concern with conventional, property and violent crime. Also, since it is the belief of the authors that crime and attempts to control it can never be properly understood when approached separately, the last part of this text for introductory criminology is devoted to the criminal justice system.