Street Justice: Retaliation in the Criminal Underworld

by Bruce A. Jacobs , Richard Wright

• ISBN13: 9780521852784
• ISBN10: 0521852781
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-05-22
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Street criminals live in a dangerous world, but they cannot realistically rely on the criminal justice system to protect them from predation by fellow lawbreakers; they are on their own when it comes to dealing with crimes perpetrated against them and often use retaliation as a mechanism for deterring and responding to victimization. Although retaliation lies at the heart of much of the violence that plagues many inner-city neighborhoods across the United States, it has received scant attention from criminologists. As a result, the structure, process, and forms of retaliation in the real world setting of urban America remain poorly understood. Criminal Retaliation: Street Justice and Social Control explores the face of modern day retaliation from the perspective of currently active criminals who have experienced it first hand, as offenders, victims, or both.

Table of Contents

1. Background and methods

2. The retributive ethic

3. A typology of criminal retaliation

4. Gender and retaliation (with Christopher Mullins)

5. Imperfect retaliation

6. Retaliation in perspective.