After surveying the roots of premodern criminology and contemporary theories, the book discusses criminal codes and citizens' attitudes toward these laws. A review of known and unreported crime in the United States warns against the inadequacies of crime statistics. Different approaches to explaining criminality are explored from the social structure perspective, including the radical-Marxist view through biogenic, psychogenic, and sociogenic theories. To demonstrate the rich and diverse forms in which crime is encountered in modern society, the text devotes separate chapters to offender typologies, predatory property crime, crimes of violence (homicide, assault, and rape), white-collar crime, organized crime, mundane crimes such as gambling and driving under the influence, patterns and trends in female criminality, and political crimes. An analysis of the law enforcement system focuses on how police action starts offenders on their way to becoming criminals and the extent to which the legal processing of offenders as described in formal theory matches up with the workings of these people-processing structures in real life. The final chapters deal with corrections procedures and social organization within correctional facilities. Tables, references, and indexes.