The first chapter considers whether social class is related to crime, an issue that is far from resolved among criminologists. This lack of resolution is partly because of a long tradition of asking junior and senior high school students to self-report their delinquencies in anonymous surveys. The next chapter analyzes why males seem so often and so much more criminal than females; this includes a discussion of methods of exploring and testing the causal theory of gender and crime. The third chapter discusses the connection between cities (urbanization) and crime. The analysis focuses on the development of cities in France during the 19th century. Chapter four turns to issues of policing and crime, seeking answers to questions about how and when police might increase, as well as deter, crime. Chapter five introduces the possibilities and problems associated with a particular explanation of crime known as subcultural theory. The last chapter examines connections between drugs and crime. The controversy is whether one is a cause of the other or whether both are parts of a whole that itself must be explained. In exploring these topics, the authors discuss a variety of methods that criminologists use to study crime. These include qualitative observation and interview data from recent ethnographic field studies, longitudinal analysis, and latent variable analysis. Chapter tables and figures, 525 references, and a subject index