The book evaluates the theoretical schools in social theory and in criminology which continue to dominate academic thinking but whose influence on contemporary realities is declining. It analyzes the nine different transformations that define the parameters of social and academic change. It then develops an alternative criminology for analyzing crime and the fear of crime in current circumstances, including special chapters on youth crime (with analyses of the issues of drugs, alcohol, and violence), the social and cultural geography of urban crime and urban fear, the temptations of crime in free market societies, and the significance of the provenance of firearms and other weapons in a market society. The book applies the argument about the influence of market relations to the marketing of social control and to the markets in actually occurring professional or semi-professional crime. Figures, tables, notes, bibliography, indexes