Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence by Bill James

By Bill James

The guy who revolutionized the way in which we expect approximately baseball now examines our cultural obsession with murder—delivering a distinct, engrossing, exceptional background of tabloid crime in America.

Celebrated author and contrarian invoice James has voraciously learn real crime all through his existence and has been attracted to writing a ebook at the subject for many years. Now, with renowned Crime, James takes readers on an epic trip from Lizzie Borden to the Lindbergh child, from the Black Dahlia to O. J. Simpson, explaining how crimes were devoted, investigated, prosecuted and written approximately, and the way that has profoundly stimulated our tradition over the past few centuries— whether we haven’t consistently taken notice.

Exploring such phenomena as serial homicide, the fluctuation of crime charges, the price of facts, radicalism and crime, legal reform and the hidden ways that crimes have formed, or mirrored, our society, James chronicles homicide and misdeeds from the 1600s to the current day. James will pay specific awareness to crimes that have been sensations in the course of their time yet have light into obscurity, in addition to still-famous circumstances, a few that experience by no means been solved, together with the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Boston Strangler and JonBenet Ramsey. Satisfyingly sprawling and drastically unique, well known Crime is a professed amateur’s strong exam of the extraordinary effect crime tales have on our society, tradition and historical past.

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Additional info for Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence

Sample text

In the context of white collar crime, risk can refer to either meaning. Risk applies to white collar crime in the original sense insofar as a calculated gamble is taken; the chances of being caught and punished are quite remote compared with the benefits that accrue from committing the crime. Although such calculations can play a role in most forms of crime, it is especially likely to be a central feature of many white collar 11 crimes. Evidence cited elsewhere in this book strongly suggests that in most cases the risk strongly favors the offender because the probability of detection, prosecution, and sanctioning is typically low.

These include Senior Acquisitions Editor Carolyn Henderson Meier, Assistant Editor Meaghan Banks, who also developed this text, and Editorial Assistant John Chell. I would also like to thank the team responsible for making this book available to you: Michelle Williams, Marketing Manager; Tami Strang, Marketing Communications Manager; Jillian Myers, Marketing Coordinator. Finally, I am indebted to Jennie Redwitz, Production Project Manager, for her professionalism and efficiency on past editions, as well as Production Project Manager Lindsay Bethoney in seeing this most recent edition through the production process.

Lawyers and law professors inevitably stress the legalistic approaches to defining white collar crime. A group of criminologists who met specifically to address the dispute over the meaning of the term “white collar crime” came up with the following definition: White collar crimes are illegal or unethical acts that violate fiduciary responsibility of public trust committed by an individual or organization, usually during the course of legitimate occupational activity, by persons of high or respectable social status for personal or organizational gain.

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