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Originating in the tradition of classical sociology (Durkheim, Merton), anomie theory posits how broad social conditions influence deviant behavior and crime. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim was the first to discuss the concept of anomie as an analytical tool in his 1890s seminal works of sociological theory and method. In these works, anomie, which refers to a widespread lack of commitment to shared values, standards, and rules needed to regulate the behaviors and aspirations of individuals, is an intermediate condition by which social (dis)organization impacts individual distress and deviant behavior. An observant of the massive social changes of 19th-century Europe, Durkheim argued that anomie resulted from rapid social change and the weakening of traditional institutions, particularly the reduced authority of such institutions in the economic sphere, as well as changes in the principles legitimizingsocial inequality. A few decades later, the American sociologist Robert Merton re-formulated anomie theory, arguing how a particular malintegration of the culture-structure constitution of modern society produces high rates of crime. Echoing selected themes in Durkheim’s work, and discussing the United States as a prime example, Merton argued how a shared overemphasis on monetary success goals undermines individual commitment to social rules and generates a particularly acute strain on individuals in disadvantaged social positions. Thus, having implications for research on crime rate differences between societies as well as between individuals and groups within the society, anomie theory has inspired a broad range of both macro- and micro-level applications and extensions. On the one hand, the theory has shaped studies of crime rates across large social units, such as countries and metropolitan areas. Such research, while often limited in terms of the types of crime that can reliably be compared across large social units, has linked crime with economic inequality, materialistic values, the institutional dominance of market-driven processes and values, and rapid social change. An important development in this tradition is the advent of multilevel research that links societal factors with individual normlessness, strain, and criminal behavior. On the other hand, micro-level implications of anomie theory, often referred to as classic strain theory, have shaped studies of individual and group differences in criminal behavior within societies. This type of work often studies youths, at times bringing in notions of gangs, subculture, and differential opportunities, focusing on the criminogenic effects of strain stemming from opportunity blockage and relative deprivation. Yet the work rarely examines individual normlessness as an intermediate process linking social structure and delinquency. Finally, anomie theory has been extended and applied to research on business/corporate and white-collar crime. While more research is needed in this area, the extant work suggests how anomie theory provides a powerful explanation of national-level differences in business/corporate crime (e.g., bribery). The article concludes by noting that an increased emphasis on multilevel research may lead to an integration of the macro-level and micro-level extensions and applications of anomie theory in the future.

While the roots of criminology largely lie in sociological explanations for crime and delinquency, a resurgence has begun wherein human behavior is explained as a product of both environmental and biological factors: biosocial criminology. Biosocial criminology encompasses many perspectives that seek to explain the relationships between human behavior and genes, evolution, neurobiology, and more. While biosocial criminology does not have a long history in the broader field of criminology, modern advances in technology have made access to data to explore biosocial criminological questions far more readily available. Advanced technology, coupled with studies suggesting that a large proportion of the variance in antisocial behavior is attributable to genetic factors has spurred many criminologists to explore how both nature and nurture influence behavior. A wide variety of perspectives is apparent within biosocial criminology. These perspectives can be seen as tools to uncover different elements of the equation seeking to understand human behavior. Behavior genetic studies seek to explain what proportion of the variation in a trait or behavior is due to genetic factors. Molecular genetic studies seek to uncover which genes are related to that trait or behavior and how strongly they are associated. Evolutionary psychology seeks to explain why a trait or behavior emerged and remained through the process of natural selection. Neurobiological studies explain how the complex structure and function is related to traits and behavior. While these perspectives vary widely in their approach, one fact remains: neither environmental nor biological explanation for human behavior is sufficient on its own; rather, the complex interplay between environments and biology is critical to advance knowledge about the causes and correlates of criminal and delinquent behavior.

In the mid-1970s, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), which came to be known as the “Birmingham School,” published two major books that contributed substantially to the field of critical criminology: Resistance Through Rituals (RTR) and Policing the Crisis (PTC). These two groundbreaking and complementary works aimed to contribute to the two main topics of criminological enquiry: deviance/crime and social reaction/punishment. In both cases, the Centre deployed a Marxist-inspired and sociologically driven approach whose main objective was to study both deviance and social reaction from a critical perspective that takes into consideration the broader social, political, economic, and cultural context in which they take place. RTR challenged the dominant discourse of the postwar era, which proclaimed the end of class antagonism and the exhaustion of “class” as a relevant social category. The Birmingham School’s research demonstrated that the many subcultures—punks, mods, teddy boys, rastas, etc. —that flourished in the United Kingdom at the time were not symptomatic, as many argued, of the rise of a “classless youth.” On the contrary, RTR made the case that subcultures are part of a century-long tradition of symbolic, working-class resistance against the hegemonic order. From this perspective, subcultures were seen as an attempt, on the part of working-class youths, to solve the many contradictions of their class experience at a time of broad, multidimensional changes. While the Birmingham School’s work on subcultures was a celebration of working-class resistance and agency, ultimately, it reached the conclusion that this form of resistance, which remained restricted to the symbolic sphere, could not offer a solution to the exploitation and oppression faced by working-class youth, which stemmed from the material, social relations of production of capitalism. While RTR focused on “deviance,” PTC shifted the analysis to the other side of the equation, that of social reaction and punishment. In this second publication, Stuart Hall and his co-authors developed an impressive “conjunctural analysis” approach that allowed them to move from the study of the so-called “mugging crisis” of the United Kingdom in the early 1970s, to the elaboration of their groundbreaking theory on crisis of hegemony and the rise of a new, “law and order society.” PTC is one of the pioneering studies that argued that the rise of “authoritarian populism” and the birth of a “law and order society” that were taking place in the United Kingdom in the 1970s were not temporary phenomena but were representative of a long-lasting change of epoch. More than 40 years after the publication of this seminal work, it leaves no doubt that the Birmingham School’s predictions have been validated, as is corroborated by an extensive literature studying the “punitive turn” that has taken over the globe over the last few decades. Overall, at a time when criminology was becoming increasingly dominated by positivism and disconnected from the sociological tradition, the Birmingham School’s most influential and long-lasting legacy resides in RTR and PTC’s invitation to critically investigate what the CCCS members called the “social and political ‘conditions of existence’” of both deviance/crime and social reaction/punishment.

The phenomenon of illegal markets is pervasive. The circulation of illegal goods and services reaches all social segments, crosses national boundaries, and produces enormous revenues. Scholarship has typically addressed issues of illegal exchanges by focusing on criminal organizations, their members’ activities, internal structures, and businesses while leaving the very notion of illegal markets conceptually underdeveloped. Different from organized crime, the notion of “illegal market” compels us to consider the demand side and to investigate the varied ways it relates to the supply side. Following the path opened up by economic sociology scholarship, this article brings illegal markets to the center of the scene in order to develop them conceptually, observe them in a differentiated way, and investigate their relationships with legal structures. From this perspective, the social organization of markets comes to the fore, highlighting such aspects as the formal and informal institutions sustaining illegal markets; the modes of internal coordination that deal with problems such as value, competition, or trust; moral attitudes toward the production, exchange, or consumption of certain products or services; the cultural elements or cognitive dispositions that promote illegal exchanges; the role of state power in defining what is and is not illegal, and thus how it controls certain exchanges; and the role of the enforcement of the law in the emergence, expansion, or extinction of these markets.

A broad understanding of crime requires explanations for both the origins of individual and group criminal propensity and when and where criminal events occur. Crime pattern theory provides explanations for the variation in the distribution of criminal events in space and time given a range of different propensities. In the organization of their everyday lives, both occasional and persistent criminals spend most of their time engaged in the same legitimate everyday activities as everyone else. The location of criminal events in space–time are shaped by these everyday activities and the specific criminal’s activity. Occasional and persistent offenders develop activity spaces and awareness spaces. The shape and dynamics of these spaces is influenced by the structures of human settlements that channel and limit movement patterns in time and space. These structures include the built environments and the socioeconomic and cultural environments in which people live, work, or go to school, and in which they spend their social, entertainment, and shopping time. Crime pattern theory utilizes the major components of the built and social environment—activity nodes, paths between nodes, neighborhoods and neighborhood edges, and the socioeconomic backcloth—in conjunction with the routine movements of the population in general to understand crime generator and crime attractor locations and the formation of repeat areas of offending for individuals and groups of offenders as well as more aggregate crime hot spots and cold spots. This information is translated into a geometry of crime that describes the journeys to crime by individual criminal offenders and groups of offenders and their victims or targets. Crime pattern theory explains the process of criminal target search, suggests strategies for crime reduction, and describes potential displacements of criminal events in space and time following changes in the suitability of targets or target locations at particular places and specific times.

Theories of cybercrime perpetration seek to identify and explain the causes of individual- and/or group-level variation in the performance of cybercriminal behavior. Fundamental to this effort is a debate pertaining to whether extant theories of crime, previously developed to explain crime in the physical world, are useful for accounting for cybercrime or whether new theories, explicitly aimed at cybercrime, are needed. This debate hinges largely on the question of whether cybercrimes can be considered to be a type of crime in general, or whether there are features of cybercrime, such as the lack of physical contact between victims and offenders or the dissociative anonymity afforded by the collapse of time-space barriers that occurs in cyberspace, that sufficiently differentiate cybercrime from crime in the physical world such that new theories are needed to explain its occurrence. To date, however, scholars have relied almost exclusively on extant theory in cybercrime studies and only one new theory has been developed that focuses exclusively on cybercrime. Moreover, cybercrime theory has focused heavily on individual-level variation in cybercrime and largely ignored group-level variation, which is a shortcoming because understanding differences across, for example, different nations or political or religious groups, is an important part of the study of crime in the physical world. Another important problem is that basic facts about cybercriminals and victims (e.g., the approximate proportion of offenders who are male or female) are largely unknown due to a lack of systematically collected, representative, or longitudinal data on cybercrime—a situation that hinders the development of cybercrime theory. Research testing cybercrime theory shows support for a number of theories from the field of criminology, especially general strain, low self-control, social learning, and techniques of neutralization and drift. A notable development in this literature are findings that social learning and low self-control theories, working in an integrated fashion, are found to provide an especially useful explanation for cybercrime such that, on their own, individuals with low self-control may not engage in a great deal of cybercrime owing to the complexity that such offending often entails. However, if low self-control individuals have friends who engage in cybercrime, they may learn the skills needed to commit certain cybercrimes and, as a result, start offending at higher levels. Psychological studies also provide important results, including that cybercriminals tend to be more introverted than offenders in the physical world, which may tap into the dissociative anonymity afforded by offending in cyberspace. Psychological research also shows that individuals with higher levels of psychopathy are more involved in cybercrimes, particularly those that entail aggression or attempts to cause harm to others, and that more impulsive (a concept that is similar to low self-control in criminology) individuals engage in more cybercrime.

This article examines the who, what, where, when, why, and how of gang joining. The question of what youth join when they join gangs speaks to the contested nature of gang definitions and types and the consequences of gang membership, specifically heightened levels of offending and victimization. The type of gang and the obligations of membership influence the joining process. Where youth join gangs, namely, the neighborhood and social context, also impacts individual opportunities and preferences for joining. When youth join gangs is considered in a developmental sense, to include both adolescent and adult onset, in order to account for continuity and change in individual levels of immersion or “embeddedness” in gangs across the life course. Who joins gangs provides a profile of gang membership grounded in the well-documented risk factors for gang membership, but limited by problems of prediction. Why youth join gangs speaks to the push and pull factors for membership, the appeal of gangs, and the selective incentives they offer. Still, motivations for gang membership cannot fully explain selection into gangs, nor can general theories of crime that do not necessarily fit with general knowledge of gangs. How youth join gangs, for example, is more complicated than initiation rites. The mechanisms underlying the selection process can be understood through the lens of signaling theory, with implications for practice.

Gang organization has been an aspect of research that is often explored and debated. The concept of organization is intertwined with questions of whether gangs have leaders, whether gangs can be considered organized crime, which groups are actually street gangs, and other related questions. Though there are some crossover categories, street gangs are viewed as distinctly different than organized crime groups, prison gangs, outlaw motorcycle clubs, skinheads, stoners, and taggers. Gang structures are widely varied, with a few being highly organized and most being loose networks of associates. The organization of a gang may change over time. There is an array of membership types that range from core members who might maintain affiliation well into adulthood to temporary members who only spend a short time in the gang. Gangs may have sub-group clique structures based on age-graded cohorts, neighborhoods, or criminal activity. Leadership roles in gangs rarely take the form of a recognizable figurehead. These variations have led to a plethora of gang categories that include evolutionary typologies that place gangs by their stage in criminal sophistication, behavioral typologies that identify gangs by the type of criminal behavior the members engage in, and structural typologies that differentiate gangs by the characteristics of their composition. It is important to note that most of the following gang typologies are focused on gangs in the United States and may not be as relevant in other countries. Major gang affiliations are also explored. Like other aspects of organizations, affiliations are not stable, as gang alliances are volatile. Despite the ability of affiliations to fluctuate, this categorization strategy is commonly used outside of academic research.

It has been a century since Frederic Thrasher researched his pioneering text on youth gangs in Chicago. In it he depicts gangs as a street-based phenomenon that emerged from the combined forces of urbanization, migration, and industrialization—with new migrant groups seeking to find a toehold on the American Dream. Gangs were discrete and highly localized, drawing on names from popular culture and the neighborhood, seeking ways to survive and thrive amid the disorganization of the emerging city. In the 21st century, street gangs have been identified in urban contexts all over the world and have become increasingly viewed as a transnational phenomenon that is qualitatively different from Thrasher’s neighborhood groups. Processes of globalization have created a degree of flow and connectedness to urban life that is unlike any other stage in human history. Yet a close reading of Thrasher shows that some of the key themes in the study of gangs in a global context—urban exclusion, grey economies, human mobility, and cultural flow—were presaged in Thrasher’s work. In a global era, however, these processes have intensified, amplified, and extended in ways that could not have been predicted. We elaborate the spatial, economic, social, cultural, and technological implications of globalization for gangs across five principle areas: (1) Gangs in the Global City; (2) Gangs, Illicit Markets, and the Global Criminal Economy; (3) Mobility, Crimmigration, and the “Transnational Gang”; (4) Gangs and Glocalization; and (5) The Gang Mediascape. Taken together, these themes seek to offer both a conceptual vocabulary and empirical foundation for new and innovative studies of gangs and globalization. Empirical evidences from Europe, the United States, and beyond, emphasize the uneven impacts of globalization and the ways in which national and cultural dynamics are implicated in the study of gangs in the 21st century.

It was once presumed that costs of Internet adoption were too great for gang members to absorb. They lacked the financial resources to access the Internet or the technological know-how to use it. That is no longer the case, which leads to two questions: What are gang members doing online? What are the responses to gangs online? The growing research on this topic indicates that gang members are online and using the Internet at a rate comparable to their peers. This occurs in the United States and abroad. Gangs do not exploit the Internet to its criminal potential, even though the law enforcement community suggests otherwise. This is most likely due to the low technological capacities of gang members. However, gang members do engage in higher rates of crime and deviance online than their non-gang peers. Gang members also use the Internet to posture, provoke, and project group power, particularly on leading social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, which in turn allows activities occurring online to have ramifications for crime and violence offline. It is debatable whether online space is as important to gangs as physical space, but the Internet is undoubtedly a valuable medium to gangs. The potential for conflict and the posting of gang images has attracted the attention of law enforcement as well as researchers to document this activity. Platforms are being developed to anticipate the spilling of online gang conflicts offline. Since the Internet is a value-neutral medium that engages youth and young adults, it is anticipated that social media and the Internet will continue to appeal to gangs and gang members for the foreseeable future.

Biodiversity is essential for the well-being of the world but has been declining at an alarming rate in the 20th and 21st centuries. An important threat to biodiversity consists of criminal and harmful activities against the environment. Biodiversity crime refers to illicit and unlawful acts or serious harms that pressure biological entities, including individuals and populations of species and their habitats, as well as the ecosystem’s functions and the services it supports and generates. A green criminological perspective, in which environmental crimes are approached from an extended principle of harm that encompasses adverse effects on human and non-human victims, serves to understand actors, legal–illegal interfaces, and harms behind biodiversity crimes. Flora and fauna crime groups are not homogeneous but include organized crime groups, corporate crime groups, and disorganized crime groups; they utilize different approaches and become involved in different flora and fauna markets. The legal–illegal dynamics of the market facilitate the laundering of flora and fauna, and some biodiversity crimes converge with other forms of crime, including drugs, arms, and sex trafficking. The harms linked to biodiversity crimes are illustrated by forced displacement, land-grabbing, and gross human rights abuses, including forced labor, and severe threats to workers’ health and safety. Biodiversity crimes are also connected to tragic and incalculable ecological consequences, since biodiversity decline alters key processes important to the productivity and sustainability of Earth’s ecosystems, and further loss will rapidly accelerate change in ecosystem processes.

Street gangs are, by definition, social groups that contain patterns of interactions between gang members, associates, and other gangs in their social environment. The structure and content of these interaction patterns, or group processes, are essential for both understanding gang life and explaining collective and individual behavior. For example, variations in organizational sophistication, internal cohesion, and individual-level social integration influence the day-to-day experiences of gang members and can affect criminal behavior. Social ties between gang members are also mediums for street socialization and the development and/or transmission of gang culture. As prospective gang members age and become exposed to street life, they gravitate to peers and collectively learn about how to negotiate their social environment. They connect to other gang members and model the gang’s ideals to become accepted by the group. Routine interactions in the gang communicate the nuances of gang culture and explain the group’s expectations for violent behavior. These lessons are reinforced when conflicts with other groups arise and contentious interactions escalate into serious threats or actual violence. Cultural meanings developed in the gang can alter how a member perceives social situations, various social roles (e.g., gender roles), and his or her sense of self. Interactions within the gang develop the gang’s collective identity, which becomes an ideal standard for members to pursue. Gang members perform this idealized notion of “gang member” in public settings, often acting as if they are capable of extreme violence. For some members these performances may be fleeting and largely disconnected from the ideals to which they truly aspire, while others may fully embrace the ideals of the gang. Such variation is contingent on social processes within the gang and how socially integrated an individual is to other members. Researching social processes within gangs provides a wealth of information about how life in the gang influences gang member behavior.

There are a variety of considerations related to the measurement of violence. Concerns regarding collection of primary data include the fact that violence is rare, and typical samples would yield very low variability. Self-report data may provide rich detail, but asking questions about violent behavior may result in social desirability biases. Techniques such as life history calendars have enhanced data collection in some studies. Children may be too young to respond to surveys; measuring their physical aggression can be done with ratings. Aggregate measures of violence are typically derived from government reports. The primary source of official crime data in the United States has been the summary Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), collected from police departments by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for many decades, but it has been replaced by the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), a change made nationwide as of 2021. Considerable gaps in the data are expected to be narrowed as local jurisdictions and states adapt to the new system. To complement UCR and NIBRS official estimates of reported crime, the Bureau of Justice Statistics also fields the annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to understand victimization in more depth. Researchers wishing to use these sources of data should be aware of the many published discussions of limitations and caveats for each data set. Those interested in studying specific forms of violent crime, including homicide, rape, robbery, and assault, should be aware of idiosyncrasies in the measurement of those crime types. For homicide, there are a variety of additional sources of official data, such as the Supplemental Homicide Reports, the National Vital Statistics System, and the National Death Index. Changes in the collection of assault data, including a move away from the “aggravated assault” category commonly used in the past by UCR and NCVS, deserve particular attention. Cross-national data are limited, and most investigators rely on World Health Organization data for homicide or the International Crime Victimization Survey. These have limited reach and scope compared to Interpol reports that were available in the past. Researchers interested in individual-level data should also be aware that there are many large-scale, secondary data sets available for analysis. These are sometimes restricted and require approval of an application to access sensitive data. Data include those derived from longitudinal studies of children and teenagers such as AddHealth and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the Social Development Project, the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, and the Pathways to Desistance study. There are several other categories of violence that deserve special attention. Because family violence is underreported to police, and official sources of data are thought to be inadequate, researchers have been systematically working to measure and track domestic violence for a long time. The data and reports generally come from noncriminal justice agencies. Many studies use the Conflict Tactics Scale and the Revised Conflict Tactics Scale(CTS2) to gauge intimate partner violence. This index includes subscales that account for severity of violence and context (e.g., fighting in self-defense). The CTS2 has been adapted for a variety of family and dating relationships. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fields the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, and researchers may access those data. In the early 21st century, the public and researchers have expressed growing interest in violence by and against the police, and there are now several sources of data for researchers to use. These include the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted data collection program and nongovernment sources such as The Washington Post’s police shootings database. Similarly, for those interested in gun violence, government sources are limited, and many investigators turn to nongovernment sources such as the Gun Violence Archive, which has no government or advocacy affiliation. Finally, those interested specifically in mass violence will also find the National Mass Violence Resource Center. The magazine Mother Jones publishes data on mass shooting events, by year, dating back to 1982, and The Washington Post and USA Today also publish an archive of mass violence events.

Since the turn of the 21st century, advances in computer technology have revolutionized how people connect, communicate, and interact at a rapid pace. Increasingly, computer technologies and computer-mediated communications have been used by individuals to connect with one another from around the globe. The Internet’s seamless accessibility and user-friendly interface have revolutionized the sharing of information and communications. Terrorists and violent extremists, among many others, have exploited the Internet and its expanding digital landscape, evolving into transnational networks through modern information and communication technologies. Indeed, the Internet has served as a central hub for terrorist groups to connect, recruit, and mobilize as well as distribute propaganda and plan attacks within and outside domestic borders. It should come as no surprise, then, that online terrorism and violent extremism research has grown rapidly in recent years, and so too have the practitioner and policymaker responses to the threat of radicalization to extremist violence.

Scholarship in criminology has focused on individuals’ pathways to crime—how life experiences, often beginning during childhood, lead to criminality in adolescence or adulthood. General frameworks for this research include life-course, developmental, and biosocial criminology. However, because the vast majority of the general pathways research literature was developed using samples of boys and men, scholars with a feminist theoretical background argue that such research is not truly representative of girls and women’s pathways to crime. While general theories of crime have been applied broadly, gender-specific pathways to crime account for important distinctions between male and female experiences. Thus, gender (and sex), through biological differences, social norms, and expectations, shapes individual life experiences that result in distinct pathways to crime for men and women. Consequently, understanding criminality requires a full consideration of gendered experiences. Even though similar life events may occur with both men and women, individual responses and effects can vary greatly and lead to different pathways to criminal behavior. Accordingly, this article discusses pathways to crime though a gendered lens. First, men’s pathways to crime are presented, which have been traditionally represented through general criminological research. Next, women’s specific pathways to crime are discussed, developed primarily through the gendered pathways literature. Finally, future directions in pathways research are outlined.