Writing shortly after the economic turmoil that began in earnest since the
fall of 2008, it is clear to any reader what is meant when reference is made to
‘‘the’’ crisis. The financial crisis that developed out of the implosion of the
United States housing bubble that reached its peek around 2006–2007 no
doubt can be told, in its origins and consequences, in terms of a complex
economic tale. But even and especially for nonexperts, the crisis need not to
be argued to be of special significance in any more detail than to consider
the reality that, on a near worldwide scale, millions of people have lost their
jobs and/or their homes, while governments have been scrambling to
develop appropriate policies to rectify conditions which they had helped
to create.
Naturally, the crisis is primarily a matter of economics, finance, and other
such issues which, from a technical-practical viewpoint, are outside the
purview of sociology and criminology. Yet, what can be valid as well as useful
about social-science perspectives devoted to the study of crime and crime
control, as the contributions in this volume will testify, is to focus on those
dimensions, dynamics, and implications of economic crisis that belong most
intimately to the scholarship of criminology, in general, and criminological
sociology, in particular.