First published in 1979, Inequality, Crime, and Public Policy integrates and interprets the vast corpus of existing research on social class, slums, and crime, and presents its own findings on these matters. It explores two major questions. First, do policies designed to redistribute wealth and power within capitalist societies have effects upon crime? Second, do policies created to overcome the residential segregation of social classes have effects on crime?

Preface; Acknowledgements; Part I 1. Defining the problem 2. The class-crime relationship 3. Theories of lower-class criminality Part II 4. The class-mix hypothesis 5. Testing the class-mix hypothesis on data in the literature 6. Testing the class-mix hypothesis on self-report data 7. Testing the class-mix hypothesis on official delinquency data 8. Testing the class-mix hypothesis on inter-city comparisons 9. Class-mix: conclusions and policies Part III 10. Rethinking the distribution of crime among classes 11. Alternative levels of analysis for determining whether inequality contributes to crime 12. Inequality: conclusions and policies; Postscript: The socialist critique of the reformist criminology in the book; Appendix: Class-mix policies; Notes; Select bibliography; Name Index; Subject Index