Paul Rock's intellectual history over the last fifty years has run parallel to and in conversation with the evolution of the discipline of sociological criminology. His classic journal articles brought together here reflect two of his preoccupations, theoretical and empirical, and form part of what has been, in effect, a running series of comparative ethnographies of government decision-making about the role of the victim in and around the criminal justice system.

Paul Rock is Professor of Social Institutions in the Department of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Contents: Introduction; Published writings; Observations on debt collection; Some problems of interpretative historiography; Law, order and power in late 17th and early 18th century England; Governments, victims and policies in 2 countries; The present state of criminology in Britain; Witnesses and space in a Crown court; Introduction: the emergence of criminological theory; The social organization of a Home Office initiative; The opening stages of criminal justice policy making; Sociology and the stereotype of the police; Murderers, victims and 'survivors': the social construction of deviance; Victims, prosecutors and the state in 19th century England and Wales; Chronocentrism and British criminology; Aspects of the social construction of victims in Australia; Urban homelessness, crime and victimisation in England (with Tim Newburn); Treatment of victims in England and Wales; Name Index.