This is a path-breaking work in the critical study of crime and criminology. In this book Livy Visano begins with an overview of the standard perspectives on crime and delinquency. In the clear style that Dr Visano's readers and students appreciate, he shows how we have come to understand crime in the conventional terms of rules and rule-breaking. But who makes the rules? Where do our ideas about crime come from? During his more than two decades of teaching and research in the fields of crime and delinquency, Dr. Visano has come to understand how power influences culture and culture produces ideologies about crime. He asks the reader to step back from the conventional view in order to see the underlying structures of political economy that have created them. Readers of this outstanding book are challenged on almost every page to rethink their views on crime. They finish the work with ideas much modified from those with which they started.