Contesting Crime Science: Our Misplaced Faith In Crime Prevention Technology By Ronald Kramer and James C. Oleson (University of California Press, 2022, 275 pp. £24.00 pbk)

Worst. Book. Ever. This book misrepresents from start to finish. It makes no effort to research crime science. There are no references to the journal Crime Science, now in its second decade, to the 22 books in the Crime Science series, to the Routledge Handbook of Crime Science (Wortley et al. 2019), or precursors such as the Crime Prevention Studies series. There are almost no references to what I would consider the core crime science literature. It is difficult to contest crime science when the subject is omitted.

Perhaps the book uses a definition of crime science different from mine? It does not, as on page 3, crime science is outlined using Ronald Clarke’s comparison of criminology and crime science. Clarke is a crime science leader, and his definition is consistent with mine: crime science is research to reduce crime and its harms, using the scientific method and including all appropriate hard and soft science disciplines. The mechanisms by which crime is prevented can be traced via the framework of situational crime prevention (SCP). In practice, this book uses the term crime science inconsistently, and seems to apply the term to anything the authors do not like.