Richard Rosenfeld is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri-St Louis, USA. He has written widely on the social sources of violent crime. Professor Rosenfeld is a member of the US National Academy of Science's Committee on Law and Justice and a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology.

• Contents: Introduction. Theoretical Considerations: 'Institutionalizing' criminological theory, Steven F. Messner and Richard Rosenfeld; Anomie, social change and crime: a theoretical examination of institutional-anomie theory, Jon Gunnar Bernburg; Crime punishment and the American dream: toward a Marxist integration, Barbara Sims; Reflections on crime and criminology at the millennium, Elliott Currie; Social support as an organizing concept for criminology, Francis T. Cullen. Cross-National Tests of Institutional-Anomie Theory: Political restraint of the market and levels of criminal homicide: a cross-national application of institutional-anomie theory, Steven F. Messner and Richard Rosenfeld; Inequality, welfare state and homicide: further support for the institutional-anomie theory, Jukka Savolainen; Social support, inequality and homicide: a cross-national test of an integrated theoretical model, Travis C. Pratt and Timothy W. Godsey; Cross-national differences in managers' willingness to justify ethically suspect behaviors: a test of institutional-anomie theory, John B. Cullen, K Praveen Parboteeah and Martin Hoegl. Based Tests of Institutional-Anomie Theory: Assessing Messner and Rosenfeld's institutional-anomie theory: a partial test, Mitchell B. Chamlin and John K. Cochran); On testing institutional-anomie theory with varying specifications, Alex Piquero and Nicole Leeper Piquero; Social institutions and violence: a sub-national test of institutional-anomie theory, Michael O. Maume and Matthew R. Lee; Decommodification and homicide rates in the 20th-century United States, Candice Batton and Gary Jensen; Social altruism and crime, Mitchell B. Chamlin and John K Cochran. Crime and Institutional Dynamics at the Local Level: Local politics and violent crime in US cities, Thomas D. Stucky; Disadvantage and neighborhood violent crime: do local institutions matter?, Ruth D. Peterson, Lauren J. Krivo and Mark A. Harris; The role of public social control in urban neighborhoods: a multi-level analysis of victimization risk, Maria B. Velez; Industrial shift, polarized labor markets and urban violence: modeling the dynamics between the economic transformation and disaggregated homicide, Karen Parker. Implications for Punishment: The political economy of imprisonment in affluent Western democracies, 1960-1990, John R. Sutton ; Incarceration, social capital and crime: implications for social disorganization theory, Dina Rose and Todd Clear; Index.

'This is an extremely valuable collection for anyone interested in exploring in some depth the particular institutional strand within 'sociological criminology' and in gaining an insight into some of the fairly recent thinking and research among a sector of leading US criminologists.' The British Society of Criminology