This popular textbook provides the reader with an indispensable guide to criminological theory. It sympathetically outlines the principal theories of crime and rule-breaking, placing them in their European and North American contexts, confronting major criticisms that have been voiced against them, and constructing defences where appropriate. The book has been thoroughly revised and brought up to date to include new issues of crime, deviance and theory in the early twenty-first century, and includes summaries of cultural criminology and new assessments of the contribution made by Gottfredson and Hirschi to control theory.