Revision Tools: Personal Learning Checklists

Personal Learning Checklists (PLCs) are a useful revision tool for both students and teachers because they allow both to identify areas of strength and weakness in an overall revision strategy: students, for example, have a list of everything they’re expected to know by way of preparation for their exams and teachers can identify any areas […]

Left Realism: Key Ideas and Criticisms

Left Realism is one of the major criminological theories at A-level  and, for this reason, it’s one that students need to know well. The following, therefore, is a basic overview of Left Realism’s key ideas: from how they conceptualise crime through to what they see as the main problem of crime and possible solutions to […]

Left Realism: The Islington Crime Surveys 1986 – 2016

One of the initial features of Left Realism, as it was developed by writers such as Young, Matthews and Lea, was the use of a very particular survey method aimed at gathering large amounts of data about a relatively small location: the local crime survey carried-out, in this instance, by Young et. al. (1986) in […]

Crime and Deviance Study Guides

The great Crime Clear-Out continues with 3 Study Guides that I probably half-inched at some point from the Queen Elizabeth High School Moodle site (which is okay because whoever put them there – along with some other crime-related bits-and-bobs that might be worth a butcher’s – seems to have got them from Greenhead College). From […]

Globalisation and Crime

For someone who explicitly rejects the notion of “postmodernity” as it’s conventionally applied in sociology (and elsewhere come to that. I try not to discriminate) I seem to have spent a great deal of my time writing about it in one form of another. This has mainly, I think, been because if it’s a widely-used […]

What Works to Reduce Crime?: A Summary of the Evidence

It’s probably safe to say that a key driver of crime policy in countries like Britain and America over the past 50 or so years has been the notion of situational crime control. The idea, in a nutshell, that there can be no “solution to the problem of crime”, as such. The best we can […]

Explaining Hate Crime

The concept of “hate crime” in English law is currently (2021) defined as: “Any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a person’s race or perceived race; religion or perceived religion; sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation; disability or perceived disability […]

PowerPoint: Does Prison Work?

Previously posted on Crime and Deviance Channel, this PowerPoint Presentation outlining Bandyopadhyay et al’s “Acquisitive Crime: Imprisonment, Detection and Social Factors” (2012) research is now available in two forms: 1. Click to advance Presentation. 2. Auto-advance Presentation. The research looked at three main questions: How are crime rates affected by the costs and benefits of […]

Sociology Transition Materials

If you’re unfamiliar with the idea, Sociology transition materials are resources designed to help students transition from either GCSE to A-level or from A1 to A2. In the normal course of events they consist of notes, readings, activities and exercises that students complete during the long months of their summer holidays when they would otherwise […]

One-Minute Marxism and Crime | An Animated Film

While the main focus of our collective energies is on the day-to-day production of psychology and sociology films for the A-level / High School market across the globe, we like, from time-to-time, to have a little play around with different ideas and formats – one of which was the “Just-A-Minute” Crime films that you can […]