Book Review: Drugs and Crime

• DOI: 10.1177/1057567707299374
• Published date: 01 March 2007
• Date: 01 March 2007
• Author: Michael Kaune
• Subject Matter: Articles

The criminologist (as opposed to the China studies specialist) will undoubtedly want to seek out

more criminologically rounded treatments of China in the English language—for example, the

excellent collection of essays in Crime and Social Control in a Changing China (2001), edited by

Jianhong Liu et al., or the more recent treatment of China in Punishment: A Comparative Historical

Perspective (2005) by Terance Miethe and Hong Lu. Yet personally, I found Bakken’s book to be a

stimulating collection of portraits of modern and contemporary Chinese law, politics, and society.

Multidisciplinary and empirical, it highlights the continuity and change in Chinese institutional cul-

ture and China’s particular adaptation of Western ideas from the Republican period to post-Mao.

This book is an anthem to how one ideology is gradually now replacing another: how “the myth of

markets and commodities came to appear both normal and even natural despite the fact that they

were so alien to the planned economy of the past” (p. 220).

Bill Hebenton

University of Manchester, UK

Bean, P. (2004). Drugs and Crime (2nd ed.). Cullompton, Devon, UK: Willan.

DOI: 10.1177/1057567707299374

Drugs and Crime by Philip Bean, emeritus professor of criminology at Loughbrough University

in the United Kingdom, is a textbook with 10 chapters on the topic of drugs and crime. The work is

well written, impeccably edited, and comprehensive. Bean writes in a lucid style, using flawless

logic to critique current drug control policy in the United Kingdom. There is dense attention to detail

with up-to-date citation and sources on most topics. The work is best used in a graduate class as a

stand-alone text for the topic of drug policy or as a supplemental text if the professor is addressing

drug policy in nations other than the United Kingdom.

The 10 chapters of the text are, chapter 1, “Drugs and Crime: An Overview”; chapter 2, “Drugs

and Crime: Theoretical Assumptions”; chapter 3, “Sentencing Drug Offenders”; chapter 4,

“Coercive Treatment and Mandatory Drug Testing”; chapter 5, “The Drug Treatment and Testing

Order and Drug Courts”; chapter 6, “Trafficking and Laundering”; chapter 7, “Policing Drug

Markets”; chapter 8, “Informers and Corruption”; chapter 9, “Women, Drugs and Crime”; and chap-

ter 10, “Suggestions for the Way Forward.” The text includes four figures of information and 20

tables. All figures and tables, except one, refer to U.K. data. The text is 269 pages long, including

references and an index.

Philip Bean began writing on the topic of drugs and crime in the late 1960s. He is considered a

leading authority on the topic in the United Kingdom. This is evident in his breadth of knowledge

on the topic and the practical lucidity of his writings on controversies in this field. He demonstrates

a broad knowledge of the topic of crime and drugs when debating the issue of drug control policy. I

found his ability to summarize without loss of detail to be extraordinary. His dense style of writing

may require the reader to reread sentences to appreciate the nuances of logic and the abundance of

empirical detail. In the remainder of the review, I will comment on some but not all of the chapters

and sections in the text. The sections selected for comment are based on my personal discretion.

Sections that I fail to comment on may be of more interest to other readers, and they are not neces-

sarily of lesser quality that those selected for review.

The text begins with a lengthy review of data on the current status of drug use in the United Kingdom.

It would appear that drug use is increasing. Unfortunately, Bean uses 18 pages, 10 tables, and one fig-

ure to make this point. The nuances of British drug consumption, although important to review, perhaps

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