Book Review: The Dark Side of the Ivory Tower: Campus Crime as a Social Problem

• Published date: 01 March 2012
• Author: Christopher J. Schreck
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016811414048
• Date: 01 March 2012
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

professionalization, and training opportunities. Given that approximately 60%of U.S. police

departments are rural, this chapter is a must read for understanding the reality of American policing.

As the other side of the coin, Chapter 7 ‘‘Policing Urban Spaces’’ by Kim Lersch introduces

unique problems that urban policing faces. Urban space invites people with varying value systems

and lifestyles. While community policing with the problem-oriented approach has been widely

implemented across the United States, urban spatial contexts can be challenging in developing

partnership for crime-reduction initiatives.

In Chapter 8 ‘‘Policing Educational Spaces: Status, Practices, and Challenges’’ by Kenneth J.

Peak and Emmanuel P. Barthe, the historical development of policing in educational settings is

described. High school and college campus police encounter unique issues, such as jurisdiction,

police authority, and carrying fire arms. Furthermore, challenges for crime analysis and crime preven-

tion in educational settings are described.

Chapter 9 ‘‘Surveillance and Urban Public Space’’ by Gregory Howard and Elizabeth Bradshow

provides an overview of contemporary surveillance practices from a sociological viewpoint. Having

conceptualized surveillance as the means to control access to certain spaces and manage behaviors

within the spaces, implications for policing are described through case studies of the cities of

Kalamazoo, Michigan, and Chicago.

Chapter 10 ‘‘Spatial Crime Prevention: Traditional and Nontraditional Perspectives’’ by Ronald

G. Burns summarizes crime prevention concepts in spatial terms. According to Burns, nontraditional

spatial crime prevention considers cultural spaces, crime mapping, cyberspace, and spatiotemporal

factors. Through the depictions of nontraditional approaches, Burns describes future challenges

that current law enforcement faces in spatial crime prevention.

As vast majority of crimes occur at certain places, controlling space is crucial in policing.

While community policing with the problem-oriented approach based on defensible space theory

and broken windows theory appear to be promising at the philosophical level, crime and other

related social problems are space and context specific. Solutions to these problems require careful

considerations of the role of space in creating these problems. Spatial Policing will be an invaluable

asset to students and practitioners in critically assessing the root causes of crime in spatial terms.

J. J. Sloan lll and B. S. Fisher

The Dark Side of the Ivory Tower: Campus Crime as a Social Problem. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2011.

xiii, 211 pp. $80. ISBN 978-0-521-19517-1

Reviewed by: Christopher J. Schreck, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0734016811414048

Only someone with a sick sense of humor would have used the term ‘‘Ivory Tower,’’ at least in

its modern meaning, to describe the university during the first several hundred years of its exis-

tence. The criminologist Thomas Bernard, for instance, once offered this charming account of

undergraduate life from medieval times: ‘‘The students of Paris attacked and slew passersby, car-

ried off the women, ravished the virgins, committed robberies and broke into houses.’’ This dis-

order led to the creation of ‘‘colleges.’’ In fact, the college originally was an organizational unit

for controlling the conduct of students. This idea was later transplanted to the United States,

where universities strictly regulated every aspect of students’ lives. So, by design, universities

were to be quiet places. The ‘‘Ivory Tower,’’ first applied to a university context in the 1700s,

thus eventually came to mean a place of the mind that was disconnected from the real world and

its grubby concerns. But the Tower as such was a relatively recent invention and now—

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