This is an introductory study of the board field of criminology which, broadly conceived is the study of crime and the social and institutional reactions to it. Topics include: the definition of crime both in a theoretical and a practical sense; criminal statistics and their alternatives, the historical legacies of the classical and positivists schools; psychology and the idea of the psychopath; labelling and moral panics; the urban context and the idea of special justice; crime and the mass media including representations of crime/criminals in film; the attractions and emotions of crime; punishment, prisons and the penal crisis; going beyond the nation state and conceiving of the state as criminal, genocide.