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Crime has become a major area of public and political debate, and is often seen as a sign of underlying problems in society related to inequality, social deprivation and social class, age, gender and race. As commonly understood, crime includes many different kinds of activities such as theft, robbery, corruption, assault, fraud, rape and murder. So the simplest way of defining it is to see it as "an act or omission prohibited and punished by law." (Collins English Dictionary 1997:203) To explain crime, sociologists looked at the strains in the social structure, at the development of deviant or abnormal subcultures and at the process of social change and urban growth. Some of these theories will be discussed. Much Sociological work was informed by a Functionalist approach that saw harmony and conformity as the norm for a healthy society (Fulcher and Scott 1999). It was seen as a physical organism...

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