Since the mid 1980s, a mass of scholarly material has been published on sex offender treatment, particularly relating to cognitive behavioural techniques. Alongside this, there has been a gradual recognition by academics and practitioners in the field of the particular challenges faced by those providing treatment for sexual offenders. As well as having to analyse detailed accounts of sexual violence, sex offender therapists are faced with the responsibility of working with some of the most difficult offenders in the system in terms of their generally poor motivation to change and the serious consequences of their reoffending. As a result, various detrimental impacts have been associated with providing treatment to sexual offenders, including stress, burnout and vicarious traumatisation. This thesis presents the results of interviews conducted with a variety of Prison Service staff working with sex offenders on the Sex Offender Treatment Programme (SOTP), which has been hailed as the ‘largest multi-site, cognitive behavioural treatment programme for sex offenders in the world’. Participants were asked about the positive and negative effects of working with sexual offenders, the quality of training they had received, and what types of personal and organisational support were available to them. The results show that the Prison Service needs to give greater consideration when selecting candidates to deliver the SOTP, and those individuals who have been a victim of sexual abuse should be excluded from the recruitment process. In addition, it is concluded that there should be further staff training for those working on the SOTP, and that existing sources of organisational support need to be improved.

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This thesis seeks to develop our understanding of the contemporary crime communication landscape. While this landscape is considered in its constituent parts, including specific features of current British politics, the evolving media sphere and the voice of the public, this thesis argues for a conceptualization of this realm that grasps its fluid and dynamic character. Original research is conducted through case studies of the 2010 UK General Election, the Phone Hacking Scandal and the 2011 Riots. Discourse analysis is employed in order to enhance our awareness of supralinguistic behaviour and of the play of power in the construction of crime narratives. This is contrasted with influential current accounts of ‘populism’ which, it is argued here, tend to be unduly deterministic and to err towards the dystopian. The research suggests that structural shifts in the media landscape, specifically the recent ubiquity of new media coinciding with an undermining of the singular tabloid narrative, have enabled a redistribution of power in the symbolic construction of crime which can make it harder for political actors to capture the crime question for populist purposes. Furthermore, this shift has empowered the public voice and has infused political debate with a chaotic plurality of views. Nevertheless, the symbolic weight of crime issues remains prominent in this landscape and Randall Collins’ Interaction Ritual Chains (2004) is employed to add a microsociological picture of the escalation from small scale narrative to broad righteous anger. This requires an adaptation of this model to address interactions that occur outside the context of physical co-presence. Such perspectives on the plurality of mediated communication today both broaden and update our grasp of the political communication of crime and in so doing argue for a degree of optimism concerning the scope for democratic debate about criminal justice issues.

This thesis is an attempt to determine the transferability of the findings of some Western studies carried out on Residential burglary, and the applicability of the main methods used for burglary reduction, to societies with different socio-economic structure, in this case Tehran, the capital city of Iran. The thesis will look at patterns of residential burglary found in Tehran and those found by European and American research studies to outline the similarities and differences between them to decide upon the suitability of `opportunity' theories, and ultimately situational preventive measures implemented in some Western countries for the prevention or reduction of burglary in Tehran. Following the failure of social and psychological methods in reducing burglary levels, situational crime prevention has received a great attention in some Western countries during the last few decades. Situational crime prevention policies are aimed at the reduction of crime levels by reducing crime opportunities, through i. e. target-hardening techniques, changes in the management, design, and manipulation of the immediate environment in which crime occurs, which lead to an increase in the risks perceived by a wide range of offenders, also by reducing the benefits of crime. A large proportion of Western criminological studies have carried out their research relying on the assumption which suggests that crime opportunities encourage crime, and that eliminating or blocking crime opportunities will result in the reduction of a large number of residential burglaries. Opportunity theory has adopted the `rationality' and the `routine activity' models of crime to explain when, where, and how burglaries occur. It is assumed that offenders are rational in the selection of crime opportunities that are associated with higher rewards and lower risks of detection. It is also suggested that the routine activities of victims, as well as offenders, play a major role in selecting crime targets that present better opportunities for crime. The main aim of this research is to determine the suitability of situational measures and theories underlying such research to other societies such as Tehran. In order to do so, patterns of residential burglary in Tehran have been examined. An attempt has been made to identify the factors influencing patterns of burglary, and to produce a better understanding of how burglary occurs in Tehran. A comparison between the findings from Tehran and those from Western studies is expected to demonstrate whether the theoretical framework underlying Western studies is capable of explaining burglary patterns in Tehran, and that preventive policies implemented in Western countries are suited to controlling of burglary levels in Tehran. It is hoped that the findings from the current research provide a basis for appropriate crime prevention policies and for future research.

In the immediate post-Second World War period, London's criminal cultures generated popular understandings of fantasy and cinematic escapism as a modern mode of life, a pleasure-seeking activity and a form of rationality. These narratives centred on increasingly visible but enigmatic genres of urban transgression: notably the phenomenon of spivery. Mixing petty crime, gambling and the black market with proletarian dandyism, urban waywardness and celebrity posturing, the cultural iconography of spivery was also associated with the deviant lifestyles of confidence tricksters, army deserters, good-time girls and mass murderers. Drawing on cinema, popular literature, courtroom drama, autobiography and psychiatry, this thesis explores how debates about the escapist mentalities of the spiv shaped the public discussions of crime as a socio-aesthetic practice. The central aim is to explore the cultural and symbolic associations between street-wise forms of deviant illusion and the cinematic representation of fantasising criminals in 1940s London. The thesis reveals how contemporary historical actors and cultural institutions understood the imagination as a popular and contested form of knowledge about the self, social change and erotic life. The method interweaves intertextual analysis of a key cinematic subgenre of crime, 'spiv films', with a historical focus on two 'true crime' stories: the cleft chin murder (1944) and the serial killings carried out by John George Haigh (1944-45). Utilising the criminals' self-confessions, trial transcripts, autobiography and popular journalism, these cases studies show how spivery was rooted in the experience and representation of everyday metropolitan life. The interdisciplinary examination of cinematic text and historical evidence emphasises how Hollywood aesthetics and indigenous national culture co-determined the public construction of 1940s crime as an embodiment of the contradictions of post-war British modernity.