The Literature of Crime and Justice
This chapter maps out a program for studying literary works representing issues of crime which can be read in conjunction with theories and histories of criminology and criminal justice. As I argue, literature offers an intellectual training academy in which future criminal justice scholars and professionals can develop skills of interpretation in the safe because fictional space of the imagination, where the consequences of misinterpretation are much less severe than they are when actually on the job. Building off this claim, the first section of this chapter offers an example of an introduction to criminology delivered through a close reading of a classic literary representation of crime and justice: the Garden of Eden. Then the second section presents an annotated bibliography of the literature of crime and justice through time – ranging from Homer, Aeschylus, Augustine, and Dante to Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and Elmore Leonard – indicating the relevance of each source to criminology and criminal justice.