Assessing the Harms of Crime: A New Framework for Criminal Policy. By GreenfieldVictoria A. PaoliLetizia(Oxford University Press, 2022, 350pp. £80.00 hbk)

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Some 20 years ago, myself and colleagues somewhat provocatively—and with varying degrees of conviction—called for a shift ‘Beyond Criminology’, so that harm might be taken more seriously, that is, specifically, harms beyond those defined as criminal by the state and which ended up as the subject matter for the eponymous discipline (Hillyard et al. 2004). To some extent that call did prompt reaction—not all favourable, of course—but certainly in the sense that work on social harm has since proliferated, albeit in and around rather than ‘beyond’ criminology. In fact, the ability of criminology to incorporate rather than be challenged by calls to take harm seriously was no better evidenced than in the insertion of ‘social harm’ and then also ‘zemiology’—the study of social harm—into the Quality Assurance Agency’s benchmark statements for criminology in 2014 and 2019, respectively (Quality Assurance Agency 2014, 2019). Here is a text that certainly takes harm seriously, albeit it seeks to place it squarely at the centre of the criminological enterprise. Thus, the starting point for the book is the failure of criminology and related disciplines to provide policymakers with tools for determining priorities in (and thus allocating resources for) crime control and prevention. Drawing on and developing their joint work over more than a decade, the aim of the authors—one an agricultural and resource economist, the other a criminologist—is to provide exactly this. Their focus on harm and its reduction is the basis for the development of a harm assessment framework, which includes ‘a method for rating and ranking harms of wide-ranging activities’—drawing upon a range of quantitative and qualitative indicators—which advances criminal and, by implication, social justice (p. 2). Drawing on their previous work, their development of the framework is an ‘iterative and ongoing process’ (p. 8)—features which are very much in evidence in the book, which reads consistently as thoughtful, reflexive and considered.