Where's the Harm?: My Life of Crime: An Alternative Introduction to Criminology

Where's the Harm? is a Criminology anti-textbook that questions the real sources of a crime--or, more precisely, the real sources of harm. The criminal justice systems that we see in many developed countries are the legacy of centuries of precedent, privilege and prejudice. The result is a corpulent system costing billions of dollars each year from which, for certain crimes, more than 95 percent of those accused can bank on walking free. What might we do with a clean slate of thought? What if we rejected the idea of crime and looked instead at the many sources of harm? What if the criminal justice system became a societal justice system where we all understood the probable outcomes and our responsibility for them? This book offers real-world situations, all based on real events in the author's life, that step away from outdated notions of punishment and challenge the reader to consider more constructive outcomes. A valuable addition to EnvelopeBooks' "Contemporary Studies" list.

Lene Hansen is a criminologist specializing in financial crime. Over two decades, she has worked for exchanges, regulators and litigators in over 20 countries. Initially dedicating herself to the human rights of sex workers, she was thrown into the world of corporate crime by an encounter with the victim of a supposedly victimless crime committed by Robert Maxwell. Her subsequent work on this area led to the offer of a postgraduate place at the University of Cambridge. Since then she has worked for positive change on projects as diverse as the Financial Secretary of Hong Kong's Peregrine Investigation, the development of derivatives risk systems with the Options Clearing Corp. of Chicago, environmental degradation across Asia, anti-money laundering in Dubai and the fallout of the Royal Bank of Scotland's takeover of ABN AMRO.