14 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Why the old examples?, December 1, 2002
By A Customer
This comes from William Doerner & Steve Lab's "Victimology" 3rd edition, published this year [2002]
from the third chapter, 'The Costs of Being a Victim.' Read it critically, because the casual reader is being
set up to accept history as contemporary fact. Look at the tense Doerner writes in, even though his
example is now thirty years old"
The Second Insult: System Participation
A victim's problems have only just begun if the case is processed through the criminal justice system. The
system extracts further costs as soon as people enter into the halls of justice. In fact, the plight of victims
and witnesses has led at least one prosecutor to chastise the system for victimizing its own patrons. Ash
(1972:390) describes typical system encounters in the following terms:
[T]he witness will several times be ordered to appear at some designated place, usually a courtroom
.... Several times he will be made to wait tedious, unconscionable long intervals of time in dingy
courthouse corridors or in other grim surroundings. Several times he will suffer the discomfort of
being ignored by busy officials and the bewilderment and painful anxiety of not knowing what is
going on around him or what is going to happen to him. On most of these occasions he will never be
asked to testify or to give anyone any information, often because of a last-minute adjournment
granted in a huddled conference at the judge's bench. He will miss many hours from work (or
school) and consequently will lose many hours of wages. In most jurisdictions he will receive at best
only token payment in the form of ridiculously low witness fees for his time and trouble.
Doerner & Lab use present tenses to describe something that happen thirty years ago, as if it happens
now. Karmen pulls the same stunt in his "Crime Victims" 4th edition (2001) by presenting a long article in
the present tense which comes from the 1982 President's Task Force Report, twenty years ago. My
problem is that these are respectable names in the victimology market, and they're trying to pull a fast one
by manipulating the reader's emotions. Of course what happened thirty years ago wasn't right, but we're
led in our outrage to presume this still happens. Why try to present past injustices as present problems?
Do the writers not have any more recent examples?
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good Text, October 1, 2010
This book is well written and informative on the topic of Victimology. One of the authors of the text, Doerner, uses this text to teach his course on Victimology, and it is very useful to have the author there to clear up any confusion. The book is generally clear on the concepts, and helps students to understand the plight of the victim through theories and through specific type of victimizations.
Interesting, easy read, and informative.
Definitely recommended.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
Lots of good information. Very dry content, cumbersome word choices, September 17, 2011
Rather dry, over-use of large cumbersome words in some areas. Grammar error on page 51, second paragraph. I'm glad it was cheap.
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