Week One - What is Criminology, Criminal Justice and Crime? Flashcards
What is the definition of Criminology according to Rock and Holdaway, 1997?
“A rendez-vous discipline”
What is the definition of Criminology according to Sutherland and Cressy, 1960?
“Criminology is the body of knowledge regarding crime as a social phenomenon. It includes within its scope the process of making laws, of breaking laws, and of reacting toward the breaking of laws”
What is the definition of Criminology?
Criminology is the scientific study of lawmaking, lawbreaking and the response to lawbreaking.
It is also the study of crime trends, the nature of crime and the theories of crime.
Criminology aims to understand crime construction, looks at the explanations for why people commit crime and also looks at the societal responses to crime
What is the objective of Criminology according to Sutherland, 1937?
“The objective of criminology is the development of a body of general and verified principles and of other types of knowledge regarding the process of law, crime, and treatment or prevention”
What is the definition of the subject of Criminal Justice?
The study of Criminal Justice is closely related to the study of Criminology and involves studying the agencies related to the control of crime
How do different people approach the discipline of Criminology according to Crawford in Rock, 2005?
“Not everyone comes to the discipline with the same background rooted in traditional social/criminological texts.. [Some] have their backgrounds in philosophy, law, policy studies, politics etc..”
David Garland argues that modern criminology is the product of two initially separate streams of work: what are these? and what happened during the twentieth century?
The ‘governmental project’ - empirical studies of the administration of justice; the working of prisons, police and the measurement of crime
The ‘Lombrosian project’ - studies which sought to examine the characteristics of ‘criminals’ and ‘non criminals’ with a view to being able to distinguish the groups, thereby developing an understanding of the causes of crime
During the twentieth century, he suggests, these gradually merged and changed to form the basis for what we recognise these days as criminology
Who first used the term Criminology?
The term criminology seems first to have been used by Paul Topinard, a Frenchman studying the body types of criminals
Who is credited with the invention of the term Criminology?
The invention of the term Criminology is generally credited to an Italian academic lawyer, Raffaele Garofalo
What is the definition of Crime within the Criminal Law?
Within the criminal law, a crime is conduct (or an act of omission which, when it results in certain consequences, may lead to prosecution and punishment in a criminal court
What is the definition of Crime according to Tappan, 1947?
“Crime is an intentional act in violation of the criminal law…committed without defence or excuse, and penalised by the state as a felony or misdemeanour. In studying the offender there can be no presumption that…persons are criminals unless they also be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of a particular offence”
What is the definition of Crime according to Sutherland, 1949?
“The essential characteristic of crime is that it is behaviour which is prohibited by the state as an injury to the state and against with the state may react, at least as a last resort, by punishment. The two abstract criteria generally regarded by legal scholars as necessary elements in a definition of crime are legal description of an act as socially harmful and legal provision of a penalty for the act”
What does Schur, 1969 say about Crime?
“Once we recognise that crime is defined by the criminal law and is therefore variable in content, we see quite clearly that no explanation of crime that limits itself to the motivation and behaviour of individuals can ever be a complete one”
