CRIMINOLOGY QUESTIONS

Criminology Questions

Can the 'state' ever be guilty?

To distinguish and differentiate between the last re-conceptualization and re-framing the study of crime

Criminology is the body of knowledge regarding crime as a social phenomenon. In an early analysis, Edwin Sutherland (1947) observed that criminology examines the processes of making laws, breaking laws, and reacting to the breaking of laws.

These processes are three aspects of a somewhat unified sequence of interactions. Certain acts which are regarded as undesirable are defined by the political society as crimes. In spite of this definition, some people persist in the behavior and thus commit crimes; the political society reacts by punishment or other treatment or by prevention. This sequence of interactions is the object-matter of criminology (Fagan, 1999, , 88).

Accordingly, criminology can be divided into three branches: the study of law making, the study of law breaking, and the study of reactions to law breaking. Because the subjects of law making and reactions to law breaking are considered elsewhere in this Handbook, we will focus on the second branch, law breaking.

With respect to crime, sociologists have pursued several lines of investigation. They have sought to determine the patterns of crime—the manner in which criminal behavior is distributed along dimensions of time and space as well as social structure. They have endeavored to explain crime, determining the conditions that not only differentiate criminals from noncriminals but also account for the occurrence of crime. And they have explored the manner in which crime can be prevented. We will discuss these lines of inquiry in turn. Before we take up the distribution of crime, though, we need to consider its measurement (Fellner, 1988, 23).

Patterns of Crime as studied in Criminology

Criminologists endeavor to document patterns of crime in order to understand the nature and extent of crime. While the public regards many crimes as random acts, criminological inquiry shows that crime is not randomly distributed across individuals or groups. Criminological study on the pat terns of crime is that crime tends to be an “intrastate” activity. For large percentage terns of crime focuses on the connection of 0 lawless individual demeanors to proportions of time and space and proportions of communal structure (Fagan, 1998, 44).

One significant insight in documenting convention of crime, the statuses that recount lawbreakers furthermore recount victims. Criminology has paid close vigilance to a kind of framework and functional proportions that underlie the rudimentary patterns of crime. These encompass the temporal and spatial circulation of crime as well as the age, sex, rush, and communal class of the participants (Fellner, 1988, 66).

Age

Crime is a young person's activity. Indeed, investigators have discerned that age is the best predictor of lawless individual behavior. The connection between age and crime is curvilinear. Criminal undertaking rises with age into adolescence, peaks in late adolescence or early adulthood, and then turns down equitably rapidly with age and extends to down turn more gradually to death. This convention usually retains despite of sex, rush, and class, as well as over time span and ...