criminology, scientific study of the nonlegal aspects of crime and delinquency, including its causes, correction, and prevention, from the viewpoints of such diverse disciplines as anthropology, biology, psychology and psychiatry, economics, sociology, and statistics.

Viewed from a legal perspective, the term crime refers to individual criminal actions (e.g., a burglary) and the societal response to those actions (e.g., a sentence of three years in prison). By comparison, the field of criminology incorporates and examines broader knowledge about crime and criminals. For example, criminologists have attempted to understand why some people are more or less likely to engage in criminal or delinquent behaviour. Criminologists have also examined and attempted to explain differences in crime rates and the criminal code between societies and changes in rates and laws over time.

Many criminologists consider themselves to be neutral public policy experts, gathering facts for various governmental officials responsible for drawing policy conclusions. However, some criminologists—like their counterparts in such fields as the atomic and nuclear sciences—maintain that scientists must shoulder responsibility for the moral and political consequences of their research. Thus, some criminologists have actively campaigned against capital punishment and have advocated in favour of various legal reforms. Criminologists who oppose this activist role contend that the findings of criminological research must be weighed along with political, social, religious, and moral arguments, a task best left to political bodies. Not denying the right of criminologists to express their opinions as ordinary citizens and voters, this view nonetheless maintains that a government by popular will is less dangerous than a government by experts.

In the last decades of the 20th century, criminology grew to encompass a number of specialized study areas. One of these was criminalistics, or scientific crime detection, which involves such measures as photography, toxicology, fingerprint study, and DNA evidence (see also DNA fingerprinting). It had previously been excluded from criminology because of its focus on particular criminal actions rather than on the broader knowledge about crime and criminals. Criminology further expanded its reach by devoting significant attention to victimology, or the study of the victims of crime, the relationships between victims and criminals, and the role of victims in the criminal events themselves. Criminal justice has also emerged as a separate but closely related academic field, focusing on the structure and functioning of criminal justice agencies—including the police, courts, corrections, and juvenile agencies—rather than on explanations of crime. (See juvenile justice.)

The relationship of criminology to various other disciplines has resulted in considerable diversity in its academic placement within universities. Universities in Europe have tended to treat criminology as part of legal education, even in circumstances where its principal teachers were not lawyers. In the United Kingdom, for example, the Institute of Criminology is part of the law faculty of the University of Cambridge; in other schools criminological research and teaching have usually been divided between departments of sociology or social administration, law faculties, and institutes of psychiatry. In South America the anthropological and medical elements predominate, and in the United States, though there has been a trend toward housing criminology and criminal justice in separate multidisciplinary departments, criminology has most often been situated in departments of sociology.

Historical development

Criminology developed in the late 18th century, when various movements, imbued with humanitarianism, questioned the cruelty, arbitrariness, and inefficiency of the criminal justice and prison systems. During this period reformers such as Cesare Beccaria in Italy and Sir Samuel Romilly, John Howard, and Jeremy Bentham in England, all representing the so-called classical school of criminology, sought penological and legal reform rather than criminological knowledge. Their principal aims were to mitigate legal penalties, to compel judges to observe the principle of nulla poena sine lege (Latin: “due process of law”), to reduce the application of capital punishment, and to humanize penal institutions. They were moderately successful, but, in their desire to make criminal justice more “just,” they tried to construct rather abstract and artificial equations between crimes and penalties, ignoring the personal characteristics and needs of the individual criminal defendant. Moreover, the object of punishment was primarily retribution and secondarily deterrence, with reformation lagging far behind.

In the early 19th century the first annual national crime statistics were published in France. Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874), a Belgian mathematician, statistician, and sociologist who was among the first to analyze these statistics, found considerable regularity in them (e.g., in the number of people accused of crimes each year, the number convicted, the ratio of men to women, and the distribution of offenders by age). From these patterns he concluded that “there must be an order to those things which…are reproduced with astonishing constancy, and always in the same way.” Later, Quetelet argued that criminal behaviour was the result of society’s structure, maintaining that society “prepares the crime, and the guilty are only the instruments by which it is executed.”

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Whereas Quetelet focused on the characteristics of societies and attempted to explain their resulting crime rates, the Italian medical doctor Cesare Lombroso (1836–1909) studied individual criminals in order to determine why they committed crimes. Some of his investigations led him to conclude that people with certain cranial, skeletal, and neurological malformations were “born criminal” because they were biological throwbacks to an earlier evolutionary stage. Highly controversial at the time he presented it, his theory was ultimately rejected by social scientists. Lombroso also contended that there were multiple causes of crime and that most offenders were not born criminal but instead were shaped by their environment. The research of both Quetelet and Lombroso emphasized the search for the causes of crime—a focus that criminology has retained.