SV Introduction into Criminology
Lecture 1 – What is Criminology?
Summary book Chapter 1
➢ Criminology and crime are not static, they are fluid and must be constantly re-thought, e.g.
new crime categories
➢ The concept of ‘harm’ has emerged within criminology as an alternative label of ‘crime’ →
damaging processes of victimization beyond narrow confines of legal understandings of crime
and the criminal justice system.
Summary book Chapter 5
➢ Counting crimes is also very complicated.
➢ Official recorded data on crime has only one part of a much bigger story on counting crime.
o Different criteria used, different categories of crime created, changing of law over
time, police competencies changed
➢ How do we count crime:
1. Official crime data
2. Information taken from victimisation survey work
3. Self-report surveys (have you committed a crime in the past 12 months?)
4. Data from non-governmental organisations and investigative journalism
➢ In order for a crime event to end up in that data, is has to have gone through the processes of
recognising, reporting and recording (3 R’s). For each point, there is a chance that the
event is lost from the eventual total (= data loss).
o Dark figure of unrecorded crime → iceberg (only see the top)
o Attrition: process whereby more and more of the total is lost over time, through the
various stages
What is criminology?
➢ Criminology: the study of crime, criminals and criminal justice.
o Wider definition: All kind of social reactions to crime
➢ Criminology: the study of crime, justice, and law and order issues, and the broader dynamics
of societies in terms of informing how those things exist and are experienced.
➢ In a nutshell: the study of crime and reactions to it, within its particular context
➢ Criminology is an applied science in its origins: governmental concerns directed the research
agenda (governmental goal of reducing crime).
➢ Criminology as an object science → it studies an object, but from different perspectives →
interdisciplinary science.
➢ Classical criminologist (18th century): crime as a results of free will and cost-benefit analysis
➢ First criminologist (19th century) are positivists: what contributing factors explain people
committing crimes? Or: what makes a ‘criminal’ different from a ‘civilized’ individual?
o Rehabilitate criminals
Criminology as an autonomous, interdisciplinary field (20/21th century)
➢ Criminography (descriptive criminology, measuring crime (statistics), historical, etc.)
➢ Aetiology (causes of crime: why it occurs)
o Critical approaches (questioning definition of crime, power inequalities, workings of
criminal justice systems, etc.)
➢ Responses to crime:
o Crime prevention
o Penology (different kinds of punishment)
➢ Victimology: study what crime does to victims
1
, What is crime?
Legal definition:
• An intentional act or omission in violation of criminal law (statutory (everything that is in a
law book/ wetten) and case law (jurisprudence/ jurisprudentie), committed without defence or
justification, and sanctioned by the state as a felony or misdemeanour.
Sociological definition:
• We need a scientific (not legal) criminology, and a scientific definition of crime. Search for
universalities in norms and rule transgression: what things to societies generally believe to be
‘wrong’?
o Moral/ social component: crime as a sociological problem
• “deviant” behaviour as a topic of study.
Social constructivist definition:
• Why is some behaviour criminalised, and other not?
• What is seen as crime is ‘a product of the dynamics of a given society’:
o Social groups create deviance by making rules whose infraction creates deviance,
and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders
o Crime is behaviour so defined by the agents and activities of the powerful
➔ Crime does not exist if we would not define and create it as crime. The behaviour is
existent, but we apply rules to this behaviour and particular people.
Social constructivist definition:
• Abolitionism: we should abolish the concept of crime, because it creates inequalities.
Criminology should take crime out. Crime has no ontological reality (it is not a thing/ no
existence of itself) and is not the object but the product of criminal policy.
Human rights definition:
• Human rights as a threshold: non-respect of these rights constitutes crime:
o Individuals who deny these (human) rights to others are criminal
o Imperialism, racism, sexism and poverty can be called crimes according to the logic
of our argument.
• Nowadays we call this: “social justice”
Harm definition:
• Crime is a legal construct steered by power positions (power!) and is anthropocentric (too
much focussed on the human species)
• We should also look at other species (environment, animals)
• “Crime” is the harms done to the environment, animals, etc.
• Use “harm” rather than “crime”.
Thus: what constitutes ‘crime’ depends on the definition used, the power struggles at play and
the time and place.
The definition of crime, is thus, situational/ contextual.
2
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