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Introduction into Criminology for Social Science Students all lectures
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Lecture notes of 33 pages for the course Introduction into Criminology at UU
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Lecture 1: What is criminology?As a criminologist you need to:
- Be a critical enquirer: Curiosity is very important. You need to constantly ask:
- What is a theory or author actually explaining?
- What are the things that I feel are kind of neglected?
- How are arguments put together? Is the argument valid? Can I deconstruct the
argument?
- Are there any gaps or alternative explanations?
- Who defines (and who lacks a voice in the negotiation over meaning)?
- Be reflective: be reflective towards yourself and what you’re studying:
- How do I look at things, how am I biased?
- What group(s) do I belong to and what power of definition does my group
have?
- What groups do I have prejudices against? How do I know? How open am I to
doubt?
- Be pragmatic, thorough (in choice and referencing of materials), digitally competent.
- Frank Furedi: curiosity, openness, ask, criticize, be involved and do not succumb to
academic (or other) cynicism!
What is criminology? At its widest and most commonly accepted it is taken to be the study of
crime, criminals and criminal justice.
Murphy: Criminology is 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. So in
a nutshell: the study of crime and reactions to it, within its particular context.
In its origins criminology is an applied science meaning it came about as a reaction to crime
occuring. It had the governmental goal of reducing crime or even eliminating it. In that sense
criminology is an object science meaning it studies an object but it does so from many
disciplines, so many different scholars have been involved in the study of crime. So
criminology has always been an interdisciplinary science.
Origins
- Classical criminologist (18th century): crime as a result of free will and cost-benefit
analysis
- First criminologists (19th century): Positivists; what contributing factors explain
people committing crimes? Or what makes a criminal different from a civilised
individual?
Criminology as an autonomous interdisciplinary field (20/21 century)
- Crimonography: descriptive, measuring, historical
- Aetiology: causes of crime, why it occurs.
, - Critical approaches: questioning the definition of crime. power, inequalities.
workings of criminal justice system
- Response to crime:
- Crime prevention
- Penology (different kinds of punishment
- Victimology: what does crime to victims
,What is crime?
I Legal definition
- Tappan: an intentional act or omission in violation of criminal law (statutory:
(everything that's in the law book and case law: jurisprudence), committed without
defence or justification, and sanctioned by the state as a felony or misdemeanor.
- Willem Adriaan Bonger: misdaad is 1: een ernstige antisociale handeling waarop 2:
de Staat door toevoeging van een leed (straf of maatregel) bewust reageert.
II Sociological definition
- Thorsten Sellin (1938): we need a scientific (not a legal) criminology, and a scientific
definition of crime
- Search for universalities in norms and rule transgression: what things do societies
generally believe to be ‘wrong’?
- This definition is different because it takes moral and social norms as a component:
crime became a sociological problem rather than only a legal problem.
III The social constructive definition
- Howard Becker (1963): why is some behaviour criminalised, and other not? What do
we actually mean when we say crime and what is crime?
- What is seen as crime is not pre given and we react to it, it’s the other way around.
We react to certain behavior and by doing that we define what is crime. So crime does
actually not exist without us defining it: What is seen as crime is ‘a product of the
dynamics of a given society’
- ‘Social groups create deviance by making rules whose infraction creates
deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as
outsiders.’
- ‘Crime (…) is behavior so defined (…) by the agents and activities of the
powerful
- Louk Hulsman (1986): abolitionism: If it’s true that power places a big role in what
we define as crime, then we could go as far to say that that is not fair and therefore we
should abolish the concept of crime altogether because it creates inequalities:
- ‘Categories of ‘crime’ are given by the criminal justice system rather than by
victims of society in general. This makes it necessary to abandon the notion of
‘crime’ as a tool in the conceptual framework of criminology. Crime has no
ontological reality [and…] is not the object but the product of criminal policy.’
That means that criminal policy it not a reaction to a pre-existing crime, it’s
rather the inverse. Criminal policy, our reactions to crime, determine and
constitute what crime is. So we make crime by making those rules.
, IV Human rights definition
- Schwendinger & Schwendinger (1970): All the behaviour that hurts people in
exercising their human rights. So every action that hurts people's human rights are
being perceived as a crime. Human rights as a treshold: non-respect of these rights
constitutes crime: ‘individuals who deny these rights to others are criminal’
- ‘(…) imperialism, racism, sexism and poverty can be called crimes according
to the logic of our argument.’
- Nowadays we call this: ‘social justice’
V Harm definition
- Lynch (1992); Beirne & South (1998); Hillyard & Steve Tombs (2007): These are
some of the important authors that claimed that the concept of crime is not enough to
capture the whole field of study that criminology should engage with.
- crime is a legal construct steered by power positions and is anthropocentric
(too much focussed on the human species)
- ‘Crime’ is the harms done to the environment, animals etc.
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.
Who is the criminal?
- Positivists (19th century): what differentiates the criminal from ‘civilised’ people?
- Biological positivism: the differences between criminals and non-criminals
can be found in someone’s biology.
- Psychological positivism: you can explain the difference between a criminal
and a non-criminal by the person's psychology.
- Sociological positivism: criminals are different from non-criminals because of
environmental things, for example: having alcoholics as parents.
Biases and gazes in criminology
- In criminology we tend to overly focus on a certain kind of offender (‘criminological
gaze’)
- Men rather than women; young rather than old; poor rather than rich, ethnic
minorities rather than ethnic majority, ‘ugly’ rather than pretty.. etc. etc.
- as well as a certain kind of victim (‘ideal victim’)
- Stereotypes based on gender, age, class, ethnicity, nationality, education…
- Statistics: do they reflect crime, or the priorities of the police? And: which crimes are
most easily detected? (big dark number in crimes of the powerful)
- Media
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