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Summary Conceptlist Introduction into Criminology
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Week 1. What is criminology?Crime & Criminology: definitions, biases & assumptions
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
In criminology we tend to overly focus on a certain kind of offender (criminological gaze)
Week 2. Tenets of criminological thought
Legal definition of crime
An intentional act or omission in violation of criminal law (statutory and case law),
committed without defence or justification, and sanctioned by the state as a felony or
misdemeanor
Sociological definition
Search for universalities in norms and rule transgression: what things do societies
generally believe to be ‘wrong’?
Moral/social component: crime as a sociological problem
Deviant behavior as a topic of study
Social constructivists definitions
Social groups create deviance by making rules whose infraction creates deviance and by
applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as outsiders
- Abolitionism
‘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
Human rights definition
All behaviour that goes against human rights is considered criminal according to this
definition. This definition includes, for example, not doing anything against poverty,
nowadays we call this social justice
, Harm definition
Crime is a legal construct (power) and is anthropocentric (too much focused on the
human species)
Crime is the harms done to the environment, animals etc
Classical school
Late 18th and 19th century: what was happening then?
Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham
Crime is a result of free will, decision based on circumstances
Hedonistic calculation & Utilitarianism
Positivism (individual vs sociological)
Late 19th and early 20th centuries: what was the societal context?
Focusing on the belief that criminal behavior can be understood and addressed through
scientific methods and empirical research.
People engage in offending because they are influences by sources outside of their own
control
Internal forces of biology/psychology (individual positivism) or external forces of social
conditions (sociological positivism
Marxism (political economy of crime)
This perspective focuses on the intersections between crime, power, and economic
interests, emphasizing that crime is often a reflection of broader social and economic
inequalities
Week 3. Philosophies of Punishment
Punishment: legitimacy to punish & social contract
State as the “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the
legitimate use of physical force” (Weber 1918)
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