INTRODUCTION TO CRIMINOLOGY AND

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INTRODUCTION TO CRIMINOLOGY AND

PSYCHOLOGY OF CRIMES

College year 2023/2024 What is Criminology?Criminology (from Latin crimen, “accusation”, and Greek-logia) is the scientific study of the nature, extent, causes and control of criminal behavior in both the individual and in society. The term “criminology” was coined in 1885 by Italian law professor Raffaele Garofalo as criminologia.Around the same time, French anthropologist Paul Topinard used the analogous French term criminologie (Wikipedia).Criminology is the body of knowledge regarding crime as a social phenomenon. It includes within its scope the process of making laws, of breaking laws, and of reacting toward the breaking of laws… The objective of criminology is the development of a body of general and verified principles and of other types of knowledge regarding this process of law, crime, and treatment or prevention (Sutherland and Cressey as cited by Siegel/ Freda Adler, Gerhard O. W. Mueller and Williams

• Laufer, 1995).

In its broadest meaning, criminology is the body of knowledge regarding crimes, criminals and the effort of society to prevent and repress them. This means that criminology is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry- that is, it draws knowledge from other disciplines such as biology, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, law, medicine, statistics, economics, and political science in order to provide an integrated approach in the study of crimes and criminal behaviors.In a narrower sense, criminology is the scientific study of crimes and criminal behavior. In a key sense, this is the central aspect of the definition of criminology. It specifies the very essence of this course. This means that criminology is primarily concerned with knowing and understanding the cause of crime and criminal behavior. It seeks to comprehend the reasons behind the commission of crime. Furthermore criminology is a science in itself. It applies scientific methods of inquiry to the study of crimes and criminal behavior. Therefore, criminology is not common sense nor guesswork, but rather, the scientific study of crime.The knowledge obtain through criminological research is based on empirical evidence.

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Other definitions of criminology include:

Criminology is the science which studies crime, forms of criminal behavior, the causes of crime, the definition of criminality, and the societal reaction to criminal activity. Related areas of inquiry may include juvenile delinquency, victimology (the study of crime victims), theories of prevention, policing and corrections (Sousa, 2008).Criminology is a social science dealing with the nature, the extent and causes of crimes, the characteristics of criminals and their organizations, the problems of apprehending and convicting law violators, and the management of jail facilities and correctional institutions. It is a scientific study of the non-legal aspects of crime, including juvenile delinquency. In its wider sense, it embraces penology, it is primarily the study of the causation, correction, and prevention of crimes, seen from the viewpoints of such diverse disciplines (Wikipedia).Criminology, on the other hand, is closer to psychology than it is to criminal justice, because it studies the minds and behaviors of criminals as opposed to their criminal actions (Sousa, 2008).Principal Divisions of Criminology The study of criminology has three principal divisions (Tradio,

1999):

1.Criminal Etiology – an attempt at scientific analysis of the causes of crimes; 2.Sociology of Law – an attempt at scientific analysis of the conditions under which penal/criminal laws develop as a process of formal social control; and 3.Penology – concerned with the control and prevention of crime and the treatment of youthful offenders.Three Principal Divisions according to Edwin Sutherland 1.The sociology of law

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