What is the scientific study of the nature extent cause and control of criminal behavior?

Introduction

Criminology is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary field that encompasses the study of crime and the criminal justice system. Criminological research focuses on issues related to the causes and consequences of crime, delinquency, and victimization, as well as the operation of the criminal justice system, with an emphasis on police, courts, and corrections. Because of the wide range of topics studied within criminology, researchers have required a variety of different methods to address various topics. At the outset, it is important to establish that there is no single, best method for studying crime and the criminal justice system in all its various dimensions. Rather, as the discussion herein explains, the type of method used should be the one best suited to answer the research question.

The primary focus of this article is to illustrate examples of methods used to study crime and the criminal justice system. The article is organized so that the methods used to measure crime, delinquency, victimization, and the operation of the criminal justice system are discussed first. Since the assessment of a particular program or policy is often contingent on the measurement of criminal behavior or some dimension to the operation of the criminal justice system, the discussion of the methods used to assess the impact of programs, policies, and legal changes builds on the description of the methods used to measure crime and criminal justice activity. Finally, the discussion turns to more qualitative and mixed methods of studying crime and criminal justice.

Abstract

Criminology has been a recognized field of scholarly inquiry for more than a century. Even so, our understanding of crime and its causes could be enhanced by consideration of the more distal causes of criminal behavior, an analysis that remains largely unrealized to date. One approach that has been almost completely ignored is the evolutionary approach to criminology and the understanding of criminal behavior. In this chapter, we argue for greater inclusion of evolutionary theory in the interdisciplinary approach that has come to characterize criminology. In recognizing that mainstream criminology has largely neglected evolutionary explanations for criminal behavior, we consider several possible reasons for this neglect, and suggest ways for integrating evolutionary approaches within criminology. In the remainder of the book, we elaborate on and illustrate how this can be accomplished.

2.1 Definitions

Criminology is the scientific study of crime and criminals and their motivations for criminal behavior. Psychopathology is the study of personality factors that are somewhat out of regular conscious awareness and that lead to behavior outside the norm in a particular social group. It studies abnormal emotional or personality phenomena that underline symptoms or behavior. Psychopathology provides criminology with methods to analyze elements of a criminal act within the personality structure and aims to find out the motivations for the crime. The interest is centered on the individual, or criminal, as somebody who is different from the rest because of personal or social deficiencies that have led him or her to commit a criminal act. Act and actor are the focus of study and intervention. In this type of criminology of difference the crime is a fact, and the criminal is singled out as an object of study.

From a wider perspective, any criminological study would ideally include the context in which the criminal behavior has taken place. This interpretation involves the criminal as wrongdoer, sometimes even as victim, the identified victim, the determinant elements of the social circumstances in which the crime has been committed, and the deciding role of the law. In this criminology of process, the crime is the result of a conflict and the criminal is the subject, or actor, caught in a web of social circumstances and legal definitions that are required to identify the act as criminal. No act could be defined as a crime without the social and legal identification that places the actor within a conflict with the group that, eventually, qualifies the act as infraction deserving of sanctions (Debuyst 1997).

Introduction

In criminology, experiments involving programs, policies, or practices are an important research design because, when implemented with full integrity, they provide the most convincing evidence about the impact of an intervention. Compared to other research designs, experiments provide more confidence that all possible alternative explanations for any observed findings—except the impact of the intervention—have been ruled out. Nonetheless, the application of experimental methods in crime and justice has met with significant controversy, and experimental designs are much less commonly used in evaluation research in criminology than are nonexperimental designs.

Criminology

Criminology has also benefitted from the application of OFT in terms of understanding the behaviour of criminals and the targeting of associated policing activities. The work of Pires and Clarke (2011) provides an elegant example of forensic foraging theory. Using the properties of illegally captured and sold Bolivian parrots, such as their ease of capture and distance from markets, Pires and Clarke draw inferences about the attributes of the illegal foragers (poachers!) Similarly, Johnson and Bowers (2004) show how ideas from OFT can be used to identify ‘hot-spots’ of criminal activity, which can, in turn, be used to allocate the resources of the police.

Introduction

Criminology is the scientific study of crime and delinquency as social phenomena. This relatively young field of study has three principal divisions: (1) the sociology of law, which examines how laws are made and enforced; (2) criminal etiology, which studies the causes of crime; and (3) penology, which addresses society's response to crime and includes the study of the criminal justice system. Criminologists are social scientists who utilize the research methods of modern science to develop a body of general, verifiable principles regarding law, deviance, and crime. Criminological analysis looks upon crime and deviance not as isolated events but as highly complex forms of social behavior. To fully understand the meaning of deviance and crime, the discipline goes beyond the legal definitions of crime and examines the total social context within which deviance and lawlessness arise. In the process of studying the causes of crime, a vast body of research has identified age, gender, ethnicity, social class, family status, and community environments as major social correlates of crime.

This article explores in depth the relationship between age and crime and summarizes current information on this subject. The second section examines in some detail the age–crime curve as it emerges from national crime statistics collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The third section discusses key statistical properties of the age–crime curve. The fourth section probes the significance of the age–crime curve and reviews the ongoing debate in criminology on the true relation between age and crime. The fifth section explores age as a critical social correlate of crime, along with other key variables. The sixth section considers age as a critical variable in the formation and termination of criminal careers. It also explores current criminal justice system responses to chronic offenders and questions the efficacy of these responses in terms of their potential for crime control and crime reduction. The seventh section investigates the effects of society's age structure on America's crime rate and tracks the expansion of the nation's juvenile population into the twenty-first century. The article concludes by assessing the implications of demographic changes on crime control and criminal justice policies.

5.9 Conclusion

The role of criminology in food fraud prevention is to help understand the root cause, which is the motivation of the human adversary, and then to provide a methodologically sound approach to crime prevention. When considering the data-collection needs, the followings are essential:

Address the entire scope of the crime: address all types of food fraud, not just adulterant substances.

Assess the problem with a focus on vulnerabilities: conduct an FFVA for all types of fraud and start with a very high-level and simple assessment before confirming there is a compliance or management decision-making–related need for more detail.

Review all research disciplines that help provide insight or guidance on the countermeasures: consider other enterprise-wide financial or securities assessments that are a nonfood compliance or certification requirement.

Follow a structured approach to plan-do-check-act: This includes the SARA methodology and to conduct a first FFVA and create a food fraud prevention strategy.

Consider future needs that will be specified by the needs of the resource-allocation decision-makers.

Food fraud prevention can be more readily addressed once the definition and scope are clearly defined. Also, it is most efficient to apply a wide range of academic disciplines that have been adopted and adapted to the overall focus of preventing the act. Criminology is the key discipline to help understand the root cause of the problem and to evaluate which countermeasures and control system will most efficiently and effectively achieve the maximum prevention impact. The goal is not to catch food fraud but to prevent it from occurring in the first place.

2 Information Bases

The geography of crime shares with criminology the problematic nature of the available data. Official crime statistics are suspect because the police record a relatively small minority of offences that actually occur and apprehend an even smaller number of criminals. Approximately 80 percent of offences that occur never enter police records. This ‘dark area’ varies by type of offence. It is very high for offences such as shoplifting or vandalism and low for car theft or homicide and arises from the unwillingness of the public, as victims or observers, to report crime to the police. Reasons for under-reporting range from embarrassment to fear of reprisal to apathy. Police themselves actually observe few criminal events and therefore rely on the public, broadly defined, to notify them when offences occur. Even the remaining 20 percent is further diminished by offences not proceeded with. This under-recording of crime may mean that official data contains biases and deficiencies. Does it over-record offences by disadvantaged youths? Does it under-record white-collar crime? Official crime statistics may reveal more about those who define criminality and administer the criminal justice system than about the actual incidence and seriousness of crime.

The official ‘antidote’ to these concerns about criminal statistics has been the introduction of national crime surveys. Dating in the main from the 1980s, these build upon an older ad hoc tradition of self-report studies and take the form of sample surveys of victimization experience and related attitudes towards crime, justice, law, and order. National crime surveys have confirmed under-recording and have qualified statements on rising crime rates, which may reflect differential recording practice rather than actual changes in crime. They have also augmented our knowledge of topics such as fear of crime. Whereas national crime surveys have not remedied the deficiencies of official criminal statistics, they have allowed their interpretation in more refined and constructive ways. For geographers, official statistics and national crime surveys are useful for studies of national and regional variations, but many geographies of crime focus on neighborhood variations and ‘crime areas’ within cities.

List of abbreviations

ACT

Australian Capital Territory

Australian Institute of Criminology

Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders

Cannabichromene

Cannabidiol

Cannabigerol

Cannabinol

Cannabis Expiation Notice

Cannabinoid replacement therapy

Gamma-hydroxybutyric acid

Illicit Drug Reporting System

Lysergic acid diethylamide

3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine

Multiple sclerosis

National Campaign against Drug Abuse

National Cannabis Policy

National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre

National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre

National Drugs Campaign

National Drug Strategy Household Survey

New South Wales

People who inject drugs

Therapeutic Goods Administration

Tetrahydrocannabinol

Tetrahydrocannabivarian

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

The State of Criminological Theory

The annual American Society of Criminology presidential address, published in the journal Criminology, often provides a forum for the president to present his or her vision of where they believe the discipline of criminology should be heading, what perspectives have been neglected, and what approaches need greater attention. Richard Rosenfeld (2011), for example, in his 2010 presidential address, argues that criminology is currently dominated by “microlevel” theories and approaches that focus on individuals and their immediate social environments (families, peer groups, schools, etc.), while “big-picture thinking is largely absent from contemporary criminology” (Rosenfeld, 2011, p. 2). Criminology, Rosenfeld suggests, needs to pay more attention to macrolevel explanations and processes that focus on the structure and function of social institutions. Robert Sampson (2013), in his 2012 presidential address, also confesses to “worries about the individual-level narrowness of much current scholarship” (p. 2) and argues for the importance of context, especially neighborhoods, in understanding criminological phenomena (see also Sampson, 2012). Messner (2012, p. 6) also notes the “epistemological imbalance in our discipline with respect to levels of analysis” in his 2012 presidential address, while arguing for the more fruitful development of multilevel theorizing in criminology.

Beyond the mission statements presented in the American Society of Criminology presidential addresses, criminologists have variously championed the need to focus more on developmental and life course processes (Laub, 2006), and the situational determinants of crime (Clarke, 2004; Wikström, Oberwittler, Treiber, & Hardie, 2012). Others have argued that criminology has for too long been dominated by sociological approaches to understanding crime, and urge the incorporation of biological and biosocial processes in criminological theorizing (e.g., Walsh, 2009; Walsh & Bolen, 2012). Raine (2013, p. 8), for instance, argues that:

The dominant model for understanding criminal behavior has been, for most of the twentieth century, one built almost exclusively on social and sociological models. My main argument is that sole reliance on these social perspectives is fundamentally flawed. Biology is also critically important in understanding violence, and probing through its anatomical underpinnings will be vital for treating the epidemic of violence and crime afflicting our societies.

It is not our intention to chastise criminologists by noting the persistent way that they have claimed that “their” perspective or approach has been neglected and is worthy of more attention—after all, we are making the very same claim in this book for evolutionary explanations! Moreover, most of the authors cited above are more than happy to recognize the importance and value of other levels of analysis to the ones that they champion. However, implicitly or explicitly there is a tendency among criminologists to claim explanatory primacy for their favored theory or theoretical approach. We think, therefore, that it is crucial to provide a clear framework (or linked set of frameworks) for understanding how different types of explanations are related to each other and the phenomena that they attempt to explain.

Although criminologists may not be able to agree on what is the most important or relevant approach to understanding crime, there is probably at least one issue on which there is consensus: criminology as an academic discipline is characterized by theoretical diversity. Agnew (2011a, p. 2) notes that “criminology is a divided discipline,” with broad fissures that separate not only “mainstream” from “critical” criminologists, but also divides mainstream criminologists from each other. Wikström et al. (2012, p. 3) agree that criminology is a “fragmented and poorly integrated” discipline, while Eskridge (2005), in his survey of the state of the field of criminology, suggests that criminology is not a “mature science” and has failed in its attempt to reduce crime. In principle, empirical testing may be able to sort some of the chaff from the wheat, and allow us to winnow out some of the least promising theoretical alternatives. However, as a rash of recent meta-analyses by Pratt and colleagues suggest (Pratt & Cullen, 2000, 2005; Pratt, Cullen, Sellers, & Gau, 2010), although some theoretical approaches have more empirical support than others, most approaches find some level of support, and taken as a whole there is much progress to be made in explanations for crime (Weisburd & Piquero, 2008). Agnew (2011a, p. 191) nicely captures this state of theoretical “attrition” in criminology:

Most theories appear to have some merit, explaining a portion of the variation in some crime. Criminologists also attempt to integrate certain of these theories. But none of the integrations has attracted wide support; partly because they reflect the divided nature of the field, combining a small number of related theories and ignoring others. And, perhaps most commonly, criminologists set up shop in their own corner of the discipline; mostly ignoring the work of criminologists in other areas, but occasionally drawing on or attacking it.

We suggest that a crucial starting point for thinking about different types of explanations in criminology is to first make it clear what the explanatory scope of criminology as a discipline is. That is, we need to establish just what we want to explain (Durrant, 2013a). As illustrated in Figure 4.1 we think there are three broad domains of interest that concern criminologists: crime causation, responses to crime, and intervention. We should note here that we are using the term “crime” as shorthand for all of the phenomena that criminologists are interested in explaining (e.g., crimes, norm violations, and harmful acts) as outlined in Chapter 1.

In each of these three broad domains, there are a large number of more specific explanation seeking “why” questions, which criminologists need to address. As we depict in Figure 4.1 for crime causation, these include the very general—but important—question about why it is that crime occurs, and relatedly, why crime often does not occur. Criminologists are also interested in explaining patterns of crime as they relate to significant demographic correlates such as age, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. For instance, we need to account for why men are much more likely than women to engage in most types of criminal behavior, and for why rates of offending tend to peak during adolescence and young adulthood. We also need to account for spatial and temporal variations in offending. That is, we need to explain why crime rates vary across neighborhoods, communities, and nation-states, and how these differences change over time. A large body of research and theory has also addressed individual variations in offending: why are some people more likely to commit crimes than others? We also need to account for intraindividual variation in offending: what specific person–situation interactions account for how an individual’s likelihood of offending varies across time and space? The questions that we provide in Figure 4.1 are clearly just a sample of the population of such questions that criminologists ask, and we can add a further layer of more fine-grained questions as we address specific types of crime (fraud, sexual offending, homicide, arson, drug use, genocide, and so forth), and even specific “etiological pathways” within types of crime (e.g., for child sexual offending—see Ward, 2013; Ward & Siegert, 2002).

We can carry out a similar exercise for the other two broad domains of interest. For many criminologists and others interested in understanding crime, the main focus of interest is not on the causes of crime, but on responses to offending. Thus, at a very general level, we want to explain why it is that certain acts (and not others) are subject to informal and formal sanctions, and the nature of the psychological and social processes that give rise to punishment. We also want to explain the variations in responses to crime as they manifest at individual and social levels of organization. A great deal of scholarship, for instance, has been directed at explaining cross-national differences in imprisonment rates, and similar work has explored changes in punishment over time (see Chapter 5). Finally, because criminology is an applied discipline, there are a host of further questions addressing appropriate ways of intervening that can reduce the harm of crime (and the harm caused by our responses to crime). We will want to ask, for instance, whether rehabilitation is effective in reducing reoffending, and how best to reintegrate offenders into the community. More generally, we will want to know how to develop effective policies and programs to reduce crime and the harm that it causes (Chapters 10 and 11Chapter 10Chapter 11).

Our analysis here is clearly not exhaustive. However, there are two key messages that we want to drive home. First, a central task for criminology, like all other scientific disciplines (be they physical or social), is explanation: we want to be able to appease our epistemic need to understand the world (or, to employ Kitcher’s (1985b) terminology, to reduce our “ununderstanding”) by addressing particular explanation-seeking “why” questions. Furthermore, of particular concern for applied sciences like criminology, we want to use this understanding to improve social outcomes (to reduce the harm caused by crime and our responses to crime). Second, a consideration of the range of questions that we want to address can assist in the evaluation of different criminological theories. Specifically, different theoretical explanations are more or less salient for answering different explanation-seeking “why” questions. Before we elaborate on this point, however, we need to consider how best to organize the range of theoretical accounts that have been offered to explain crime and our responses to crime.