Criminology is the study of crime, criminal justice, and its relationship with society; it dominates national and world news reports and is a constant feature in entertainment media.
Crime is a subject with an inherent fascination that grips many of the public. Crime dominates the news, features prominently in political debates, and forms the subject matter of many of the films and series we watch in our leisure time. These are things we consider in our Applied Criminology courses, but we also explore so much more!
Criminology is a multi-disciplinary subject that approaches its subject matter through different perspectives, including sociology, the law, psychology, philosophy, and history. As part of this, we cast a critical and analytic eye over processes of criminalization – or how and who becomes a criminal – and crime control.
Teaching on the course sets these processes within wider historical, social, cultural, economic, and political contexts to understand the institutional context of crime and social responses to deviance. In doing this, we explore theoretical debates focused on the individual characteristics of offenders, victims, and criminal investigators, alongside the social contexts within which criminal behavior occurs. We also examine the nature and extent of crime, as well as the social and psychological theories of crime causation, the operation of social control, and the workings of the criminal justice system.