What is criminology? What isn’t criminology? Is it a discipline in its own right, “autonomous,” or is it an interdisciplinary field? Is it a specifically modern discourse, or are their pre-modern criminologies? Is it necessarily scientific? If so, what does it mean to be scientific? And if it is a science, is it a “pure science,” narrowly concerned with understanding crime, or an “applied science,” more ambitiously concerned with the prevention of crime and the treatment of criminals? If, however, criminology isn’t scientific, then what is it instead? And is it only the study of crime, or is it, more broadly, the study of crime and criminal justice? Or is it, even more broadly, the study of crime, criminal justice, and anything under the sun that relates to crime and justice (including ethics, law, politics, culture, and so forth)? Is it better to have a narrow and limiting definition of the word criminology or a broad and inviting definition?
As I define it, criminology is the formal study of crime, criminals, criminal law, and criminal justice – that is, the methodical and organized examination of making laws, breaking laws, enforcing laws, including the adjudication of allegedly broken laws, and the public discourse about the creation, violation, enforcement, and adjudication of laws.
In this definition, criminology is “formal,” as opposed to informal, meaning that it involves interpretation with a method and affiliation with an organization. But it is also “formal” as opposed to academic and scientific. The methods of criminology are often, though not necessarily, academic and scientific, which means that (1) criminology usually comes in the form of scholarly writing, but it can also come in the form of essay and art; (2) criminology may be scientific (drawing upon fields such as biology, psychology, and sociology) and/or humanistic (taking cues from not only philosophy and history but also legal, cultural, and literary studies); and (3) criminology can be either analytical or ethical – that is, either pure research concerned with an accurate understanding of crime or applied research involved in the treatment of criminals and prevention of crime.
As I see it, the above definition is risky and potentially controversial because of what it leaves out: gone are the insistences that criminology is “scientific,” “academic,” “sociological,” and “modern.” As such, the virtue of my definition is its inclusiveness: it opens up new and unorthodox possibilities for funding and employment in the name of criminology, which holds the promise of new perspectives on crime, new theories of criminology, and new policies for prevention and treatment.
Criminology is diverse in both its concerns and its methods. Because criminology is so expansive and diverse, it may be helpful to draw a distinction between mainstream criminology and criminology from the margins. In this distinction, mainstream criminology is a social science; it is academic (housed in institutions of higher education), scientific (in its collection and analysis of quantitative data), and practical (in its application of scientific research to public policy). Such an enterprise is what people usually have in mind today when they say the word criminology, but I have sought to expand the boundaries of this field to acknowledge the fringe activities that occur in the name of criminology. Criminology from the margins is defined not by what it is but by what it is not, namely mainstream criminology. This criminology from the margins includes forms and activities that are not common in the usual practice of criminology, forms and activities that, in their unusualness, can generate new and productive ways of thinking about crime and justice.
Criminology can be good or bad. It is wrong to think of criminology as the hero in a battle for knowledge about crime, popular and humanistic thought being the enemy in this supposed war. Instead, it is better to think of criminology as the name for the battleground. Criminology contains within it both the good and the bad, and there are both good and bad academic criminologies just as there are both good and bad public criminologies. Criminology is not the solution to bad thought on crime but the name for thinking about crime in a serious way, and even serious thought on crime can be bad.
Criminology is formal. It is defined by the presence of a rigorous and deliberate method for gathering, evaluating, and displaying facts and ideas about crime – this in contrast to the amateur thought on crime that is rash, erratic, haphazard, reactionary, uninformed, and/or unsystematic. To be formal is to be methodical. The method of criminology need not be the scientific method, but there must exist some sort of formal procedure of analysis in order for an activity to be properly criminological.
Criminology is the study of crime, criminals, criminal law, and criminal justice. The biological school which insists that criminology is only the study of criminals, not crimes, is as myopic as the sociological school which insists that crime can be approached as only a social, not a biological, phenomenon. Criminology is not limited to only one of these categories. Furthermore, to say that criminology involves the study of criminal law is to stake a claim to a subject that is usually reserved for “legal studies.”
Criminology is organized. Criminology is thought on crime that people are willing to pay for. Even as I write this last sentence, however, I hesitate, because it sounds like it would marginalize and silence the most oppressed and most vulnerable voices on crime, those that come from people without the financial and social resources to plug their ideas into official outlets.
Criminology is timeless. It is wrong to think of criminology as a specifically modern discourse. The writers who first theorized the term criminology thought of and referred to earlier writing on crime as criminology, and we should as well.
Organizations should use the term criminology to describe themselves. Criminology is not a field within the discipline of criminal justice. Instead, the opposite is true: criminal justice is a field within the discipline of criminology.
Criminology is usually, but not necessarily, academic. It can be either academic or public. In other words, criminology can come in the form of “pure research” that is academic, analytical, and philosophical, interested only in understanding crime accurately; or it can come in the form of “applied research” that is public, ethical, political, concerned with preventing crime and treating criminals.
In its academic forms, criminology is usually, but not necessarily, scientific. It can be either scientific or humanistic.
In its scientific forms, criminology is usually, but not necessarily, a social science. It can be a social science or a natural science. Usually, criminology treats crime and justice as social phenomena, not philosophical nor biological phenomena, meaning that, whatever else it does, criminology tends to come back to the notion that crime is contextual and must be considered as a component of culture, not nature.
Criminology is what criminologists do. From this perspective, what’s needed is a congress in which criminologists can gather to declare, “This is what I do,” and then formulate a definition of criminology that is abstract enough to be meaningful yet specific enough to be accurate.
Criminology is interdisciplinary. As such, departments of criminology and criminal justice should actively seek to employee scholars whose degrees are in areas other than criminology and criminal justice. I can think of no better environment for vibrant criminological research than a department that employs, say, a biologist, a psychologist, a legal scholar, a sociologist, a historian, a philosopher, and a literary critic.
Criminology is intermedial. Criminology is not only interdisciplinary, drawing upon the sciences and the humanities alike, but also intermedial, occurring most often in academic prose, but also possibly in journalistic or even artistic forms.