Criminology, Penology and Victimology

Its practical subjects: prisons and their administration, prison conditions and overcrowding, undertrial detention, probation, parole, remission, open prisons, community sentences, restorative justice, and the rehabilitation of released prisoners.

In India the field includes the prison system administered by the states, probation legislation, provisions for the release of offenders on probation of good conduct, the juvenile justice system with its distinct approach for children in conflict with law, and the long-standing problem of the proportion of prisoners who are undertrials rather than convicts. Figures should be taken from the National Crime Records Bureau's prison statistics and attributed.

Victimology

Its subject: the victim, who was for most of criminology's history invisible, since the discipline studied offenders and the state studied prosecutions.

Its concerns: the characteristics and distribution of victimisation; the victim-offender relationship; the dark figure of unreported crime, from [Crime and Social Deviance], which victim surveys were invented to measure; the treatment of the victim by the police and the courts, and what is called secondary victimisation, the further harm done by that process itself; and compensation and support.

In India the field includes provisions for victim compensation schemes, the rights of victims to be heard and to appeal in certain circumstances, and special protections for victims of particular offences, including the identity protections noted in [Explaining Deviance: The Sociological Theories].

The three compared

A worked example

One theft, studied by all three.

The criminologist asks why theft occurs at the rate it does in this locality, which explanations fit, whether the offender's circumstances resemble those of others, and how theft came to be defined and graded as it is.

The penologist asks what the sentence achieves: whether the offender is deterred, whether others are, what the imprisonment costs, what it does to the offender's employability and family, and whether probation would produce a better outcome.

The victimologist asks what the theft cost the victim, whether they reported it and why, how the police and the court treated them, whether they were compensated, and what the process itself cost them in time, money and distress.

The three together are the sociology of the criminal process, and the point of the example is that a legal system answers only the middle question by itself, while the other two decide whether the answer was worth anything.

Quick revision

1. Criminology: the scientific study of crime as a social phenomenon. Sutherland: the processes of making laws, breaking laws, and reacting to the breaking of laws.
2. Schools: classical (Beccaria, Bentham; rational actor; certain, prompt and proportionate punishment); positivist (Lombroso, Ferri, Garofalo; the offender is determined; attention moves from act to actor; the born criminal is rejected); sociological; and critical, which asks who defines and against whom.
3. Penology: punishment and its administration. Theories: retributive, deterrent (special and general), preventive, reformative, expiatory.
4. Its practical subjects: prisons, undertrial detention, probation, parole, remission, open prisons, restorative justice, rehabilitation.
5. Victimology: the victim; victimisation surveys and the dark figure; the victim-offender relationship; secondary victimisation by the process itself; compensation.
6. Criminology is interdisciplinary, drawing on law, psychology, statistics and medicine as well as sociology.

Test yourself

1. Define criminology and state Sutherland's account of its scope. The scientific study of crime as a social phenomenon, of offenders, and of the systems by which crime is defined and dealt with. Sutherland described its scope as comprising three processes: the making of laws, by which conduct comes to be defined as criminal; the breaking of laws, which is the study of causes; and the reaction towards the breaking of laws, which is penology. It is interdisciplinary, drawing on law, psychology, psychiatry, statistics and medicine as well as on sociology.

2. Distinguish criminology, penology and victimology. Criminology is the whole field, studying crime, the criminal, and the making and enforcement of criminal law. Penology is its branch concerned with the reaction to crime: the theories of punishment, its administration, prisons and the alternatives to them, and the treatment of offenders. Victimology, now largely an independent field, studies the person harmed: the distribution of victimisation, the victim-offender relationship, the unreported crime that victim surveys measure, and the treatment of victims by the process itself.

3. Distinguish the classical from the positivist school. The classical school, associated with Beccaria and Bentham, treats the offender as a rational actor who weighs the gains of an offence against its consequences, and concludes that punishment should be certain, prompt and proportionate to the offence rather than severe; its concern is the act. The positivist school, associated with Lombroso, Ferri and Garofalo, treats the offender as determined by biological, psychological or social factors beyond their control, and shifts attention from the act to the actor and from punishment to treatment; Lombroso's born criminal identified by physical type is rejected, and the school's lasting contribution is the empirical study of offenders.

4. Name the theories of punishment. Retributive, that punishment is inflicted because it is deserved by the offence, of which Durkheim's account of punishment as reaffirming the collective conscience is the sociological form; deterrent, that it prevents future offences by deterring the offender specially and others generally; preventive, that it disables the offender from offending; reformative, that it aims at the offender's reform and return to society, which underlies probation and parole; and, in older classifications, expiatory.

5. What is secondary victimisation? The further harm done to a victim by the process that follows the offence rather than by the offence itself: repeated questioning, disbelief, delay, exposure of identity, the cost and inconvenience of attending court, and treatment that leaves the victim feeling that they are the person under scrutiny. It is one of the principal concerns of victimology, and it is among the reasons for protections such as restrictions on disclosing a victim's identity and provisions for recording evidence in ways that reduce the ordeal.