Is Criminology a Science?

And it has been useful. Actuarial risk instruments, situational prevention, and the design of policing around hot spots are all applications that were tested and that worked.

The case that it is not

Its subject matter is defined by law, not by nature. Chemistry studies a substance that is what it is regardless of what any legislature says. Criminology studies a category whose contents change when Parliament votes. Adultery was in the category until 2018 and is not now, and nothing about the behaviour changed. A science whose object of study is redefined by an outside authority is in an odd position.

Controlled experiment is mostly impossible. You cannot randomly assign one group of children to a broken home and another to an intact one. Criminology therefore works with natural variation and statistical control, and correlation is much harder to convert into causation.

Its data are poor and systematically biased. Recorded crime is a record of what was noticed, reported, believed and written down. The gap between that and crime committed is the dark figure, and it is not random: it is largest exactly where this paper's third module concentrates, in the crimes of the powerful.

Its generalisations are tendencies, not laws. Poverty is associated with some kinds of offending, and most poor people never offend. No proposition in criminology holds in the way that a physical law holds.

Prediction of individuals is weak. The prediction of dangerousness has been studied for decades and remains poor enough that using it to justify detention is contested.

Objectivity is hard. Whether a phenomenon is described as a labour dispute or as public disorder, whether a payment is a facilitation fee or a bribe, and whether a killing is communal violence or a law and order problem are all classification decisions carrying values.

The answer

Say this, and say it as a conclusion rather than as a hedge.

Criminology is a social science. It is scientific in method: it observes systematically, generalises, tests and revises. It is not an exact science, because its object is defined by law, its experiments are natural rather than controlled, its data are incomplete in a patterned way, and its findings are probabilistic.

That is not a defect peculiar to criminology. It is the position of economics, of sociology and of most of medicine outside the laboratory. Nobody says epidemiology is not a science because it cannot say which smoker will get cancer. The right question is not whether criminology reaches the standard of physics but whether it produces reliable knowledge that could not be had by unaided common sense, and it plainly does.

A worked example

A newspaper reports that eighty per cent of prisoners in a Maharashtra jail are from poor households and concludes that poverty causes crime.

A scientific criminology takes that apart in four moves.

The sample is of convicted prisoners, not of offenders. The wealthy who offend are less often reported, less often arrested, better defended, more often bailed and more often acquitted. The prison population is the output of a filter, not a sample of offending.

There is no control group. What proportion of the general population of the same districts is poor? If it is also eighty per cent, the figure shows nothing at all.

Correlation is not cause. Poverty travels with low education, poor housing, unstable employment, weak schooling and heavier policing. Any of those could carry the effect.

And the crimes of the rich are missing from the denominator. Tax evasion, fraud and adulteration are absent from the jail because they are absent from the prosecution.

That is the discipline working. Four objections, each testable, none available to common sense. Whether or not you call it a science, that is what it does.

What beginners get wrong

Do not answer with a definition of science alone. The question is comparative and needs both sides.

Do not say "criminology is not a science because it deals with human beings". So do economics, psychology and medicine.

Do not confuse criminology with forensic science. Forensic science genuinely is an applied natural science, and a student who defends criminology by pointing to fingerprint analysis has answered a different question.

Do not treat the answer as a yes or a no. The examiner's word is usually "critically evaluate", and a flat answer either way loses the marks that are in the qualification.

Quick revision

• Test a discipline against six criteria: defined subject matter, systematic observation, generalisation, verification, prediction, objectivity.
• For: real methods; findings that recur everywhere, such as the age-crime curve, the sex difference, the concentration of offending in a few offenders, and the superiority of certainty over severity in deterrence; theories that have been tested and have failed, such as Lombroso's.
• Against: the subject matter is defined by law and changes when the law changes; controlled experiment is impossible; the data carry a patterned dark figure; generalisations are tendencies; individual prediction is weak; classification carries values.
• Conclusion: criminology is a social science, scientific in method but not exact, and it stands where economics, sociology and epidemiology stand.

Test yourself

1. State the criteria by which the question should be judged. Whether the discipline has a defined subject matter, systematic observation and measurement, generalisations that go beyond the case, verification against evidence, predictive power, and objectivity independent of the observer's values.

2. Give two findings of criminology that could not be had by common sense. That severity of punishment deters much less than the certainty and swiftness of detection, which is contrary to the intuition on which most penal legislation is built; and that a small minority of offenders accounts for a large majority of offences, which redirects policy from general deterrence towards the identification of that minority.

3. Why does the fact that Lombroso's theory was disproved support rather than undermine the scientific claim? Because falsifiability is a mark of a scientific proposition. Lombroso made a claim about a measurable physical difference; Goring measured it against a control group and found no such difference; the claim was abandoned. A body of thought in which no proposition can fail is not science, and criminology's propositions plainly can.