The Scope, Divisions and Objectives of Criminology

To predict. If an explanation is good, it should say what will happen when conditions change. Prediction in criminology is weak, and the honest position is that the discipline predicts aggregate rates better than it predicts individuals.

To evaluate. Does a measure work? Does a longer sentence deter? Does probation reduce reoffending more than prison? Does a police reform change anything? This is the most useful thing criminology does and it is the least done.

To inform policy. To put the answers before those who make the law and run the system, so that a decision to criminalise, to punish more severely, or to build a prison rests on something.

The scope, negatively defined

It helps to say what criminology does not cover, because a scope question is often answered by a list that is too generous.

It is not the whole of the law of crimes. The interpretation of a section, the ingredients of an offence and the rules of evidence are criminal law.

It is not investigation or forensic science. The identification of the offender in a given case is criminalistics.

It is not the administration of prisons. The study of imprisonment is penology; the running of a jail is administration.

And it is not moral philosophy. Criminology can tell you what the effects of a punishment are. It cannot, by itself, tell you that the punishment is deserved. The retributive argument is a moral argument, and criminologists who forget that overreach.

A worked example

The Government of Maharashtra proposes to raise the maximum sentence for snatching from three years to seven, on the ground that snatching in Mumbai has risen.

Describe. Has it risen? Against what baseline, and is the rise in incidents or in reporting? If a helpline was publicised last year, reported snatching will rise without any change in behaviour. A criminologist asks this first and it very often ends the discussion.

Explain. If the rise is real, why? Routine activity theory would ask whether the supply of suitable targets has changed, and the answer in a city where everyone now carries a phone worth a month's wages is that it has, enormously.

Predict and evaluate. Will a longer maximum sentence reduce snatching? The classical premise says yes, but the research finding, repeated across many countries, is that certainty and swiftness of detection deter far more than severity of sentence. Snatching has a low detection rate, so raising the maximum changes the expected cost to the offender very little.

Advise. The criminological advice is that money spent on street lighting, on visible patrolling in the identified hot spots, and on making stolen handsets unusable will do more than the amendment. The advice may well be rejected, and noticing why it is rejected, because the amendment is cheap and visible while the alternatives are expensive and slow, is itself criminology.

What beginners get wrong

"Scope" is not a list of everything crime touches. An answer that says criminology covers law, sociology, psychology, medicine, statistics and economics has described the subject's borrowings, not its scope. Scope is the set of questions it asks.

The objectives are not one objective repeated. Describing, explaining, predicting, evaluating and advising are different activities with different standards of success, and the discipline is much better at the first two than at the last three.

Criminal policy is not the same as criminal law. Policy is the choice; law is the instrument.

Quick revision

• Divisions of criminology: criminal etiology, criminal sociology or the sociology of criminal law, penology, victimology, criminal statistics and criminal policy.
• The scope of criminology is the study of law-making, law-breaking and the reaction to law-breaking; it excludes doctrinal criminal law, forensic detection, prison administration and moral philosophy.
• Objectives: describe accurately, explain, predict, evaluate the measures taken, and inform criminal policy.
• Criminology predicts aggregate rates better than it predicts individuals, and evaluation is the most useful and least practised of its activities.

Test yourself

1. Set out the divisions of criminology. Criminal etiology, the study of causes; criminal sociology or the sociology of criminal law, which studies criminalisation and the justice system as institutions; penology, the study of punishment and the treatment of offenders; victimology, the study of the victim; criminal statistics, the measurement of crime; and criminal policy, the application of all of these to the design of law and institutions.

2. State the objectives of criminology in order. To describe crime accurately, to explain it, to predict it, to evaluate the measures taken against it, and to inform criminal policy. Each depends on the one before, which is why poor measurement disables everything downstream of it.

3. Give one question that is within the scope of criminology and one that is outside it, on the same facts. On a corporate fraud: why frauds of this kind are prosecuted less often than thefts of far smaller sums is a criminological question about criminalisation and enforcement. Whether the particular accused had the dishonest intention the section requires is a question of criminal law and of evidence, and criminology has nothing to say about it.