Standard textbook accounts find two scriptural beginnings to the history of criminology: the ‘classical school’ and the ‘positivist school’, each one marking out a somewhat different fate for the discipline. More sophisticated...

Criminology is the systemic study of the ‘nature, extent, cause, and control of lawbreaking behavior’ (Lanier and Henry 1998: 2). For hundreds of years, criminologists have sought to explain the disproportional numbers of crimes committed...

The roots of modern criminology can be found in the writings of social philosophers, who addressed Hobbes's question: "How is society possible?" Locke and Rousseau believed that humans are endowed with free will and are...

Criminology is the social-scientific study of crime as an individual and social phenomenon. Criminological research areas include the incidence and forms of crime as well as its causes and consequences. They also include social and governmental...

Three things started happening in the early 1990s which started changing the criminological paradigm holding that the criminal justice system had a limited impact on crime. The first was a steep decline in criminal justice statistics throughout the Western world, second and third were...

The author believes that the term radical criminology inaccurately describes the quality of work, the empirical investigation and the theoretical analysis that characterizes the field of criminology. Criminologists who define themselves as such, as a fringe or sub-specialization, have marginalized the work of other...

In another blow to the Motor City's tarnished image, Detroit pushed past St. Louis to become the nation's most dangerous city, according to a private research group's controversial analysis, released Sunday, of annual FBI crime statistics.The study drew harsh criticism even before it came out....

In another blow to the Motor City's tarnished image, Detroit pushed past St. Louis to become the nation's most dangerous city, according to a private research group's controversial analysis, released Sunday, of annual FBI crime statistics.The study drew harsh criticism even before it came out....

Outlines the contribution of American Sociologist Robert Merton's work to criminological theory. Discusses if his work still has relevance to our understanding of crime problems today.

For many years sociologists have analyzed crime statistics to get an overall picture of crime trends and how they affect us as individuals and as a collective society. Sociologists have used three different methods to collect information on crime and measure these trends; each method provides particular information and carries its own strengths and weaknesses. The following overview covers these three methods of collecting information -- official statistics, victim surveys, and self-report studies -- and ex

Discussion of relevance of Classical School and Positivist Schools of criminology in present day society.