Can Criminology Ever Be A Value Free Discipline

Essay from the year 2000 in the subject Law - Criminal process, Criminology, Law Enforcement, grade: 2 (B), University of Newcastle upon Tyne (Law School), 7 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Criminology is not a typical law discipline. It can be referred to as an interdisciplinary subject dealing a lot with sociology, psychology, statistics, medicine, economics, political science and geography. It is concerned with a body of knowledge about crime as a social phenomenon. A broad definition would be that crime is behaviour that breaks the law. The studies of crime are supposed to include in their scope describing, analysing and explaining the behaviour of state penal law. This seems to make criminology a rather analytical subject. But is it therefore really valuefree and, if not, should or can it ever be? If we speak of values, we mean emotional attitudes in a subjective way of seeing things as well as moral values. This examination shall basically be focused on the influence of emotional attitudes and if criminology can be free from opinions and subjective views. In some way this is the personal reflection of moral values, too. Specifying the question it should be asked if criminology is or can be practised and used in an objective and neutral way.

Written by an internationally renowned authority in the field, the founder of the highly regarded School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University, the book draws heavily on research done on three Continents: North America, Europe and Australia, to trace the discipline's historical evolution, its current problems, disappointing achievements, and promising trends. It concludes with a prospective look at the future of criminology and criminology of the future. Although the perspective is critical, the author's critique is constructive and he expresses a healthy optimism about the discipline's future and offers several guidelines as to how current deficiencies could be remedied and present gaps could be addressed.

A Criminological Imagination contains a selection of key articles from Pat Carlen's research studies of magistrates' courts and women's imprisonment together with a range of other articles on social control, discourse analysis, ideology, punishment, criminology and critique. They are all informed by an assumption that while criminal justice must remain imaginary in societies based upon unequal and exploitative social relations, one task of a criminological imagination might be to suggest why this is so, and how things could be otherwise. This is an invaluable collection for anyone interested in crime, justice and injustice and the social, political and academic contexts in which knowledge of them is constructed.

Abolish Criminology presents critical scholarship on criminology and criminal justice ideologies and practices, alongside emerging freedom-driven visions and practices for new world formations. The book introduces readers to a detailed history and analysis of crime as a concept and its colonizing trajectories into existence and enforcement. These significant contexts buried within peculiar academic histories and classroom practices are often overlooked or unknown outside academic and public discussions, causing the impact of racializing-gendering-sexualizing histories to extend and grow through criminology’s creation of crime, extending how the concept is weaponized and enforced through the criminal legal system. It offers written, visual, and poetic teachings from the perspectives of students, professors, imprisoned and formerly imprisoned persons, and artists. This allows readers to engage in multi-sensory, inter-disciplinary, and multi-perspective teachings on criminology’s often discussed but seldom interrogated mythologies on violence and danger, and their wide-reaching enforcements through the criminal legal system’s research, theories, agencies, and dominant cultures. Abolish Criminology serves the needs of undergraduate and graduate students and educators in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. It will also appeal to scholars, researchers, policy makers, activists, community organizers, social movement builders, and various reading groups in the general public who are grappling with increased critical public discourse on policing and criminal legal reform or abolition.

Guido Rossi As Chairman of ISPAC, I want to thank all the contributors to this book that originates from the International Conference on Crime and Technology. This could be the end of my presentation if I did not feel uneasy not considering one of the problems I believe to be pivotal in the relationship between crime and technology. I shall also consider that the same relationship exists between terror and globalization, while globalization is stemming from technology and terror from crime. Transnational terrorism is today made possible by the vast array of communication tools. But the paradox is that if globalization facilitates terrorist violence, the fight against this war without borders is potentially disastrous for both economic development and globalization. Antiterrorist measures restrict mobility and financial flows, while new terrorist attacks could lead the way for an antiglobalist reaction. But the global society has yet to agree on a common definition of terrorism or on a common policy against it. The ordinary traditional criminal law is still depending on the sovereignty of national states, while international criminal justice is only a spotty and contested last resort. The fragmented and weak international institutions and underdeveloped civil societies have no power to enforce criminal justice against t- rorism. At the same time, the states that are its targets have no interest in applying the laws of war (the Geneva Conventions) to their fight against terrorists.

This book provides a lively, concise and definitive introduction to the study of the causes of crime. Authoritative yet accessible, it offers a guide to the historical development of criminology as an academic discipline and in doing so: presents an overview of a range of different theories of crime, including classical, biological, psychological and sociological approaches analyses the strengths and weaknesses of each theory discussed provides chapter overview boxes and key summary points helps you to take your studies further with self-study tasks and suggestions for further reading. In covering key theoretical positions and placing them in their historical context, Criminological Theory in Context is perfect for students taking introductory courses in criminological theory.

In Punishment and the History of Political Philosophy, Arthur Shuster offers an insightful study of punishment in the works of Plato, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Beccaria, Kant, and Foucault.

This three-volume work offers a comprehensive review of the pivotal concepts, measures, theories, and practices that comprise criminology and criminal justice. No longer just a subtopic of sociology, criminology has become an independent academic field of study that incorporates scholarship from numerous disciplines including psychology, political science, behavioral science, law, economics, public health, family studies, social work, and many others. The three-volume Encyclopedia of Criminology presents the latest research as well as the traditional topics which reflect the field's multidisciplinary nature in a single, authoritative reference work. More than 525 alphabetically arranged entries by the leading authorities in the discipline comprise this definitive, international resource. The pivotal concepts, measures, theories, and practices of the field are addressed with an emphasis on comparative criminology and criminal justice. While the primary focus of the work is on American criminology and contemporary criminal justice in the United States, extensive global coverage of other nations' justice systems is included, and the increasing international nature of crime is explored thoroughly. Providing the most up-to-date scholarship in addition to the traditional theories on criminology, the Encyclopedia of Criminology is the essential one-stop reference for students and scholars alike to explore the broad expanse of this multidisciplinary field.