What Is the Legal Definition of Criminology

The Chicago School emerged in the early twentieth century through the work of Robert E. Park, Ernest Burgess, and other urban sociologists at the University of Chicago. In the 1920s, Park and Burgess identified five concentric zones that often exist as cities develop, including the „transition zone,“ which has been identified as the most volatile and disorderly. In the 1940s, Henry McKay and Clifford R. Shaw focused on young offenders and found that they were concentrated in the transition zone. The Chicago School was a school of thought that blamed social structures for human behavior. This idea can be combined or used in criminology because it essentially takes the position of defending criminals and criminal behavior. The defense and argument is based on the thought that these people and their actions are not their fault, but that they are in fact the result of society (i.e. unemployment, poverty, etc.), and that these people behave properly.

[1] The interests of criminologists include the study of the nature of crime and criminals, the origins of criminal law, the etiology of crime, the social response to crime, and the functioning of law enforcement agencies and penal institutions. In general, criminology can be said to direct its investigations in three directions: first, it examines the nature of the criminal law and its administration and the conditions under which it develops; secondly, it analyses the causality of crimes and the personality of criminals; and third, it examines crime control and offender rehabilitation. Thus, criminology includes, within its scope, the activities of legislative bodies, law enforcement bodies, judicial institutions, prisons and private and public educational social institutions. This school developed during a major reform of the penal system, when society began to design prisons for extreme sentences. During this period, there were also many legal reforms, the French Revolution and the development of the legal system in the United States. [5] Criminology of social processes Theories of the criminology of social processes attempt to explain how people become criminals. These theories arose from the realization that not all people exposed to the same socio-structural conditions become criminals. They focus on criminal behavior as learned behavior.

One area of criminal justice research that has proven ineffective is trying to predict which offenders are most likely to commit other crimes. Not only were the models unable to identify repeat offenders, but the researchers were also asked whether such efforts violated people`s constitutional rights. The fear is that the perpetrators will not be punished for what they have done, but for what they might do in the future. Public criminology is a strand of criminology that is closely related to ideas associated with „public sociology“ and focuses on disseminating criminological findings to a wider audience than academia. Proponents of public criminology argue that criminologists should „conduct and disseminate research on crime, law, and deviance in dialogue with affected communities.“ [79] The goal is for scientists and criminological researchers to make their research available to the public in order to make public and policy decisions. This allows criminologists to circumvent the limitations of traditional criminological research. [80] Public criminology takes many forms, including media and policy advice, as well as activism, civic education, public relations, expert testimony, and knowledge co-production. [81] The legal definition of a crime is a crime against public law, as UpCounsel explains. To be considered a crime, the crime must be punishable, whether by fine, loss of liberty or other methods.

Criminologists have expanded the definition of crime to include behavior that does not violate applicable law, JRank reports. These include economic exploitation, racial discrimination and unsafe or unhealthy work environments. Although the theories of political criminology and conflict criminology partially overlap, political criminologists deny that the terms are interchangeable. The main focal points of the new political criminology movement also intersect with other theories, including the concerns and implications of street crime and the distribution of power in crime-fighting strategies. This move was largely a loose academic effort. The value of criminology from a queer theoretical perspective is controversial; Some believe that it is not worth researching and is not relevant to the field as a whole, and therefore, it is a topic that lacks a wide range of research.