1.2 What Is Criminology?
Janis Ian, activist and singer/songwriter
Criminology can be described as trying to understand people’s behavior as it relates to crime. Janis Ian’s quote humorously shows how challenging that can be. Still, it is this effort that sets criminology apart from criminal justice in terms of focus, approach, and perspective.
First, what is criminology exactly? Edwin Sutherland (1934), an influential criminologist, described it as the scientific study of breaking the law, making the law, and society’s reaction to those who break the law. Essentially, criminology is the study of crime and why it happens. It considers individual, societal, and environmental factors to better understand what drives someone to commit a crime. Once we understand the whys of criminal behavior, we can start to address those causes and prevent harm. With this goal in mind, criminologists look at crime from many perspectives—psychological, sociological, economic, political, biological, and more.
Crime is a legal term that describes the violation of criminal law. While crime in its technical sense is important to criminologists, criminologists acknowledge that crime is also a social construct. In other words, the people who make laws live in a specific time, place, and culture, all of which influence what becomes known as crime. Consequently, concepts of harm and deviance are also important in criminology.
Deviance—often misunderstood as being the same as crime or bad behavior—is a sociological term describing behavior that deviates from socially and culturally accepted norms. To illustrate the difference between crime and deviance, consider speeding and the practice of bondage and discipline, domination and submission, sadism and masochism (BDSM). Speeding is a pretty common traffic offense that a lot of us commit. It is a crime, but it is not really deviant. In contrast, participation in the BDSM community is likely to be considered deviant in American society, but such behavior is not criminal, assuming all involved are consenting adults. However, some behaviors may be considered both deviant and criminal, such as murder.
Why does this distinction matter? Criminologists do more than assess crime rates and what makes them go up or down; they also try to make sense of human behavior and understand harm, safety, and justice, regardless of the legal “lines in the sand.” Although our exploration of criminology will include a little bit about victimization, this book focuses on understanding criminal offending behavior and those who engage in it. The focused study of victims and their experiences of victimization, or victimology, is a subject deserving of its own separate textbook and course.
One way we can see criminology in action is when criminologists attempt to break down why there has been an increase in violent crime, such as gun violence in Portland, Oregon, as described in the chapter-opening example. Criminologists are looking at what happened du