Crime and Justice

Description

The ‘problem’ of crime and its remedy through the criminal justice system has been of crucial and ongoing concern to urban societies. It was out of a desire to find what causes crime and how it can be prevented that people first became interested in criminology. But it soon became clear that criminal behaviour has many and various aspects, and that understanding it is far from simple. This caused some to develop even more complex theories about its causes, while others began to wonder if the causes even mattered. If criminal behaviour refers to the breaking of rules, the latter reasoned, the behaviour may be less pertinent than the rules which make it so. It was from this type of reflection that modern criminology emerged.

What criminology does now is look at the character of rules, which necessarily prefaces any understanding of rule-breaking. The nature of rules, the acts which violate them, and the responses of society to these violations, are all themes which run like a leitmotif through crime and justice theory today.

This approach to offending is more than four decades old and over the years criminological theory has altered significantly. Theories of crime have been closely linked to other social and intellectual developments and have often had little to do with utility. Like other forms of knowledge, specific theories of deviance only became popular when society was ready for what they had to offer.  What the theories actually said is of relatively minor importance now. The significance of theory to us is not its content, so much as the way it responds to the dominant paradigms of its day.