What Is Criminolgy

What is It?
Learn About the Study of Crime, Its
Causes and Its Consequences sociology criminal justice system criminology careers Criminology is most often associated with the study of the law enforcement and criminal justice system.
A person looking for a career in criminal justice will very likely first seek to earn a criminology degree.
While criminal justice and criminology are certainly related fields, they are by no means interchangeable, as so many people tend to believe. What exactly, then, is criminology?
Etymology of Criminology
The word "criminology" itself tells us that it is essentially the study of crime. Criminology is derived from the Latin crimen, which means accusation, and the transliterated
Greek logia, which has come to denote "the study of." The field goes far deeper than studying crimes themselves, though.
What is Criminology?
Criminology is a branch of sociology and has, in effect, been studied in one way or another for thousands of years. It has only been relatively recently, though, that it has been recognized as a scientific discipline in its own right. Criminologists
Criminologists look at a broad range of topics related to crime.
They are dedicated to studying not only the causes of crime, but the social impact as well.
In essence, criminologists look at every conceivable aspect of deviant behavior. This includes the impacts of crime on individual victims and their families, society at large, and even criminals themselves. Some of the specific areas that criminology focuses on include: Schools of Though Within
Criminology
The end goal of criminology, of course, is to determine the root causes of criminal behavior and to develop effective and humane means of preventing it. This has lead to several schools of thought within the discipline, each of which looks at different factors involved in deviant behavior and each coming to different conclusions about how best to