Summary: Criminological Language

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• Criminology as a practice

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• Define crime as a legal concept:

  We have criminal laws which indicate which acts are illegal.

• Define crime as a social concept:

  Who becomes labelled ‘criminal’ and under what circumstances?

• In this history, Garland argues that modern criminology is the product of two initially separate streams of work:

  • The ‘governmental project’ > empirical studies of the administration of justice; the working of prisons, police and the measurement of crime.

  
  

  • The ‘Lombrosian project’ > studies which sought to examine the characteristics of ‘criminals’ and ‘non-criminals’ with a view to being able to distinguish the groups, thereby developing an understanding of the causes of crime.

• What was the key aspect of the work of Italian scholar Cesare Lombroso?

  Cesare Lombroso:
  
  His work, in variousforms, was concerned with attempts to identify physical and other characteristics that set criminals apart.

• Describe the relation between Lombroso's theory and modern-day criminology:

  Garland’s argument is that one very significant stream of criminology has continued to be concerned with identifying the individual, social and environmental factors that
  are associated with offending.
  
  
  

  • Though, by and large, crude attempts to identify and measure characteristics that distinguish criminals from others have largely disappeared. 

• Describe the distinction between criminology and criminal justice:

  Criminological work tends to be more theoretically informed than criminal justice studies and also more concerned with crime and its causes. Both, however, have clear concerns with criminal justice and penal systems.

• Concerns itself with social and individual antecedents of crime and with the nature of crime as a social phenomenon.What study is described here?

  Criminology.

• Deal with the specific institutional aspects of the social construction of crime’ such as policing, prosecution, punishment and so on.What study is described here?

  Criminal justice studies.

• Describe the three great tributaries (zijrivieren) that make up the subject:

  • The study of crime.
    
  • The study of those who commit the crime.
  • The study of criminal justice and penal systems.

• As we will see, identifying the boundary between acts that are crimes, and acts which are not crimes is often far from straightforward.In the Spanner case, the difficult question was whether or not the men on the tapes were performing criminal activities. Why is this a question in the Spanner case?

  All argued that they consented to the activities. Indeed, all freely gave statements to the police believing them- selves not to have done anything criminal.