Free Essay On Criminal Research And Social Policy

Criminology defined as the study of criminals or criminality. If crime was to remain the same and laws never expanded or changed completely criminology would be a field that only had room for improvement when moving forward in studying criminals. However laws and crimes change often and shift dramatically making studying criminals and their behavior a unique challenge. One example of how criminals change and how crime changes as well would be if two people were on the same street in 1933 and one had a bottle of alcohol while the other had a bag of gold, the person with the alcohol would be guilty of a crime. However only a year later this would be opposite because alcohol was legalized and hoarding gold was made a criminal act. This is only one of many different changes to both criminals and crime that have happened over time and an excellent example of the extreme changes that criminology faces when crime changes (Lafree, Bursik, Short & Taylor, 2000).
In many instances it is society and their fears as well as comforts which determine what will be a law and what constitutes a criminal act and that is why the law sees so many rapid changes. For instance the war on terror has society taking a new look at what criminal and illegal means and should be because society has taken a better look at how crime has started to become an international problem (Smartt, 2008).
When criminology is defined it is described as a plethora of disciplines attempting to find an explanation for criminal deviance. Part of the purpose of criminology is to use laws and the justice system to find understand the crimes as well as criminals for the purpose of creating a system that applies humane and reliable punishments for the people that commit crime. When the nature of crimes shift and change very rapidly it can make the study of criminology for this and many other purposes a much more difficult task to complete, creating a wide horizon of possibilities when it comes to interpreting criminals, crimes and criminal justice (Farlax, 2015).

References

Farlax,. (2015). Criminology. TheFreeDictionary.com. Retrieved 9 April 2015, from http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Criminology
Lafree, G., Bursik, R., Short, J., & Taylor, R. (2000). The Changing Nature of Crime in America (1st ed., p. 1). NCJRS. Retrieved from https://www.ncjrs.gov/criminal_justice2000/vol_1/02a.pdf
Smartt, L. (2008). What Determines a Criminal Today (1st ed., p. 1). Sage. Retrieved from http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/23603_01_Smartt%28Law%29_Ch_01.pdf