criminology

—criminological /krim'euh nl oj"i keuhl/, criminologic, adj. —criminologically, adv. —criminologist, n.

/krim'euh nol"euh jee/, n.

the study of crime and criminals: a branch of sociology.

[1855-60; < L crimin- (s. of crimen; see CRIME) + -O- + -LOGY]

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Scientific study of nonlegal aspects of crime, including its causes and prevention.

Criminology originated in the 18th century when social reformers began to question the use of punishment for retribution rather than deterrence and reform. In the 19th century, scientific methods began to be applied to the study of crime. Today criminologists commonly use statistics, case histories, official records, and sociological field methods to study criminals and criminal activity, including the rates and kinds of crime within geographic areas. Their findings are used by lawyers, judges, probation officers, law-enforcement and prison officials, legislators, and scholars to better understand criminals and the effects of treatment and prevention. See also delinquency, penology.

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Introduction

 scientific study of the nonlegal aspects of crime and delinquency, including its causes, correction, and prevention, from the viewpoints of such diverse disciplines as anthropology, biology, psychology and psychiatry, economics, sociology, and statistics.

      Viewed from a legal perspective, the term crime refers to individual criminal actions (e.g., a burglary) and the societal response to those actions (e.g., a sentence of three years in prison). By comparison, the field of criminology incorporates and examines broader knowledge about crime and criminals. For example, criminologists have attempted to understand why some people are more or less likely to engage in criminal or delinquent behaviour. Criminologists have also examined and attempted to explain differences in crime rates and the criminal code between societies and changes in rates and laws over time.

      Many criminologists consider themselves to be neutral public policy experts, gathering facts for various governmental officials responsible for drawing policy conclusions. However, some criminologists—like their counterparts in such fields as the atomic and nuclear sciences—maintain that scientists must shoulder responsibility for the moral and political consequences of their research. Thus, some criminologists have actively campaigned against capital punishment and have advocated in favour of various legal reforms. Criminologists who oppose this activist role contend that the findings of criminological research must be weighed along with political, social, religious, and moral arguments, a task best left to political bodies. Not denying the right of criminologists to express their opinions as ordinary citizens and voters, this view nonetheless maintains that a government by popular will is less dangerous than a government by experts.

      In the last decades of the 20th century, criminology grew to encompass a number of specialized study areas. One of these was criminalistics, or scientific crime detection, which involves such measures as photography, toxicology, fingerprint study, and DNA evidence (see also DNA fingerprinting). It had previously been excluded from criminology because of its focus on particular criminal actions rather than on the broader knowledge about crime and criminals. Criminology further expanded its reach by devoting significant attention to victimology, or the study of the victims of crime, the relationships between victims and criminals, and the role of victims in the criminal events themselves. criminal justice has also emerged as a separate but closely related academic field, focusing on the structure and functioning of criminal justice agencies—including the police, courts (court), corrections, and juvenile agencies—rather than on explanations of crime. (See juvenile justice.)

      The relationship of criminology to various other disciplines has resulted in considerable diversity in its academic placement within universities. Universities in Europe have tended to treat criminology as part of legal education, even in circumstances where its principal teachers were not lawyers. In the United Kingdom, for example, the Institute of Criminology is part of the law faculty of the University of Cambridge; in other schools criminological research and teaching have usually been divided between departments of sociology or social administration, law faculties, and institutes of psychiatry. In South America the anthropological and medical elements predominate, and in the United States, though there has been a trend toward housing criminology and criminal justice in separate multidisciplinary departments, criminology has most often been situated in departments of sociology.

Historical development

  Criminology developed in the late 18th century, when various movements, imbued with humanitarianism, questioned the cruelty, arbitrariness, and inefficiency of the criminal justice and prison systems. During this period reformers such as Cesare Beccaria (Beccaria, Cesare) in Italy and Sir Samuel Romilly (Romilly, Sir Samuel), John Howard (Howard, John), and Jeremy Bentham (Bentham, Jeremy) in England, all representing the so-called classical school of criminology, sought penological and legal reform rather than criminological knowledge. Their principal aims were to mitigate legal penalties, to compel judges to observe the principle of nulla poena sine lege (Latin: “ due process of law”), to reduce the application of capital punishment, and to humanize penal institutions. They were moderately successful, but, in their desire to make criminal justice more “just,” they tried to construct rather abstract and artificial equations between crimes and penalties, ignoring the personal characteristics and needs of the individual criminal defendant. Moreover, the object of punishment was primarily retribution and secondarily deterrence, with reformation lagging far behind.

      In the early 19th century the first annual national crime statistics were published in France. Adolphe Quetelet (Quetelet, Adolphe) (1796–1874), a Belgian mathematician, statistician, and sociologist who was among the first to analyze these statistics, found considerable regularity in them (e.g., in the number of people accused of crimes each year, the number convicted, the ratio of men to women, and the distribution of offenders by age). From these patterns he concluded that “there must be an order to those things which…are reproduced with astonishing constancy, and always in the same way.” Later, Quetelet argued that criminal behaviour was the result of society's structure, maintaining that society “prepares the crime, and the guilty are only the instruments by which it is executed.”

      Whereas Quetelet focused on the characteristics of societies and attempted to explain their resulting crime rates, the Italian medical doctor Cesare Lombroso (Lombroso, Cesare) (1836–1909) studied individual criminals in order to determine why they committed crimes. Some of his investigations led him to conclude that people with certain cranial, skeletal, and neurological malformations were “born criminal” because they were biological throwbacks to an earlier evolutionary stage. Highly controversial at the time he presented it, his theory was ultimately rejected by social scientists. Lombroso also contended that there were multiple causes of crime and that most offenders were not born criminal but instead were shaped by their environment. The research of both Quetelet and Lombroso emphasized the search for the causes of crime—a focus that criminology has retained.

Methods

      Criminology encompasses a number of disciplines, drawing on methods and techniques developed in both the natural and the social sciences. As do other disciplines, criminology distinguishes between pure and applied research and between statistical and intuitive ways of thinking. More than most other disciplines, however, criminological research depends upon the willing cooperation of governmental agencies and other public authorities for the provision of essential data.

Descriptive statistics

      The manner and extent of data collection differ considerably from country to country and even within countries that have federal systems. Variables include how often data are collected and published, what items are given importance, whether the choice is between complete listings or sample surveys, and what the ratio between governmental and private research is. These differences, combined with differences in law and legal administration and in popular views and habits, have made it difficult to devise a meaningful system of international criminal statistics and to compare national statistics that are collected separately.

      The most common data used in criminological research are official statistics, which are collected as part of the operation of criminal justice agencies. For example, police collect data on the crimes they know about and on the people they arrest for committing those crimes; courts collect data on the cases that are brought to them and on the outcomes of those cases, including convictions; and prisons and jails, as well as probation and parole agencies, collect data on the people under their jurisdiction. In all cases the usefulness of official criminal statistics depends on human factors such as the willingness of private individuals to report criminal events to the police, of the police to officially respond to the criminal event, and of court officials to prosecute the case. Because these decisions depend on a variety of factors—including whether the criminal laws at issue are popular or unpopular, whether the criminal event occurs in a high-crime or low-crime area, and whether the victim or offender is a member of a minority group—they are not very reliable as a measure of the amount of crime in a society or of changes in the amount of crime over time.

      To overcome problems with official statistics, researchers in many countries have utilized victimization surveys, in which random samples of the population are generally asked whether they have been victims of crime within a specified period of time. Although these surveys have methodological problems (e.g., they rely entirely on the memory of victims), they have generally been more accurate than official statistics in displaying trends in crime over time. These surveys have often been conducted by governmental agencies, such as the U.S. Census Bureau, which began its annual survey in 1972. Many other countries later implemented victim surveys, including Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Israel, and New Zealand; the United Nations also sponsors an international crime victim survey.

      Criminologists supplement the official statistics with self-report surveys, in which people are asked if they have committed any offenses of a particular kind. Usually conducted by individual criminologists rather than by government agencies, these studies generally survey juveniles rather than adults, and they typically ask respondents about relatively minor criminal events rather than very serious ones. Nevertheless, the combined information from self-report surveys, victimization surveys, and official statistics will generally provide a more accurate description of crime.

Case studies

      The case study, also called the individual case history, concentrates on the career or life of one individual or group of individuals and is the method used primarily, though not exclusively, by psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts. Although the method has some shortcomings, such histories can provide insights into the personalities and motives of criminals. The number of criminological case studies has grown steadily, but their reliability is sometimes suspect: their publication is comparatively rare; professional ethics often forbid the exposure of details given confidentially; and those studies actually published may be atypical of the general subject they attempt to explore. In a similar vein, autobiographies and other books written by criminals can cast light on criminal motives and acts. Despite their considerable human and scientific interest, however, such works generally suffer from significant disadvantages—including a lack of objectivity.

Typologies

      Typologies (typology) involve classifying offenses or offenders according to some criteria of relatedness or similarity. For example, criminologists have made many attempts to arrange offenders into categories such as “normal” or “abnormal” and “habitual” or “professional” and to develop a continuum of criminals that would extend from the “insane” at one extreme through various career criminals, petty offenders, and white-collar criminals to “organized” or “professional” criminals at the other extreme. The typological method, while broader than the case study, is not so broad as the statistical method, being less impersonal and heterogeneous than that method and less individual or specific than the case study. The method, developed initially in Germany and Austria, has been criticized because it attempts to reduce complex phenomena to simple terms while tending to ignore important individual differences. Despite its considerable intuitive appeal, its problems seem to outweigh its benefits, and it is consequently not often used.

Experimental methods

      A controlled experiment involves taking two closely related situations or groups, subjecting one of them to a specific stimulus, and comparing the subsequent characteristics of both. In the past, so-called experiments by judicial, penal, and reformatory institutions were not really controlled or even experimental in the scientific sense, because public agencies considered themselves bound by the idea of justice to give equal treatment to equals rather than one kind of treatment to one group and another kind to another group. By the 1980s, however, public criminal justice agencies were more willing to engage in experimental research. Police in Minneapolis, Minn., for example, participated in a controlled random experiment on the use of arrest in domestic violence situations. When police encountered domestic violence, the decision of whether to arrest the offender was determined by random assignment, and these events were recorded for the next six months. The results indicated that, if the offender was arrested and spent one night in jail, the incidence of repeat domestic violence against the same victim in the next six months was halved. The research had a significant impact on police policies regarding domestic violence throughout the United States, and, because of such significant results, experimental research became more common in criminology and criminal justice.

      Such experimentation is nonetheless criticized by justice officials and the public, largely because they continue to believe that equal treatment should be accorded to equals. Nevertheless, its use has been spreading, largely because it seems to be the most effective means of determining whether police policies actually produce their intended effects.

Prediction studies

      Criminological prediction attempts to forecast the future conduct of persons under certain conditions. Whether based on statistics, case histories, or a combination of both, the predictions indicate the likelihood that a specific individual or group will be affected by certain conditions or treatments. Thus, for example, some people who commit some kinds of crimes, such as drug and sex offenses, are considered fairly likely to recidivate, while people who commit crimes such as murder are considered fairly unlikely to recidivate. Although statistical prediction can never be conclusive and can merely show certain probabilities, the method can be valuable in supplementing the inevitably limited personal experience of judges and administrators. In the last decades of the 20th century, prediction research became a very popular criminological method.

Action research

      Action research, which is often contrasted with experimental research, consists of drawing upon the observations of field-workers and other persons directly involved with delinquents, potential delinquents, or prisoners. For example, social workers (sociology) have attempted to help children and adolescents living in slums cope with their problems and at the same time have studied their delinquent behaviour, related it to their environment, and evaluated the results of youth clubs or other services offered. Action research attempts to achieve practical results through collaboration with field-workers. Trying to build a bridge between abstract theories and practical work, it often dispenses with formal hypotheses and simply aims at identifying and implementing tactics and activities that will help prevent delinquent behaviour. The best known and perhaps most successful example was Clifford Shaw's Chicago Area Project, carried out during the 1920s and '30s, which applied the ecological theories of University of Chicago sociologists Robert Park (Park, Robert E.) and Ernest Burgess (Burgess, Ernest Watson) in an attempt to motivate local residents to deal with the social problems of their neighbourhoods.

Cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural approaches

      In the late 20th century, criminology increasingly focused on cross-cultural approaches. Some cross-cultural studies have emphasized comparisons between descriptive statistics (e.g., two studies of delinquency in Philadelphia birth cohorts—persons born in the same year—were replicated with similar cohorts in Puerto Rico and China). Other studies have attempted to determine the individual characteristics associated with the increased likelihood of committing crime. For example, a study comparing youths born in Dunedin, N.Z., with youths born in Pittsburgh found that crime-prone youths in both countries tended to combine impulsivity with “negative emotionality” (e.g., anger, anxiety, and irritability). Still other studies explored the characteristics of societies that led to higher or lower crime rates; one such study found that the rates of lethal violence in the United States in the 1980s were five times greater than in other industrialized countries but that rates of other types of crimes were similar or even lower. Researchers have attempted to explain why this pattern existed and have also recommended policies designed to reduce lethal violence.

Major concepts and theories

Biological theories

      Biological (biology) theories of crime asserted a linkage between certain biological conditions and an increased tendency to engage in criminal behaviour. In the 1890s great interest, as well as controversy, was generated by the biological theory of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (Lombroso, Cesare), whose investigations of the skulls and facial features of criminals led him to the hypothesis that serious or persistent criminality was associated with atavism, or the reversion to a primitive stage of human development. In the mid-20th century, William Sheldon (Sheldon, William) won considerable support for his theory that criminal behaviour was more common among muscular, athletic persons (mesomorphs (mesomorph)) than among tall, thin persons (ectomorphs (ectomorph)) or soft, rounded individuals (endomorphs (endomorph)). During the 1960s, significant debate arose over the possible association between criminal tendencies and chromosomal (chromosome) abnormalities—in particular, the idea that males with the XYY-trisomy (characterized by the presence of an extra Y chromosome) may be more prone to criminal behaviour than the general population.

      Although the popularity of such earlier biological theories has waned, research has continued, yielding important findings. For example, studies have found general evidence for a connection between biology and criminality for both twins (twin) and adoptees (adoption). Twins are more likely to exhibit similar tendencies toward criminality if they are identical (monozygotic) than if they are fraternal (dizygotic). The fact that identical twins are more similar genetically than fraternal twins suggests the existence of genetic influences on criminal behaviour. Similarly, studies of adopted children have shown that the likelihood of criminality generally corresponds with that of their biological parents. The rate of criminality is higher among adopted children with one biological parent who is a criminal than it is among children who have one adoptive parent who is a criminal but whose biological parents are not criminals. The highest rates of criminality are found among children whose biological and adoptive parents are criminals.

      Biochemical research (biochemistry) in the 1980s and '90s attempted to identify specific factors associated with an increased risk of engaging in criminal behaviour. For example, certain neurotransmitter imbalances in the brain (e.g., low levels of serotonin), hormonal imbalances (e.g., higher levels of testosterone), and slower reactions of the autonomic nervous system appear to be associated with increased criminality. These factors do not absolutely determine whether a person will commit a crime; indeed, most people with these factors do not commit crimes. Instead, the presence of these factors merely increases the chance that the person will engage in criminal behaviour. Because these various biological factors may be influenced by environmental conditions, however, the direction of causation is unclear.

      Researchers have identified other biological factors associated with increased violence and aggressiveness, including alcohol intoxication, the use of some drugs (drug abuse) (e.g., crack cocaine but not marijuana), diet, and the ingestion of toxic substances. Drinking alcohol has tended to increase criminality temporarily, and the long-term effects of ingesting lead (such as is found in lead-based paint) have generally been associated with long-term increases in criminality. Further, certain types of head injuries and complications during pregnancy or birth are correlated with long-term increases in the tendency of the child to commit crime. The direction of causation in these cases is clearer than with serotonin and testosterone but not entirely certain. For example, it could be the case that some other nonbiological intervening factor (e.g., poverty) causes the increased tendency to commit crime and also causes the increased tendency to experience complications during pregnancy and birth, to ingest lead and other toxins, and to abuse alcohol.

Psychological theories

 Psychologists (psychology) approach the task of explaining delinquent and criminal behaviour by focusing on an individual's personality. In particular, they examine the processes by which behaviour and restraints on behaviour are learned. These processes often are conceived as being the result of the interaction of biological predispositions and social experiences.

      Among the earliest psychological theories of crime were those based on the work of Sigmund Freud (Freud, Sigmund) (1856–1939). Freud argued that human nature includes a great reservoir of instinctual drives (the “ id”) that demand gratification. These drives are restrained by moral and ethical codes (the “ superego”) that children internalize as a result of their great love for and attachment to their parents. Adults develop a rational part of their personality (the “ ego”) that mediates between the drives of the id and the restraints of the superego. Because the id is a relatively constant drive, criminality is assumed to result from the failure of the superego, a consequence of its incomplete development. However, the empirical evidence for this theory is thin.

      Later psychological theories of crime were based on behaviour theory (behaviourism), such as that of the American psychologist B.F. Skinner (Skinner, B.F.) (1904–90), who viewed all human behaviour—criminal and otherwise—as learned and thus manipulable by the use of reinforcement and punishment (see behaviourism). The social learning theory (social learning) of Ronald Akers (Akers, Ronald L.) expanded behaviour theory to encompass ways in which behaviour is learned from contacts within the family and other intimate groups, from social contacts outside the family (particularly from peer groups), and from exposure to models of behaviour in the media, particularly television.

      Beyond these broad psychological theories, it is sometimes argued that crime is associated with certain mental conditions. Mental illness (mental disorder) is generally the cause of a relatively small proportion of crimes, but its perceived importance may be exaggerated by the seriousness of some of the crimes committed by persons with mental disorders. The closure of many American mental institutions in the 1960s and '70s thrust many mentally ill people into the surrounding communities, where some of them later became troublesome. Because authorities had no other place to put them, there was a strong tendency for mentally ill people to end up in jails and prisons.

      One particular personality configuration—antisocial personality disorder—is thought to be strongly associated with criminality. However, because the criteria for diagnosing the disorder emphasize committing crimes and engaging in crimelike behaviour, it is unclear whether the disorder is a cause of crime or simply a label that psychiatrists use to describe people who happen to be criminals. In the 1990s, psychological research was focused on early childhood experiences that tended to lead to criminality in later life, including poor parental child-rearing techniques, such as harsh or inconsistent discipline. Research also isolated impulsivity—the tendency to engage in high levels of activity, to be easily distracted, to act without thinking, and to seek immediate gratification—as a personality characteristic associated with criminality.

Sociological theories

      The largest number of criminological theories have been developed through sociological inquiry (sociology). These theories have generally asserted that criminal behaviour is a normal response of biologically and psychologically normal individuals to particular kinds of social circumstances.

      Examples of these approaches include the theory of differential association, which claims that all criminal behaviour is learned and that the learning process is influenced by the extent of the individual's contact with persons who commit crimes. The more an individual associates with such persons, the more likely it becomes that he will learn and adopt criminal values and behaviours. The theory of anomie, proposed by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton (Merton, Robert K.), suggests that criminality results from an offender's inability to attain his goals by socially acceptable means; faced with this inability, the individual is likely to turn to other—not necessarily socially or legally acceptable—objectives or to pursue the original objectives by unacceptable means. The concept of a criminal subculture—an alternative set of moral values and expectations to which people can turn if they cannot find acceptable routes to the objectives held out for them by the broader society—represents an integration of the differential-association and anomie theories. Developed from studies of gangs of delinquents in U.S. cities, the subculture approach has been disputed by some sociologists, who deny the existence of any subculture of delinquency among the less affluent; the behaviour of gangs, they argue, is in fact an expression of widespread lower-class values that emphasize toughness and excitement.

      Another set of sociological theories also denies the existence of subcultural value systems. Neutralization theory, advanced by the American criminologists David Cressey, Gresham Sykes (Sykes, Gresham M.), and David Matza, portrays the delinquent as an individual who subscribes generally to the morals of society but who is able to justify his own delinquent behaviour through a process of “neutralization,” whereby the behaviour is redefined to make it morally acceptable. Control theory emphasizes the links between the offender and his social group—his bond to society. According to this view, the ability of the individual to resist the inclination to commit crime depends on the strength of his attachment to his parents, his involvement in conventional activities and avenues of progress, and his commitment to orthodox moral values that prohibit the conduct in question.

      The theory of low self-control retains the focus on restraints from engaging in crime but argues that those restraints are primarily internal. People with low self-control, according to this theory, are impulsive and insensitive to others, tend to engage in physical rather than mental activities and to take risks, and are oriented toward the short term rather than the long term. Advocates of self-control theory argue that these characteristics result from parental child-rearing practices and coalesce in the individual by about age eight, remaining stable throughout life.

      In contrast, labeling theory portrays criminality as a product of society's reaction to the individual. It contends that the individual, once convicted of a crime, is labeled a criminal and thereby acquires a criminal identity. Once returned to society, he continues to be regarded as a criminal and is consequently rejected by law-abiding persons and accepted by other delinquents. Over time, therefore, the offender becomes increasingly socialized into criminal behaviour patterns and more estranged from law-abiding behaviour.

      “Radical” criminological theories focus on power but anchor it in the political and economic structure of society. In particular, these theories generally explain both crime and criminal justice as by-products of capitalism and explore alternative systems that might generate more harmonious social relations. Radical theories tend to view criminal law as an instrument by which the powerful and affluent coerce the poor into patterns of behaviour that preserve the status quo. One such view, the so-called “peacemaking” theory, is based on the premise that violence creates violence. Advocates of this theory argue that criminal justice policies constitute state-sanctioned violence that generates rather than suppresses criminal violence.

      A similar view is represented by conflict theories, which hold that the powerful pursue their own self-interest though the enactment and enforcement of criminal laws. According to conflict theory, those with power and wealth are more likely to obey the criminal law because it tends to serve their interests. In addition, they are better able than poor people to avoid being incriminated when they do violate the law.

      Social-structural-strain theories attempt to explain the high rate of theft for monetary gain in the United States as a product of the class structure of American society. They hold that pressures to achieve financial success drive people to engage in this type of crime. They also maintain that less-affluent people commit these types of crime more frequently than wealthy people do, because members of lower economic classes generally have fewer opportunities to make money through legitimate means.

      Finally, ecological theories focus on the influence of neighbourhood organization on criminal activity. Researchers have found that poorer neighbourhoods, where families frequently move from one location to another and where there is a relatively high proportion of single-parent households, tend to have higher crime rates. Ecological theorists argue that this is a result of the inability of neighbourhood residents, because of the chaotic conditions of their lives, to organize effectively to achieve their goals.

A non-Western view: China

      Since 1949 China has generally advocated a Marxist (Marxism) interpretation of the causes of crime, viewing it as a product of an exploitative class structure founded upon the institution of private property. Because the official view is that crime is impossible in a purely socialist system, the “unreformed” elements of Chinese society are often identified as the causes of contemporary crime. A number of specific sources of criminal activity have been suggested: (1) external enemies and remnants of the overthrown reactionary classes (the latter referring to the government of the Republic of China in Taiwan), (2) other remnants of the old (pre-1949) society, including gangsters and hooligans, who refuse to reform, (3) lingering aspects of bourgeois ideology that value profit, cunning, selfishness, and decadence and thus encourage crime, and (4) the poverty and cultural backwardness that is seen as the legacy of the old society. The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and '70s also has been cited as a cause of crime, largely because it is thought to have confused notions of right and wrong and to have destroyed respect for authority.

      The economic reforms launched in China beginning in the mid-1970s led to dramatic economic growth but also to a significant increase in criminal activity. Although some dismissed the increase as a residual effect of the Cultural Revolution, the phenomenon is more often explained as arising from various unintended consequences of the economic reforms, including a loss of respect for leaders of society and for the collective goals of the socialist state and the spread of selfishness and lack of regard for others. Thus, because Chinese criminology views crime as mainly caused by backward thinking and ignorance, Chinese authorities have emphasized thought reform and education to combat criminal activity. Similar theories of the causes of crime are found in other societies that retain a Marxist economic system, including Cuba and North Korea.

Trends

      Criminology represents a diverse body of knowledge that incorporates a wide variety of approaches. Although few contemporary trends can be applied to the whole field of study, it is nonetheless the case that much research is increasingly quantitative, particularly in studies examining the causes of crime. Some of this work applies the statistical approach originated by Quetelet to explain the crime rates associated with particular societies and social groups; other work employs the approach originated by Lombroso to explain the likelihood of an individual's committing a crime in terms of his biological, psychological, or social characteristics. In addition, these approaches are increasingly aimed at probabilistic predictions rather than absolute or deterministic ones. Finally, criminologists now tend to concentrate on identifying factors in societies that are associated with relatively small increases in crime rates and factors in individuals that are associated with relatively small increases in the probability that they will commit crimes. All of this reflects the inherent complexity of the subject and points to the conclusion that no single factor actually determines whether an individual commits a crime or whether a society has high or low crime rates.

Hermann Mannheim Thomas J. Bernard

Additional Reading

Broad coverage of criminology is provided in Mike Maguire, Rod Morgan, and Robert Reiner (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 3rd ed. (2002); and Larry J. Siegel, Criminology, 8th ed. (2003). Theories of criminology are explored in Ronald L. Akers and Christine Sharon Sellers, Criminological Theories: Introduction, Evaluation, and Application, 5th ed. (2007); and George B. Vold, Thomas J. Bernard, and Jeffrey B. Snipes, Theoretical Criminology, 5th ed. (2002).Research methods are the subject of Michael G. Maxfield and Earl Babbie, Research Methods for Criminal Justice and Criminology, 4th ed. (2006). Policy considerations and their relationship to criminological research are the subject of Samuel Walker, Sense and Nonsense About Crime and Drugs: A Policy Guide, 6th ed. (2006).Some specific works representing the diversity of theory and research in criminology are Marvin E. Wolfgang, Robert M. Figlio, and Thorsten Sellin, Delinquency in a Birth Cohort (1972, reissued 1987); Robert J. Sampson and John H. Laub, Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life (1993); and Lawrence W. Sherman, Janell D. Schmidt, and Dennis P. Rogan, Policing Domestic Violence (1992).Thomas J. Bernard

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