In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a state or other authority. The term crime does not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition, though statutory definitions have been provided for certain purposes. The most popular view is that crime is a category created by law; in other words, something is a crime if declared as such by the relevant and applicable law. One proposed definition is that a crime or offence is an act harmful not only to some individual but also to a community, society, or the state. Such acts are forbidden and punishable by law.
Donald Black is a University Professor of the Social Sciences at the University of Virginia. Black received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan in 1968, and he taught at Yale and Harvard before moving to Virginia in 1985.
Like rational choice theory, conflict theory, or functionalism, pure sociology is a sociological paradigm — a strategy for explaining human behavior. Developed by Donald Black as an alternative to individualistic and social-psychological theories, pure sociology was initially used to explain variation in legal behavior. Since then, Black and other pure sociologists have used the strategy to explain terrorism, genocide, lynching, and other forms of conflict management as well as science, art, and religion.
Edwin Hardin Sutherland was an American sociologist. He is considered one of the most influential criminologists of the 20th century. He was a sociologist of the symbolic interactionist school of thought and is best known for defining white-collar crime and differential association, a general theory of crime and delinquency. Sutherland earned his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1913. In 1939 Edwin was the first who introduced White Collar Crime.
Stuart Henry is professor emeritus, Criminal justice and former director of the School of Public Affairs, San Diego State University (2006–17). He has also been visiting professor of criminology at the University of Kent's School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research from 2008 to 2013 and visiting research scholar in sociology at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, 2017.
Andreas von Hirsch, before 2008 published under his anglicised name Andrew von Hirsch, is a legal philosopher and penal theorist and the founding Director of the centre for Penal Theory and Penal Ethics at the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge. He also has been Honorary Professor of Penal Theory and Penal Law at Cambridge University, and an Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College.
James Barrett Jacobs was the Warren E. Burger Professor of Constitutional Law and the Courts at New York University School of Law, where he was a faculty member since 1982. He was a specialist in criminal law, criminal procedure, and criminal justice.
Lucia Zedner, FBA is a British legal scholar, who is Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Oxford and a senior fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
Jonathan Simon is an American academic, the Lance Robbins Professor of Criminal Justice Law, and the former Associate Dean of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Simon’s scholarship concerns the role of crime and criminal justice in governing contemporary societies, risk and the law, and the history of the interdisciplinary study of law. His other interests include criminology; penology; sociology; insurance models of governing risk; governance; the origins and consequences of, and solutions to, the California prison "crisis"; parole; prisons; capital punishment; immigration detention; and the warehousing of incarcerated people.
David Downes is a British sociologist and criminologist and is Professor Emeritus of Social Administration at the London School of Economics.
Johan Thorsten Sellin was a Swedish American sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, a penologist and one of the pioneers of scientific criminology.
Sir Anthony Edward Bottoms FBA is a British criminologist. He is life fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, having previously been a Wolfson Professor of Criminology at the Institute of Criminology in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge from 1984 to 2006 and until December 2007 a professor of criminology jointly at the universities of Cambridge and Sheffield.
Robert Agnew is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Sociology at Emory University and past-president of the American Society of Criminology.
Vincenzo Ruggiero is Professor of Sociology at Middlesex University, London. He is also director of the Centre for Social and Criminological Research at Middlesex University.
Punishment and Social Structure (1939), a book written by Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, is the seminal Marxian analysis of punishment as a social institution. It represents the 'most sustained and comprehensive account of punishment to have emerged from within the Marxist tradition’ and ‘succeeds in opening up a whole vista of understanding which simply did not exist before it was written'. It is a central text in radical criminology, and an influential work in criminological conflict theory, cited as a foundation text in several major textbooks. It offers a broader (macrosociological) level of analysis than many micro-analyses that focus on the atomized and differentiated individual.
Criminology is the interdisciplinary study of crime and deviant behaviour. Criminology is a multidisciplinary field in both the behavioural and social sciences, which draws primarily upon the research of sociologists, political scientists, economists, psychologists, philosophers, psychiatrists, social workers, biologists, social anthropologists, as well as scholars of law.
Philip Thomas Bean is Emeritus professor of Criminology at Loughborough University, former President of the British Society of Criminology (1996–99) and an authority and author on the impact on society of drugs, mental illness and crime having published 62 works that are held in approximately 6,000 libraries around the world.
Valerie Jenness is an author, researcher, public policy advisor, and professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society and in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Jenness is currently a visiting professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and prior to that, was a senior visiting scholar at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan. Jenness served as dean of the School of Social Ecology from 2009 to 2015 and chair of the Department of Criminology, Law and Society from 2001-2006. Jenness is credited with conducting the first systemic study of transgender women in men's prisons.
Lesley McAra is Chair of Penology at the University of Edinburgh She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and was appointed a CBE in the New Year's Honours List 2018, for services to Criminology.
Gregg Barak is an American criminologist, academic, and author. He is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University, a former visiting distinguished professor in the College of Justice & Safety at Eastern Kentucky University, and a 2017 Fulbright Scholar in residence at the School of Law, Pontificia Universidade Catholica, Porto Alegre, Brazil. He is most known for his research in the fields of criminology and criminal justice.
