A hate crime is a prejudice-motivated crime which occurs when a perpetrator targets a victim because of their perceived membership of a certain social group.
Victimology is the study of victimization, including the psychological effects on victims, the relationship between victims and offenders, the interactions between victims and the criminal justice system—that is, the police and courts, and corrections officials—and the connections between victims and other social groups and institutions, such as the media, businesses, and social movements.
A serial killer is typically a person who murders three or more people, with the murders taking place over more than a month and including a significant period of time between them. While most authorities set a threshold of three murders, others extend it to four or lessen it to two.
A spree killer is someone who commits a criminal act that involves two or more murders in a short time, often in multiple locations. There are different opinions about what durations of time a killing spree may take place in. The United States Bureau of Justice Statistics has spoken of "almost no time break between murders", but some academics consider that a killing spree may last weeks or months, e.g. the case of Andrew Cunanan, who murdered five people over three months.
Harold Schechter is an American true crime writer who specializes in serial killers. He is a Professor Emeritus at Queens College, City University of New York where he taught classes in American literature and myth criticism for forty-two years. Schechter's essays have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and the International Herald Tribune. He is the editor of the Library of America volume, True Crime: An American Anthology. His newest book, published in March 2021, is Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer.
A thrill killing is premeditated or random murder that is motivated by the sheer excitement of the act. While there have been attempts to categorize multiple murders, such as identifying "thrill killing" as a type of "hedonistic mass killing", actual details of events frequently overlap category definitions making attempts at such distinctions problematic.
Articles related to criminology and law enforcement.
David Wilson is a Scottish emeritus professor of criminology at Birmingham City University. A former prison governor, he is well known as a criminologist specialising in serial killers through his work with various British police forces, academic publications, books and media appearances.
Steven Barkan, an American sociologist, is Professor and chairperson of the Sociology department at the University of Maine.
Jack Olsen was an American journalist and author known for his crime reporting.
Don Eldridge Gorton III was a Massachusetts attorney who served as a state tax judge from 1997 to 2008.
A copycat crime is a criminal act that is modelled after or inspired by a previous crime. It notably occurs after exposure to media content depicted said crimes, and/or a live criminal model.
Cultural criminology is a subfield in the study of crime that focuses on the ways in which the "dynamics of meaning underpin every process in criminal justice, including the definition of crime itself." In other words, cultural criminology seeks to understand crime through the context of culture and cultural processes. Rather than representing a conclusive paradigm per se, this particular form of criminological analysis interweaves a broad range of perspectives that share a sensitivity to “image, meaning, and representation” to evaluate the convergence of cultural and criminal processes.
James Alan Fox is the Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy and former dean at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States. Fox holds a bachelor's degree in sociology (1972), a master's degree in criminology (1974), a master's degree in statistics (1975), and a Ph.D. in sociology (1976), all from the University of Pennsylvania.
Marvin Eugene Wolfgang was an American sociologist and criminologist.
Michael Andrew Arntfield is a Canadian academic, author, criminologist, true crime broadcaster and podcaster, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, and a Fulbright scholar. He is also a workplace violence harassment consultant, threat assessor, and former police officer. From 1999 to 2014, Arntfield was employed with the London Police Service as a Police Officer and Detective. In 2014, Arntfield left policing to accept a customized academic appointment at the University of Western Ontario. Today, Arntfield teaches "literary criminology," a term he adopted combined English literature and crime studies program.
James Densley is a British-American sociologist and Professor of Criminal Justice at Metropolitan State University. He is best known as co-founder of The Violence Project and as co-author of the bestselling book, The Violence Project: How To Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic. Densley has also published extensively on street gang issues and has been described as "among the most accomplished rising leaders of modern gang research in criminology." He was one of the top 250 most cited criminologists in the world in 2019.
Amanda Howard is an Australian fiction writer, true crime author, and expert on serial killers.
Arnold Arluke is professor emeritus of sociology and anthropology at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts and senior fellow at the Tufts Center for animals and public policy. Arluke earned a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard School of Public Health. He has served as a visiting scholar at Cornell Medical College, the department of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, Yale Law School, and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). Currently, he resides in St. Petersburg, Florida where he is a consultant to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) and a portrait photographer.
James E. Hawdon is an American sociologist, academic, and author. He is a professor of Sociology and a Director for the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention at Virginia Tech.
