Criminal justice is the delivery of justice to those who have been accused of committing crimes. The criminal justice system is a series of government agencies and institutions. Goals include the rehabilitation of offenders, preventing other crimes, and moral support for victims. The primary institutions of the criminal justice system are the police, prosecution and defense lawyers, the courts and the prisons system.
Gary LaFree is a Professor and Chair of the Criminology and Criminal Justice department at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Director of the Maryland Crime Research and Innovation Center (MCRIC) and the Founding Director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). His main areas of expertise are sociology, criminology, race and crime, cross-national comparative research and political violence and terrorism.
In criminology, a political crime or political offence is an offence that prejudices the interests of the state or its government. States may criminalise any behaviour perceived as a threat, real or imagined, to the state's survival, including both violent and non-violent opposition. A consequence of such criminalisation may be that a range of human rights, civil rights, and freedoms are curtailed, and conduct which would not normally be considered criminal per se is criminalised at the convenience of the group holding power.
Articles related to criminology and law enforcement.
A super-maximum security (supermax) or administrative maximum (ADX) prison is a "control-unit" prison, or a unit within prisons, which represents the most secure level of custody in the prison systems of certain countries.
State crimes are crimes committed on behalf of or with the connivance of governments. The investigation and prosecution of such crimes is made more difficult by a number of circumstances.
The Institute of Criminology is the criminological research institute within the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge. The institute is one of the oldest criminological research institutes in Europe, and has exerted a strong influence on the development of criminology. Its multidisciplinary teaching and research staff are recruited from the disciplines of law, psychiatry, psychology, and sociology. It is located on the Sidgwick Site in the west of Cambridge, England. The Institute of Criminology building was designed by Allies and Morrison. The institute is also home to the Radzinowicz Library, which houses the most comprehensive criminology collection in the United Kingdom. The institute has approximately 50 PhD students, 30-40 M.Phil. students, and 200 M.St students. The institute also offers courses to Cambridge undergraduates, particularly in law, but also in human social and political sciences and in psychology and behavioural sciences.
John Lea is a British left realist criminologist. For many years he was based at the Centre for Criminology and the Crime and Conflict Research Centre, Middlesex University in the United Kingdom.
Jock Young was a British sociologist and an influential criminologist.
Lawrence W. Sherman is an American experimental criminologist and police educator who is the founder of evidence-based policing.
Meda Chesney-Lind is a US feminist, criminologist, and an advocate for girls and women who come in contact with the criminal justice system in Hawaii.
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.
Karlene Faith was a Canadian writer, feminist, scholar, and human rights activist. She was a professor emerita at the Simon Fraser University School of Criminology.
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, legal sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, psychiatrists, social workers, biologists, social anthropologists, scholars of law and jurisprudence, as well as the processes that define administration of justice and the criminal justice system.
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.
Kenneth George Pease is a British forensic psychologist and criminologist. He is a visiting professor at the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at University College London, a visiting professor at the University of Loughborough and an honorary visiting fellow at the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research at the University of Manchester. Previous positions he has held include Head of School of Sociology and Social Policy at the Ulster Polytechnic from 1981 to 1983, professor of criminology at the University of Huddersfield, the University of Manchester, the head of the Home Office's Policing and Reducing Crime Unit from 1999 to 2000, advisor to the Home Office Crime Reduction Programme from 2000 to 2003, associate professor at the University of Saskatchewan and consultant criminologist at the Correctional Service of Canada, working in the maximum security Regional Psychiatric Centre (Prairies), Saskatoon. He has been described as a "leading British criminologist" by Zoe McKnight of Maclean's.
Daniel Preston Mears is an American criminologist, a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology, and the Mark C. Stafford Professor of Criminology at the Florida State University College of Criminology & Criminal Justice. A 2011 ranking of American criminologists ranked Mears as the second most influential in terms of scholarly contributions. His research interests include the study of supermax prisons, immigration and crime, causes of offending, sentencing, and juvenile and criminal justice policy.
Anarchist criminology is a school of thought in criminology that draws on influences and insights from anarchist theory and practice. Building on insights from anarchist theorists including Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Peter Kropotkin, anarchist criminologists' approach to the causes of crime emphasises what they argue are the harmful effects of the state. Anarchist criminologists, a number of whom have produced work in the field since the 1970s, have critiqued the political underpinnings of criminology and emphasised the political significance of forms of crime not ordinarily considered to be political. Anarchists propose the abolition of the state; accordingly, anarchist criminologists tend to argue in favour of forms of non-state justice. The principles and arguments of anarchist criminology share certain features with those of Marxist criminology, critical criminology and other schools of thought within the discipline, while also differing in certain respects.
Kerry Lyn Carrington is an Australian criminologist, and an adjunct professor at the School of Law and Society at the University of the Sunshine Coast (USC). She formerly served as head of the QUT School of Justice for 11 years from 2009 to 2021. She was editor-in-chief of the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy. She is known for her work on gender and violence, feminist criminology, southern criminology, youth justice and girls' violence, and global justice and human rights.
Roderic Broadhurst is a criminal justice practitioner, academic, and author. He is an Emeritus Professor at the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) and Fellow of the Research School of Asian and the Pacific at the Australian National University (ANU).
