Maureen Cain (born 1938) is a British criminologists and professor.
She received her bachelor's degree from London School of Economics in 1959, and she attained her PhD from the London School of Economics in 1969. After graduating from LSE, Cain became a professor.
Cain's three main teaching posts have been:
She has taught courses in Sociology of Law and Crime and Sociology of Law.
She was president of the British Society of Criminology from 2003 to 2006. [2]
Cain's interests have been as broad as looking and studying the major works of Marx & Engels "Sociology of Law" to looking into "Society and the Policeman's Role". Cain's more current teaching and research interests have come from her years in Trinidad teaching at The University of the West Indies. While in Trinidad she studied Women, Crime and Social Harms. Cain's original interest and her PhD dissertation was "Society and the Policeman's Role", which is noted for being ahead of its time in feminist criminology. Cain then moved away from criminology to look at "The main themes of Marx's and Engels' sociology of law" then she returned to a look into policing when she wrote "Racism, the police, and community policing: a comment on the Scarman Report”. [3] Cain then wrote “Orientalism, Occidentalism and the sociology of Crime” and today she is about to publish a new book called “Globality, Crime and Criminology” due to be available for sale 30 July 2010. [4]
Maureen Cain's biggest contribution to feminist criminology was her first contribution, “Society and the Policeman’s Role”. This has been noted as being “Ahead of its feminist time”. "Society and the Policeman's Role" is just one example of her contribution to feminist criminology and because of this initial and prolific contribution Maureen Cain can be considered a pioneer in the field of feminist criminology. [5] Cain also looks at women's issues in many of her articles of Transgressions in Criminology as she looks at the historical treatment of men vs women and she brings up many political questions as to the level of rights surrounding feminism. [6]
Critical criminology applies critical theory to criminology. Critical criminology examines the genesis of crime and the nature of justice in relation power, privilege, and social status. These include factors such as class, race, gender, and sexuality. Legal and penal systems are understood to reproduce and uphold systems of social inequality. Additionally, critical criminology works to uncover possible biases within traditional criminological research.
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan is an 1884 anthropological treatise by Friedrich Engels. It is partially based on notes by Karl Marx to Lewis H. Morgan's book Ancient Society (1877). The book is an early historical materialist work and is regarded as one of the first major works on family economics.
Marxist criminology is one of the schools of criminology. It parallels the work of the structural functionalism school which focuses on what produces stability and continuity in society but, unlike the functionalists, it adopts a predefined political philosophy. As in conflict criminology, it focuses on why things change, identifying the disruptive forces in industrialized societies, and describing how society is divided by power, wealth, prestige, and the perceptions of the world. It is concerned with the causal relationships between society and crime, i.e. to establish a critical understanding of how the immediate and structural social environment gives rise to crime and criminogenic conditions. William Chambliss and Robert Seidman explain that "the shape and character of the legal system in complex societies can be understood as deriving from the conflicts inherent in the structure of these societies which are stratified economically and politically".
The feminist school of criminology is a school of criminology developed in the late 1960s and into the 1970s as a reaction to the general disregard and discrimination of women in the traditional study of crime. It is the view of the feminist school of criminology that a majority of criminological theories were developed through studies on male subjects and focused on male criminality, and that criminologists often would "add women and stir" rather than develop separate theories on female criminality.
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.
Gloria Laycock was the founding Director of the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at University College London (UCL), and ran UCL's Centre for Security & Crime Science. She is an internationally renowned expert in crime prevention, and especially situational approaches which seek to design out situations which provoke crime.
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.
Nicole Hahn Rafter was a feminist criminology professor at Northeastern University. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, achieved her Master of Arts in Teaching from Harvard University, and obtained a Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from State University of New York in Albany. She began her career as a high school and college English professor and switched to criminal justice in her mid-thirties.
Carol Christine Smart is a feminist sociologist and academic at the University of Manchester. She has also conducted research about divorce and children of divorced couples.
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.
Freda Adler is a criminologist and educator, currently serving as professor emeritus at Rutgers University and a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She was President of the American Society of Criminology in 1994-1995. She has acted as a consultant to the United Nations on criminal justice matters since 1975, holding various roles within United Nations organizations. A prolific writer, Adler has published in a variety of criminological areas, including female criminality, international issues in crime, piracy, drug abuse, and social control theories.
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.
Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory is a book by the sociologist Lise Vogel that is considered an important contribution to Marxist Feminism. Vogel surveys Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's comments on the causes of women's oppression, examines how socialist movements in Europe and in the United States have addressed women's oppression, and argues that women's oppression should be understood in terms of women's role in social reproduction and in particular in reproducing labor power.
Manuel Eisner is Wolfson Professor of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, and Deputy Director of the Cambridge Institute of Criminology. He researches the history of interpersonal violence, and has conducted a study on levels of homicide throughout Europe over a period of 800 years. His research has highlighted the ways in which cultural models of conduct of life, embedded in social institutions, have shaped patterns of daily behaviour among adolescent and young adult men, which in turn have influenced the likelihood of frictions leading to aggressive behaviour. He is also recognised for his studies on the developmental causes of crime and delinquency and advocates the effectiveness of early prevention during childhood. Recent projects include the London Medieval Murder Map and the Evidence for Better Lives, a global birth-cohort study in eight cities across the world.
Marxist literary criticism is a theory of literary criticism based on the historical materialism developed by philosopher and economist Karl Marx. Marxist critics argue that even art and literature themselves form social institutions and have specific ideological functions, based on the background and ideology of their authors. The English literary critic and cultural theorist Terry Eagleton defines Marxist criticism this way: "Marxist criticism is not merely a 'sociology of literature', concerned with how novels get published and whether they mention the working class. Its aims to explain the literary work more fully; and this means a sensitive attention to its forms, styles and, meanings. But it also means grasping those forms styles and meanings as the product of a particular history." In Marxist criticism, class struggle and relations of production are the central instruments in analysis.
Lise Vogel is a feminist sociologist and art historian from the United States. An influential Marxist-feminist theoretician, she is recognised for being one of the main founders of the Social Reproduction Theory. She also participated in the civil rights and the women's liberation movements in organisations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi and Bread & Roses in Boston. In her earlier career as an art historian, she was one of the first to try to develop a feminist perspective on Art History.
Per-Olof Helge Wikstrӧm is Professor of Ecological and Developmental Criminology at the University of Cambridge, Professorial Fellow of Girton College and Principal Investigator of the Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+), a major ESRC funded longitudinal study of young people in the UK which aims to advance knowledge about crime causation and prevention. His main research interests are developing a unified theory of the causes of crime, testing it empirically and applying it to devising knowledge-based prevention policies. His work is internationally acknowledged, as demonstrated by his election as a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology in 2010 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2011.
Penny Green is an Australian criminologist. She has been a Professor of Law and Globalisation and Head of the Department of Law at Queen Mary University of London since September 2014.
Mary Susan McIntosh was a British sociologist, feminist, political activist and campaigner for lesbian and gay rights in the United Kingdom.
Frances Mary Heidensohn is an academic sociologist and criminologist at the London School of Economics, who is acknowledged as a pioneer in feminist criminology. Her 1968 article The Deviance of Women: A Critique and An Enquiry was the first critique of conventional criminology from a feminist perspective.