CRCJ 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Adolphe Quetelet, Psychopathy, Social Physics
27 Feb 2018
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Document Summary
Week 1 introduction to criminology and criminal justice. Criminology = the study of making law, breaking laws, and the reaction to breaking laws: the study of crimes, criminals and criminalization. Crime: how much, where, characteristics of the offenders? (i. e. typically young male, low socioeconomic status, characteristics of the victims, evolution through space and time, epidemiological approach = the study of incidence and distribution of diseases. Introduction of statistic methods in the sciences of the social: they connect crime with location, age, etc. Predictive policing = software using statistics to determine where officers should be in order to stop crime. Methodological strategies: official crime data (police-reported, self-report surveys, victimization surveys. Criminals: the criminology of perpetration: classical: crime is the result of an action by a relational actor; nothing particularly unusual about committing crime/there"s a benefit to it. Utilitarianism = sees punishment as bad in itself; can only be justified if it can prevent further crime.
