Criminological Theory

The course studies contemporary theoretical perspectives in criminology and uses them to explain and understand various forms of offence. Attention is paid to the manner in which central concepts in each theoretical perspective have been defined and how they have been related to one another in the criminological literature. Consideration is given to the way in which theories have been evaluated in the discipline. A focus of the course is a comparison of European criminology and United States criminology, with scrutiny directed toward the social, economic, cultural, and political influences on the practice of criminology in each region. A goal of the class is to explore the implications for public and private responses to crime that derive from the different theories.

Victimology, Punishment and Social Control

Victimology focuses on crime patterns and criminal victimization, fear of crime, the impact of victimization, the role of victims in the criminal justice process, and victim-centred conceptions of justice. Special emphasis is given to repeat victimization; victimization of socially, economically and politically marginalized populations; the economic, social and psychological impacts of victimization; and the response to victimization by various social institutions, which may contribute to secondary victimization. Various forms of victimization (e.g., child abuse, intimate partner assault, prejudice-based/hate crime, state crime) will be used as case studies.

Punishment and social control focuses on the common philosophical justifications for the use of punishment by the state, and the way they are operationalised in prison and non-custodial settings. Critical attention is given to “what works” and effectiveness research. The course also looks at the relationship between statutory and informal responses to crime, including the social, economic, and political features of society that inform punishment and social control in Europe and the United States, and their relevance for the Mediterranean region.

Comparative Legal Systems

The course explores the historical and philosophical influences on the world's major legal systems, focusing specifically on countries that practice civil (Roman) law, common law, the Islamic legal tradition, and the socialist legal tradition. The course analyzes the legal and criminal justice systems of the European Union and examines the civil legal traditions of France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, the original common law of Great Britain, the derivative common law systems of the United States, Ireland, Canada and Australia, the Islamic legal system of Saudi Arabia, and the socialist system of China and Russia.

Criminal Justice Processes

The course compares criminal justice organizations and the exercise of discretion by criminal justice workers in Europe and the United States, focusing particularly on police, courts, and punishment. Attention is paid to theoretical accounts of criminal justice practices. Consideration is given to the social, economic, and political influences that shape criminal justice organizations and their procedures. Reform of criminal justice organizations is studied, especially in the European Union and the United States. One aim of the course is to situate the Mediterranean experience of criminal justice against the background of systems in Europe and North America.

Studying Public Policy

The course addresses key questions: How do governments arrive at particular public policy choices? What social problems move on to the political agenda? What actors, events, or interests influence policy choices? Who is accountable for policy outcomes? Drawing on public policy literature in Washington DC, the European capitals, and Brussels, the course focuses on the process by which public policies are formed, reformed and implemented. The course draws on current policy debates in criminal justice and related areas with special emphasis on the underlying matter of bureaucratic accountability.

Research Methods

The course addresses the ways social and public policy research is conducted. It introduces basic social science research methods and controversies with particular attention to critical evaluation of research design choices, including the construction of research questions and the choice of appropriate research methods. Data collection strategies, data analysis techniques, and measurement and observation challenges are addressed. Students prepare a critical evaluation of a published research paper.

Qualitative Methods and Analysis

The course familiarizes students with qualitative epistemological and methodological approaches to data collection, analysis and reporting. Qualitative research is considered through both a philosophical and practical lens as it relates to criminal justice. Attention is paid to the utility and validity of qualitative approaches, along with an acquisition of skills within various means of data collection, analysis and reporting. The entirety of qualitative inquiry will be considered; however, explicit focus will be given to field research, interviews, focus groups, action research, unobtrusive research, and applied/evaluation research.

Crime Control and Crime Prevention Policy

The course explores how crime control policy is established in international contexts across criminal justice – policing, sentencing and corrections – with special emphasis on moral and ideological considerations, and the social, economic, and political drivers of crime control policy, including the role of the media. Special emphasis is placed on the privatization of the criminal justice response. The course also surveys crime prevention schemes in a comparative, multi-national context, including social crime prevention, situational crime prevention, and crime prevention through social development and community safety. It also examines restorative and reconciliatory justice strategies. Students acquire a critical appreciation of state-sponsored mechanisms and their effectiveness where crime prevention strategies act as an alternative or accompaniment to more "traditional" and reactive forms of justice administration, and the way these are increasingly challenged by new thinking such as the development of the private security industry.

Quantitative Methods and Analysis

The course offers an introduction to statistical modelling strategies typically employed in social science and policy analysis. The course includes extensive supervised lab work involving analysis of government expenditure data and social and economic indicators from the Organisation for Economic Development (OECD) – the international organisation helping governments tackle economic, social and governance challenges of a globalised economy. The implications for criminal justice strategies in law enforcement and policing, sentencing and corrections, and crime prevention and community safety are drawn and considered.

Spatial Analysis of Crime and Research Project Seminar

The course develops skills with which to analyze the distribution of crime geographically and how best to draw out appropriate law enforcement and criminal justice policy implications. Employing geographic information system software such as MapInfo, Arcview or ArcGIS, attention is paid to crucial issues of data management. Basic spatial analysis techniques such as proximity analysis, spatial distribution analysis, and distance analysis are examined. Advanced spatial analysis technique such as hot spot analysis, clustering, density mapping, and spatial dispersion mapping are also studied.  A goal of the class is to develop an ability to interpret reports in the research literature that make use of spatial analyses.

The course also asks how research projects are organized to yield convincing answers to important questions about crime and criminal justice, including ethical issues in conducting social research. Special attention is paid to the way in which information is managed in a research project and the way in which its argument can be made more compelling. These themes are addressed in seminar form designed to provide practical skills with which to organize and complete a defensible dissertation and other research projects.

State and Corporate Crime

The course centres on state (government) and corporate crime from a socio-criminological perspective. State and corporate crime is best conceptualized as an aspect of organizational crime, which is a subfield of white-collar crime. The course begins with an examination of the history of white-collar crime and analyzes important definitional and conceptual issues. It then focuses on the nature, extent, and costs of organizational crime, with attention toward the criminological theories used to explain these crimes. More detailed and specific attention is paid to national and multinational illustrations of state and corporate crime, the human rights violations contained therein, and the problems associated with reacting to and controlling these types of crimes. A case study on state and corporate crime in each student’s own region will be completed.

Environmental Crime and Justice

The course explores the emergence of environmental crime and environmental justice movements as facets of the contemporary concern with the environment. Attention is directed to how environmental crime has been defined in various legal systems and how criminal justice agencies enforce environmental laws and react to environmental justice movements. Consideration is given to how risks and benefits associated with economic production are distributed in space and time and how various environmental justice movements mobilize on behalf of groups who have been unfairly burdened by these risks and denied the benefits. The course covers environmental history, environmental movements, environmental risk, the various "isms" of environmental justice such as racism, classism, sexism, and speciesism, as well as environmental justice in the workplace and the global context. A case study on environmental justice in the student’s own region will be developed.

Gender, Crime and Justice

In the last three decades global feminist literature has seen a significant growth in research and writing about gender justice, legal and constitutional rights of women, citizenship, and development. A multi-disciplinary assessment of gender injustices has revealed the endemic inequalities between men and women in the cultural, social, political, legal, and economic contexts. Thus, gender injustice is represented in the public domain where unequal justice is dispensed by judicial, legal, and political institutions. Gender injustice is also present in the private domain where the cultural construction of gender limits women's agency and leaves them powerless. Gender and justice is viewed globally and studied in the context of the cultural construction of gender, feminization of poverty, citizenship, constitutional rights, violence against women, criminalization of women, development, and political and women's empowerment. A case study on gender and justice in the student’s own region will be developed by each student.

Surveillance and Security

This course studies the idea and practice of surveillance so that its role in the production and maintenance of social order and security might be understood in its criminological and wider context. While the course is concerned with the sociological literature on surveillance, it is also interdisciplinary with reading material taken from the fields of art, criminology, philosophy, popular culture, education, law, information technology, and public health. An examination of the central concepts and theories of surveillance is the primary focus but attention is also given to the relationship between privacy and surveillance as well as resistance to surveillance regimes. The course will inspect five areas in which practical applications of surveillance are core features, particularly in the Mediterranean region: deviance/crime, e-commerce, border control, food systems, and tourism. A case study will be prepared by each student on a chosen form of surveillance.

Dissertation

The dissertation draws on all aspects of the taught courses drawing on the knowledge and analytical skills developed through the programme. Students produce an investigation that evidences competence to design, carry out, and report an original and important criminological study. It has a number of key components: formulating a research question important to the discipline of criminology; evaluating the existing literature that bears on the selected research question; formulating a research design that permits the collection of observations with which to answer the research question; analyzing the observations collected by the research design using quantitative, qualitative, or spatial techniques; synthesizing the results of the research with the extant literature related to the research question; and recommending  policy responses or further research related to the research question.