WHAT ARE THE BRANCHES OF CRIMINOLOGY? - CULTURE VOCABULARY - 2025

The branches of criminology are penology, sociology of law, victimology, anthropological criminology, forensic psychology, and forensic science. Criminology is the study of law enforcement and the criminal justice system.

A person seeking a career in criminal justice will most likely first try to earn a criminology degree. While criminal justice and criminology are certainly related fields, they are not identical.

"Criminology" is derived from the Latin "crime", which means accusation, and the transliterated Greek word "lodge", which has come to denote "the study of", therefore, the study of crime.

Criminology is an interdisciplinary field in both the social and behavioral sciences, drawing especially on the research of sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, psychiatrists, social anthropologists, and legal scholars.

The term criminology was coined in 1885 by the Italian law professor Raffaele Garofalo as "criminology." Later, the French anthropologist Paul Topinard used the French analog "criminologie."

The importance of criminology lies in its interest in the scientific study of the nature, extension, management, causes, control, consequences and prevention of criminal behavior, both at the individual and social level. Criminology improves society.

Main branches of criminology

Criminology encompasses wide areas of study as it is a humanitarian science that seeks to improve society.

The various fields and study methods have led to the establishment of new branches that manage to explain the criminalistic aspects around the world.

Penology

It is a branch of criminology that deals with the philosophy and practice of various societies in their attempts to suppress criminal activities and satisfy public opinion through an appropriate treatment regime for people convicted of crimes.

Penology is a term that was probably coined by Francis Lieber. The Oxford English Dictionary defines penology as "the study of the punishment of crime and prison management," and in this sense it is equivalent to corrections made to criminals.

Penology deals with the effectiveness of social processes devised and adopted for crime prevention, through the repression or inhibition of criminal intent through fear of punishment.

Therefore, the study of penology is concerned with the treatment of inmates and the subsequent rehabilitation of convicted offenders.

It also covers aspects of probation (rehabilitation of offenders within a community) as well as prison science related to the safe detention and retraining of committed offenders with secure institutions.

Penology refers to many themes and theories, including those relating to prisons (prison reform, prisoner abuse, inmate rights, and recidivism), as well as theories of the purposes of punishment (such as deterrence, rehabilitation, retribution and utilitarianism).

Contemporary penology deals mainly with penal rehabilitation and prison management.

The word is rarely applied to punishment theories and practices in less formal settings such as parenting, school, and correctional measures in the workplace.

Sociology of law

The sociology of law (or legal sociology) is a branch of criminology that is often described as a sub-discipline of sociology or an interdisciplinary approach within legal and / or social studies.

Consequently, it can be described without reference to mainstream sociology as "the systematic, theoretically founded and empirical study of law, as a set of social practices, or as an aspect or field of social experience."

It has been seen that the system of law and justice is a fundamental institution of the basic structure of society that mediates between “political and economic interests, culture and the normative order of society, establishing and maintaining interdependence and constituting itself as sources of consensus and social control ”.

As such, legal sociology reflects social theories and employs social scientific methods to study law, legal institutions, and legal behavior.

More specifically, the sociology of law consists of various approaches to the study of law in society, which empirically examine and theorize the interaction between law, legal and non-legal institutions, and social factors.

Socio-legal research areas include the social development of legal institutions, forms of social control, legal regulation, the interaction between legal cultures, the social construction of legal issues, the legal profession and the relationship between law. and social change.

Victimology

Victimology is the study of victimization, including relationships between victims and offenders, interactions between victims and the criminal justice system, and connections between victims and other social groups and institutions such as the media, the companies and social movements.

However, victimology is not limited to the study of crime victims, but can include other forms of human rights violations.

Anthropological criminology or criminal anthropology

It is a field of offender profiling, based on the perceived links between the nature of a crime and the personality or physical appearance of the offender.

Although similar to physiognomy and phrenology, the term "criminal anthropology" is generally reserved for the works of the Italian school of criminology of the late 19th century (Cesare Lombroso, Enrico Ferri, Raffaele Garofalo).

Lombroso thought that offenders were born with lower physiological differences that were detectable.

He popularized the notion of "born criminal" and thought that criminality was an atavism or hereditary disposition.

Forensic psychology

Forensic psychology, defined by the American Psychological Association, is the application of clinical specialties to the legal field. This definition emphasizes the application of clinical psychology to the forensic context.

Writer Christopher Cronin defines it as "The application of clinical specialties to legal institutions and persons who come into contact with the law" (page 5), again emphasizing the application of clinical skills such as assessment, treatment, and evaluation to forensic adjustments.

Forensic science

Forensic science is the application of science to criminal and civil laws, mainly in criminal matters during the criminal investigation, as governed by the legal norms of admissible evidence and criminal procedure.

References

1. Jane Tyler Ward, PhD. (2013). What is forensic psychology? August 03, 2017, from American Psychological Association Website: apa.org.
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4. Siegel, Larry J. (2003). Criminology, 8th edition. Thomson-Wadsworth. p. 7.
5. Garland, David (2002). "Of Crimes and Criminals." In Maguire, Mike; Rod Morgan; Robert Reiner. The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 3rd edition. Oxford University Press. p. twenty-one.
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7. Arnaud, André-Jean (2007) "Carbonnier, Jean" in Encyclopedia of Law and Society: American and Global Perspectives (Thousand Oaks: SAGE).
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