Criminology and Criminal Justice

What is crime and how do societies respond to it? How do race, gender and class shape criminal justice processes? How is criminal justice changing in a globalizing and warming world? These are the questions of our Criminology & Criminal Justice option. The course begins by setting out the four thematic blocks that structure the seminars. In the first part, we learn to navigate criminology as a multidisciplinary field of study exploring legal, sociological and anthropological approaches to crime, punishment and justice. In the second part, we delve more deeply into newer forms of criminological knowledge production, including feminist, intersectional, queer, material, southern, decolonial and indigenous criminologies, which have often been neglected in mainstream criminology. Equipped with these rich theoretical perspectives, we then examine different criminal justice processes, institutions and actors such as the police and policing, courts and sentencing, prisons and imprisonment, victims and victimization in the third part. In the final part, we situate the study of criminology in a global context discussing cross-border developments like immigration detention, international criminal justice, ecocide and calls for a green criminology.

The course is taught collaboratively by members of the Faculty of Law, who are also members of the Centre for Criminology, bringing together their rich expertise. There will be one tutorial for each thematic block to help students make the connections between different themes. Students will learn to analyse crime, punishment and justice in an interdisciplinary, global and intersectional context and develop a critical understanding of the global inequality of criminological knowledge production. They will also learn to apply different theoretical frameworks including critical race, black feminist, political economy and decolonial theories to study key criminal justice processes and institutions such as policing, criminalization and imprisonment.