Criminology

Criminology

Introduction

A defining feature of modernity was a belief in science and rationality, and a commitment of their application in public policy. This paper discusses the implications of this statement for understanding the character of criminology and crime control policy in a concise and comprehensive way.

Discussion

Rationality may be the most contested concept in all of the social and human sciences. Since the European Enlightenment, it has been a primary normative goal of humankind. The empirical view of humans as rational creatures has justified setting us apart from other species, even as it has served as the cornerstone for the most elaborated theories of human behavior. Attempts to cure irrationality have been at the heart of the development of psychology and the goals of social institutions (Manning, 2001). The attempts to define rational behavior and the question of under what circumstances humans exhibit it have been central to debates among and within the major social science disciplines. Meanwhile, chronicling the folly of man's attempts to act rationally is regularly explored in the humanities. Understanding rationality has even been a key driver in the attempt to use natural science (in the form of neurobiology) to put social science on a firmer basis.

To understand the meaning of crime statistics, one must first define crime. Crime is a very flexible concept, something like a woven carpet that produces powerful associations from the public and agencies charged with its control. It varies cross-culturally, historically, and spatially, as well as by social morphology and cultural and social differentiation. Since Adolphe Quetelet first advocated that social order could be captured metaphorically by numbers, and the regularity and stability associated with large numbers, commensurability has been sought across measures and numbers have been used to represent social trends (Tilley, 2003).

Official crime data, like official statistics generally, are associated with the development of the nation-state and its need to tax and count its citizens. They appear to function differentially in Anglo-American societies and European states. They reflect a belief and trust in numbers and science in fragmented, individualistic, and horizontally differentiated societies, and are less central to policy making in more centralized and integrated societies. Furthermore, the bureaucratically driven capacity of nation-states to monitor, direct, refine, and analyze data is increasing.

The social organization of detection and recording is central to the discussion of crime and crime statistics. The study of the social organization of response includes questions about the nature ...