Criminal Justice Studies
Definition
The applied study of the agencies that respond to crime, chiefly the police, the courts, and correctional institutions, and how they operate and interact.
Related terms
- Criminology
- The scientific study of crime, its causes and distribution across populations, the operation of criminal justice institutions, and strategies for prevention and...
- Interdisciplinarity
- The practice of drawing concepts and methods from several established disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, and biology, to explain a single phenomenon.
- Penology
- The branch of criminology concerned with the theory and practice of punishment and imprisonment. It examines the aims of punishment (retribution, deterrence,...
- Applied Discipline
- A field of study oriented toward improving how an institution or practice functions, as criminal justice studies is oriented toward how police,...
- Biosocial Criminology
- An approach that treats biological and social factors as mutually constitutive rather than alternative explanations for crime. It holds that genetic or...
- Rational Choice Theory
- A criminological theory, associated with Cornish and Clarke, that treats offending as purposive behaviour: offenders assess the rewards, costs, risks, and effort...
- Sociology of Law
- The study of whose interests a given criminal statute serves and how criminalisation decisions track shifts in economic or political power.
- Theory-Building
- The activity of constructing and testing general explanations for a phenomenon, the core activity of criminology as against the operational focus of...