The paper stresses the need for a concise, non-polemical definition of criminology and offers one that emphasizes its empirical, non-speculative and non-normative nature and that restricts its subject-matter. The paper asserts that attempts to broaden the scope of criminology and to stretch its subject-matter have been detrimental to the discipline. They have led criminology astray. It argues therefore for a retrenchment and calls on criminology to make territorial concessions and to restrict its field of research to the pursuit of scientific knowledge about crime, offenders and victims. In line with this, the paper calls for separating criminology from the normative/dogmatic discipline of criminal law, from the political/ideological field of criminal policy and from the professional areas of criminal justice that are simply users of criminological knowledge.
The paper argues that there is no logic, rationale or compelling reason dictating that the study of social reaction to crime, the study of making, unmaking and remaking the laws, be part and parcel of the empirical, non-normative science of criminology. It argues that there is no sound rationale for considering distinct disciplines such as penology or the sociology of punishment as branches of criminology. One of the questions it asks is “why should a practical, legal exercise like sentencing be part of a science of crime?”
The call for criminology to detach itself from criminal policy and to devote itself to the scientific pursuit of knowledge about crime, offenders and victims logically leads to questioning current attempts to divorce victimology from criminology and to claim it to be an autonomous discipline it its own right. The paper laments the fact that in their missionary zeal victim advocates have killed any hope for victimology to develop into a truly scientific, objective, non-partisan discipline. They navigated it towards becoming a branch of social work. Since social work is not a science but a profession, the only hope for victimology to reclaim the status of a scientific discipline is to detach itself from victim policy and to revert to its original position as an integral branch of criminology.
Following this, the paper calls attention to the basic differences between “sciences” and “professional disciplines”. Criminology, it maintains, is a social/behavioral science. Criminal justice, policing, corrections, probation and parole supervision, after-care are not sciences. They are professions. The relationship of criminal justice to criminology is not dissimilar to that between nursing and medicine. Though related in some ways, they are distinct. Criminal justice is concerned with the “HOW” questions. Criminology's main preoccupation is with the “WHY” questions. The distinction between criminology as a social/behavioral science and criminal justice as a profession and the need to teach them in separate settings, with different curricula, has long been recognized and is the dominant model in North America. There are university departments of criminology that have a theoretical and research focus and there are schools (or programs) of criminal justice as well as police colleges that have applied, practical, vocational and technological orientations.
The paper then examines at length the fundamental differences between the social/behavioral science of criminology and the normative/dogmatic discipline of criminal law. It stresses the autonomy of criminology and refutes the popular, yet fallacious argument that criminology's subject-matter is determined and circumscribed by the criminal law. It goes on to show why teaching criminology and criminal law under the same roof and within the same administrative structure is detrimental to the development and advancement of criminology. Stressing criminology's nature as a multidisciplinary, synthesis science it asks how could a synthesis science advance, develop and flourish in a unidisciplinary setting? This leads to the argument that the optimal setting for teaching criminology is autonomous multidisciplinary departments at the graduate level. And the paper follows this up by proposing an abbreviated model for the teaching of criminology and related disciplines.
To conclude the paper affirms that Criminology's stagnation, lack of innovation and its slow adaptation to the realities of the 21st century is threatening its very existence as it risks becoming irrelevant to the threats facing post 9/11 society, namely the flagrant abuses of power and the serious violations of human rights and civil liberties. To avoid such distressing scenario, the paper suggests that if criminology is to gain in stature and prestige it has to shed its undeserved European reputation as an auxiliary branch of the criminal law and its American reputation as a sub-field of sociology. It has to fight and correct the misperception that it is a peripheral discipline at the bottom heap of the social sciences. It has to affirm its scientific nature, its own identity, its originality, and its autonomy. It has to affirm its specificity, its objectivity and its neutrality. It has to dissociate itself from the criminal law and to divorce itself from criminal policy. And finally the time seems to have come to separate the teaching of criminology from the teaching of other professional fields such as law, law enforcement, criminal justice, etc. in the same way that medicine is taught separately from nursing and the science of economics is taught separately from the professional discipline of accounting.
