Criminology is an emerging concept which is gaining a lot of popularity because of its uniqueness as well as high demand in the present scenario. The word Criminology is derived from latin word crimen means crime and greek word logos means doctrine. Definitions of criminology are many but defining criminology in simple terms would be like; it is the scientific study of crime, criminals, and the justice system. There are also other definitions such as “Criminology is the scientific study of non legal aspects of crime and delinquency with its causes, correctness and prevention”. The most fascinating aspect of criminology is that it provides a number of opportunities to work and observe a number of people from different fields. Many law aspirants and psychology students take a lot of interest in these subjects. Different educational platforms also provide different courses on Criminology.
To understand the concept of Criminology, first one has to know complete details about the core of the subject. The foundation of these subjects is based on Crime. The most important questions: Why? When? How? And What did the person who committed the crime get? The answers to these questions are hard to find but they are very important to understand in order to punish a crime and that’s where a criminologist comes in handy. Now who is a criminologist? Criminologist is a professional who studies crime and works in order to reduce crime and prevent it. There are various law related platforms which provide the best online law certification courses, they teach every aspect of criminology and skills related to them. In India, this field is in high demand and there are a number of career options that are available on completion of the course based on criminology.
Importance of Criminology
The advantages of criminology are numerous, it helps to understand the mind behind the crimes which help to understand the motive of the crime, what triggered it and how it can be reduced. After finding the cause of the crime there could be possible ways to prevent it from happening again and save innocent victims from future harm. Basically understanding the mindset of criminals works as the best resource to control crime rate. Most importantly criminology can help a lot in reducing delinquency let’s understand how? A wrongful act committed by a juvenile comes under Delinquency. So a criminologist can easily understand the intention of the crime and also help these juveniles to be a better human in future. Not just the juvenile but also the criminals, criminology suggests various methods to reform these criminals for good.
Criminology in Legal System:
Criminology plays a significant role in the legal system and it also has a number of benefits. Especially in Cases related to criminal law and Cyber crime investigation in such cases requires a lot of expertise and critical thinking at the very same time, it's also the job of the lawyer to understand the crime completely to make sure their client’s winning the lawsuit. This is one of the reasons that many educational platforms are providing free online certification courses on Criminology to help in their legal professions. Along with this Criminology works to reduce crime they help to decide harsh punishments which can make a prospective criminal understand the consequence of the crime and thus indirectly reduce the criminal rate.
Sub Groups of Criminology
Criminology is a broad range of study, all of them are very important parts of criminology and are necessary to understand in order to grasp a better understanding of these subjects, learners opt for criminology courses. Criminology is divided into major 4 subgroups, they are as follows;
Penology: The word peonology is derived from the latin word “poena”, which means penalty. Penology is the field of criminology which focuses on principles and methods of punishment of crimes. Penology mainly focuses on prison management or administration and the process of how crimes are defined and punished. The major difference between criminology and penology is that Criminology focuses on study of crimes and criminal behaviour while penology focuses on the study based on punishments of crime.
Biocriminology: It is also known as Bio social Criminology. Biocriminology investigates biological and genetic factors and their relation to criminal behaviour. Basically this part of criminology studies the role one's genes plays in their criminal behaviour. This section of criminology is yet to be completely discovered but at the same time this is a very fascinating study as the mystery residing underneath human behaviour is very interesting when discovered.
Feminist Criminology: It is that branch of criminology that tries to explain the causes and outcomes of criminal behaviour from women’s perspective. Feminist Criminology focuses on women offenders and women victims in order to understand the causes and motive behind female criminality. Initially whenever they talk about criminals they were regarded as man or male offenders only. After that many scholar in order to bring gender justice and also to utilise women’s perspective to solve and understand criminal nature of crime introduced feminist criminology.
Criminalistics: This branch of criminology deals with analysis of physical evidence from crime scenes. Criminalists with their knowledge analyse and examine every piece of the physical evidence. They after analysing all this evidence give a written report to court. This plays a significant role in the legal system and is very helpful in legal professions. That’s the reason that this branch of criminology is very high in demand.