Criminology is a social science in which criminologists work to build knowledge about crime and control based on empirical research. Criminology can be classified as a discipline that has only recently emerged although discussions about crime have emerged at least 250 years ago.Ĭriminology can be defined as a systematic study of the nature, types, causes, and controls of criminal behavior, deviance, delinquency, and violations of law.
However, a discussion of the problems of crime has been studied earlier, as in work of Ces are Beccaria (1738-1794) and Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). The word “criminology” was first used by French anthropologist Paul Topinard (1830-1911) who researched the physical anthropology approach to find a correlation of how body shape influences someone to commit crime. Thus, literally, criminology is the science of crime, or rather criminology studies all aspects of crime.
Crimen means crime, while logos means science Criminology comes from the Latin: crimenand logos.
