Researching criminal justice

This chapter is concerned with social scientific – or criminological – research into crime and justice. This sort of research is, of course, by no means the only source of systematic information about crime. The administrative statistics generated by the police and the justice system have provided insights into the topic for at least three centuries, and the contribution of the hard sciences is also important. However, this chapter is restricted to a discussion of criminological research grounded in sociology, psychology and the other human sciences. It has five further sections. I begin with an account of the – quite short – history of criminology and associated research. This is followed by a discussion of the inherently political nature of research into social control – which is, at heart, what criminology is about. The third section discusses the ethical and practical issues that criminological research presents, and the fourth examines the sensitive question whether we researchers actually achieve any significant impact on crime and justice. The final section speculates about the future of criminological research