Criminal Justice and Penology

Criminal justice and penology examine how societies define, respond to, and attempt to prevent crime — tracing the full arc from policing and courts through incarceration, rehabilitation, and victim experience. At stake are fundamental questions about fairness, public safety, and the uneven ways punishment falls across race, class, and geography. Researchers today are actively debating whether prisons reduce crime or reproduce it, how restorative justice practices can repair harm without relying on incarceration, and how globalization complicates national frameworks for controlling transnational crime. Victimology has also pushed the field to reckon with whose suffering gets recognized and how institutions can better serve people harmed by crime rather than treating them as peripheral to a process centered on offenders and the state.

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120,008

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63,619

Keywords

Criminal JusticePenal SystemSocial ControlInsecurityDelinquencyPrison System