Running head: A THEORETICAL CONTRAST AND COMPARISON OF CRIMINOLOGY AND
A Theoretical Contrast and Comparison of Criminology and Criminal Justice
University of Phoenix
Criminology
CJA/332
Mr. Greg Mohr
June 20, 2009
A Theoretical Contrast and Comparison of Criminology and Criminal Justice
Criminology is the use of the scientific method to define the interactions of the making of laws, the breaking of laws, and society’s reactions to these processes. Criminology has recently been compared to the field of sociology, in addition to gleaning information from the biological sciences. Criminal justice, in contrast, is comprised of applied criminological research findings. Practitioners of criminal justice are required to have knowledge of criminology; however, the components of criminal justice include the understanding of how the system works, the effect of criminal law on that system, and the administration of that system. Theories have been shown to suggest that criminal justice is an extension of criminology that is more comprehensive, and that possibly a new field will one day arise that will eclipse both the old criminology and criminal justice. (Conrad, R.P)
One of the most heated debates in the fields of criminology and criminal justice entails the degree of divergence or convergence between the two (Conrad and Myren, 1979). Proponents of a divergence between the fields usually argue that criminal justice is a more practitioner-oriented discipline that is centered around the study of the criminal justice system and its institutions and agencies, while criminology’s primary concern is the theoretical and empirical study of the etiology of crime. (Ward and Webb, 1984, Zalman, 1981). Convergence proponents counter, on the other hand, that while criminology and criminal justice may have developed as separate disciplines with different purposes, they have recently re-converged so that only a few meaningful delineations are left to enable one to...