Morality, Criminal Justice and Criminal Events

Abstract

The word crime inevitably brings to mind images of violent offenders targeting defenceless victims. The emotional connotation of crime is more indicative of mugging, bank robberies, rape or murder than tax fraud or illegally dumping chemical waste. So it is no wonder the field of criminology, the social science that addresses conduct relevant to criminal law, is largely focused on differentiating this intuitive significance and putting it into the proper perspective. The results of a great deal of criminological research might be summarized as follows: Criminality as such does not exist. The picture of a violent offender and a suffering victim has been replaced in criminology by predominantly statistical insight into the nature and severity of offences, types of perpetrators, circumstances, underlying factors and the like. The concept of criminality has been stripped as it were of its stereotypical associations centred around the cruelty of man to his fellow man.