Modern academic criminology has direct roots in the 19th-century Italian School of "criminal anthropology", which according to the historian Mary Gibson "caused a radical refocusing of criminological discussion throughout … See more

There were three main schools of thought in early criminological theory, spanning the period from the mid-18th century to the mid-twentieth century: Classical, Positivist, and Chicago. These schools of thought were supersede… See more

Both the positivist and classical schools take a consensus view of crime: that a crime is an act that violates the basic values and beliefs of society. Those values and beliefs are manifested as laws that society agr… See more

Areas of study in criminology include:
• Comparative criminology, which is the study of the social phenomenon of crime across cultures, to identify differences and similarities in crime patterns.
• Crime prevention… See more