1. Crime, Criminal Justice, and Criminology
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Learning Objectives
This section will broadly introduce crime, criminal justice, and criminology. This section is designed to be a broad overview of what the subsequent chapters will cover in detail. It also discusses how criminal justice policymaking—and policymakers—has shaped the media representations of crime. After reading this section, students will be able to:
- Identify the differences between deviance and criminality
- Describe the three components of the criminal justice system
- Identify the differences between crime control and the due process model
- Identify the differences between the interactionist, consensus, and conflict views in the creation of laws
- Discuss the role of the media and how and how it impacts our criminal justice system
Background Knowledge Probe: Each chapter will begin by assessing your current knowledge about different criminal justice topics. Each of these topics will be covered by the chapter, meaning that you should be able to answer them correctly after you have completed the reading. All definitions can be seen by clicking on the bolded vocabulary terms in each chapter.
Please indicate whether you know each statement to be True or False. This is an ungraded exercise, but you may want to record which questions you answer incorrectly, so that you can verify that your knowledge has improved by the end of the chapter.
