This module introduces students to the criminal process, criminal justice agencies and criminal justice systems, with a focus on England and Wales. It considers ways in which crime and criminal justice processes and outcomes are represented including, but not only, by official statistics. Students are helped to explore how lawbreaking, criminalisation and victimisation are variously patterned by socio-economic disparities (or ‘class’), gender, ethnicity and age. In so doing, we introduce students to core concepts as well as relevant policies and practices, illustrating how analysis of social stratification, social divisions and social identities, and significantly intersectional analyses, can help understand data and accounts of lived experience relating to crime and criminal justice. The module concludes by reflecting on the capacity of the criminal process to protect society, to provide justice, and to address social harms, making connections with material encountered in subsequent years of the programme(s).
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the module students should be able to:
Show basic understanding of the concepts of crime, criminalisation and victimisation
Show awareness of the key sources of information about crime and criminal justice and an understanding of their strengths and limitations
Accurately identify the core criminal justice agencies in England and Wales and show introductory level knowledge of how they interact within a criminal justice system and a criminal process
Be able to describe how lawbreaking, victimisation and criminalisation are unequally distributed, with a focus on England and Wales, and an ability to draw on relevant theoretical material to analyse these patterns
