Program Description

The mission of the major in criminology is to provide students with a multidisciplinary approach to crime and deviance, with particular emphasis on providing critical thinking skills and familiarizing students with the dominant ways professionals use to explain, predict and prevent crime and victimization.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of the program, students will be able to:

• Identify the strengths and weaknesses of major criminological theories.
• Analyze the policy implications of criminological theories.
• Describe the elements and development of the criminal justice system and its role in maintaining social order.
• Evaluate how the institutions and elements of the criminal justice system vary across jurisdictions and interact with one another.
• Apply principles of crime prevention to the policy that attempts to effectively reduce crime and victimization.
• Compare the theoretical foundations of crime analysis and their abilities to predict and analyze patterns of crime.
• Articulate several major types of crime, their causes and proposed solutions to reduce them.
• Compare the techniques, sources and means of analysis of criminological data research methods.