Professional Criminology Diploma Course

Track criminology's evolution from 18th century Europe through the classic and determinist debates to the Chicago school's sociological approach, detailing instrumental and expressive motives and how they shape punishment.

Criminology studies the non-legal aspects of crime and delinquency, including its causes, correction and prevention, from viewpoints across psychology, biology, economics, sociology, psychiatry, and statistics.

Examines Lombroso's biological criminology, linking atavism and stigmata to a criminal type within a Darwinian framework, while noting racial hierarchies and Ferri's view that biological causes interact with social factors.

Explore how the Chicago School links urban ecology and social disorganization to crime, arguing environment and poverty shape behavior, and highlighting reforms through schools, churches, and community programs.

Link class structures to crime and social stratification, noting that offending concentrates among lower classes, and discuss life chances, social exclusion, and debates on state bias and policing.

Community crime prevention unites actors with police to reduce crime through neighborhood engagement and self-policing via Neighbourhood Watch, but critics say it is externally imposed and focuses on low-level crime.

examine corporate crime as offenses by legitimate business organizations, including fraud, tax evasion, mis selling, price fixing, and overcharging, and the harms to individuals, workers, customers, and communities.

Explore how drugs relate to crime via Goldstein’s psychopharmacological, economic compulsive, and systemic categories, including local markets, violence, and the war on drugs.

Examine how family crime encompasses domestic violence, physical and sexual abuse, emotional harm to children, and elder neglect within the home, highlighting its history, victimization patterns, and laws and policing.

Explore how cybercrime lacks a universal definition, spans pre-internet crimes adapted to cyberspace, and includes cyber trespass, cyber deceptions, and cyber violence, with anonymity enabling mass victimization.

Examine how hate crime poses a serious criminal justice issue motivated by prejudice against race, religion, gender, sexuality, disability, and ethnicity, and how prosecutions hinge on perceived motivation.

Explore how criminal psychology informs crime study and define crime as a harmful offense built on intent to harm individuals and the community, noting laws and beliefs evolve over time.

Apply criminal profiling to predict offender characteristics using four approaches—geographical, investigative psychology, topological, and clinical—assisting investigations and crime reconstruction.

Map crime data by combining census data, schools, businesses, and neighborhood crime rates to identify trends and guide police resource allocation, rooted in the Chicago school and surveillance debates.

Explore penology as the study of punishment and prison management, focusing on rehabilitation, corrections, and the social processes that deter crime.

Identify five criminal types: the ordinary man under pressure, the impulse-driven offender, the neurotic delinquent, the genuine delinquent, and the mentally deficient or organically ill, reflecting psychological and sociological factors.

Explore five explanations of criminal behavior, including social learning and Bandura's imitation, individual predispositions, stress and tension, rupture of social bonds, and developmental pathways shaping delinquent careers.

Explore major perspectives on the causes of criminal behavior by examining risk and protective factors across biology, psychology, and family history, with childhood patterns shaping future criminal activity.

Identify how energizing processes, anti-social directionality, and inhibitions shape delinquent careers, influenced by friends, maturation, and parental rearing, with prevention guided by risk, needs, and individualization principles.

Explore how crime arises from both individual factors and social environments, with ethnicity, poverty, and social and economic disadvantage heightening risk.

Defines narcissistic personality disorder as grandiose, entitled, and lacking empathy, notes uncertain treatment effectiveness, and links manipulation, gaslighting, and rule-breaking to criminal behavior, illustrated by Bundy.

Explore how inherited traits, brain development, nutrition, hormones, and genes influence criminal behavior, under biological and physiological theories of crime, including racial and gender differences.

Explore offender profiling to identify social and mental characteristics. Contrast top down and bottom up approaches, organized and disorganized offenders, and outline interview strategies.

Identify offenses believed to be linked by the same offender using behavioral similarity, i.e. case linkage. Crime analysts compare similarities and differences among crime pairs to assess linkage.

Explore how deviance, violations of formal rules and informal norms, vary across cultures and time, and examine Becker's four types: falsely accusing, pure deviance, conforming, and secret deviance.

Explore the four main serial killer types—visionary, mission-oriented, hedonistic with subcategories lust, thrill, comfort, and power-control—and how motivations and organization shape their crimes.

Explore behaviorism as a stimulus-response theory that emphasizes observable behavior and environment, explains voluntary behavior through conditioning, and guides behavior modification interventions despite criticisms.

The humanistic approach views behavior from a subjective perspective, emphasizes free will and improving psychological health toward fully functioning individuals. Criminal psychology blends psychology and law to understand criminal behavior.

Identify eight risk factors that increase criminal behavior, including four robust predictors: history of crime, pro-criminal attitudes, pro-criminal associates, and antisocial personality, and show that targeting these reduces crime.

Eysenck’s theory links criminal behavior to a personality model—neuroticism, extraversion, and psychoticism—rooted in nervous-system functioning and socialization through conditioning, with neuroticism and extraversion making conditioning difficult and psychoticism predicting aggression.

Cultural transmission shows how delinquent behavior is socially learned across generations within Chicago school theory, with older gang members transmitting norms to younger boys, sustaining delinquency across neighborhoods.