Study of Crime Is Also the Study of Criminalisation Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne CRIM10001: Crime, Criminology and Critique 16/06/2022 Word count - 637 The Concept of Sousveillance and How It Can Be Used as a Harm Reduction Tool in Relation to Digital Vigilantism Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne CRIM10001: Crime, Criminology and Critique 16/06/2022 Word count - 760
Study of Crime Is Also the Study of Criminalisation What is crime? This has been a question that has interested people from many areas of studies for a long time, but no one has been able to find a justifiable answer for it. Crime is something that gets upgraded with time, social perspective, cultural perspective etc. Controversially speaking, crime is defined as an act that goes against the law of a certain authority (Wikipedia Contributors, 2018). And through study of crime, people try to find what causes crime, what make people want to commit a crime and what can be deemed as a crime (Ryan, 2017). Criminalisation is also a concept that is often mentioned with the concept of crime. Criminalisation can be defined as the process that uses the threat of punishment to stop people from committing crimes (Wikipedia Contributors, 2018). And through study of criminalisation, people try to find what crimes should be punished and how (McNamara et al., 2019). Through this essay I am going to show that even though study of crime and study of criminalisation are both core content in criminology, study of crime is not study of criminalisation. Since the early times when people study crime, many of them do it because they want to find out why someone would commit a crime, to find the ultimate cause of a crime (Rafter, 2011), they are fascinated by what would drive someone to commit a crime (Ryan, 2017). This research mostly end up with five main points, whether the crime was committed under free will or did they have some motivation, whether the act of crime was a natural reflex or was it planned and learned, whether the mentality of the person who committed the crime normal or not, whether the crime was committed because of a cause or not, and whether crime was committed because the person who committed it was driven to it or not (Ryan, 2017). When they study these reasons, they do not try to figure out whether the crime should be punished or not, they are simply trying to figure out the cause of crime. So, we can see that even though study of crime can eventually lead to study of criminalisation, study of crime and study of criminalisation is not the same. And when people study criminalisation, many of their goal is to interpret the need of criminal law (Wikipedia Contributors, 2018), how the people who oversee deeming a punishment to a certain crime do it, how does their thinking work, is what they pass as a law fair to everyone (McNamara et al., 2019). In studying how