Launching 'The Practice of Understanding Crime'
You want to understand crime. Maybe you’re a current or aspiring lawyer, police officer, or advocate. Maybe you write (or read) crime novels or true crime books. Or maybe you’re a citizen who’s concerned about becoming a victim of crime—or maybe you already are.
Whatever your reason, you want to understand crime, but here’s the thing.
Crime isn’t a single, static entity.
There are many kinds of crime (for example, homicide, femicide, robbery, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, intimate partner violence, white-collar crime, and so on).
Crime changes over time (for example, see Jeff Asher’s work on the apparent drop in homicides in the U.S.).
Crime has a multitude of causes (for example, societal, psychological, or biological influences).
Criminology and criminal justice scholars study all of this and more.
While there are many ways to attain an understanding of crime, I think they can all be augmented by regularly considering what these academics discover. More than that, you need to be willing to do three things:
Question your beliefs about crime.
Review the results of new scientific research studies conducted on the various aspects of crime.
Consider the implications of new information for what you believe about crime.
And you need to repeat that over and over. In a nutshell, that’s the “practice” of understanding crime.
Through regular1 journalism covering new research from academic journals, The Practice of Understanding Crime2 will help.
Watch this space by signing up to receive the newsletter:
I have some health-imposed constraints about how much work I can do on any given day that might push the definition of “regular.” I intend to be transparent about that, starting with this footnote. You can read more about these constraints here:
The Practice of Understanding Crime is an evolution of a Medium publication called Understanding Crime. Some content will appear in both places.