Quotes About Criminologists

Even academic elites are drawn to the figure of the murderer, which has long been a focus of attention for psychiatrists, sociologists, and criminologists.

But remember, the logic of the inverted-U curve is that the same strategies that work really well at first stop working past a certain point, and that's exactly what many criminologists argue happens with punishment.

By contrast, public health researchers place these same policies near the bottom of their list. Their top policy choice — barring gun sales to people deemed dangerous by a mental health provider with just over a 6 out of 10 rating — is the fifth most valued policy by criminologists (4.88), but their other top policies aren't viewed positively by criminologists.

Criminologists have documented that the amount of coverage a crime victim receives affects how much attention police devote to the case and the willingness of prosecutors to accept plea bargains.

The ignorance is measurable. Pollsters repeatedly find that while people tend to be too optimistic about their own lives, they are too pessimistic about their societies. For instance, in most years between 1992 and 2015, an era that criminologists call the Great American Crime Decline, a majority of Americans believed that crime was rising.

The Leviathan reduces violence by asserting a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, thereby replacing what criminologists call "self-help justice"—in which individuals settle their own scores and disputes, often violently (such as the Mafia)—with criminal justice, leading overall to a decrease in violence.