| Criminology as a Multi-disciplinary Field
Think about all the information that may be required to explain even one criminal incident, such as a home burglary. A criminologist may want to start by knowing about the identity of the burglar, and ask these questions: What is his/her family background? What is his/her psychological condition? A criminologist may also want to understand the community where the burglar was born and raised and research this issue: What kinds of resources were available in that community when he/she was growing up? The criminologist may also want to have a good understanding of the laws that the burglar broke, and explore these questions: Who created these laws? What people benefit from them? If explaining even a single crime can be so complex, imagine what might be required to explain large crime trends.
To try to answer these questions it is necessary to understand criminology, not as a single discipline, but as a variety of different fields. Many criminologists, in fact, may start out as sociologists. In addition to sociology, criminology also includes political science, psychology, criminal justice, public policy, economics, history, and other fields. Different fields contribute to what we call criminology, which is good because a wide range of information and perspectives are necessary to have a meaningful understanding of crime.
Criminology relies on different fields to accomplish its three main objectives: to understand why people break laws, to study the process of making laws, and to understand how society reacts to the breaking of laws. For example, some researchers will focus on the private family lives of the law breakers, some will study their childhoods, some will analyze the society where the law-breaker lives, and some will study why we have certain laws and the societal harm they may cause.
In your own words, explain how is it an advantage for criminology to be made up of different fields.
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