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Abstract
An increasing debate over whether criminology and criminal justice (CCJ) should be viewed as an independent academic area has evolved over the past 20 years. Some scholars have argued that CCJ is best understood as a subfield of sociology, while others have proposed it deserves independent status. This paper provides a brief history of this debate and offers key rubrics used by recent scholars to evaluate CCJ’s standing within academia. By assessing data such as graduation statistics, program placement, faculty degree area, and scholarly productivity, we contrast CCJ with sociology. Our findings offer strong support for the position that CCJ is no longer a minor specialization within sociology, but rather a robust, growing, and increasingly independent academic area.
Notes
1. We recognize that there are distinct differences between CCJ; however, the combination of these areas into a singular designation is common practice when referring to the larger academic study of crime (see Footnote 1 of Akers, Citation1992 p. 14; Kleck, Wang, & Tark, Citation2007; Laub, Citation2004).
2. This article is not intended to evaluate whether CCJ possesses a distinct theoretical and methodologically orientation. Therefore, in order to avoid labeling CCJ as a discipline or as a subfield of some other discipline, we refer to it simply as an “academic area.” The reader can decide to interpret this as he or she so chooses. We believe that CCJ possesses an independent and autonomous position within academia.
3. Morn (Citation1980) argues that CCJ developed independently of sociology.
4. Scholars seem to suggest, even early on, that CCJ in Europe was far less sociologically based (Garland, Citation1985; Mannheim, Citation1954; Wolfgang, Citation1963). For the purpose of this article we shall be focusing entirely on CCJ as it exists in the USA.
5. Dantzker (Citation1998, p. 8) suggests criminology emerged as a discipline in the late 1960s. By the late 1970s’, Cressey (Citation1978, p. 173) noted “Criminology courses have shifted out of departments of sociology.”
6. Between 1986 and 2000, Travis Hirschi was the most cited researcher within the major American CCJ journals (Cohn & Farrington, Citation2007).
7. Interestingly, Berry (Citation1994) suggests that many academics perceived CCJ as offering little of value, even though studies on the subject of crime, law, and deviance were the second most published topic in the sociological literature from 1971 to 1985.
8. Akers’ address was subsequently published in September 1992 in the journal Social Forces. Akers also served as the president of the American Society of Criminology in 1979.
9. Akers does not provide any specific evidence for this statistic in his paper.
10. Clear’s presidential address was published by the journal Justice Quarterly (Clear, Citation2001).
11. It is interesting to note that Clear makes no mention of Akers’ presentation or subsequent article in any way.
12. Starting with the 2005/2006 data year, “field of study” in the title of the table was changed to “discipline division.”
13. According to IPEDS data (National Center for Education Statistics, Citation2011c), 16 CCJ Ph.D. programs reported the graduation of 174 doctoral students in 2008-2009. This equates to an average of 10.8 completed CCJ Ph.D.s per program. For the same year, IPEDS lists 69 programs in sociology granting 722 Ph.D.s, for an average of 10.4 sociology Ph.D.s per program.
14. US News and World Report label these top CCJ programs under the term “Criminology,” but they obviously include Criminal Justice programs as well.
15. We used Kleck and Barnes’ (Citation2011), Table 3, which ranks 35 programs according to a weighted measure of scholarly productivity of faculty members. This list purports to give the top CCJ Ph.D. programs based on scholarship.
19. Library catalog records for doctoral dissertations, usually created by librarians at the institution where the doctorate degree was earned, frequently indicate the department in which the doctoral candidate studied.
16. Once again we use the listing provided in Kleck and Barnes’ (Citation2011) Table 3, see Note 15.
17. Of the 37 faculty who did not have a Ph.D. or had an unknown degree, the degree compositions were varied. The two largest categories were 15 J.D.s and 11 master’s. Of the 11 with master’s six held a degree in CCJ; none possessed a degree in sociology.
18. For example, two of the 15 CCJ programs, Penn State and Delaware, are part of a larger department that also includes sociology. For those schools, we used information from the departmental web pages to exclude faculty members who were indicated as professors who taught sociology and not CCJ.
20. We originally found 309 faculty members with identified Ph.D.s. However, we were unable to determine the Ph.D. areas of two faculty members and hence dropped them from our analysis.
21. The most popular “other” degree area was psychology which represented roughly 28% of the “other” category.
22. Kleck and Barnes (Citation2011) looked at refereed articles from 398 different scholarly journals in which doctoral CCJ faculty published during the calendar years 2005-2009.
23. In the most recent survey report of the Association of Doctoral Programs in Criminology and Criminal Justice (2010, p. 9) “thirty program representatives” reported a median publication number of 1.59 peer-reviewed journal articles for the period 2009-2010.
24. The NRC matched faculty lists to data from the Thomson Reuters list of 1,906 publications. They reported the average over seven years, 2000-2006, of the number of articles for each allocated faculty member divided by the total number of faculty allocated to the program.
25. Graduation numbers for 2008/2009 were: Anthropology 10,638; Economics 30,547; Geography 5,937.
26. The American Sociological Association reports a membership of over 14,000. In contrast, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences and the American Society of Criminology have a combined membership of slightly over 6,000. From these numbers one could make the rough estimation that CCJ programs have much fewer faculty members than sociology programs, even though they service more majors.
27. At our university, the bachelor’s student to full-time faculty ratio for criminology majors is 47 to 1; in comparison, the bachelor’s student to full-time faculty ratio for sociology majors is 15 to 1. Anthropology is 14 to 1.
28. The CCJ graduating graduate student to faculty ratio is derived from 25 schools that reported 510 graduating master’s degree students, 26 schools that reported 96 graduating Ph.D. students, and 26 schools that reported 492 full-time faculty members by specific rank.
29. The sociology graduating graduate student to faculty ratio was derived by dividing the sum of master’s and Ph.D. graduations in 2006 as derived from the Digest of Education Statistics and dividing it by the number of sociology faculty in 2006 as reported by The National Research Council (Citation2010).
30. It is important to point out that just because a CCJ faculty member has a Ph.D. in sociology, does not mean that he or she primarily approaches the study of crime from a sociological perspective. Nor does it prove that such a faculty member views CCJ as a subfield of sociology. Indeed, one of the authors of this article has a Ph.D. in sociology, but believes CCJ is an independent academic area.
31. The most recent example of a split occurred at Missouri State University in spring 2011, when criminology separated from sociology and anthropology to create a new Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice. In the fall of 2010, the School of Criminal Justice was formed at University of Central Oklahoma when the Criminal Justice Program separated from the Department of Sociology and Substance Abuse Studies.