Lombroso's Children - Thinking about Criminology part 1

In a previous post, I lamented the sad state of my Criminology class. The students appeared to be bored and unmotivated, while I was unambiguously uninspiring and dry. Unlike my other course (the Criminal Justice System) where I seem to consistently find ways to engage (most of the) class in discussion; criminology is hit or miss. This led me to think about the problem of criminology. I'm convinced that Crim is just a hard class to teach at a 200 (sophomore) level. Elaborations to follow.

Criminology is the study of:

1. The making of laws
   
2. The breaking of laws
   
3. The ways society reacts to law breaking

Nearly every criminology textbook that I have ever seen (a topic for a future post) divides the subject into three areas:

1. Concepts of Criminology and law. This is where the big picture concepts, like what is crime, are introduced and defined. This also is where most texts cover the social science dimensions of criminology, explaining how crime is measured and what some of the baseline trends look like.
   
2. Theories of Crime Causation. Criminology does not have an overarching paradigm. Accordingly, there are multiple contemporary perspectives on what causes crime. These range from individual trait theories (biology, psychology, neuro-psychology) to macro-social pressures (environmental disorder, capitalist economy, etc). This is an area that is terribly challenging to teach because of the diversity of ideas... sometimes I think this comes across to my students as a bunch of meaningless words, names, and flowcharts.
   
3. Types of Crime. Property crime, violent crime, white collar crime, public order crime... (different texts vary beyond the universal violent, property, and public order). This too sometimes seems like a laundry list of facts and figures.

This organizational approach is troublesome. While putting all the theory together might allow us to compare and contrast ideas, focusing on strengths and weaknesses of each approach; in practice it becomes overwhelming to the beginning student. The substantive units on type of crime similarly allows us to examine similarities and differences of criminal behavior, they should be married more closely to the theoretical ideas.

This semester, I tried to resolve (some) of these confusions by joining some substantive units with theoretical units. Introducing Trait Theory & Social Structural Theories in conjunction with violent crime; Choice theory & critical theory with property crime, etc. This does not seem to be working either. I think, perhaps, we try to do too much with the basic introductory criminology course. Of course, at the moment I'm at a loss for what to do about it.

There is one thing that I do believe is fairly certain. People like narrative case studies (e.g., cases presented in a story form). I'm going to try and introduce more stories into the presentation of the content. We'll see if that fosters more discussion.

Now off to prep.