A Review of Criminology and Victimization Theories and their Implications for Crime Control and Prevention within Societies

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2019 in the subject Law - Criminal process, Criminology, Law Enforcement, , language: English, abstract: This article provides a synthesis of criminology and victimization theories and offers an explanation on the causes, control and prevention in crime particularly on criminals and victims behavior and their interaction within the society. In addition to explaining why it is important to understand the causes, control and prevention on crime, the author described the relevant criminology and victimization theories and explained the implications of criminology and victimization theories on developing and implementing crime control and prevention strategy. The final segment of the paper provides an illustration with explanation on how effective crime control and prevention can be explained through criminology and victimization theories and how these efforts serve as a strategy to control, prevent and reducing crime. As crime happened in our everyday life, as such it is important for us to know why do individuals commit crimes. There are indeed many crime control and prevention that have been implemented, but they are seldom developed from sound theories. Swanson (2001) emphasized that theory is required to be both scholarly in itself and validated in practice, and can be the basis of significant advances. Given the large investment in the effort on crime control and prevention within a society, it is rational to identify, analyze and critique the criminology and victimization theories underlying the causes of crime in a society. High crime rates can force societies to re-examine crime control and prevention strategy as part of their efforts to maintain and to increase public safety and peace but rarely develop these practices from existing theories. The author therefore described the important of understanding causes of crime as well as crime control and prevention strategy and explained how crime control and prevention strategy can be more effective by identifying, analyzing, and critiquing criminology and victimization theories and showing the relationship between causes of crime and crime control and prevention. According to Global Peace Index (2019 report), there is a strong correlation between perceptions of peacefulness and actual peacefulness. Both men and women in more peaceful countries are more likely to report that they feel safe walking alone at night than people in less peaceful countries. Even when crime rate is low, societies are particularly concerned about maintaining the effectiveness of the crime control and prevention strategies.

Dr. Wee P. Leong has been involved in the field of education for more than 30 years. He has been a Principal, Head of Academics, International Business Director, and Director of Operations, as well as a member of the teaching faculty at private colleges and universities in Malaysia. His current research interests focus on Risk Management, Human Resource Management and criminology. He has also supervised more than 100 students in their dissertation at the MBA level.