Criminology

Criminology is the social scientific study of crime, deviance, and the systems societies use to respond to them. It asks deceptively fundamental questions: what is crime, and who decides? Who commits it, and why?

Who are the victims, and how are they treated? What do the police, courts, and prisons actually do, and do they achieve what they are supposed to achieve? These questions sit at the intersection of sociology, psychology, law, politics, and history, and criminology draws on all of these to build a rigorous and often critical account of crime and criminal justice as social phenomena.

At Cardiff University, this three-year full-time programme is taught within the School of Law and Politics, which reflects the way criminology in the UK has developed as a discipline closely connected to legal studies and to questions of public policy. Cardiff is a university with strong social science traditions, and the criminology programme engages with both theoretical criminology and the empirical study of crime data, criminal justice processes, and the experiences of offenders and victims. You will develop social research skills alongside your substantive knowledge of the field, learning to critically evaluate evidence and to construct well-argued positions on contested questions.

Wales has its own distinct criminal justice landscape in some respects, and studying in Cardiff gives you access to Welsh institutions and policy debates as well as to the broader UK context. The School's proximity to the Welsh Assembly, legal institutions, and the Cardiff criminal justice community provides a rich practical backdrop to your studies.

Criminology graduates from Cardiff move into careers in probation, the prison service, policing, victim support, social work, youth justice, the voluntary and community sector, research, public policy, journalism, and law. Many graduates go on to postgraduate study, including conversion to law or specialist criminology and criminal justice master's programmes.