ABSTRACT
This chapter considers two sociologies of crime built principally on the official statistics of crime produced by the state. These sociologies are administrative criminology and correctional criminology. The one is carried out largely by state officials themselves, the other mostly by professional sociologists. The chapter reviews briefly some of the major examples of professional theories, beginning with the non-sociological theories which have as their focus the biological and psychological causes of criminal behaviour. Sociological theories of criminal behaviour locate the difference between the criminal and the normal person in the character of the social environment to which the person is exposed. The idea underlying correctional criminology that there must be something – whether biological, psychological, sociological or some combination thereof – about criminals which distinguishes them from non-criminals is deeply problematic from the outset, and for this reason. The greater part of the scientific study of crime is taken up by correctionally motivated, positivistically researched theories of so-called criminal behaviour.
