ABSTRACT
Hopefully what you have read thus far in this book has made you sensitive to the diversity and range of criminological interests. It should have also made you aware of the differences between media and common sense images of crime, the criminal and the victim, as compared with criminological understandings of these issues. As was said in Chapter 1, criminology as a discipline is peopled by a wide variety of individuals from a wide variety of academic backgrounds tied together by their common interest in crime. However, this interest in crime is not only an academic one. It is also an interest in crime as a social problem. In other words (again as you will remember from Chapter 1), the discipline is also concerned with looking for ways of not only understanding the nature and impact of this social problem but also for ways of alleviating it. Hence, the links between what it is that criminologists study and do, and the question of criminal justice policy. By way of conclusion this chapter will explore the changing nature of those links in the light of the questions posed for the discipline by the process of globalization. First of all, it will be valuable to offer a few comments on the growth and development of criminology itself over the last 25 years.
