The relationship between criminology and criminal justice

The paper ” The Relationship Between Criminology and Criminal Justice” is a brilliant example of an assignment on social science. There are several assumptions in regard to how criminology and criminal justice are related. Some believe that both are mutually exclusive while some view one as an integral part of the other. (Dantzer 1998, p. 3) Whichever the case is, no one can deny that they are closely intertwined. I would like to use the framework provided by Maguire, Morgan, and Reiner (2007) to demonstrate the relationship between criminology and criminal justice. These authors explored such a relationship in the context of the social construction of crime itself by considering criminology and criminal justice as its two broad divisions. On the one hand, criminology is concerned with social and individual antecedents of crime and with the nature of crime as a social phenomenon while criminal justice deals with the institutional aspects of the social construction of the crime. (p. 180) Here, one sees how they cover entirely different aspects: people and sociology for criminology; and, institutions for criminal justice while dealing with one single subject, which is a crime. These two theories affect criminal justice system differently. For instance, in regard to probation, criminology could study the relative merits of the different methods of applying probation and that how a definite methodology and technique could be identified by probation officers in social diagnosis, in their daily work as a whole and in the developing probation processes. Meanwhile, criminal justice would be concerned with studying cases that would lead to the development of a system reducing the amount of time and resources available to an overextended criminal justice agency concerned with probation.