The Relationship between Criminology and Criminal Justice - Assignment Example

Maguire, Morgan, and Reiner explored a relationship between criminology and criminal justice in the context of the social construction of crime itself by considering criminology and criminal justice as their two broad divisions. On the one hand, criminology is concerned with social and individual antecedents of crime and with the nature of the 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 the 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.