Criminology - MA

This module is designed to develop your ability to apply relevant approaches from a range of advanced methodological and theoretical perspectives in order to conduct research into criminology and criminal justice relate issues.

This module provides you with an opportunity to critically reflect on your in-depth knowledge and systematic understanding of criminal justice practice. It focuses on professionals working in the criminal justice sector drawn from the statutory, voluntary and community and private sectors and critically evaluates their respective roles in criminal justice policy and practice. For those of you who are working, or who have worked, in the criminal justice field you can utilise this specialised work experience to make sense of a range of practical issues. If you do not have experience of this type you will still be able to assess the nature of work done in such environments through the use of current examples of criminal justice practice.

This module will give you the opportunity to make sense of the relationship between academic research and the practicalities of working in the criminal justice sector.

This module is designed to enhance knowledge and understanding of the link between place and crime, and to analyse the extent to which neighbourhood effects shape the narrow and wider determinants of patterns of crime within different communities. Although taking the urban sociology perspective of the Chicago School, and subsequent developments within environmental criminology, as an initial explanatory framework for understanding crime, the module seeks to introduce you to the much wider and specialised literature on neighbourhood and place which sits within the field of social, economic and political geography.

The module also adopts a novel and cutting-edge perspective to conventional approaches to environmental criminology by examining the geography of crime from the perspective of spatial variations in the response of public service organisations to crime as well as the more traditional perspectives that focus upon the socio-demographic, economic, and morphological and community-based determinants of crime.

This module focuses on the important role of offender management in the context of crime reduction initiatives, paying particular attention to the National Offender Management Service and National Offender Management Model. It demonstrates that managing offenders has become more complex over recent years. In large part this can be attributed to the growth and inter-connectivity of organisations – statutory or otherwise – that are employed to ensure that offenders are effectively managed.