There can be no crime without society. Combining the specialist study of criminology with a broad approach to sociological questions, this University of Essex course emboldens students to study crime, criminals, and criminal justice within wider social contexts. Understanding society is key to understand every other phenomenon within it, including crime.

Criminologists and sociologists engage with some of the most pressing issues, decisions and dilemmas facing societies today. In this Essex course students explore the nature of crime, criminal justice and punishment within wider social contexts. Students will also explore how society deals with the past and the present, with issues such as colonialism and post-colonialism and the future of human rights as the backbone of every analysis.