Criminology
History of academic criminology

Modern academic criminology has direct roots in the 19th-century Italian School of "criminal anthropology", which according to the historian Mary Gibson "caused a radical refocusing of criminological discussion throughout Europe and the United States from law to the criminal. While this 'Italian School' was in turn attacked and partially supplanted in countries such as France by 'sociological' theories of delinquency, they retained the new focus on the criminal." According to Gibson, the term criminology was most likely coined in 1885 by Italian law professor Raffaele Garofalo as Criminologia. In the late 19th century, French anthropologist Paul Topinard used the analogous French term Criminologie.

Criminology grew substantially as a discipline in the first quarter of the twentieth century. From 1900 through to 2000 this field of research underwent three significant phases in the United States: (1) Golden Age of Research (1900–1930) which has been described as a multiple-factor approach, (2) Golden Age of Theory (1930–1960) which endeavored to show the limits of systematically connecting criminological research to theory, and (3) a 1960–2000 period, which was seen as a significant turning point for criminology.
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