47 courses with the subject CRIM, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
CRIM 1000Criminology
This introductory course examines the multi-disciplinary science of law- making, law-breaking, and law-enforcing. It reviews theories and data predicting where, when, by whom and against whom crimes happen. It also addresses the prevention of different offense types by different kinds of offenders against different kinds of people. Police, courts, prisons, and other institutions are critically examined as both preventing and causing crime. This course meets the general distribution requirement.
This course examines how the criminal justice system responds to crime in society. The course reviews the historical development of criminal justice agencies in the United States and Europe and the available scientific evidence on the effect these agencies have on controlling crime. The course places an emphasis on the functional creation of criminal justice agencies and the discretionary role decision makers in these agencies have in deciding how to enforce criminal laws and whom to punish. Evidence on how society measures crime and the role that each major criminal justice agency plays in controlling crime is examined from the perspective of crime victims, police, prosecutors, jurors, judges, prison officials, probation officers and parole board members. Using the model of social policy evaluation, the course asks students to consider how the results of criminal justice could be more effectively delivered to reduce the social and economic costs of crime.
Statistical techniques and quantitative reasoning are essential tools for properly examing questions in the social sciences. This course introduces students to the concepts of probability, estimation, confidence intervals, and how to use the statistical concepts and methods to answer social science questions. The course will require the use of R, a free, open source statistical analysis program. This course has been approved for the quantitative data analysis requirement (QDA).
CRIM 2010American Death Penalty in Theory and Practice
Over the past forty years, in response to controversy over the American death penalty, the Supreme Court has created a framework of rules designed to make the death penalty conform to current societal standards. In this course, we will identify the critical issues identified by the courts (and the critics) in light of the practical realities of capita litigation, and we will ask whether the efforts to address these issues have been successful. The class will use specific case examples to identify the critical points in a death penalty case- for example, the decision to designate a prosecution as "capital", the performance of defense counsel, the penalty decision, and the method of execution. These critical stages will provide a platform for discussing critical issues like the proper limits of discretion; bias; cruelty; and the decision to disqualify certain groups of people from capital punishment (the mentally disabled, minors). Students will be assigned readings from differnt kinds of sources. Cases from the Supreme Court will identify key issues and the efforts to address them under the law. More general death penalty history will provide some context. We will also read pieces by advocates (pro and con). Finally, we will focus on a few specific prosecutions and discuss how abstract theories work in a particular case.
This course explores the intricate relationship between media and crime through a multidisciplinary lens. It delves into the foundational principles of journalism and news reporting, examining how news values shape public perceptions of crime. Students will analyze various theoretical frameworks and apply them to understand moral panics, media portrayals of different demographic groups, and the depiction of law enforcement in both fictional and non-fictional contexts. Key topics include the influence of media on public fear and perception of crime, the portrayal of children, women, police, and minority groups, and the comparative analysis of crime news across different countries. The course also investigates the role of media in political discourse and its impact on voter beliefs, as well as media coverage of white-collar crime and anti-corruption efforts. Through critical examination of police, courts, and prisons as depicted in the media, students will gain insights into how these institutions are both represented and scrutinized in public discourse. This course provides a comprehensive understanding of the symbiotic relationship between crime and media, emphasizing critical thinking and analytical skills. By the end of the unit students should be able to 1) Assess the role of news sources and news values in producing crime news, 2) Evaluate crime news in historical context and as a sociocultural product, 3) Analyze and theorize the representation of offenders, victims, and criminal justice agencies in the mass media, 4) Engage with a range of theoretical and conceptual explanations for media renderings of crime and criminal justice, and 5) Evaluate fictional representations of crime and criminal justice by locating them historically, culturally, and socially. Not Offered Every Year 1 Course Unit University of Pennsylvania Catalog 1467
This course examines the complex and evolving landscape of transnational crime, which generates billions of dollars annually and operates across international borders. Far from the glamorized portrayals in popular media, the reality of transnational organized crime is rooted l in fluid, global networks that thrive on illegal markets for drugs, firearms, human trafficking, counterfeit goods, and more. In this course students will explore the multifaceted nature of these crimes, their impact on global security, and their role in undermining economic, social, and political systems worldwide. 1 Course Unit
This course explores constitutional criminal procedure or the law of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to the United States Constitution. Topics included the laws and rules associated with search and seizure, arrest, interrogation, the exclusionary rule, and deprivation of counsel. Social science evidence that supports or raises questions about legal doctrine will be examined. No prerequisites are required.
This course discusses the need for stronger scientific foundations in the analysis of forensic evidence from a scientific and a policy perspective. Forensic evidence, such as fingerprints, firearms, and hair, has been analyzed for hundreds of years to inform crime investigations and prosecutions. However, recent advances, especially the use of DNA technology, have revealed that a faulty forensic analyses may have contributed to wrongful convictions. These advances have demonstrated the potential danger of information and testimony derived from imperfect analysis, which can result not just in wrongful convictions but also in errors of impunity. In this course, students learn about the history of forensics, as well as about the recent advances that aim to improve current practices. It is an interdisciplinary course, but it focuses mostly on the statistical and scientific aspects of testing in forensics. Students discuss recent solutions that quantify the uncertainty, limitations, and errors associated with human factors, pattern evidence, and digital evidence. No prior statistical or forensic knowledge is expected. The course will be useful for students who wish to become forensic practitioners, law enforcement officers, lawyers, judges, researchers, or simply informed citizens.
One of the central research problems in criminology is the relationship between human development and the likelihood of committing crime. This course will examine the tools for measuring the onset of crime, its persistence, intermittency, and desistence. These tools include the study of birth cohorts of everyone born in a certain time and place, life course studies of juvenile delinquents and non-delinquents, trajectory analysis of people studied from pre-school through middle age, and interviews with 70 year old former delinquents who reflect on how their life-course affected the crimes they committed. This course will also examine the research findings that have been produced using these tools. Students will be asked to consider what these findings imply for major theories of crime causation as well as policies for crime prevention.
Crime varies in time, space and populations as it reflects ecological structures and the routine social interactions that occur in daily life. Concentrations of crime can be found among locations, with antisocial activities like assaults and theft occurring at higher rates because of the demographic make-up of people (e.g. adolescents) or conflicts (e.g. competing gangs), for reasons examined by ecological criminology. Variation in socio-demographic structures (age, education ratios, and the concentration of poverty) and the physical environment (housing segregation, density of bars, street lighting) predicts variations between neighborhoods in the level of crime and disorder. Both ethnographic and quantitative research methods are used to explore the connections between the social and physical environment of areas and antisocial behavior.
This course explores wrongful convictions from an interdisciplinary perspective. Using research from the disciplines of law, criminology, psychology and sociology, this course explores how legal errors occur and how they might be prevented in the future. Connections to quality control research and practice in other industries will also be examined. No prerequisites are required. 1 Course Unit
This course will investigate and discuss the various techniques of analysis that biological anthropologists can apply to forensic cases. Topics include human osteology, the recovery of bodies, the analysis of life history, the reconstruction of causes of death, and various case studies where anthropologists have contributed significantly to solving forensic cases. Discussions will include the limitations of forensic anthropology and the application of DNA recovery to skeletal/mummified materials. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ANTH 3230 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26
The degree and major requirements displayed are intended as a guide for students entering in the Fall of 2026 and later. Students shoul consult with their academic program regarding final certifications an requirements for graduation. 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26 Sample Plan of Study Course Title Course
This course covers the tools and techniques to acquire, organize, link and visualize complex data in order to answer questions about crime and the criminal justice system. The course is organized around key questions about police shootings, victimization rates, identifying crime hotspots, calculating the cost of crime, and finding out what happens to crime when it rains. On the way to answer these questions, the course will cover topics including data sources, basic programming techniques, SQL, regular expressions, webscraping, and working with geographic data. The course will use R, an open-source, object oriented scripting language with a large set of available add-on packages.
This course provides an introduction to machine learning techniques for social science researchers. The course will cover a range of techniques including supervised and unsupervised learning, as well as more specialized methods such as deep learning and natural language processing. The course will also discuss ethical and privacy considerations in the use of machine learning, as well as the role of machine learning in policy and decision-making. The aim of the course is to be focused on applications. While the class will present the formal background on the development of the machine learning methods, the class will focus on putting the tools into practice. We will use data on a variety of topics including criminal justice data (recidivism prediction) as well as other social science disciplines. Students completing the course will know how to apply several of the most common machine learning tools to a variety of social science problems including prediction and clustering. The course will also discuss the role of machine learning in causal inference.
This course is an introduction to the theory and methods employed in social network analysis. Foundational to the study of social network analysis is the understanding that actors are interdependent, and that social structure emerges from regularities in this interdependence. Focus in social network analysis includes how networks form and evolve, and on how relationships affect the behavior and outcomes of actors in a network. Social network analysis also refers to the corresponding methods for investigating and measuring social structures and the dependencies between actors. This course primarily focuses on social network methods but will necessarily cover foundational concepts. Both descriptive and inferential approaches to social network analysis will be covered. The approach taken to the material will be a combination of lecture, labs, quizzes, and homework, with final application in the form of a research proposal/paper. Homework assignments will focus on the analysis and interpretation of a variety of network data sets. By the end of the class, each student should be familiar with the most commonly employed methods in social network analysis and should be competent at both applying and interpreting these methods for both exploratory analysis and theory testing. Students will also be exposed to the use of the R statistical computing system for network analysis and RStudio, yet familiarity with programming in R is not a pre-requisite.
What should society do when children break the law? This seminar will explore the theory and practice of juvenile justice in the United States from the 18th century until the present. Using the lenses of legal history and policy evaluation we will explore the development and current state of juvenile justice policies, practices, and institutions. Students will be asked to assess the continuities and changes between different policy regimes as well as the risks and opportunities that they represent. Class visits by juvenile justice practitioners will provide another opportunity to learn about and explore these themes and topics. Spring, odd numbered years only Mutually Exclusive: CRIM 6022 1 Course Unit
This course provides an introduction to applied statistical techniques in the social sciences and is tailored, in particular, to students pursuing the master of science degree in the Department of Criminology. It is taught as a basic course in statistics and presumes minimal mathematical or statistical background. We’ll begin with a brief introduction to the research process. We’ll then cover the computation, interpretation and understanding of basic descriptive statistics, distributions, hypothesis testing, measures of association and finally regression analysis. Depending on how much time we have, I will cover several more advanced topics in regression analysis at the end of the semester.
This course provides an overview of the leading criminological theories of crime. The central focus is on the major theories of crime developed over the past century from the disciplines of economics, psychology, and sociology. The course will focus on the application of social science research as a way to evaluate theories of crime. Special attention is devoted to the issues of measurement of crime and what is known from the available empirical data. In addition, the course will focus on how these theoretical perspectives relate to public policy responses to crime.
This course provides and overview of what we know about the criminal justice system in the United States and other developed nations. The central purpose of the course is to increas your knowledge about how the U.S. criminal justice system works but we will also spend a great deal of time thinking about the quality of the available evidence and how we know what we know. Topics covered will vary from year to year; recent topics have included police use of force, capital punishment, pre-trial detention, the use of predictive algorithms in the criminal justice system and the relationship between immigration and crime in the United States.
This course covers the tools and techniques to acquire, organize, link and visualize complex data in order to answer questions about crime and the criminal justice system. The course is organized around key questions about police shootings, victimization rates, identifying crime hotspots, calculating the cost of crime, and finding out what happens to crime when it rains. On the way to answer these questions, the course will cover topics including data sources, basic programming techniques, SQL, regular expressions, webscraping, and working with geographic data. The course will use R, an open-source, object oriented scripting language with a large set of available add-on packages.
This course provides an overview of the application of social science research methods and data analysis to criminology. Students will learn research design principles and statistical techniques for the analysis of social science data, including how to interpret results as part of the rigorous practice of evidence-based criminology. M.S. students will conduct a semester-long, data-intensive crime analysis project using quantitative methods to address a specific research question. Student projects culminate with a poster presentation, an oral defense, and the submission of a written research paper.
In this capstone course, students will meet weekly with guests who work on or close to the front line of the criminal justice system. Past guests have included police chiefs, forensic scientists, lobbyists for gun rights and lobbyist for gun control, formerly incarcerated individuals, crime analysts, directors of sentencing commissions, prosecutors and defenders, politicians, and researchers at research organizations working closely with criminal justice agencies. Guests share their career paths, the roles of their organizations in the justice system, and key justice system challenges. Students interact with all guest speakers.
In this capstone course, students will meet weekly with guests who work on or close to the front line of the criminal justice system. Past guests have included police chiefs, forensic scientists, lobbyists for gun rights and lobbyist for gun control, formerly incarcerated individuals, crime analysts, directors of sentencing commissions, prosecutors and defenders, politicians, and researchers at research organizations working closely with criminal justice agencies. Guests share their career paths, the roles of their organizations in the justice system, and key justice system challenges. Students interact with all guest speakers.
CRIM 6010Causal Inference in the Social Sciences I
This is the first course in a two half-credit course sequence. The course is intended for graduate students who are interested in learning how to do applied social science research which seeks to address causal questions. The course is highly applied and focuses on training students to understand how to use the most common econometric methods that are used to analyze observational data.
CRIM 6011Causal Inference in the Social Sciences II
This is the second course in a two half-credit course sequence. The course is intended for graduate students who are interested in learning how to do applied social science research which seeks to address causal questions. The course is highly applied and focuses on training students to understand how to use the most common econometric methods that are used to analyze observational data. 0.5 Course Units 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26
This course provides an introduction to machine learning techniques for social science researchers. The course will cover a range of techniques including supervised and unsupervised learning, as well as more specialized methods such as deep learning and natural language processing. The course will also discuss ethical and privacy considerations in the use of machine learning, as well as the role of machine learning in policy and decision-making. The aim of the course is to be focused on applications. While the class will present the formal background on the development of the machine learning methods, the class will focus on putting the tools into practice. We will use data on a variety of topics including criminal justice data (recidivism prediction) as well as other social science disciplines. Students completing the course will know how to apply several of the most common machine learning tools to a variety of social science problems including prediction and clustering. The course will also discuss the role of machine learning in causal inference.
Social network analysis also refers to the corresponding methods for investigating and measuring social structures and the dependencies between actors. This course primarily focuses on social network methods but will necessarily cover foundational concepts. Both descriptive and inferential approaches to social network analysis will be covered. The approach taken to the material will be a combination of lecture, labs, quizzes, and homework, with final application in the form of a research proposal/paper. Homework assignments will focus on the analysis and interpretation of a variety of network data sets. By the end of the class, each student should be familiar with the most commonly employed methods in social network analysis and should be competent at both applying and interpreting these methods for both exploratory analysis and theory testing. Students will also be exposed to the use of the R statistical computing system for network analysis and RStudio, yet familiarity with programming in R is not a pre-requisite.
What should society do when children break the law? This seminar will explore the theory and practice of juvenile justice in the United States from the 18th century until the present. Using the lenses of legal history and policy evaluation we will explore the development and current state of juvenile justice policies, practices, and institutions. Students will be asked to assess the continuities and changes between different policy regimes as well as the risks and opportunities that they represent. Class visits by juvenile justice practitioners will provide another opportunity to learn about and explore these themes and topics. Spring, odd numbered years only Mutually Exclusive: CRIM 4022 1 Course Unit
Becoming an effective leader in policing requires more than just experience of having been in the organization. It requires understanding the political and social context of policing, as well as the dynamics of community engagement. It needs a leader to be able to understand and work with a diverse range of stakeholders to move policing forward in evidence-based, effective, and equitable ways. This series brings leaders and real-world examples to the classroom to help students develop these competencies.
Becoming an effective leader in policing requires more than just experience of having been in the organization. It requires understanding the political and social context of policing, as well as the dynamics of community engagement. It needs a leader to be able to understand and work with a diverse range of stakeholders to move policing forward in evidence-based, effective, and equitable ways. This series brings leaders and real-world examples to the classroom to help students develop these competencies.
What is evidence-based policing and how is it done? This course provides an answer to both questions, offering an introduction and hands-on guide for police officers wanting to know how to put principles into practice. It serves as an introduction to the terminology, ideas, and scientific methods associated with evidence-based policy, and outlines some of the existing policing applications. On completion of the course, students will be better informed about this important policing innovation and equipped to research existing topics in law enforcement practice.
This course introduces students to eight key concepts that can explain offender behavior, effectiveness of policing strategies and tactics, crime prevention principles, and theories of organizations. Discussion seminars address applying these principles to the decisions police leaders make across the range of professional environments in which they move.
Change within the criminal justice system can be notoriously challenging. Competing priorities at both the local and national level often conflict with on-the-ground experience in cities like Philadelphia. Leaders in criminal justice need an appreciation for these dynamics to be able to navigate ideas and projects sourced from research evidence and theory to implementation. This series brings leaders and real-world examples to the classroom to help students develop these competencies and be able to articulate the tools necessary to achieve success.
Change within the criminal justice system can be notoriously challenging. Competing priorities at both the local and national level often conflict with on-the-ground experience in cities like Philadelphia. Leaders in criminal justice need an appreciation for these dynamics to be able to navigate ideas and projects sourced from research evidence and theory to implementation. This series brings leaders and real-world examples to the classroom to help students develop these competencies and be able to articulate the tools necessary to achieve success.
This course explores research methods used to undertake program evaluation in policing and criminal justice. Students learn about the design and delivery of data collection instruments across a range of policy environments. These include quantitative data analysis, qualitative analysis, survey design. On completion of the course, students will be able to explain the pros and cons of various methodologies and identify appropriate research choices for different policy problems.
This course explores research methods used to undertake program evaluation in policing and criminal justice. Students learn about the design and delivery of data collection instruments across a range of policy environments. These include quantitative data analysis, qualitative analysis, survey design. On completion of the course, students will be able to explain the pros and cons of various methodologies and identify appropriate research choices for different policy problems.
The capstone project allows students to undertake and complete a real- world project, ideally in their professional environment. During the fall semester students work through principles learned in the evidence-based policing class of project identification and conceptualization, planning, and research design. The spring semester includes conducting analysis, writing, and creating and presenting deliverables.
The capstone project allows students to undertake and complete a real- world project, ideally in their professional environment. During the fall semester students work through principles learned in the evidence-based policing class of project identification and conceptualization, planning, and research design. The spring semester includes conducting analysis, writing, and creating and presenting deliverables.
This second year doctoral course is a weekly discussion group designed to help students integrate their coursework from different disciplines around the unifying perspectives of criminology. It focuses on preparation for the doctoral comprehensive examination, detailed critiques of published research reports, and colloquia by leading guest lecturers presenting new research results. Students preparing for dissertation research on the causes and prevention of crime will report on their developing research ideas.
