Learning Journal: Introduction to Criminology

A reflection on Introduction to Criminology: A Canadian Open Education Resource by Shereen Hassan and Dan Lett

Introduction

Introduction to Criminology: A Canadian Open Education Resource provides more than an explanation of crime, criminal behaviour, and the Canadian justice system. It examines how societies decide what is right or wrong, how conduct becomes criminalized, who has the power to create and enforce laws, and how communities respond when harm occurs.

Before studying criminology, it is easy to assume that crime is a clear and stable category. An act is either criminal or it is not. A person who violates the law is a criminal, while a person who obeys the law is not.

The text complicates this assumption. Laws are created within particular historical, political, economic, and cultural conditions. Conduct that is prohibited in one period may be accepted in another. Some harmful actions are criminalized, while other harmful actions are treated as regulatory, civil, organizational, or political matters.

Criminology therefore asks more than why individuals break laws. It asks who creates laws, whose interests those laws protect, which people are most closely watched, which harms receive public attention, and how punishment is distributed.

Crime is not only an individual act. It is also a social judgment about behaviour, harm, responsibility, and power.

This perspective connects strongly with sociology, psychology, organizational behaviour, conflict management, and Standing on the Ledge. Each examines the relationship between individuals and the systems surrounding them.

What Is Crime?

Crime is generally understood as behaviour prohibited by criminal law. However, a legal definition does not fully explain why certain behaviours are criminalized.

Some actions cause serious harm but may not be treated as crimes. Unsafe organizational decisions, environmental destruction, workplace exploitation, and misuse of institutional authority may harm many people without producing the same response as visible street crime.

Other behaviours may be criminalized even when the harm is uncertain, contested, or influenced by moral and political beliefs.

This distinction between crime and harm is one of the most important lessons in criminology. The criminal law does not provide a complete catalogue of everything society considers harmful or unjust.

Laws also change. Conduct involving substances, sexuality, protest, property, public order, and personal relationships has been treated differently across Canadian history.

This means crime should be examined within its social context. We must ask:

• What conduct has been prohibited?
• Who decided it should be prohibited?
• What harm is the law intended to prevent?
• Who is most likely to be investigated or punished?
• Whose behaviour is overlooked or treated less severely?
• What historical conditions influenced the law?

These questions do not mean that all laws are illegitimate. They mean that law is a human institution and should remain open to examination.

Crime, Deviance, and Social Norms

Crime and deviance are related but are not identical.

Crime refers to behaviour prohibited by law. Deviance refers more broadly to conduct that violates social expectations or norms. A behaviour may be considered deviant without being illegal. A criminal act may also occur without attracting strong social condemnation.

Social norms influence clothing, language, relationships, work habits, emotional expression, and public behaviour. People who violate these expectations may experience criticism, exclusion, ridicule, or informal punishment even when they have broken no law.

This demonstrates that social control extends beyond the police, courts, and correctional system. Families, workplaces, schools, religious institutions, media, and communities also influence behaviour.

In organizational behaviour, employees learn formal rules through policies and informal rules through experience. A workplace may officially encourage employees to report problems while informally punishing those who do so.

The formal rule says to speak. The informal norm says to remain silent.

Criminology teaches me to examine both forms of control. Written rules may not reveal how power actually operates.

Crime in the Canadian Context

A Canadian approach to criminology must consider the country’s legal institutions, political history, geography, cultural diversity, and colonial development.

Canadian criminal law operates within a national framework, but experiences with crime and justice vary across provinces, territories, communities, and social groups.

Urban and rural communities may face different challenges. Northern and remote communities may have limited access to legal, social, health, and victim support services. Poverty, housing insecurity, substance use, mental health, transportation, and employment conditions may affect both victimization and contact with the justice system.

A Canadian analysis must also recognize that the institutions of law and justice did not develop on neutral ground. They developed through colonization, settlement, displacement, and the imposition of European legal structures.

This history continues to influence contemporary justice.

Colonialism, Criminalization, and Indigenous Peoples

One of the strongest features of the textbook is its refusal to treat colonialism as separate from criminology.

Colonial governments used law to control Indigenous lands, movement, culture, governance, ceremony, families, and identity. Conduct connected with Indigenous ways of life could be prohibited while colonial seizure and forced assimilation were presented as lawful government actions.

This reveals an uncomfortable truth: legality and justice are not always the same.

A government may use law as an instrument of order while the order itself is unjust. An institution may follow its own procedures while causing serious harm.

Indigenous overrepresentation in the criminal justice system cannot be explained by individual behaviour alone. It must be considered alongside colonial displacement, residential schools, intergenerational trauma, child welfare intervention, discrimination, poverty, inadequate housing, and unequal access to services.

This does not deny individual responsibility for harmful conduct. It places that conduct within a fuller historical and social context.

Accountability without context becomes blame. Context without accountability becomes avoidance. Justice requires both.

The inclusion of Indigenous knowledge also challenges the assumption that Western punishment is the only legitimate response to wrongdoing.

Indigenous justice traditions may emphasize relationships, community responsibility, healing, restoration, balance, and reintegration. These approaches do not necessarily avoid consequences. They understand consequences within a broader goal of repairing harm.

Race, Racialization, and the Justice System

Race is not a biological explanation for criminal behaviour. It is a social classification that has been created and maintained through history, institutions, political decisions, and unequal relationships.

Racialization occurs when racial meanings are assigned to individuals or groups and then used to shape how they are perceived and treated.

This can influence surveillance, police contact, public suspicion, media representation, credibility, charging decisions, sentencing, and access to resources.

Racial profiling occurs when race or perceived ethnicity influences enforcement decisions without sufficient connection to individual behaviour or reliable evidence.

Criminology must therefore examine not only who commits recorded offences but also how offences are detected, reported, investigated, and processed.

Recorded crime statistics do not provide a neutral picture of all criminal behaviour. They reflect where enforcement is concentrated and which activities are most visible.

A heavily policed community may produce more recorded offences partly because more behaviour is being observed. Illegal conduct occurring in private offices, corporate systems, or financially powerful institutions may be much more difficult to detect.

Intersectionality strengthens this analysis by examining how race interacts with gender, class, disability, sexuality, age, immigration status, and other social positions.

People do not experience justice through one identity at a time.

Media and Crime

Most people learn about crime through media rather than direct experience.

News coverage, television, film, social media, and political communication influence which crimes appear common, which offenders appear dangerous, and which victims receive sympathy.

Media organizations tend to favour events that are dramatic, unusual, violent, emotionally powerful, or easy to explain. These events attract attention, but they may not accurately represent the most common forms of crime or harm.

Repeated coverage can create the impression that a rare event is widespread. At the same time, familiar harms may receive little attention because they are gradual, complicated, or less visually dramatic.

Media framing also influences how responsibility is assigned. One person may be presented as a dangerous offender. Another may be described as troubled, promising, or someone who made a mistake.

Victims may be portrayed differently depending on race, gender, class, age, occupation, or lifestyle. Some victims are treated as innocent and deserving, while others are questioned or blamed.

This connects with organizational communication. The person who controls the narrative can influence how others understand the conflict.

Once a simple story becomes accepted, contradictory information may be ignored.

The first explanation is not always the most accurate explanation, but it often becomes the frame through which every later fact is interpreted.

Research and Counting Crime

Criminology relies on research to examine patterns, causes, consequences, and responses to crime.

Researchers may use official police data, court records, correctional records, victimization surveys, self-report studies, interviews, observation, case studies, and other methods.

Each source provides useful information, but each has limitations.

Official statistics include only incidents that become known to authorities and are recorded. Many offences are never reported. Victims may fear retaliation, believe nothing will be done, feel ashamed, distrust authorities, or fail to recognize what happened as a crime.

Police discretion and enforcement priorities also influence recorded data. Changes in crime statistics may reflect changes in reporting, enforcement, definitions, or recording practices rather than an identical change in underlying behaviour.

Victimization surveys can identify incidents not reported to police, but they depend on memory, willingness to disclose, question wording, and sampling.

Self-report studies can provide information about behaviour that never resulted in arrest. However, participants may forget, minimize, exaggerate, or refuse to disclose their conduct.

The important lesson is that data must be interpreted rather than merely repeated.

This connects directly with organizational behaviour. Workplace statistics may count complaints, incidents, absenteeism, injuries, turnover, or disciplinary actions. Low numbers do not necessarily prove that a problem is absent.

Employees may not report concerns when reporting appears unsafe or pointless.

An absence of recorded complaints may demonstrate trust and stability, or it may demonstrate that people have learned not to complain.

Biological Influences on Criminal Behaviour

Biological criminology examines possible relationships among genetics, brain functioning, brain injury, hormones, nutrition, substance use, and behaviour.

Biology may influence temperament, impulse control, emotional regulation, attention, aggression, learning, and sensitivity to stress. However, biological influence should not be confused with biological destiny.

A risk factor does not guarantee that a person will commit a crime. Human behaviour develops through interaction among biology, psychology, relationships, culture, opportunity, and environment.

Biological explanations have also been misused historically to classify groups as naturally inferior, dangerous, or criminal.

This history requires caution. Scientific language can give prejudice an appearance of objectivity.

A responsible biological approach recognizes complexity, avoids deterministic claims, and considers protective factors as well as risks.

Psychological Theories of Crime

Psychological theories examine how cognition, personality, development, emotion, trauma, learning, and mental health may influence offending.

Cognitive theories may focus on how people interpret situations, justify behaviour, evaluate consequences, or understand the effects of their actions on others.

Cognitive behavioural approaches examine the interaction among beliefs, emotions, habits, and behaviour. These approaches may help people identify harmful patterns and practise different responses.

Trauma-informed perspectives recognize that some harmful behaviour develops in the context of violence, neglect, instability, loss, or chronic threat.

Understanding trauma does not excuse violence or remove responsibility. It may help explain why certain responses developed and what forms of intervention could reduce future harm.

Mental illness must also be discussed carefully. Most people living with mental illness do not commit serious violence, and criminal behaviour should not automatically be attributed to psychological disorder.

Using mental illness as a general explanation for crime contributes to stigma and ignores the social, situational, and individual factors involved.

Sociological Theories of Crime

Sociological theories shift attention from individual characteristics to relationships, communities, institutions, inequality, and social structure.

These theories ask why crime rates differ across communities, why certain groups experience greater contact with the justice system, and how social conditions influence behaviour.

Social Disorganization

Social disorganization theories examine how instability, concentrated disadvantage, weakened institutions, and limited community resources may reduce a neighbourhood’s ability to exercise informal social control.

The theory should not be interpreted as blaming communities. Many communities display strong relationships and resilience despite significant structural barriers.

The more useful question is whether communities have the resources, stability, services, and political support needed to address problems collectively.

Strain Theory

Strain theory examines the pressure created when people are encouraged to pursue socially valued goals but lack legitimate access to the means of achieving them.

A society may strongly promote financial success while distributing education, employment, housing, and opportunity unequally.

This contradiction can produce frustration, withdrawal, adaptation, or rule breaking.

Strain theory does not suggest that poverty automatically causes crime. Most people experiencing economic hardship do not commit serious offences. It explains how blocked opportunities and unequal expectations may increase pressure under certain conditions.

Social Control Theory

Social control theory asks why most people obey rules most of the time.

Strong bonds to family, school, employment, community, and shared values may discourage offending because people have relationships and commitments they do not want to lose.

This highlights the importance of belonging. Exclusion can weaken the very relationships that encourage lawful participation.

A justice system that permanently isolates people may make reintegration more difficult.

Labelling Theory

Labelling theory examines what happens when a person becomes publicly defined as deviant or criminal.

Once labelled, the person may encounter exclusion from employment, housing, education, and social relationships. Others may interpret all future behaviour through the label.

The person may eventually internalize the identity or find that conventional opportunities are no longer available.

This does not mean the original conduct should be ignored. It means that the social reaction can influence what happens next.

Labelling theory connects directly to organizational behaviour. Labels such as difficult, unreliable, disloyal, negative, or troublemaker can become organizational identities.

Once applied, the label may shape every later decision about the employee.

Learning Theories

Learning theories propose that criminal behaviour can be learned through interaction, observation, reinforcement, and group participation.

Differential association theory suggests that people learn definitions, attitudes, methods, and justifications favourable to law violation through relationships with others.

Social learning theory expands this by examining imitation, rewards, punishments, and expected consequences.

People learn not only how to perform behaviour but also how to explain it to themselves.

An organizational culture can similarly teach misconduct. Employees may observe that rules are ignored when breaking them produces results. They may learn that concealing problems is rewarded while reporting them causes punishment.

Over time, misconduct can become normalized.

Organizations teach ethics through consequences more effectively than they teach ethics through slogans.

Learning theories therefore have an important preventive lesson. Changing behaviour may require changing the environment that rewards, models, or excuses it.

Critical Criminology

Critical criminology examines the relationship among crime, law, inequality, economic systems, and political power.

It questions why public attention is often concentrated on crimes committed by people with limited power while harmful actions by corporations, governments, and wealthy individuals receive less punishment.

Critical criminology also asks whether the justice system protects social order in a neutral way or whether it sometimes protects existing relationships of power.

This perspective does not require believing that every law exists solely to benefit elites. It requires recognizing that power affects which harms become visible, which laws are enforced, and which people can defend themselves effectively.

Legal representation, time, education, status, and financial resources influence a person’s ability to navigate the justice system.

Formal equality does not always produce equal outcomes when the parties begin with very different resources.

Feminist Criminology

Feminist criminology emerged partly because traditional theories often treated male experience as the universal model of crime.

Women and gender-diverse people were frequently overlooked, stereotyped, or explained through assumptions about morality, sexuality, family roles, and emotional instability.

Feminist criminology examines gendered pathways into offending, sexualized violence, intimate partner violence, economic dependence, caregiving, victimization, criminalization, and treatment within the justice system.

It also demonstrates that gender does not operate separately from race, class, disability, sexuality, and colonialism.

A significant lesson is that victimization and offending are not always separate categories. Some people who commit offences have also experienced abuse, exploitation, coercion, poverty, or trauma.

This does not erase the harm they caused. It challenges simplistic categories of innocent victims and naturally bad offenders.

Cultural Criminology

Cultural criminology examines the meanings, emotions, identities, symbols, media representations, and experiences connected with crime.

Not all offending can be explained through rational calculation or economic need. Behaviour may involve excitement, status, anger, resistance, belonging, boredom, identity, or the desire to challenge authority.

Culture also influences how crime is represented. Some offenders become feared symbols. Others become celebrities, folk heroes, or sources of entertainment.

This perspective reminds me that behaviour has meaning to the person performing it. Effective intervention requires understanding that meaning rather than assuming every offence has the same motivation.

Victimology

Victimology examines victimization, its effects, the needs and rights of victims, and the ways institutions respond.

The language used is important. Some people prefer the term victim because it recognizes that a wrong was committed against them. Others prefer survivor because it emphasizes agency and continued life beyond the event.

Neither term should be imposed automatically.

Victimization can produce physical injury, financial loss, fear, disrupted relationships, sleep problems, anger, shame, grief, and changes in trust.

The justice process may also create secondary victimization when people are disbelieved, blamed, repeatedly required to recount events, excluded from decisions, or treated without dignity.

Victim blaming occurs when attention shifts from the offender’s conduct to what the victim supposedly should have done differently.

Risk reduction can be discussed without transferring responsibility for the offence.

A person may be able to reduce exposure to risk, but the responsibility for committing the harmful act remains with the person who committed it.

For Standing on the Ledge, victimology reinforces the importance of agency. People affected by harm should be allowed to define their needs rather than being treated merely as evidence within someone else’s process.

Crimes of the Powerful

Crimes of the powerful include occupational, corporate, financial, political, and state-organized wrongdoing.

These offences may cause extensive financial, physical, environmental, and social harm. However, they can be difficult to identify and prosecute.

Powerful organizations may control records, legal expertise, public communication, and specialized knowledge. Harm may be distributed across many victims and develop gradually over time.

Corporate wrongdoing may also be described as a mistake, compliance failure, accounting problem, or regulatory issue rather than as crime.

Street crime usually has a visible offender and event. Organizational harm may emerge from a chain of decisions in which responsibility is divided among departments, managers, policies, and contractors.

This division can make accountability difficult. Each person may claim to have followed instructions or possessed only limited authority.

Organizational behaviour helps explain how this occurs. Pressure to meet targets, obedience to authority, groupthink, normalization of deviance, divided responsibility, and fear of retaliation may allow harmful conduct to continue.

The lesson is not that every organizational failure is criminal. It is that social status and organizational form influence whether harmful behaviour is understood as crime, negligence, poor management, or an unfortunate outcome.

Green Criminology

Green criminology examines environmental harm, ecological destruction, harm to non-human animals, environmental injustice, and the unequal distribution of environmental risk.

Some environmental harms violate criminal law. Others are legally permitted, weakly regulated, or treated primarily as economic activities.

This again demonstrates the difference between crime and harm.

Environmental damage may affect communities for generations. Pollution, habitat destruction, unsafe disposal, resource extraction, and climate-related harms can affect health, food, water, land, culture, and economic security.

Environmental injustice occurs when vulnerable communities carry a disproportionate share of environmental risk while receiving fewer benefits and possessing less political influence.

Indigenous communities may experience environmental harm as an attack not only on property or resources but also on relationships with land, culture, ancestors, and future generations.

Green criminology broadens the meaning of victimization. Victims may include communities, ecosystems, animals, and people not yet born.

Environmental Criminology

Environmental criminology is distinct from green criminology. It examines how physical locations, routines, opportunities, guardianship, and movement patterns influence where and when crime occurs.

Routine activity theory considers the convergence of a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of capable guardianship.

Crime pattern theory examines how people move through familiar locations and how opportunities arise within those patterns.

Situational crime prevention attempts to reduce opportunities by improving guardianship, increasing effort, reducing rewards, or changing physical design.

These approaches can be useful because they produce practical prevention strategies. However, they may focus on where crime occurs without fully explaining why social conditions produce offending or unequal victimization.

Environmental prevention should therefore be combined with social, economic, cultural, and developmental approaches.

Restorative and Transformative Justice

Restorative justice represents one of the most important connections between criminology, conflict management, and Standing on the Ledge.

Traditional criminal justice often asks:

• What law was broken?
• Who broke it?
• What punishment is deserved?

Restorative justice asks additional questions:

• Who was harmed?
• What are their needs?
• Who is responsible for addressing the harm?
• What relationships or community conditions were affected?
• What would meaningful repair require?

Restorative justice does not simply mean forgiveness or the absence of consequences. It requires accountability, participation, recognition of harm, and meaningful efforts to repair what can be repaired.

It may involve dialogue, restitution, community participation, agreements, healing circles, conferences, or other processes.

These approaches are not appropriate in every case. Safety, power imbalance, coercion, willingness, and the seriousness of the harm must be considered.

Transformative justice goes further by asking what social or institutional conditions allowed the harm to occur and what must change to prevent repetition.

Restorative justice seeks to repair the damage. Transformative justice asks why the conditions producing the damage existed in the first place.

This has direct relevance to organizational conflict. An organization may resolve a complaint by disciplining one person without correcting the workload, leadership, communication, or incentive systems that contributed to the problem.

The individual case appears closed, but the conditions remain.

Connections to Organizational Behaviour

Criminology and organizational behaviour overlap whenever rules, authority, power, culture, accountability, and harmful conduct are examined.

Important connections include:

• Organizations create formal rules and informal norms.
• Authority influences which behaviour is reported or ignored.
• Group pressure can normalize misconduct.
• Employees learn from rewards and punishments.
• Labels can shape how future behaviour is interpreted.
• Power affects access to information, representation, and decision makers.
• Organizational culture can either encourage or suppress accountability.
• Divided responsibility can allow harmful decisions to continue.
• Performance pressure may encourage rule breaking or concealment.
• Restorative processes can address relationships and harm rather than punishment alone.

The text also reinforces the importance of psychological safety.

Employees must be able to report hazards, errors, misconduct, and ethical concerns without automatic retaliation. A system that punishes internal criticism may preserve the appearance of stability while allowing larger problems to develop.

Organizations should examine what their systems actually teach.

A written ethics policy has limited value when employees observe that high performers are protected despite misconduct.

Connections to Communication and Conflict Management

Conflict is often framed as a dispute between individuals. Criminology encourages a broader assessment.

A conflict may involve unequal authority, disputed definitions, institutional rules, stereotypes, historical relationships, and competition over whose account will be accepted.

Communication is not neutral when one party controls the official record, investigation process, resources, and consequences.

Fair conflict management requires more than allowing each person to speak. It requires examining whether each person has a meaningful opportunity to be heard and whether the process is capable of challenging its own assumptions.

Labelling is particularly dangerous during conflict. Describing someone as aggressive, difficult, dishonest, unstable, or non-compliant can determine how later communication is interpreted.

A fair process should focus on specific conduct, evidence, context, harm, and responsibility.

Restorative principles may improve conflict resolution by asking:

• What happened?
• Who was affected?
• What harm resulted?
• What responsibility does each participant hold?
• What is needed to repair the harm?
• What changes would reduce the chance of repetition?

Connections to Standing on the Ledge

Introduction to Criminology strengthens Standing on the Ledge by showing how collapse, harm, responsibility, and recovery are shaped by systems of power.

People experiencing collapse often blame themselves entirely. Criminology does not remove responsibility, but it encourages a fuller investigation.

It asks:

• What rules governed the situation?
• Who created and interpreted those rules?
• Who controlled the evidence and official narrative?
• What harm occurred even if no criminal law was broken?
• Were some people more closely scrutinized than others?
• What structural pressures influenced the conduct?
• What opportunities existed to report or resist?
• What would accountability and repair actually require?

The distinction between crime and harm is especially important.

A person may suffer serious financial, emotional, occupational, or social harm even when no criminal charge exists. The absence of criminal wrongdoing does not prove that a decision was fair, ethical, competent, or harmless.

Victimology also strengthens the framework by showing that recovery is not limited to determining who was right. People may need practical stability, recognition, information, safety, social support, and restoration of agency.

Labelling theory explains why a period of collapse can become an imposed identity. A person may be labelled a failure, problem employee, offender, victim, or unstable individual.

Rebuilding requires separating the event from the whole person.

Restorative and transformative justice provide a useful model for the later phases of Standing on the Ledge. Recovery should ask not only how the individual can return to functioning but also what relationships, systems, and conditions must change.

Rebuilding is incomplete when the person adapts to the harm but the system that produced the harm remains untouched.

Critical Evaluation of the Resource

The primary strength of Introduction to Criminology: A Canadian Open Education Resource is its breadth.

It introduces conventional biological, psychological, sociological, and learning theories while also examining colonialism, race, gender, culture, environmental harm, victimization, crimes of the powerful, and restorative justice.

Its Canadian focus is particularly valuable. Criminology cannot simply import theories from other countries without examining Canadian law, Indigenous history, geography, institutions, and social conditions.

The inclusion of author positionality and Indigenous perspectives encourages readers to consider how knowledge is shaped by identity, history, culture, and power.

Its open education format is another strength. Educational access is itself a justice issue. Expensive resources can exclude students or place additional pressure on people already balancing employment, family, health, and financial responsibilities.

The resource also has limitations.

Its breadth means that complex theories and debates must be condensed. No introductory text can fully represent the diversity of Indigenous legal traditions, feminist criminology, critical criminology, psychology, sociology, victimology, and justice reform.

The textbook is therefore a foundation rather than a complete account.

Criminological knowledge also changes as laws, statistics, social conditions, and research develop. Readers should continue consulting current Canadian research, legislation, court decisions, community knowledge, and Indigenous scholarship.

Personal Application

The most important change in my thinking is that I will no longer treat crime as a simple division between good people and bad people.

People remain responsible for the harm they cause, but behaviour must be examined within biological, psychological, social, cultural, economic, and institutional contexts.

I will also distinguish more carefully among crime, harm, deviance, conflict, and organizational failure.

Not every harmful act is criminal. Not every violation of a social norm is harmful. Not every legal decision is just. Not every person who has offended is permanently dangerous.

When examining an event, I will ask:

• What happened?
• What evidence supports the account?
• What information may be missing?
• Who defined the behaviour as a problem?
• Who held decision making power?
• Who experienced harm?
• What social and historical conditions influenced the event?
• What response would provide accountability?
• What response would reduce future harm?
• What would meaningful repair require?

I will also become more critical when reading crime statistics and media reports. Numbers and narratives require context. A dramatic story may not represent the most common harm, and official records may not contain everything that occurred.

Finally, I will try to separate accountability from permanent condemnation.

A person should not be reduced to the worst action they have committed. At the same time, compassion should not erase the needs of those harmed.

Justice must be able to hold both truths.

Conclusion

Introduction to Criminology: A Canadian Open Education Resource demonstrates that criminology is not simply the study of criminals. It is the study of law, harm, power, social control, inequality, victimization, responsibility, punishment, resistance, healing, and justice.

The text challenges the assumption that laws are neutral reflections of universal morality. Laws develop through historical and political processes and may be applied unevenly.

It also challenges explanations that locate crime entirely within the individual. Biological and psychological factors matter, but so do inequality, colonization, social learning, opportunity, community resources, culture, labelling, and institutional power.

For organizational behaviour, the book demonstrates how rules, authority, incentives, labels, group pressure, and divided responsibility can encourage or conceal harmful conduct.

For communication and conflict management, it shows that fairness depends on who controls the narrative, whose evidence is believed, and whether the process recognizes unequal power.

For Standing on the Ledge, criminology provides a way of examining harm without reducing the person to either total blame or total helplessness. It encourages accountability while also examining the systems and relationships surrounding the event.

The book’s deepest lesson is that justice must involve more than identifying a broken rule and imposing a consequence. Justice must consider who was harmed, what created the conditions for harm, what accountability requires, and how individuals and communities can move forward.

To understand why someone stands on the ledge, we must examine not only what they did or what was done to them, but who defined the rules, who held the power, whose harm was recognized, and whether the response created punishment, repair, or meaningful change.

Reference

Hassan, S., and Lett, D. (2023). Introduction to Criminology: A Canadian Open Education Resource. Kwantlen Polytechnic University.