MPhil in Criminology

Skills in communicating criminological knowledge to specialist and non-specialist audiences.

Contact Hours

Students will attend these four core courses:

• Criminological Theories (CT)
• Criminological Research Methods (CRM)
• Academic Skills Development Workshops (ASDW)
• Introduction to Quantitative Analysis (IQA)

 And at least one optional course (OPT) on offer this term.

• (CT): Six hours / week
• (CRM): Four hours / week
• (ASDW): Two hours / week
• (IQA): Two hours / week
• (OPT): Two hours / week (minimum)

Students will attend one core course: Criminological Research Methods Workshops (CRMW).

And at least one optional course (OPT) on offer this term.

(CRMW): Two hours / week

(OPT): Two hours / week (minimum)

One Criminological Theories essay, and;

Two Optional Course essays (each relating to a different optional course the student has attended in Michaelmas & Lent Terms).

One Criminological Research Methods Portfolio relating to the core course in Criminological Research Methods.

This may include a written paper, one or more pieces of coursework or other exercises, or a combination of these.

A dissertation of not more than 18,000 words, involving original research on a criminological topic relating to the study of crime chosen by the student with approval of their supervisor (i.e. the nature of crime, what causes or prevents crime, or how we respond to crime). The dissertation will be expected to demonstrate the students critical understanding of research principles and analytical skills .

The dissertation is researched and worked on from the start of the academic year in October, but most intensively from April to July during the 'research term' (Easter Term).

Students should be aware of the limited time frame to complete their dissertation, especially if they wish to collect original data or request access to restricted data.

Students will need to meet with their supervisor at the earliest opportunity during the Michaelmas Term to discuss the feasibility of their planned research. In particular, they will need to discuss the steps and time needed to: (i) plan their research design,(ii) gain access and (iii) collect and analyse relevant data. The dissertation may rely on a variety of quantitative or qualitative research methods, including, for example, a series of interviews, an observational case-study, documentary or discourse analysis, a small survey, an experiment or quasi-experiment, secondary analysis of existing data, a systematic review, or a legal or philosophical analysis.

Please state how you see taking this course would help you meet your career goals.

(This statement should be no more than 1000 characters long, including spaces and punctuation between words).

This is where you should explain your personal reasons for applying. Questions you might consider could be:

• Why Cambridge?
• What would studying this course do for you / your career?
• What aspects of the course interest you the most?

(This statement should be no more than 1500 characters long, including spaces and punctuation between words).

On the application form your Statement of Interest should:

• Capture more broadly why are you interested in Criminology as a subject. What are the Criminological themes that attract you and why?
• Outline some of your reasons for studying Criminology. You should mention particular academic interests you may have in the field of criminology and how you see these fitting in with your medium- and long-term plans.

(This statement should be no more than 7,500 characters long, including spaces and punctuation between words).

You need to submit one sample of your academic writing, for which you are the sole author. We will not accept a piece of work you have written collaboratively with others

Applicants tend to submit either an essay or piece of coursework from a previous degree or a chapter from a dissertation. The sample of written work is more about showing your academic abilities and style of writing so it doesn't need to on a Criminological subject or directly related to Criminology. Many applicants don't come from a Criminological background, and most tend to submit a piece of coursework from their current or previous degree.

(This pieces of work should be between 1,500 – 5,000 words long. A Reference list or Bibliography is not included in the word count, however, we do include footnotes.)

This must be uploaded as a Supporting Document.

For our MPhil course, we expect applicants to have an honours degree, with at least a high II.i (67 per cent) from a UK university, or equivalent from a non-UK institution (i.e. GPA 3.6/4 in the United States).

If your degree is not from a UK institution, please check the International Qualifications section of the Postgraduate Admissions website to find the equivalent qualification standard in your country.

Course Convenor:

Dr Kyle Treiber

Criminological Theories introduces you to key explanations of crime, seminal texts and ongoing debates.

The course is taught by a range of lecturers who have worked directly with, advanced, or even developed these theories.  As part of the Criminological Theories course you will also attend Criminological Theories discussion groups. These groups provide an opportunity for you to discuss key theories and their application in further detail, helping to situate them in the wider scope of criminology.

Course Convenor:

Dr Charles Lanfear

This course will introduce you to the basics of criminological research, from sampling and measurement of key variables to the most fundamental quantitative and qualitative methods. Like Criminological Theories, seminars are taught by lecturers who have expertise in the given method. The course aims to familiarize you with key considerations regarding criminological research and equip you to critically assess research designs..

Course Convenor:

Dr Charles Lanfear

Course Convenor:

Dr Charles Lanfear

Course Convenor:

Professor Justice Tankebe

In the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals the United Nations recognised that promoting peaceful societies, reducing all forms of violence, and providing justice for all are core elements of sustainability. This seminars series aims to introduce students to the increasing literature on violence, and violence prevention at a global level. Topics covered in this seminar series include, amongst others:

• the epidemiology of violence across world regions,
• the interplay of social, community, and
• individual factors in explaining interpersonal violence, violence against women in different societies, cultural attitudes to corporal punishment, organised and gang violence, vigilante and police violence.

We will also aim to critically assess the current knowledge about how to achieve substantial reductions in violence. 

Course Convenor:

Professor Paolo Campana

(Not on offer in 2025-2026)

The course offers an analytical exploration of organised forms of criminality. It adopts a comparative approach to tease out similarities – and differences – between phenomena operating in different settings, i.e., countries and markets. Particular emphasis will be placed on the mechanisms underpinning organised crime operations. The course begins by discussing the concept of organised crime and its (contested) history.  Next, it looks at drug production and trafficking; cybercrime; human trafficking and smuggling. The course then discusses topics related to gangs, Mafia-like organisations and protection rackets. The course is multidisciplinary and draws on concepts from sociology, law, industrial economics, political economy, and political theory.

Course Convenor:

Dr Kyle Treiber

(Renowned US criminologist Frank Cullen has argued that “Criminology risks being a field of study in which many ideas are developed and all are chosen—in which all theories have equal claim to legitimacy and in which only the most highly specialized scholars can separate the theoretical wheat from the chaff”.)

Within criminological theory and research there are dozens of competing explanations of what causes crime (e.g., because people are poor, bored, impulsive, abused, unsupervised, cognitively impaired or undeterred) and as a consequence many conflicting ideas about how to best approach the problem of crime prevention (e.g., welfare provision, leisure activities, architectural design, focused policing, social skills training, parent training, drug treatment, restorative justice, or tougher sentencing). Against this background, it is not surprising that policy makers and practitioners may struggle to develop comprehensive crime prevention policies and devise and implement effective interventions.

That people’s acts of crime have some­thing to do with their ‘character’ (their personal morals and ability to exercise self-control) and something to do with the ‘circumstances’ they experience in their daily lives (the moral contexts of the opportunities and frictions they encounter) seems a reasonable proposition. After all, crimes are breaches of rules of conduct about what is right or wrong to do (or not do) in particular circumstances.

Arguably, the causes of crime are situational. People express their character in actions in response to the circumstances of the settings in which they take part and, therefore, the explanation of why acts of crime happen ultimately depends on understanding the role of the interaction between ‘character’ and ‘circumstances’ (people and places) in crime causation. Arguing that the causes of crime are situational does not mean that cultural and structural and development factors and processes are unimportant in the analysis of crime causation. Quite the contrary, but they are best analysed as ‘causes of the causes’. Such factors and processes do not directly explain what moves people to commit par­ticular acts of crime, but help explain (1) why people develop certain and different crime propensities (based on their personal morals and ability to exer­cise self-control), and why environments develop specific and different criminogenic inducements (depending on the moral contexts of the opportunities and frictions they provide); and (2) why particular interactions between kinds of people (‘characters’) and kinds of places (‘circumstances’) occur creating the crimino­genic situations in which acts of crime may happen.

In this course we will focus on addressing ‘Cullen’s dilemma’ and take an integrative approach, drawing on different theories, perspectives and interdisciplinary knowledge to comprehensively answer five key questions about crime causation and prevention:

1. Why do crime events happen?
2. Why do people vary in their crime propensity?
3. Why do places vary in their criminogeneity?
4. Why does people’s crime involvement vary across the life course?
5. How do we develop the most effective crime prevention based on knowledge about crime causation?

Course Convenor:

Professor Justice Tankebe

This course seeks to achieve three aims:

• (i) To explore critically the history of the police and their place in contemporary society;
• (ii) To introduce students to some of the challenges and debates in the policing of developed and developing societies; and
• (iii) To encourage students to engage critically with a variety of conceptual and empirical issues in analyses of the police.

Course Convenor:

Professor Leo Zaibert

This course is about the ways in which individuals and institutions respond to (perceived) wrongdoing. Amongst several such responses, the course focuses on two: inflicting punishment and granting mercy.

Since whatever else punishment involves, it surely involves the effort to make wrongdoers suffer (in a broad sense of “suffering”) punishment, and is immediately in need of a justification. For millennia, humans have attempted to offer such elusive justification, yet nothing approximating consensus has ever been achieved.

Course Aims: Rather than direct action-guidance, or direct policy recommendations, or direct engagement with current affairs, the course focus will be punishment and mercy in the abstract. Participants will do some intellectual history, and may indeed discuss actual political events, but always in the service of deep analytical points. Wilfrid Sellars once pithily stated: “the aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”. This captures neatly the goals of this course, which will attempt to understand what punishment and mercy are, how they “hang together” with the rest of our world view (if at all), and what could justify punitive or merciful behaviour, and we will tackle all these questions in their broadest possible senses.

Course Convenor:

Dr Adrian Grounds

This course offers some psychiatric perspectives on criminological topics. The psychiatric perspectives are shaped by the history, empirical research base and ethical traditional of clinical medicine, and provide a framework for discussing a range of issues in victimology, explanations of crime, criminal court proceedings, the management of offenders, the effects of detention and imprisonment, and miscarriages of justice. The course will aim to develop insights and critical understanding of relevant theory, research and dilemmas of practice. The eight seminars will cover: 

• 1. Perspectives on cruelty and psychological trauma; 
• 2. Perspectives on mental disorder and violence;
• 3. The use of psychiatric evidence in the criminal courts;
• 4. Offender treatment programmes, rehabilitation and corruption of care;
• 5. Mental health legislation and safeguards;
• 6. Risk assessment and release decision-making (role play of a mental health review tribunal); and 
• 7. and 8. Research on the causes and consequences of miscarriages of justice.

The course does not require students to have prior knowledge of the field or a clinical or psychology background: perspectives from other academic disciplines are positively welcomed.

Course Convenor:

Dr Caroline Lanskey

This course covers sociological and critical perspectives on the treatment and experiences of minority groups in criminal justice systems:

• Who is recognised as a minority group?
• What accounts for variations in the visibility of minority groups in criminal justice settings and processes?
• Who is marginalised?
• Who is hyper-visible?
• Which groups receive criminal justice policy attention and why?
• What are the justice issues?

Drawing on research and theory on the criminal justice experiences of minority ethnic communities, young people, women, LGBTQ populations, and prisoners’ families the seminars examine themes of social control, criminalisation, social exclusion, social justice, equality and citizenship.

Course Convenors:

Professor Ben Crewe & Professor Alison Liebling

This course provides an advanced introduction to the field of prison sociology, addressing questions of what prisons are for, how they work, what they signify, and what goes on in them, including the nature and determinants of the prisoner experience. Drawing on recent and classic literature, and on our own empirical research, it explores topics ranging from the aims of imprisonment to prison managerialism, psychological survival and the prisoner social world. The course seeks to explore the connections between penal sensibilities, practices and outcomes. The seminar is highly participatory and responsive, organised around an organised discussion of each week’s key readings.

Course Convenors:

Dr Maria Ttofi & Dr Adrian Grounds

(Not on offer in 2025-2026)

This course offers an introduction to main themes of victimology:

• What do we mean when we refer to victims?
• What makes a person a vulnerable individual likely to be victimised?
• What theories provide sufficient framework for understanding and preventing victimization of vulnerable individuals?
• Are different theories necessary for different types of victimization?
• How have psychological and psychiatric theories of trauma shaped understanding and practice?
• What are the psychological and social consequences of miscarriages of justice?
• Is the criminal justice system addressing sufficiently the needs of victims?

These questions are addressed through a critical perspective, using examples from both the UK and abroad and also via a historical perspective.