Mississippi State University will offer a new criminology degree program starting this summer.
Sociology department head Greg Dunaway said criminology courses and a certificate program have been offered for many years, but now after a long process of proposals and collaborative thinking, there is an official criminology degree student can obtain.
“The curriculum was approved during the beginning of this semester and we are now able to accept majors,” Dunaway said. “The classes for the major [criminology] will be available in the summer and fall.”
Dunaway said the criminology major is a social science discipline interested in the nature, types and patterns of crime, as well as the factors which relate to crime.
“Criminology encompasses what we call the social ideology of crime,” he said. “It also looks at how crime impacts society and how society responds to problems of crime, both from a criminal justice perspective, but also from other social institutions like schools, churches and media.”
Dunaway said the criminology program at MSU is unique and the only program in the state of Mississippi.
“There are a lot of criminal justice programs, but they concentrate more on how the criminal justice system responds to crime. We are just a little bit broader than that, we encompass that aspect, but we are looking at other factors as well,” he said. “The faculty members who are teaching the curriculum will be sociologists, so it’s our perspective that this program will be a sociology-based criminology program.”
Dunaway said there are three areas students studying criminology may choose to concentrate on when completing their course work in the major.
These three areas include patterns and types of crime, which concentrate on classes like drug use and abuse, white collar crime and violence. The second concentration is in social dimensions of crime. These courses look at how crime is related to various aspects of society, such as race and gender. Lastly, the justice policy concentration focuses on criminal justice type classes like law in society and correctional systems.
Dunaway said the department feels the students who complete a criminology degree will be prepared to pursue a variety of careers in crime and justice related fields.
“Our students will be able to work in areas that are related to community crime prevention, social services, programs that deal with juveniles and at risk youth, school-based programs and counseling programs focusing on things like substance abuse and domestic violence,” Dunaway said. “We are also trying to prepare students to take on positions within community government … where it is useful to have data analysis skills and to help effect change in policy.”
Dunaway said he encourages students to think about the criminology major if they have an interest in crime.
“Crime is consistently rated as one of the most significant social problems that people are concerned about,” Dunaway said. “It is just a very important social problem, so if people and interested in trying to understand this problem and trying to think about it in a way that may lead to doing something about it, this is the kind of program I think they should look into.”
Ashley Thompson, graduate student in sociology with an emphasis in criminology, said if students are even partially interested in criminology, it is something they should definitely try.
“Once they get involved in the program, they will only get more interested because the teachers in this department are wonderful,” she said.
Thompson said she has always found crime and what causes people to commit crime interesting and she hopes to work with juveniles after completing her master’s degree.
“I feel like a lot of people that don’t know about criminal behavior just think it is bad people who do it, and that is just not the case,” she said. “I enjoy the theory behind criminology.”
Thompson suggests if students do not necessarily want to make criminology their major, but just want to take a class, they should take correctional systems or criminology.
“There are a lot of new classes in criminology I didn’t have like crime and justice in America,” Thompson said.
Sophomore microbiology major Katie West Oswalt said she is interested in the new major and she would probably take some criminology classes now that more are being offered.
“I like to think about why people do the things they do, not just criminals, but everyone,” West Oswalt said. “I think it would be interesting to get into the mind of a criminal a little bit and see what pushes them to do the terrible things they do.”
West Oswalt also said she thinks it is important for MSU to expand and offer new majors like criminology because it is different from many things MSU all ready offers.
“It [new majors] attracts people here and so many people go other places because the major they are interested in is not offered at MSU,” West Oswalt said. “The more we can offer, the better we become and the bigger we can grow.”