Developing a New Interdisciplinary Paradigm: Epidemiological Criminology at the Crossroad

The sciences of epidemiology and public health and the sciences of criminology and criminal justice have long overlapped in their relationship to one another. While behavioral and biomedical scientists have studied aberrant behavior and its root causes, the processes in investigating a crime, and the many psychological, social, environmental, and ecological factors that contribute to deviant behavior or its antecedents—there continues to exist fragmented theories that directly skirt this scientific overlap between epidemiology/public health and criminology/criminal justice. Public health, as a discipline, has evolved its lexicon of terminology to include “violence epidemiology”, “forensic epidemiology”, and “Injury Epidemiology”, among others. However, to date, this fragmentation has left epidemiologists and criminologists, from varying theoretical perspectives, vying for a coherent framework in which both sciences can eventually emerge to create a viable paradigm in which scientists, practitioners, educators, and students can advance new bodies of research in a scientific field such as “Epidemiological Criminology”. This panel will serve as the first scientific forum to raise the “Epidemiological Criminology” paradigm as an umbrella theory that incorporates the many contextual and empirical methods, models, and techniques used across various disciplines. Such disciplines may include psychology, sociology, social work, nursing, medicine, forensics, information sciences generally and informatics specifically, environmentalism, epidemiology, and criminology, among many others. It is through a coherent paradigm when the scientific community will better understand such issues as human rights, intentional injury, mental health, violence, substance abuse, recidivism, and (bio)terrorism, among others.