BA (Hons) Criminology course preparation

Especially, but not only, documentaries. Some are more easily available than others and some you’d have to pay for. We’d recommend, for example:

• 13th.
  This is an excellent Netflix film about how the mass incarceration of Black people in the United States has come about historically and how it mirrors the slavery of the nineteenth century. Brilliant. The Dirty Money series on Netflix is also very good on aspects of crimes of the powerful.
• The House I Live In.
  This is a powerful documentary by Eugene Jarecki about the failure of the ‘war on drugs’. It argues that the war on drugs has led to massive harm in the United States and globally.
• Before the Flood, An Inconvenient Truth, Our Planet and A Plastic Ocean
  All really interesting and powerful films about environmental crisis. Of course there is also a wealth of documentary material now emerging about the pandemic. It has been argued for some time now that disruption of natural environments and closer proximity of humans and non-human species has elevated the potential for these pandemics. It’s how Ebola, Sars and coronavirus pandemics each originated. This isn’t new. Human diseases have long emerged from such inter-species interaction (the smallpox that nearly wiped out indigenous Americans for example was originally transferred from animals to humans in Europe – by the time Europeans invaded the Americas they had developed immunity,. But the native population hadn’t). But the ever greater pressure that humans put on the environment for land, the greater the danger.
• Capitalism a Love Story, Inside Job and Too Big to Fail.
  These are all worth watching to develop an understanding of the financial crisis of 2008 – the response to which included tripling your tuition fees. Again, most of what happened was attributable to legal practices and values. A number of criminologists / zemiologists would argue that such destruction should not have been permitted to happen. It is interesting that many of the top people who pursued policies that led to the crisis have seen their careers rise, rather than fall.
• Auschwitz, Nazis and the Final Solution and Nazis: A Warning from History
  These are both very good documentary series you should be able to find online.
• The Corporation
  An online documentary that was released alongside a very good book of the same name by Joel Bakan. They both examine how the normal structure and legal status of corporations have led to massive harms. Free online.
• The War You Don’t See
  By John Pilger. This is available free on his website johnpilger.com. It is a searing indictment of lying and deceit by government and media that manufactured public consent for the Iraq war.
• Fourteen Days in May
  A harrowing fly on the wall documentary about an American prisoner on Death Row. Brilliant and agonising. Don’t watch it alone.

As a Criminology student, you’ll need to have a good knowledge and understanding of current events (at home and abroad) so getting into the habit of paying attention to news and political events will certainly help you with your studies.

• Get into the habit of reading a good quality, broadsheet newspaper on a daily basis; The Guardian is a good choice. The ‘i’ newspaper is a cheap and effective way of getting across current events.
• Listen to news programmes on radio and television, especially the extended news programmes which provide more analysis, such as Newsnight and Channel 4 News
• Watch good quality documentaries (such as Dispatches or Unreported World).

It might be worth seeing of you can borrow or get access to some zemiological or related material. Look up the titles below online and see which of them interests you. Don’t spend much money – try and get them through your library if you can. If not, borrow them once you get here. Textbooks are not included here. You can read those when you arrive. Don’t spoil your summer.

• Crimes of the Powerful: A Reader by Vicky Cooper and Dave Whyte
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color-blindness by Michelle Alexander
• Ignorance, Power and Harm: Agnotology and the Criminological Imagination by Alana Barton and Howard Davis
• This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate by Naomi Klein
• Criminal Records:The Use and Abuse of Music by Eleanor Peters
• Inequality and the 1% or Peak Inequality by Danny Dorling
• Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth.

But if you really want to look at general textbooks before you arrive, these two are good:

• Croall H (2011) Crime and Society in Britain, 2nd Ed, Pearson
• Muncie J & McLaughlin E (2013) Sage Dictionary of Criminology, 3rd Ed, Sage