Naturally, criminology must take into account that the definition of crime varies according to the cultural mores and, especially, laws of a given area. This is an area where caution is warranted; if one is comparing, e.g., violent crimes between nations, one must be careful that the actions counted in that category are similar for each nation; otherwise the comparison is meaningless.
Criminology has, over time, been developed by several schools of thought, including:
Not only was criminological thinking until the late 19th century not distinctly sociological, even when the earliest generation of criminologists focused on the social (rather than the biological or mental) correlates of crime, their analyses were not particularly informed by the theoretical insights from the burgeoning discipline of sociology.
Importantly, the endeavors in criminological sociology in the immediate post-war era not only took up a central place within the discipline as a whole, but that many theoretical ideas in our subfield were also central to sociological theorizing as such.
And serious criminological sociologists, like the representatives of any another disciplinary subfield, realize that core epistemological and theoretical issues are at stake in how their specialty enterprise and sociology as a whole are constituted.
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