To discuss the overlap between criminal justice and cybercrime, it is important to define cybercrime. Through criminology, cybercrime is labeled as illegal acts involving cyber technologies that violate criminal law. In addition, criminologists acknowledge ways to determine how to define varying types of cybercrime. These ways include defining cybercrime from: a harm orientation, an ethical orientation, a social constructionist perspective, a deviance perspective, a white-collar crime orientation, and workplace deviance orientation. Criminal justice is able to identify appropriate actions and responses to cyber offenders. Additionally, criminal justice scholars tend to hone their research on the development of strategies meant to protect against victimization.
Through further research criminal justice further provides insight regarding the types of cyber offending and victimization. Cyber offenses include cyberbullying, hacking, cyberterrorism, ransomware, and phishing schemes to name a few. These types of crimes and the rationale for committing them are explained by the neutralization theory. This theory posits that although individuals know right from wrong, they rationalize their behavior, allowing for justification to commit a crime. Sykes and Matza are two criminologists who developed the five “original” neutralizations. These are: denial of injury, denial of victim, denial of responsibility, appeal to higher loyalties, and condemnation of condemners. Condemnation of condemners explains that cyber offenders will rationalize their behaviors as crimes that the government also commits, while the other neutralizations explain concepts such as convincing themselves that nobody will be hurt or that victims deserve the cyber harm inflicted on them.
Criminal justice and cybercrimes overlap relate to other disciplines discussed in class, due to their evolution grounded uniquely in information technologies boom over the years. New considerations and integrations between disciplines such as Sociology that considers how people interact with information technology or computer science which cybersecurity is a sub-field of were necessary to encompass the growing field.