What is the overlap between criminal justice and cybercrime? How does this overlap relate to the other disciplines discussed in this class?

“Cybercrime is any criminal activity that utilizes a computer, network device, or network.” (Brush, 2021). Cybercrimes can range from a variety of offenses including identity theft, fraud, harassment, and even business or government intellectual property. Criminal justice is the study of laws, procedures, institutions, and policies at play before, during, and after the commission of a crime (Criminal Justice, 2020). The commonality between cybercrime and criminal justice is that cybercrime is basically a crime committed using a computer usually through cyberspace. Therefore, it makes complete sense that both the fields of criminal justice and cybercrime overlap. Since cybercrimes are on the rise and have been on the rise for a period of time, criminologists need to study this phenomenon to better understand the laws and policies that can contribute or hinder cybercriminal behavior. However, criminologists should not be the only discipline that should be studying these occurrences. Other professionals in the fields of psychology, sociology, mathematics, computer scientists, and political scientists are also needed to holistically examine cybercrime. The additional fields have the ability to contribute additional information like psychologists can provide a behavioral perspective; sociologists discuss the family, religious, economic impacts that drive a motivation; political scientists may look at the ideologies of terrorists or revolutionists that can provide an explanation of a person’s motivation for crimes in the name of a group, state, or other belief; mathematicians can consider mathematical concepts to explain how the encryption security was defeated; computer scientists contribute to the understanding and development of algorithms that can reverse engineer malware source code to detect future attacks. Cybercrimes have introduced new types of employment like cybersecurity professionals and security engineers within the job market; academia has introduced cybercrime and cybersecurity courses into their curriculum; and criminal investigative tools, such as digital forensics, has been developed to forensically investigate “cyber, computer, electronic, or other types of cyber crimes.” (Payne & Hadzhidimova, 2018, P. 390). Cybercrimes after all are human-induced tragedies to our current society. Therefore, we as a society need to put forth combined resources to study the problem, to better understand the problem, and to find a solution to the problem.    

References

Brush, K. (2021, September). What is cybercrime? Definition from SearchSecurity. SearchSecurity. https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/cybercrime

Payne, B., & Hadzhidimova, L. (2018). Under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) 385 Cyber Security and Criminal Justice Programs in the United States: Exploring the Intersections. International Journal of Criminal Justice Sciences. Of Criminal Justice Sciences (IJCJS) -Official Journal of the South Asian Society of Criminology and Victimology, 13(2), 110. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2657646

Criminal Justice. (2020, June). LII / Legal Information Institute. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/criminal_justice