What is Digital Criminology?

Cybercrime has become one of the most prominent areas of development in policing in the last twenty years. Early attempts to move beyond the broad media language of ‘cybercrime’ and develop a more rigorous framework for categorizing types of cybercrime still focused on the addition of a computer-related element for otherwise familiar types of criminality. More recently, the term ‘digital criminology’ has emerged from the consideration in Australian criminological scholarship of the potential impact of digital technologies across a broader range of criminal justice practices (Smith et al., 2017; Stratton et al., 2017). James interrogates the opportunities and challenges of digital criminology, including the potential of digital technologies in the fields of procedural justice, policing supporting the process of desistance from offending. However, digital criminology includes the potential to raise new concerns about the structure of society and how criminal justice practitioners and researchers can engage with the digital environment.