Bachelor of Arts - Criminology (Honours)

BA (Hons) Criminology examines crime as a social fact across three years: criminological theory from classical to critical, the operation of policing, courts, prisons and probation, victimology, punishment and rehabilitation, and contemporary crime forms from cybercrime to organised exploitation, closing with a dissertation grounded in real research methods.

Leicester De Montfort’s justice-facing research culture — including its established work on miscarriages of justice — textures the teaching with live cases and practitioner contact, and methods training runs seriously through the degree because criminology’s employable graduates are the ones who can handle evidence, data and evaluation rather than only theory.

Dissertation choice functions as a career lever on this degree and merits early planning: projects built on data — sentencing patterns, reoffending statistics, survey evidence — convert directly into the analyst roles that pay criminology’s best early salaries, while purely theoretical projects, however excellent, leave that door harder to open; supervisors steer willing students accordingly from the second year.

Assessment ranges across case analysis, policy evaluation, data exercises and fieldwork-flavoured projects, and option choices let students tilt toward policing, penology or the social-harm perspectives that dominate the discipline’s current debates — a curricular breadth that supports both justice-sector and general graduate applications.

First destinations cluster in community justice, victim services, youth work and crime analysis at £20,000–£24,000, with charity-sector and research lanes fully open to international graduates where some statutory roles are not. The completed honours degree qualifies for the Graduate Route’s 18-month post-2026 allowance, and dependants cannot accompany students on taught study.