摘要：Members of the public health and criminal justice disciplines often work with marginalized populations: people at high risk of drug use, health problems, incarceration, and other difficulties. As these fields increasingly overlap, distinctions between them are blurred, as numerous research reports and funding trends document. However, explicit theoretical and methodological linkages between the 2 disciplines remain rare. A new paradigm that links methods and statistical models of public health with those of their criminal justice counterparts is needed, as are increased linkages between epidemiological analogies, theories, and models and the corresponding tools of criminology. We outline disciplinary commonalities and distinctions, present policy examples that integrate similarities, and propose “epidemiological criminology” as a bridging framework. FOR DECADES, THE SOCIAL and behavioral sciences have held a dominant position, both theoretically and methodologically, in explaining crime and criminal behavior. Their methods have guided and advanced the fields of criminology and criminal justice while expanding our understanding of crime and criminal behavior. However, what has been lacking across the many methodological and theoretical approaches in the study of criminology is interaction with another mature, robust, and evolving field of study with which criminologists can work in a dynamic process of synthesis—specifically, the science, theories, and methods of epidemiology. The methods and theories used by epidemiologists in tracking and studying disease processes have transcended the realm of traditional biomedical science and are now integral to diverse fields of study within the social and behavioral sciences. Within the context of the criminological literature, the science of epidemiology and its methods and theories have received no more than a footnote in the study of criminal behavior. Much has been written regarding the psychological, sociological, and psychiatric dimensions of criminal behavior with respect to substance abuse, mental health, deviance, social control, violence, and many other theoretical issues and normative constructs. However, deliberate practical and theoretical integration of epidemiology's precepts into the study of criminology from a behavioral and social science perspective, which would be required to articulate a science of epidemiological criminology, is lacking throughout the body of literature. We postulate that although the term epidemiological criminology has not been directly published or discussed in any body of social and behavioral literature, researchers across the 2 broad sciences routinely integrate, yet never define, such interdisciplinary research into their theories and analyses of criminal and deviant behavior.
