Choose an example of a criminal event (e.g. break and enter, shoplifting, domestic violence, assault in the CBD, illegal fishing or hunting, drug dealing etc.) for which you can find offenders’ accounts of what motivates their behaviour. From these accounts (confessions, excerpts from academic articles or police interviews, court transcripts, autobiographical material, newspapers, etc.), outline the criminological theory which best reflects various offenders’ viewpoints, as well as any possible shortcomings of your chosen theory.

Be sure to make explicit the specific concepts which resonate with what you find in your literature review (i.e. it is not enough to say, for instance, that Strain Theory holds relevance to your chosen crime. Instead, you would need to match a specific concept within Strain Theory (such as ‘innovation’), to what offenders are or appear to be saying).

You can choose a single specific criminal event (e.g. a particular assault or other crime) or a closely-related set of criminal events (e.g. a series of similar crimes committed by the same people).

The purpose of the essay is to develop the capacity to construct a criminological argument by:

Identifying relevant criminological issues and case studies;
Reviewing the relevant literature;
Analysing data (in this case offender accounts) within appropriate criminological perspectives;
Presenting the argument in a well-structured and lucid form.