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Journal Article 1: Davis, M. S. (2006). Crimes mala in se: An equity-based definition. Criminal Justice Policy Review, 17, 270–289.
Abstract: Legal scholars have used the terms mala prohibita and mala in se to draw the distinction between legally proscribed and morally proscribed offenses. The former are those offenses that are wrong simply because there exist formal, codified rules prohibiting them. Efforts to define mala in se, on the other hand, have resulted in vague, often conflicting meanings that leave the analyst with little but examples to serve as definitions. As a result, some have argued that the distinctions mala in se and mala prohibita be abandoned altogether. If one examines mala in se from an equity theoretical viewpoint, incorporating the concepts of intent and harm, it may be possible to arrive at a more understandable and useful concept.

Journal Article 2: Rafter, N. (2005). The murderous dutch fiddler: criminology, history and the problem of phrenology. Theoretical Criminology, 9, 65–96.
Abstract: To form a clear view of the origins of criminology and present-day practices in criminal justice, criminologists need to recognize phrenology as one of their progenitors. Although phrenology is dismissed as a ‘pseudo-science’ and mocked as ‘bumpology’, it in fact constituted an important early science of the mind, and the theories that phrenologists generated in the fields today called criminology, criminal jurisprudence and penology influenced those fields long after the phrenological map of the brain had been forgotten. Coming to terms with phrenology requires rejecting simple distinctions between ‘science’ and ‘pseudo-science’. It leads to a better understanding of the scientific project of criminology and, more broadly, to a better understanding of the nature of social-scientific knowledge

Journal Article 3: Bruinsma, G. (2016). Proliferation of crime causation theories in an era of fragmentation: Reflections on the current state of criminological theory. European Journal of Criminology.
Abstract: In this presidential address I reflect on the theme of the 2015 annual European Society of Criminology meeting by addressing and discussing the issue of the overwhelming number of crime causation theories in criminology, as well as providing a brief assessment of their quality. The discipline possesses a mixture of hundreds of perspectives, definitions, ideas, sketches, multiple factors, theories and single hypotheses that are partly true and partly untrue, and none are completely true or untrue. It will be argued that, among other factors, criminologists in fact apply hardly any rule to distinguish between true and untrue theories. I sketch the evolution of the discipline and some of its features that led to the current state of affairs. With these issues in mind I raise the question of whether this situation is good or bad for criminology. A future challenge for the discipline will be a stronger commitment by criminological researchers to design more epistemological and methodological studies to limit further proliferation of criminological theories and improve their quality. To reach that reduction, three strategies will be discussed.