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Sample Personal Statement for Criminology & Deviance Control
I am a person who has a strong sense of justice. In my
pre-university days, I witnessed and was outraged by the increasing
number of criminal acts in China as the country experienced dramatic
social and economic changes in the past two decades. But I was more
frustrated with the failure of the law enforcing departments to
prevent and crack down on criminal activities effectively. But as
senior middle school students, my classmates and I could only
criticize, in our heated discussions concerning some major criminal
cases disclosed by the media, the deficiencies in the existing
law-making process and the lack of effective guidance in the entire
society in the field of crime prevention, which made it possible for
some criminals to act unpunished. It is such an awareness that became
my strongest motivation in enrolling in the People's Public Security
University of China to major in security and crime-prevention at the
Department of --------, when I qualified myself during the fiercely
competitive nationwide university entrance examinations. The moment I
entered the university, I realized that my life would never be
peaceful, for many questions that had been perplexing me would be
worked out by myself, demanding my lifelong dedication. I also
realized that the value of my life was to be embodied in my
contributions to the maintenance of social order and the peaceful life
of the general public.
As I started my undergraduate studies, I became fascinated by the
systematic trainings that I received in the criminological theories
and the relevant laws. Apart from achieving satisfactory results in my
coursework, I did considerable amount of extracurricular readings that
included Criminology co-authored by Freda Adler, Gerhard O.W. Mueller
and Williams Laufer, and the Journal of Financial Crime published by
London Henry Stewart Press. Through those readings, I developed some
initial understanding of E-Commerce Security and Internet Casinos and
Money Laundering, areas that characterize future criminological study
but remain unexplored in China. These efforts helped lay a solid
foundation for me to carry out higher-level research in the future. I
also participated actively in seminars on and off campus. The regular
weekly seminars held in my department witnessed my perceptive
presentations. In particular, as representative of excellent students
of our university, I attended the International Symposium on
Preventive Criminology held in Beijing. My exchanges with the domestic
and international elites in the field of preventive criminology
significantly improved my theoretical level. This experience also made
me alarmingly aware that my existing knowledge needs to be improved.
In studying every subject and every theory, I would maximize my
initiative and creativity. I would not embrace uncritically any
orthodox theory, but would attempt to arrive at its deeper
implications. For instance, in learning the TAP (Time of Arrival of
Police) Theory, I knew from my investigation that this theory has been
widely applied in the criminal prevention practice of China's urban
communities, which is symbolized by the establishment of the 110
Command Systems and the Street Patrol Systems by all the provincial
and municipal public security bureaus, among which Beijing Municipal
Public Security Bureau's 110 Alarm Reporting, Reception and Police
Dispatch System serves as a model. However, after consulting many
materials, I discovered that the security problems in Beijing are
still serious. Then, why the TAP Theory that has been effectively
practiced in other countries becomes problematic when applied in
China? My teachers and classmates had heated discussions over this
question and some even cast doubt about the validity of the theory. I
conclusion was that their discussions were somehow removed from
reality and inevitably suffered from some degree of partiality. To
verify the TAP Theory, I made field trips to several patrol police
stations and obtained my answers. The first is the poor coordination
among different police units, resulting in chaotic dispatching of
those units. The second is the unclear subordination of the patrol
police, which led to ineffective application of TAP Theory. This
process of making detailed first-hand investigations concerning
apparently perplexing questions excited me, making me realize that
criminology and jurisprudence, as two broad disciplines of social
science, are inseparable from reality for their construction and
development. Their theoretical problems can be solved only in
practice.
This initial sense of achievement encouraged me greatly. I used my
winter and summer vacations to undertake internships in the district
procuratorate, municipal public security bureau, and various relevant
organizations of security and crime-prevention. During my internship
at the district procuratorate, my proposals to the procuratorate
leader that the prevention of internal vocational crimes should
specify the potential criminals and that unnecessary prevention costs
should be reduced were adopted. At the grass-root police stations, my
concept that the prevention of crimes should take precedence over the
penalties of the crimes aroused general attention. My distinguished
performance during the internships organized by my university won me
the honor of Outstanding Individual of Social Practice.
As a subject of response strategy that indicates crime genesis,
development, laws of change, and prevention, criminology should focus
on the correct diagnosis of the etiology and social conditions of
crimes to provide firm foundations for the effective prediction and
prevention of crimes. However, the deeper I delve into my subject, the
more I have discovered that the existing criminological theories in
China are too emptily abstract and most preventive measures are not
practically feasible on one hand and depend excessively on foreign
sources on the other. To make matters worse, most domestic scholars
tend to indulge themselves in theorizations and importation of foreign
concepts, resulting in their gaps from the international level in
terms of the practical applications of advanced criminological
theories. In the field of economic crimes in which I am particularly
interested, I believe that the prevailing theories of crime etiology
such as Ecological Theory, Subculture Theory, and Theory of Imitation
are all somewhat far-fetched when applied to economic crimes. The lack
of effective etiological studies of crimes has led to the ineffective
functioning of the theories of crime prevention and control. This
accounts for the increase in recent years of economic crimes in China,
the continuous occurrence of major criminal cases and their serious
impact on the social and economic order of the country.
An earnest reflection on those factors has convinced me that, for
pursuing a more advanced academic degree, my ideal choice would be the
establish London School of Economics and Political Science which, with
its most systematic criminological theories in the world, offers me
the opportunity to major in Msc Crime, Deviance and Control. The
lively yet rigorous style of teaching, the pluralistic and
multi-perspective academic climate and the world-leading research
strengths of your esteemed school will undoubtedly enable me to
assimilate the most comprehensive knowledge of criminology in a
competitive class. The professional knowledge and expertise that I
acquire in your school will become the foundation for the ultimate
fulfillment of my career objective in my home country: to work as a
criminologist who can contribute to social stability, reduce the crime
rates, enhance the level of social civilization.
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