Any intellectual history is, in part, informed by where we understand ourselves to be today. Today, criminology finds itself defined by three major themes: (1) the steady movement toward a more rigorous science, (2) a commitment to rigorously tested theories of crime and criminal behavior, and (3) the establishment of a de-mand for evidence-based crime control and justice assurance policies and practices. This was perhaps best expressed by Edwin Sutherland (1934), who defined criminologyas the study of the making of law, the break-ing of law, and the reaction of society to lawbreaking. However, this is not always how criminology understood its scope. So let us return to one beginning before we consider the beginning that is now defined as the foun-dation for our field