Criminology
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50 free Criminology trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Criminology asks one of the oldest questions there is: why do some people break the rules, and what should society do about it? Over the centuries the answers have ranged from measuring bodies to mapping neighborhoods, and many of the ideas you meet in crime dramas began as serious academic arguments. This quiz covers the subject the way an introductory course does, with more fun along the way. Expect the big thinkers and their theories, landmark experiments, the history of policing and prisons, forensic breakthroughs, courtroom Latin, and a few notorious cases that changed how investigators work. It is written for students revising for a criminology or criminal justice class, true crime fans who want the ideas behind the stories, and anyone who enjoys a good quiz night. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you pick something up even when you guess.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which comic-book superhero was created by William Moulton Marston, the psychologist behind an early lie detector test?
Wonder Woman
Wonder Woman forces villains to tell the truth by binding them with her magic lasso. Her creator's systolic blood pressure test became one component of the modern polygraph.
Q 02Which crime, rather than bootlegging or murder, finally sent gangster Al Capone to federal prison in 1931?
Tax evasion
Tax evasion earned Al Capone eleven years in federal prison and a $50,000 fine. Federal authorities had charged him with twenty-two counts, and a jury convicted him on five.
Q 03Which unidentified murderer did surgeon Thomas Bond describe in a report sometimes called the first offender profile?
Jack the Ripper
Jack the Ripper, Bond wrote in 1888, was probably a quiet, inoffensive-looking man, middle-aged and neatly dressed. He added that the murderer had no scientific or anatomical knowledge.
Q 04Which detective agency claimed to have foiled the 1861 Baltimore Plot to assassinate President-elect Abraham Lincoln?
Pinkerton
Pinkerton detective Kate Warne arranged the disguises that got Lincoln through Baltimore and is said to have stayed awake all night guarding him. The agency later took an open eye as its logo.
Q 05Which hostage condition takes its name from a 1973 siege at a Kreditbanken branch on Norrmalmstorg square?
Stockholm syndrome
Stockholm syndrome was coined by criminologist Nils Bejerot, who never met or spoke to the hostages he diagnosed. He called it the Norrmalm Square syndrome, but abroad the city's name stuck.
Q 06Which psychologist halted the 1971 Stanford prison experiment on its sixth day, though it was planned to run two weeks?
Philip Zimbardo
Philip Zimbardo said he had internalized his own role as the prison's superintendent. He stopped the study after psychologist Christina Maslach confronted him about how the volunteers were being treated.
Q 07Which pseudoscience, developed by Franz Joseph Gall, claimed to read character and criminality from bumps on the skull?
Phrenology
Phrenology divided the brain into 27 organs said to shape personality. It was also among the first movements to argue that criminals should be rehabilitated instead of simply punished.
Q 08Which sport inspired the name of three-strikes laws, which give repeat offenders long sentences on a third conviction?
Baseball
Baseball's rule that a batter is out after three strikes gave the laws their name. California's 1994 version passed with 72% of the vote and was more sweeping than any other state's.
Q 09Which country's penal colonies received about 162,000 convicts transported from Great Britain and Ireland up to 1868?
Australia
Australia took most of them for petty crimes: thieves made up 80% of those transported. More serious crimes became transportable only in the 1830s, and the last convict ship arrived in 1868.
Q 10Which Mesopotamian king's law code, carved on a basalt pillar, set punishments on the principle of an eye for an eye?
Hammurabi
Hammurabi is shown at the top of the stone with Shamash, the Babylonian sun god and god of justice. The pillar was carried off as plunder to Susa, rediscovered in 1901, and now stands in the Louvre.
Q 11Which Italian physician claimed a 'born criminal' could be identified by a sloping forehead, unusual ears and long arms?
Cesare Lombroso
Cesare Lombroso built his list of signs from years of postmortem examinations and body measurements. The phrase 'born criminal' was actually supplied by fellow criminologist Enrico Ferri.
Q 12Beccaria's 1764 treatise On Crimes and Punishments made some of the first modern arguments against which punishment?
The death penalty
The death penalty, Beccaria argued, is neither a useful nor a necessary form of punishment. His brief book also protested against torture to obtain confessions and against secret accusations.
Q 13Which prison design by philosopher Jeremy Bentham lets a single officer observe every inmate without being seen?
Q 21Which Frenchman standardized the mug shot and identified repeat offenders by a system of body measurements?
Alphonse Bertillon
Alphonse Bertillon's method was the first scientific system police used to identify criminals, until fingerprinting supplanted it. His flawed evidence also helped wrongly convict Alfred Dreyfus.
Q 22Which forensic pioneer, dubbed the Sherlock Holmes of France, taught that every contact leaves a trace?
Edmond Locard
Edmond Locard started what became the first police forensic laboratory in 1910 with two attic rooms and two assistants. His exchange principle is still treated as the basis of forensic work.
Q 23Which TV crime drama lends its name to an effect in which jurors expect forensic evidence in every criminal trial?
Panopticon
Panopticon comes from the Greek for all-seeing. Because inmates never know when they are being watched, Bentham reasoned, they would have to follow the rules all the time.
Q 14Which term did sociologist Edwin Sutherland introduce in 1939 for offenses by respectable people at work?
White-collar crime
White-collar crime became the title of Sutherland's 1949 book, but corporations threatened to sue and had their names removed from it. The uncensored text was not published until 1983.
Q 15Which theory, set out by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in 1982, says visible petty disorder invites serious crime?
Broken windows
Broken windows takes its name from the claim that one unrepaired window signals that no one cares, so more get smashed. New York police commissioner William Bratton popularized it in the 1990s.
Q 16Which Home Secretary founded London's Metropolitan Police in 1829, earning its constables the nickname 'bobbies'?
Robert Peel
Robert Peel later served twice as prime minister. He is thought to have helped write the force's first instructions to officers, which stressed its civilian nature and policing by consent.
Q 17Which FBI director led the bureau and its predecessor for 48 years under eight presidents, until he died in 1972?
J. Edgar Hoover
J. Edgar Hoover was appointed by Calvin Coolidge in 1924, when the agency was still called the Bureau of Investigation. It became the FBI eleven years later, with him still in charge.
Q 18Which term for a repeat murderer is FBI profiler Robert Ressler often credited with coining in the 1970s?
Serial killer
Serial killer is in fact a direct translation of the German Serienmörder, coined in 1930 by Berlin investigator Ernst Gennat. Ressler helped interview thirty-six such convicts to find common patterns.
Q 19Which half-cousin of Charles Darwin put fingerprint identification on a scientific footing in his book Finger Prints?
Francis Galton
Francis Galton devised a classification system that survives to this day and helped courts accept the evidence. He never acknowledged that the idea was not his own: Henry Faulds had proposed its forensic use in 1880.
Q 20Which forensic technique did Alec Jeffreys discover in 1984, leading to murderer Colin Pitchfork's conviction?
DNA profiling
DNA profiling first cleared Richard Buckland, a suspect who had confessed to one of the crimes. Pitchfork had tried to dodge the mass screening by coercing a coworker to give blood in his place.
CSI
CSI premiered in 2000, and the effect was first reported in a 2004 USA Today article. Jurors who expect instant lab results may raise the standard of proof prosecutors have to meet.
Q 24Which novelist and magistrate founded the Bow Street Runners, called London's first professional police force, in 1749?
Henry Fielding
Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones, began with a force of six men. His blind half-brother John succeeded him as magistrate and could reputedly recognize criminals by their voices alone.
Q 25Which French criminal turned detective founded the Sûreté and inspired both Valjean and Javert in Les Misérables?
Eugène Vidocq
Eugène Vidocq also headed the first known private detective agency. His life story inspired Honoré de Balzac and Alexandre Dumas as well as Victor Hugo.
Q 26Which French city has hosted the headquarters of Interpol since the organization left a Paris suburb in 1989?
Lyon
Lyon took over from Saint-Cloud, just outside Paris, but Interpol was founded in Vienna in 1923. The United States did not join until 1938.
Q 27The FBI Academy, where new agents train, sits on a Marine Corps base near which Virginia town?
Quantico
Quantico's Marine Corps base first lent the FBI its firing ranges, and the bureau later built its own academy on 547 acres there. Construction of the present complex began in 1969.
Q 28Which federal prison in San Francisco Bay, nicknamed The Rock, closed in 1963 after costing far more than others to run?
Alcatraz
Alcatraz cost about $10 per prisoner per day in 1959, against $3 at the federal prison in Atlanta. Its name comes from an old Spanish word for a seabird, usually taken to mean the pelican.
Q 29Which American prison, opened in 1829 with a wagon-wheel floor plan, became the model for over 300 prisons worldwide?
Eastern State Penitentiary
Eastern State Penitentiary kept every inmate in separate confinement, in the hope that isolation would bring reform. It held Al Capone and bank robber Willie Sutton before closing in 1971.
Q 30Which New York prison on the Hudson gave English the phrase 'up the river' for being sent to jail?
Sing Sing
Sing Sing stands about 30 miles north of Midtown Manhattan, so convicts sentenced in New York City really were sent upstream. It was renamed Ossining Correctional Facility from 1970 to 1985.