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Study masters degree online with Macquarie University through Open Universities Australia. Explore all degrees, subjects and short courses now.

The Master of Criminology (OUA) at Macquarie University is a future-focused, interdisciplinary programme designed to meet the growing demand for ethical, evidence-based, and innovative responses to crime and justice. Positioned at the intersection of theory, practice, and policy, the programme empowers students and professionals to lead transformative change in an increasingly complex criminological landscape. The programme combines experiential learning, applied research, and professional skill development to equip students for leadership in practice, innovation and reform. Students and professionals engage with contemporary challenges through policy design, ethical leadership training, and diverse case studies that reflect real-world justice challenges.The Master of Criminology (OUA) explores the causes, consequences, and prevention of crime through a curriculum grounded in solutions building and justice innovation. Key areas include criminological theory, justice reform, and policy development, alongside the examination of contemporary challenges facing criminal justice systems, such as technological innovations and questions of social justice. Whether advancing in current roles or pursuing new opportunities, graduates will be equipped with the skills and knowledge to design and implement ethical, evidence-based solutions that lead transformative change across diverse justice contexts.

Build advanced criminology expertise. You’ll delve into practical, ethical solutions to current justice challenges. Explore policy, technology, and global crime trends. Hone professional skills to analyse and transform modern justice systems.

Master of Criminology

Australia and Cyber Intelligence

Cyber Crime and Cyber Policing

Policing Investigations and Intelligence

Understanding Victims and Offenders

Applied Cyber Security

Homicide

Fraud and Cybercrime

Introduction to Criminology and Criminal Justice

Fundamentals in Forensic Science

Risk Assessment and Management in Forensic Mental Health

This unit covers the social, moral and political relationships that underpin &#39;justice&#39; and &#39;punishment&#39;. Students will explore the purpose, aims and operation of criminal justice in New South Wales. The &#39;cycle of justice&#39; is unpacked, including: concepts of justice; the politics of justice; what happens in court; how people are punished and what we expect to happen afterwards. Students re-examine the socially constructed nature of both justice and punishment, questioning the purpose of law, the rule of law and the social contract. Students will analyse the role of these concepts in maintaining, or disrupting, established notions of justice. Students will observe justice in action and report back on their findings.

Introduction to Justice and Punishment

This unit explores the methods, motivations, and impacts of cybercrime, from financially driven attacks to technology-facilitated violence. As digital threats grow in scale and complexity, understanding how offenders operate and how systems are exploited is essential for effective prevention and response. Students will examine key cybercrime typologies, the tools and techniques used by cybercriminals, and the evolving tactics that underpin malicious activity in digital environments. The unit also introduces the incident response lifecycle, offering a structured foundation for identifying, managing, and mitigating cyber incidents. Through applied analysis, simulation, and collaborative activities, students will gain practical skills in threat identification, attacker profiling, and response strategy development. Legal and policy frameworks relevant to cybercrime will also be considered. By the end of the unit, students will be equipped to assess the impact of cyber threats, apply key principles of incident response, and develop foundational plans and reports to support organisational resilience.

Cyber Crime and Methods

Prisons are a standard response to crime, but incarceration raises pressing social, economic, and ethical questions about its effectiveness, equity, and sustainability for the future. As pressure mounts to find more effective and equitable responses to crime, the role of punishment has never been more critical. Through engagement with practitioners, case studies, and real-world policy initiatives, the unit takes a practice-oriented approach grounded in first-hand examinations of the role, purpose, and effectiveness of different forms of punishment and sentencing in contemporary Australian and international justice systems. The unit examines the purposes of punishment for victims, offenders, and communities, asking when prison is appropriate and when alternative responses are more effective. Students will explore how custodial and non-custodial sanctions are implemented, experienced, and challenged. Emphasis is placed on the ethical, political, and practical dimensions of punishment, and on evaluating policy arguments for and against incarceration. Students will develop the capacity to critically assess justice practices, evaluate alternatives to incarceration, and advocate for evidence-based, ethically grounded responses to crime. This unit challenges students to consider effective, just, and sustainable responses to crime.

Incarceration, Justice and Punishment

From early CCTV in banks to AI-driven surveillance, technology has long shaped policing. Today, it permeates all aspects of everyday life, from tracking to predicting and influencing behaviour. As law enforcement and offenders harness digital tools, urgent questions arise about power, privacy, and justice in an increasingly monitored world. This unit adopts a critical, practice-informed approach, engaging students with real-world case studies, legal frameworks, and current technologies to explore how surveillance is implemented, regulated, and experienced in contemporary policing. It explores the expanding role of surveillance in policing, from body-worn and in-car cameras to aerial surveillance, facial recognition, and covert monitoring. Students will examine how these tools are deployed in everyday policing, while critically analysing their unintended consequences, including overreach, bias, and privacy violations. The unit also considers the legal and ethical frameworks governing surveillance and the emerging role of AI in law enforcement. Students will critically assess the ethical, legal, and operational dimensions of surveillance and its limits. They will develop the capacity to evaluate the use and misuse of technology by public and private actors and anticipate the challenges and possibilities posed by emerging technologies.

Technology, Surveillance and Policing

Globalisation has presented many opportunities in global trade, travel, and communication, but it has also fundamentally changed the nature of crime. The erosion of national borders has enabled the rise of transnational criminal networks and illicit markets, often outpacing regulatory systems. These developments challenge notions of sovereignty, justice, and security, demanding new frameworks for understanding and addressing crime in a global context. Through a transnational approach, this unit examines how crime transcends national jurisdictions to disrupt legal political boundaries. It encourages students to look beyond their own contexts to better understand the global drivers of crime and insecurity. The unit explores diverse global contexts of crime, analysing the social, political, and economic conditions that enable or constrain key issues, such as the international drug trade or organised crime. It also investigates the convergence and divergence of criminal justice responses to key issues. Students will be able to critically analyse how global and transnational forces shape crime and justice, and develop informed, ethical, context-sensitive responses to the complex challenges that globalisation poses for security, criminality, and justice systems.

Global Crime and Justice

The spread of transnational crime is one of the most significant challenges facing governments around the world today. For all its benefits, globalisation has opened new avenues for criminal enterprise to expand across traditional domestic borders, creating new challenges for global security, risk governance and crime control. Traditionally crime has tended to be - and largely still is - viewed as a security concern within nation states. By contrast, this unit examines how crime has evolved through the globalising process, creating global and regional instability. Moreover, many state responses to crime, such as illicit drugs, wholly fail to address to systemic, global networks that underpin the trade. Across this unit, students will evaluate a variety of transnational criminal issues, from drug trafficking to people smuggling, money laundering to counterfeiting, and will examine the regional implications of for national and transnational security. In many instances, as students will discover, underpinning civil conflict and terrorist organisations are crime networks. Engaging with these debates will enable students to think beyond traditional, state-based crime, and better understand the global challenges and preventative strategies required to combat transnational crime.

Transnational Crime

What is the role of the police and policing in the 21st Century? Who gives the police legitimacy for their use of force and detention? How do the police respond to societal and political challenges of our time? Drawing on these questions, this unit offers an analytical look at policing, from police behaviour and organisation to its operations and historical perspectives. Focusing on the relationship between the police, society and the community, the unit examines how policing has changed over time, drawing on important theoretical foundations, examine the changing function of the police and policing. Through this unit, students will be introduced to the societal position of policing, which prioritises the careful scrutiny of the role and function police practice. In doing so, the unit examines the police as an institution as well as police practice, focusing on police legitimacy, the use of force, police culture, corruption, policing strategies and challenges to the police in the contemporary world. In undertaking this unit, students will be guided through the criminological study of policing, understanding how the police are a key institution across social democracies as well as their systemic failings and challenges. Taken together, students will be better able to understand and critically analyse the wider challenges, impact and development of the police in Australia.

Policing and Crime

This unit introduces students to the challenges of intelligence policy. It covers intelligence policy in the Western world--with a focus on the Five Eyes intelligence services and other Western/non-Western allies; as well as adversarial intelligence communities. Upon successful completion of the course students will understand some of the dynamics that affect intelligence policy at the national, regional, and international levels. They will also understand the different mechanisms through which intelligence policy is shaped, formulated and implemented. Moreover, students will gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of coordination, prioritization and evaluation of the intelligence community, and of the dilemmas of and different approaches to integrating intelligence into policy and decision-making at the national and international levels. Finally, students will understand the broad social, economic, and political ramifications of different intelligence-policy choices.

Intelligence Management and Policy

This subject was previously known as PICX842 Australia&#39;s Approach to Law Enforcement.How do we transform inequalities ingrained in the criminal justice system? This unit examines the relationships between social inequalities and crime and justice. It explores historical and contemporary critiques and methods that challenge and transform this relationship. The unit draws from multiple disciplines to theorise, examine, and re-imagine the understanding of crime and justice. It focuses on social cleavages to explore how inequalities are structured and re-produced by the criminal justice system. We foreground the lived experiences of marginalised individuals and communities impacted by the criminal justice system and critically examine research-based approaches and collaborative solutions that respond to injustices. In doing so, the unit explores the role of the criminal justice system in amplifying and reproducing social inequality, whilst analysing what punishment systems say about us as a society. This approach enables students to understand the relationship between inequality and justice and how to build a ethically-focused response to issues of crime, inequality and justice.

Look at the for-profit private security industry by examining methods, decision makers and stakeholders. You’ll analyse the working partnerships with the public, police and the wider law enforcement industry.  

Crime, Inequality and Justice

This subject is previously known as PICX845 Intelligence Theory and Practice.This unit exposes students to the diverse theories and/or theorems of intelligence as well as the different areas of intelligence and to intelligence process methodologies in a variety of contexts.and practice. It discusses the essential characteristics of intelligence systems and examines how the intelligence function fits within a dynamic national or international security context, situating the intelligence function within the Law Enforcement, Foreign, National Security and Military domains. The unit examines the Australian and selected international and other Western intelligence communities, as well as premier non-Western intelligence communities such as China, Russia, and other regions.

Recognise how the intelligence function sits within the dynamic contexts of national security, law enforcement, military and foreign domains. Compare Australian and selected international intelligence communities. 

Intelligence: From Theory to Application

Macquarie University Masters Degree Criminal justice Courses & Degrees | Open Universities Australia

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