Your instructions and the amount of information you find will determine how far you need to narrow down your topic.You need to narrow down your topic so that you don't ramble or take on more work than you can possibly do or than the assignment requires.
My topic is too big.
Your topic should be humanly possible for one person to study. If your topic would take yours and many others' life work to research adequately, then you should probably narrow it down. One example of such a topic would be juvenile justice. At the very least, there are thousands of resources that address this big issue. But if you narrow your topic down from juvenile justice to juvenile detention center libraries, you will have a much smaller and more manageable set of results to look at. If you're not sure what you want to narrow your topic down to, search for and read some materials that include your broad topic. These materials will focus on a different smaller aspect of the topic. For example, if you just searched for death penalty you might find results about philosophy, demographics, history, and the list goes on. While you review your results, you are bound to find a topic that is manageable to search for.
Don't know if your topic is too broad? Search for it in one of our databases with a criminology focus (try this a few times with different keywords; sometimes there is more research on a topic than you know, but you didn't search for the right keywords to find the information you need). If there are more results than you can reasonably be expected to look at, then your topic is too broad.
My topic is too small.
Sometimes your topic may be too narrow or give you few results when you search for it. This may happen if your topic is ultra specific, i.e. the effectiveness of teaching Othello to juvenile offenders in deterring the offenders from continuing to commit crime. If that is the case, you may need to make your topic broader (perhaps focus on the effectiveness of using drama and theater on recidivism) or pull on research that addresses some piece of your topic (e.g. the effectiveness of teaching drama on student outcomes for public high school students and the effectiveness of extracurricular interventions in juvenile detention.)
My topic is just right.
Now you can move on to evaluating your sources.