Schools of Criminology

To understand criminology, a person must first know what crime is. A violation of criminal law, for
example breaking the code of conduct set forth by a state, is how Thorsten Sellin defines crime.

Thorsten also goes on to say that deviant behavior that is injurious to society, but is not governed
by the law is inaccurately described as crime. Crime is also defined as an illegal act that is
considered punishable by the government.

In the late nineteenth century, some of the principles on which the classical school was based
began to be challenged by the emergent positivist school in criminology, led primarily by three
Italian thinkers: Cesare Lombroso, Enrico Ferri, and Raffaele Garofalo. It is at this point that the
term criminology first emerged, both in the work of Italian Raffaele Garofalo (criminologia) in
1885 and in the work of French anthropologist Paul Topinard (criminologie) around the same
time.

Positivist criminology assumes that criminal behaviour has its own distinct set of characteristics.
As a result, most criminological research conducted within a positivist paradigm has sought to
identify key differences between criminals and non-criminals. Some theorists have focused on
biological and psychological factors, locating the source of crime primarily within the individual
and bringing to the fore questions of individual pathology. This approach is termed individual
positivism. Other theorists – who regard crime as a consequence of social rather than individual
pathology – have, by contrast, argued that more insights can be gained by studying the social
context external to individuals.

This approach is termed sociological positivism.

Criminological Theories are an important part of criminology. Theory is a term used to describe
an idea or set of ideas that is intended to explain facts or events. Therefore, a theory is
suggested or presented as possibly true, but that is not known or proven to be true, as well as,
the general principles or ideas that relate to a particular subject. Criminological Theories examine
why people commit crimes and is very important in the ongoing debate of how crime should be
handled and prevented. Many theories have been developed and researched throughout the
years. These theories continue to be explored, separately and in amalgamation, because
criminologists pursue the paramount elucidations in eventually reducing types and intensities of
crime.

· Classical School of Criminology

Classical School is Born. The Classical School of Criminology was brought to light in the late
1700s and early 1800s. The classical school developed during the Enlightenment in response to
excessive and cruel punishments to crime. Beccaria argued for more humanitarian forms of
punishment and against physical punishment and the death penalty. He believed that
punishment should fit the crime and not be excessive. Central to the classical school was the
presence of free[1]will.

All people act within reason; conduct results from the conscious operation of a person’s will after
reflection and choosing among alternatives of action. People know the difference between right
and wrong.

Awareness of right and wrong combined with crime as a choice played into how the classical
school thought of punishment. Because crimes are chosen through free will, they should be
punished swiftly and proportionally to the crime. This is the most effective deterrent to crime.

A primary premise of the classical school was the fundamental equality of all people, which
meant that every person should be treated equally under the law. Criminal behavior would be
subject to similar punishment, and people had to know what categories of conduct were
punishable. Punishable conduct would only be that which encroached on someone else’s
freedom in violation of the social contract. No longer would status be a factor to receiving
favorable treatment or more favorable punishment.

Positivist School of criminology

The positivist school opposed the classical school’s understanding of crime. All people are
different, and thus vary in their understanding of right and wrong; this needed to be a barometer
for punishment. The person and not the crime should be punished.

Positivism saw its role as the systematic elimination of the free will metaphysics of the classical
school—and its replacement by a science of society, taking on for itself the task of the
eradication of crime, Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young wrote in The New Criminology:
For a Social Theory of Deviance. This new, deterministic movement was consolidated by
Enrico Ferri, who championed the approach then being employed by an Italian military physician,
Cesare Lombroso.

The positive method consisted of carefully observing the characteristics of criminals to gain
insight into the causes of antisocial conduct or behavior. Ferri did not endorse all of Lombroso’s
conclusions, such as that some people are born criminals and that some physical features, like
the shape of a person’s head or the placement of one’s cheekbones, can predict criminal
behavior. However, Ferri adopted the inductive method and set out to create a science that
would explain the causes of crime within society and the individual offender.

The school started by considering crime a product of heredity and environment. Instead of
criminal conduct, criminal behavior became the focus. Environmental factors such as societal
conditions and pressures interact with hereditary factors in a person to cause that individual to be
predisposed to criminal acts. The deterministic school was more concerned with the actual or
would-be criminal rather than criminal conduct.

Positivism’s focus on the individual may have been the greatest contribution to criminology and
the criminal justice system. It led to classifications of offenders, such as habitual criminals, as
well as categories between insanity and sanity. It also led to the use of psychology in studying
offenders, opening the way for different kinds of sentences and treatments that fit the criminal
and not the crime.

·Neo-Classicist School
The neo-classicist school emerged, in large part, to remedy some of the problems created by the
classical school.

According to Taylor, Walton and Young, contradictions in classicism presented themselves in

universal penal measures and in day-to-day practice. It was impossible in practice to ignore the
determinants of human action and proceed as if punishment and incarceration could be easily
measured on some kind of universal calculus: apart from throwing the working of the law itself
into doubt (e.g. in punishing property crime by deprivation of property) classicism appeared to
contradict widely-held commonsensical notions of human behavior.

Classicism concentrated on the criminal act and ignored individual differences between criminals.
Neo-classicism still held that free will is important, but that it can be constrained by physical and
environmental factors.

Thus, neo-classicists introduced revisions to account for problems presented in classicism:

Allowing for mitigating circumstance by looking at the situation (physical and social environment)
in which the individual had been placed.
Some allowance was given for an offender’s past record. A court needs to take into account an
offender’s criminal history and life circumstances when making a decision about someone’s
sentence.

Consideration should be given for factors like incompetence, pathology, insanity and impulsive
behavior. Also, certain individuals, such as children and the mentally ill, are generally less
capable of exercising their reason.

Neo-classicism heavily emphasizes free will and human rationality; it simply refined these ideas
slightly so that they would work in the world and in day-to-day operations of the criminal justice
system. This model provided a look at possible influences that could undermine volition.
Agencies of social control in all advanced industrial societies have adopted this model of human
behavior.[2]

Conclusion
The concept of social harm can be used to open up the possibilities of new narratives in critical
criminology, such areas as Green Criminology and eco crime, human rights and human security.
It creates the opportunity for new considerations of how to govern global social relations and
alternative ways of conceiving justice. Within a social harm and supranational framework, a
variety of social and criminological concerns can be thought about differently.

Critical criminological perspectives all broadly refer to a strain of criminology that views crime as
the product of social conflict; unequal power and social relations; and processes of labelling and
meaning-making. As a result, critical criminologies have invited a radical reconfiguring of our
focus from criminal justice to social justice.

Critical criminological approaches departed from the positivist origins of mainstream criminology
that had focused primarily on the search for the causes of crime, rather than questioning the
basic category of crime. These critical approaches began to focus instead on the processes by
which the law is made, and by which, therefore, individuals and groups become criminalised.

The emergence of critical criminology represented a stark shift in criminological thinking. In this
course you have been introduced to a number of key ideas and clusters of theories that rejected
concepts of individual and social pathology in preference to frameworks that examine crime and
deviance through processes by which certain behaviours are defined, labelled and policed by the
state.