AMITY LAW SCHOOL

CRIMINOLOGY
POSITIVE SCHOOL OF CRIMINOLOGY
SHIKHA SINGH

The Positivist School basically indicates the scientific objective for the quantification and
measurement of criminal behavior of a person. The scientific method became the major pattern
in the search for all the knowledge, as the result of which the Classical School's social
philosophy was replaced by the quest for scientific laws that would be discovered by the experts.

This positivist school of criminology had a great deal of influence on the operation of the
criminal justice system. As we can see in the United States, rehabilitation emerged as the
primary goal of the justice system during the early of 1900s. The above assumption of the
rehabilitative model is that, the factors which cause crime can be identified, and the treatment
plans for the same can be formulated and can be administered to correct law violators. Under this
model, the offender is seen as a person in need of intervention or treatment rather than an
evildoer person whom to be punished. The “rehabilitative ideal” involved isolation and
correction, within each individual who commits anything wrong, the specific deficits that led to
the individual’s criminal behavior. In this sense, the punishment must fit such offenders, rather
than the offenses committed by them. In addition, efforts to affect crime through broader social
change are also rooted in this positivist school. For example, the antipoverty programs created in
the 1960s were justified, in part which was based on sociological theories of crime.

This school was started by considering crime a product of heredity and environment. Instead of
criminal conduct, criminal behavior became the focus in this school. In this school it was
assumed that environmental factors such as the societal conditions and pressures interact with
heredity factors in a person to cause that an individual to be predisposed to do criminal acts. This
school was of more concerned with the actual or we can say offender rather than criminal
conduct.

Positivism focuses on the individual which may have been one of the greatest contributions to
criminology and the criminal justice system. It also led to classification of offenders, such as
habitual criminals, as well as categories between insanity and sanity. It also led to the use of
psychological terms in studying offenders mindsets, which opens the ways for different kinds of
sentences and treatments that fit the criminal and not the crime done by the offender.