Three School of

Criminology that
Shaped Corrections

CU14 | FINALS
Classical School of Criminology
• “The true measure of crimes is namely the harm
done to society.” – Cesare Beccaria
• Beccaria was very clear that for a given act, a
particular punishment should be administered
as established by law, regardless of the
contextual circumstances.
• However, this principle did not take into account
the offender’s intent in committing the crime.
• In modern justice systems, intent plays a key
role in the charges and sentencing of
defendants for many types of crimes.
• Mens rea – literally means “guilty mind.” In modern justice system, it refers to
the criminal intent of the offender.
• Concept regarding whether offenders actually knew what they were doing
and meant to do it.
• Actus reus – literally means “guilty act.” The physical act itself, or omission
that constitutes to the crime.
• Whether the offender actually engaged in a given criminal act.
• Beccaria’s proposition focus only on the actus reus, because he claimed that
an act against society was harmful regardless of the intent (mens rea).
• Beccaria was against the use of capital punishment (death penalty).
 • Beccaria claimed that three characteristics of
Concept of punishment make a significant difference in whether
a person will commit a criminal act. These three
Deterrence characteristics deter crime according to Beccaria:
and the 1. Celerity – swiftness of punishment. Assumption
Three Key that the faster the punishment occurs after a
crime is committed, the more an individual will be
Elements of deterred in the future.
Punishment • Promptness of punishment is more useful
when the length of time that passes between
the punishment and the misdeed is less, so
much the stronger and more lasting in the
human mind is the association of these two
ideas, crime and punishment… one as the
cause, the other as the necessary inevitable
effect.
2. Certainty – certainty of punishment. Beccaria considered this as the
most important quality of punishment. It is the assumption that when
people commit crime, they will perceive a high likelihood of being
caught and punished.
3. Severity – severity of punishment. The assumption that a given
punishment must be serious enough to outweigh any potential
benefits gained from crime.
• Beccaria makes clear in this statement that punishments should
equal or outweigh any benefits of a crime if they are to deter
individuals from considering engaging in such acts;
• However, he also explicitly states that any punishment that exceed
reasonable punishment for a given crime not only are inhumane, but
also may lead to further criminality.
Jeremy Bentham
• Hedonistic calculus – the concept of
weighing pleasure versus pain.
• This is strongly based on the
Enlightenment/Beccarian concept of
rational choice and utility (utilitarianism).
• He became best known for his design of a
prison structure, known as the “Panopticon”
• Panopticon Prison – a model which used a
type of wagon-wheel design in which a post
at the center allowed a 360 degree visual
observation for the various spokes or
corridors containing the inmate cells.
Neoclassical School of Criminology

• French Government – strictly followed Beccaria’s ideas after the

country’s revolution in the late 1780’s, but found one exception.
• The French realized that not everyone who commits a given act
should be punished identically.
• The significant difference between Neoclassical School (“neo”
means new) and the Classical School is that Neoclassical takes
into account contextual circumstances of the individual or
situation that allow for increases or decreases in the
punishment.
• Neo Classical School – assumes that aggravating and mitigating
circumstances should be taken into account for purposes of sentencing and
punishing an offender.
• Example:
• Would a society punish a 12-year-old, first time offender the same
way as a 35-year-old, repeat offender who committed the same
crime? Most probably not.
• The French came to acknowledge that circumstantial factors play an
important part in how malicious or guilty an offender is. They revised their
laws to take into account both mitigating and aggravating circumstances.
• This concept became the standard in most justice systems.
Loss of Dominance
• For about 100 years after Beccaria wrote his book, the Classical and
Neoclassical School was dominant in criminological theorizing. Most
governments shifted their justice frameworks toward the Neoclassical
model – which has not changed even in modern times.
• However, the rise of the discoveries on other influences on human behavior
(e.g. genetics, psychological deficits) beyond free will and rational choice
resulted to the loss of dominance of the two theories among academics and
scientists in the 19th century.
• Despite the shift, the actual workings of the justice system retained the use
of the Classical and Neoclassical model.
Positivist School of
Criminology
• Just as classicism arose from the 18th
century humanism of the Enlightenment,
positivism arose from the 19th century
spirit of science.
• This became known as determinism, and
its adherents were known as positivists.
• An essential assumption of positivism is
that human actions have causes. The
search for causes of human behavior led
positivists to dismiss the classical notion
that humans are free agents who are alone
responsible for their actions
• Auguste Comte - the founder of sociology and positivism, believed that
both external and internal forces are important for understanding human
behavior.
• There is great diversity in positivist theories on the causes of crime: some
stress external (or social) factors more, and others stress internal (or
individual) factors more.
• Based on Comte’s positivism, Cesare Lombroso (1835– 1909) and his
distinguished pupils Enrico Ferri (1856–1929) and Raffaele Garofalo
(1852–1934) founded positivist criminology—the modern, positivist
school of penal jurisprudence—and led what has been called the Italian
school of criminology.
Early Positivism
• Lombroso’s theory of the “born criminal” is said to be a
hard form of determinism.
• Positivism slowly moved towards an appraisal of the
characteristics and circumstances of the offender as an
additional determinant. Because human actions have
causes, many of which are involuntary, i.e., out of
their control, the concept of legal responsibility was
called into question.
• Raffaele Garofalo (1852–1934) believed that because
human action is often evoked by circumstances beyond
human control, the only thing to be considered at
sentencing was the offenders’ “peculiarities,” or risk
factors for crime
Rafaele Garofalo: Offender Peculiarities

• Peculiarities – particular characteristics that place offenders at risk for criminal

behavior.
• Extreme Criminals – (whom we might call as psychopaths today) punishment
is execution
• Impulsive Criminals – Imprisonment
• Professional Criminals – punishment is “elimination” either by life
imprisonment or transportation to a penal colony overseas
• Endemic Criminals – (those who commit what we today might call victimless
crimes) controlled through changes in the law
• According to Garofalo, incapacitation through death or imprisonment or
“transportation” (banishment to penal colonies) was the key to eliminating
criminals from society.
• Franz von Liszt (German criminal lawyer) - campaigned for
customized sentencing according to the rehabilitative
potential of offenders, which was to be based on what
scientists find out about the causes of crime (Sherman, 2005).
• This ideal of individualized sentences tailored to the
characteristics of individuals meant that judges were to enjoy
wide sentencing discretion, which argued against the classical
ideal of predetermined statutory sentences imposed on all
who commit the same crime without any consideration at all
for individual differences.
Enrico Ferri and Social Defense
• Ferri’s concern was social preservation, not the nature of criminal behavior.
• Ferri was instrumental in formulating a concept of social defense the rational for
punishment. This theory of punishment asserts that its purpose is not to deter or to
rehabilitate but defend society from criminal predation.
• Ferri developed Criminal Sociology:
• The science which involved an:
1. INDIVIDUAL FACT (somatopsychological condition of the offender) by
anthropology, psychology, and criminal psychopathology; and a
2. SOCIAL FACT (physical and social environmental conditions) by criminal statistics,
monographic studies, and comparative ethnographic studies for the purpose of
systematizing social defence measures of:
A. Preventive Nature, either indirect or remote (through ‘penal substitutes’) or
direct or proximate (by the police);
B. Repressive Nature through criminal law and procedure, techniques of prison
treatment, and aftercare.
 • Charles Goring – published a book in 1913
entitled “The English Convict: A Statistical
Study” concluded that there is no such thing as
a physical criminal type.
Charles • It was the first to adopt the position that
Goring’s criminality is probably the result of the
interaction of a variety of hereditary and
Assault on environmental factors.
• One of the legacy of positivism is it did not
Lombroso disprove or destroy classical principles; it simply
shifted emphasis from crime and penology to
the individual offender.
 Summary and Comparison of the Classical and Positivist
Schools Pertaining to Certain Issues
CLASSICAL
Historical Period 18th Century Enlightenment,
early period of Industrial
Revolution
Leading Figures Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy
Bentham
Purpose of School To reform and humanize the
legal and penal system
Image of Human Humans are hedonistic, rational
Nature and have free will. Our behavior
is motivated by maximizing
pleasure and minimizing pain.
POSITIVIST
19th Century Age of Reason,
mid-Industrial Revolution
Cesare Lombroso, Rafael
Garofalo, Enrico Ferri
To apply scientific method to
the study of crime and
criminality
Human Behavior is determined
by psychological, biological, or
social forces that constrain our
rationality and free will.
 CLASSICAL
Image of Criminals Criminals are essentially the
same as non-criminals. They
commit crimes after calculating
the costs and benefits
Definition of Crime Strictly legal; crime is whatever
the law says that it is.
Purpose of Punishment To deter. Punishment is to be
applied equally to all offenders
committing the same crime.
Judicial discretion to be limited.
POSITIVIST
Criminals are different from
non-criminals. They commit
crimes because they are inferior
in some way
Based on universal human
abhorrence; crime should be
limited to inherently evil (mala
in se) acts.
Social defense. Punishment to
be applied differently to
different offenders based on
relevant differences and should
be rehabilitative.
Sources
• https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/87094_Chapter_3_The_Class
ical_School_of_Criminological_Thought.pdf
• https://law.jrank.org/pages/22506/Criminal-Law-Elements-Crime-Mens-Rea-Actus-Reus.h
tml
• https://uk.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/43041_1_The_Philisophical_an
d_Ideological_Underpinnings_of_Corrections.pdf