CRIMINOLOGY

Criminology

Criminology

The word criminology has a Latin root, crimen, which means “judgment,” “accusation,” or “offense.” Criminology is the scientific study of crime and criminals. As two well-known criminologists, Edwin Sutherland and Donald Cressey (1978: 3), explained, criminology includes “the processes of making laws, breaking laws, and reacting to the breaking of laws.” But this rather simple definition masks a good deal of debate and diversity within the field because criminology is hardly a unified discipline.

Criminologists disagree about how to study crime and criminals, the causes of crime, the most effective methods of responding to crime, and even the definition and nature of crime. For example, some criminologists maintain that the primary focus of the discipline should be individual offenders and their behavior; they tend to hold a legalistic view of crime, seeing it as a violation of consensually generated legal statutes. Others, however, argue that criminologists should study the legal system itself, including how laws are created, how they are applied, and in whose interests they are created and applied. These criminologists conceive of crime as behavior that produces social harm, so crime may include behaviors that are not officially deemed illegal by the state. Throughout much of criminology's history, the former perspective has been dominant; the latter perspective is a relatively recent development.

THE ORIGINS OF CRIMINOLOGY

Although a concern with crime or rule breaking can be found as far back as ancient Babylonia, as evidenced by the Code of Hammurabi, modern criminologists usually trace the origins of their discipline to Western Europe during the Enlightenment period of the late eighteenth century. The Enlightenment was a time of social and intellectual reforms. Enlightenment philosophers, such as Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau, argued that social life should be guided by reason and direct experience rather than by the superstition and blind faith that had characterized social life during feudalism. Human reason and experience are embodied in what the Enlightenment philosophers called the social contract, that is, the members of a society agree to sacrifice a portion of their individual freedom by vesting government with the authority to enact laws for the benefit of all and to punish those who, in their pursuit of personal pleasure or gain, choose to infringe on others' liberties. This Enlightenment philosophy gave birth to what is today called the classical school of criminology.

The classical school is exemplified in the writings of Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) and Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). Both Beccaria and Bentham were critical of the corrupt and tyrannical union that church leaders and the aristocracy had formed against the peasants and the rising middle class. They saw this corruption and tyranny mirrored in a criminal justice system that used secret accusations and flimsy evidence as grounds for imprisoning people and relied on torture to extract confessions. Punishments imposed by judges, who had unlimited discretion, were often arbitrary and had more to do with the social status of the offender than with the seriousness of the crime. Both Beccaria and Bentham argued that it is beyond the authority of judges ...