CRIMINOLOGY

Criminology

Criminology

This paper provides answers to five questions related to the topic of criminology. These questions are based on classical criminology and other related subjects. This paper also presents views on Chicago School of thought.

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. According to the classical school of thought, 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 (Beccaria, 1983, 102). This Enlightenment philosophy gave birth to what is today called the classical school of criminology. According to this school, humans by their nature wish to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. This assumption formed the basis of their strategy for deterring crime. First, laws can deter crime if they have the full support and approval of the citizenry. This support and approval will be forthcoming if the laws are fair and impartial, written clearly and simply so that everyone can understand them, and widely publicized so that everyone knows them. If punishment is arbitrary, as it was at the time Beccaria and Bentham were writing, then individuals who are unsure as to when and if they will be punished are likely to take their chances by increasing their pleasure through lawbreaking. If punishment is extreme, then people may be induced to commit more crime, reasoning that if they are going to be punished severely for a single crime, they might as well commit others and enjoy themselves as much as they can. For these reasons, both Beccaria and Bentham opposed the death penalty (Beccaria, 1983, 103).

Raffaele Garofalo's Contribution in Psychology of Crime

Contemporary criminology also has its roots in another perspective on crime and criminals—one that developed in Europe during the nineteenth century and is known as the positivist school. In fact, it was a positivist, Raffaele Garofalo, who is credited with first using the term criminology in 1885 to refer to the scientific study of crime and criminals. Positivism emphasizes the application of the scientific method to the study of a subject—for example, how the solar system works, how germs contribute to disease, why people commit crimes—so as to identify patterns or consistencies in the observed facts that reveal causes and allow people to make predictions about outcomes when specific conditions exist (Fitzgerald, 1981, 240).

Positivists studying human behavior largely reject the classical school's emphasis on rational free will. Instead, a hallmark of positivism is determinism, that is, the position that human behavior is caused by factors within the individual or his or her ...