Criminology

BY
RIAZ MAJID
Definition
 Criminology derives from the Latin word 'crimen'
(crime) and the Greek word 'logos'(doctrine)
 The word Criminology’ originated in 1890. The
general meaning of the term is the scientific study of
crime as a social phenomenon, of criminals and of
penal institutions
 Criminology is a branch of criminal science which
deals with crime causation, analysis and prevention
of crime
The Evolution

Demonization
Classical School
Positivist school
Chicago School
Demonization
 Evil spirits
 Most things in life are destined and cannot be controlled.
 People are born either male or female, good or bad and all our
actions are decided by a higher being.
 Primitive people regarded natural disasters such as famines,
floods and plagues as punishments for wrongs they had done to
the spiritual powers.
 Crime was a private affair that was conducted between the
offender and the victim’s family. The method proved to be too
vengeful, and the state took control of punishment.
Classical School
 Classical thinking derives its core ideas from a period known as
the Enlightenment, first emerging in France during the early eighteenth
century.
 Underlying Principles of the Classical School
 Humans have free will and are hedonistic
 They try to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.
 The main instrument of the control of human behavior is fear, especially fear
of pain.
 Punishment, as a principal method of operating to create fear, is seen as
necessary to influence human will and thus to control behavior.
 Some code of criminal law, or some system of punishment is necessary to
respond to crime
 The main purpose of the criminal justice system is to prevent crime
through deterrence.
 A potential criminal will decide against committing a crime because the
punishment would be too costly.
Classical School
 Cesar Beccaria(March 1738 –November 1794) & Jeremy Bentham
 Sees man as a rational self-seeking being whose acts are freely chosen. Faced
with alternative courses of action, he will weigh up the risks and benefits of
each and act so as to maximize his pleasure and minimize his pain.
 To be an effective deterrent, punishment must be swift, certain, and
proportionate to the offence.
 Law was inconsistent needed reforms
 Citizens are equal
 "felicitation principle" of utilitarianism, i.e. that whatever is done should aim
to give the greatest happiness to the largest possible number of people in
society.(Bentham)
 Crime control model – conservative
 Due process model - liberal
Classical School Summary
 Six principles underlie the Classical approach to crime:
 All people are by their nature self-seeking and therefore liable to commit
crime;
 In order to live in harmony and avoid a "war of all against all" people agree
to give up certain freedoms in order to be protected by a strong central state;
 Punishment is necessary to deter crime and the state has the prerogative to
administer it;
 Punishment should fit the crime and not be used to rehabilitate the offender;
 Use of the law should be limited and due process rights should be observed;
 Each individual is responsible for his or her actions and thus mitigating
circumstances or excuses are inadmissible
Problems with the Classical
Approach
 People do not always act rationally and not all people are
hedonists and self-serving
 Incorrectly assumes that people are equal in terms of life chances
– but you cannot have equal justice in an unequal society
 Famous quote from the French philosopher Anatole France who
praised the “majestic equality of the law” in that it “forbids rich and
poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal
bread.”
 The classical school does little to address the causes of crime
 Almost like saying that a person for no apparent reason “chooses”
to commit a crime, with no consideration of why this happened.
 One critic noted that under this view justice is "an exact scale of
punishments for equal acts without reference to the nature of the
individual involved and with no attention to the question of
special circumstances under which the act came about”
 It is based upon an “atomistic” view of humans which sees human
behavior disconnected with any sort of social context – I call this
“de-contextualization”
 From the atomistic point of view, deterrence means that when the
state punishes person X, other persons are unaffected by that
punishment in every way except in calculations of the desirability
of engaging in crime.
Positivist School
 Positivism - a method of inquiry that attempts to answers
questions through the scientific method.
 The researcher examines the "real world" of "empirical facts"
through the testing of "hypotheses" with the main goal of
arriving at the ultimate "truth" and deriving "laws" (e.g., the
law of falling bodies, the law of relativity).
 This school of thought argues that humans do not have free
will, that their behavior is determined by various biological,
psychological and sociological factors.
 Thus, responsibility for one's actions is diminished
Positivist School cont’d
 Adolfe Quételet (a Belgium mathematician) and Andre-Michel
Guerry (a French statistician) in Europe during the 1830s and
1840s were the first to do detailed statistical studies of
crime.
 Quételet found strong correlations between rates of crime
and such factors as illiteracy, poverty, and similar variables
 He also noted that these same variables remained the same
as the highest crime rates continued to occur in the same
parts of the city through several decades
 Some called this school of thought the “Cartographic School”
since it used maps to plot crimes within a certain geographic
area.
Positivists cont’d
 Cesare Lombroso
 Italian doctor who stressed the biological roots of
crime and argued that there was such as thing as a
“born criminal”
 Such a person was a sort of an “atavistic” throwback
with various stigmata or characteristics that are
throwbacks to more primitive people.
 Criminals are essentially biologically inferior like the
Neanderthal Man
Variations of Positivistic
Criminology
 Three major versions of positivist criminology:
biological (which began with Lombroso),
psychological, and sociological.
– Biological positivism locates the causes of
crime within the individual's physical makeup;
– psychological positivism suggests the causes
are in faulty personality development;
– sociological positivism stresses certain social
factors within one's environment or surrounding
culture and social structure
Body Types
• Humans can be divided into three basic body types or somatotypes.
• These body types in turn are said to correspond to certain
innate temperaments.
• Endomorph - excessive body weight and Described as being “soft”
and having an extroverted personality (the stereotype of the “jolly fat
man” comes to mind).
• Mesomorph - athletically built and muscular. Described as being
active and behaving aggressively. Said to be most likely to be involved in
serious criminal activity and to join gangs.
• Ectomorph - thin and delicate and having an introverted personality
(they are also said to be loners and hence not likely to engage in crime).
Criminality as an Inherited Trait
• Pretty much discredited within scientific circles, but some still claim there is a “criminal
gene”
– Alive and well today – see section called “Gene Warfare”
• Mostly explained by social and cultural factors
• No such thing as a “born criminal”
• Likewise with the so-called XYY chromosome abnormality (see text)
– One variation is PMS to explain female crime
Psychological Theories
• Feeblemindedness and Crime – closely related to genetic theories, claiming that low IQ
causes crime
– This can easily be dismissed when considering white collar and corporate crime
• Psychoanalytic Theories – based largely upon Freud’s theories (id, ego, superego)
• Mental illness and crime
– Although it has never been proven that various kinds of mental illnesses “cause”
crime, it is nevertheless true that a large proportion of inmates (as many as 1/3) have
suffered from one or more symptoms of various mental diseases.
The Psychopathic Personality
• This is a variation of the “personality trait”.
• What is interesting is that a researcher came to the conclusion that the characteristics
associated with this personality type fit the modern American corporation!
Institutional Characteristics of Corporations & Psychopathic Traits
• Irresponsible – in an attempt to satisfy the corporate goal (profits) everybody else is put
at risk
• Manipulative – they try to manipulate everything, including public opinion, not to
mention politicians
• Grandiose – we’re no. 1 or the best
• Lack of empathy and asocial tendencies – no concern with victims
• Refuse to accept responsibility and unable to feel remorse – when corporations get
caught breaking the law they pay big fines and then continue doing what they were
doing before
• Relates to others superficially – present themselves to the public as doing good,
when in fact they may not.
• Psychopaths use charm to hide what they are really all about.
Sociological positivism
 Societal factors such as poverty, membership of subcultures, or
low levels of education can predispose people to crime. Adolphe
Quetelet used data and statistical analysis to study the
relationship between crime and sociological factors. He found age,
gender, poverty, education, and alcohol consumption were
important factors to crime. Lance Lochner performed three
different research experiments, each one proving education
reduces crime
 Differential association (subcultural)
 People learn crime through association. This theory was advocated
by Edwin Sutherland.
Chicago school
 The Chicago school arose in the early twentieth century, through the work
of Robert E. Park, Ernest Burgess, and other urban sociologists at
the University of Chicago. In the 1920s, Park and Burgess identified
five concentric zones that often exist as cities grow, including the "zone of
transition", which was identified as the most volatile and subject to disorder.
In the 1940s, Henry McKay and Clifford R. Shaw focused on juvenile
delinquents, finding that they were concentrated in the zone of transition.
The Chicago School was a school of thought developed that blames social
structures for human behaviors.
Sutherland
 Edwin Sutherland adopted the concept of social
disorganization to explain the increases in crime. It
accompanied the transformation of preliterate
and peasant societies—in which "influences surrounding a
person were steady, uniform, harmonious and consistent"—
to modern Western civilization, which he believed was
characterized by inconsistency, conflict, and un-organization.
He also believed that the mobility, economic competition,
and individualistic ideology that accompanied capitalist and
industrial development had been responsible for the
disintegration of the large family and homogeneous
neighborhoods as agents of social control.
Strain theory (social strain
theory)
Strain theory, was advanced by American sociologist Robert Merton. He
suggests that mainstream culture, especially in the United States, is saturated
with dreams of opportunity, freedom, and prosperity— labeled as American
Dream.
 Most people buy into this dream, and it becomes a powerful cultural and
psychological motivator.
 Merton used the term anomie, but it meant something slightly different for him
than it did for Durkheim. Merton saw the term as meaning
a dichotomy between what society expected of its citizens and what those
citizens could actually achieve. Therefore, if the social structure of
opportunities is unequal and prevents the majority from realizing the dream,
some of those dejected will turn to illegitimate means (crime) in order to
realize it. Others will retreat or drop out into deviant subcultures (such as gang
members, or what he calls "hobos"). Robert Agnew developed this theory
further to include types of strain which were not derived from financial
constraints. This is known as general strain theory"
Social Solidarity by Emile
Durkheim
 Anomie in the lack of social or ethical norms in an individual
or group.
 Mechanical Solidarity: common values and beliefs, collective
consciousness, much independent
 Organic Solidarity: division of labour
 Today, among cultivated people, the woman leads a
completely different existence from that of man. One might
say that the two great functions of the psychic life are thus
dissociated, that one of the sexes takes care of the effective
functions and the other of intellectual functions."
Feminist criminology
 Feminist criminology is a paradigm that studies and explains
criminal offending and victimization, as well as institutional
responses to these problems, as fundamentally gendered.
 That emphasizes the importance of using the scientific
knowledge we acquire from our study of these issues to
influence the creation and implementation of public policy that
will alleviate oppression and contribute to more equitable
social relations and social structures.
Feminist Criminology Theories
 Traditional explanations for crime and delinquency have mostly focused on
male offending. While men were the primary subjects of criminological
research and theory as well as the central focus of the justice system, gender
was not explicitly examined. Consequently, girls and women—whether as
victims or offenders—were often ignored by justice professionals and
misrepresented in criminological theory. Feminist criminology remedied this
deficiency in criminology, introduced the various influences of gender theory
to the discipline, and challenged the field to consider seriously how sex and
gender impact crime, victimization, and justice involvement.
 Feminist criminology seeks to address this limitation by enhancing our
understanding of both male and female offending as well as criminal justice
system responses to their crimes. Feminist criminologists seek to place
gender at the center of the discourse, bringing women’s ways of
understanding the world into the scholarship on crime, criminality, and
responses to crime.
 Developing in the United States in the late 1960s and in the UK in the
1970s.
 Heavily critical of much mainstream criminological theorizing.
 Heidensohn (1996: 111) put it starkly when she observed: ‘criminology,
mainstream and tributary, has almost nothing to say of interest or
importance about women’.
 Early criminology, often characterized as ‘biological positivism’ or
something similar it did actually pay some attention to women.
 Lombroso and
 Ferrero’s work on the female criminal concluded that there were far fewer
‘born female criminals’ than males.
While the majority of female criminals are merely
led
into crime by someone else or by irresistible
temptation,
there is a small subgroup whose criminal
propensities
are more intense and perverse than even those of
their
male counterparts. These are the female born
criminals,
whose evil is inversely proportionate to their
numbers
. . . The extreme perversity of female born criminals
 Variety of crimes
 Many female born criminals specialize in not just one but several types of
crime and often in two types that in males are mutually exclusive, such as
poisoning and murder . . . In history we find Agrippina, an adulterer, incest
offender, and party to homicide, and Messalina, a prostitute, adulterer,
accomplice in homicide and thief.
 Cruelty
 Second, the female born criminal surpasses her male counterpart in the
refined, diabolical cruelty in which she commits her crimes. Merely killing her
enemy does not satisfy her; she needs to watch him suffer and experience
the full taste of death . . . In short, while female born criminals are fewer in
number than male born criminals, they are often much more savage. What is
the explanation?
 W.I. Thomas was another who propounded a view of female deviance that
emphasised sexuality, with promiscuity being regularly equated with
delinquency. Much of Thomas’s focus was on prostitution and soliciting, and
these activities were seen as typical of female deviance. The female
criminal, according to Thomas (1923), was cold, calculating and amoral.
They had failed, in essence, to learn appropriate female roles and required
greater control and oversight.
 A similar, sex-based theory was that developed by Otto Pollak (1961). He
sought to explore the phenomenon of hidden female crime – being
convinced that the relatively low official rates of female offending disguised
the real situation. It also reflects the fact that women are in many ways
manipulative and deceitful, this being a reflection of the nature of their
sexuality and biology. In particular, women’s passive role in sex, he argued
(1961: 10), forms the basis for women’s skill in deceit:
Sociological
 1968 in the British Journal of Sociology Frances Heidensohn drew attention
to the notable failure to examine and research female deviance. This, she
said, was remarkable for at least three reasons:
 Deviance in general (male and female) has long aroused much
sociological and other academic interest (from at least the time of
Durkheim). It is surprising, therefore, that the actual or potential deviance
of approximately half the members of any society elicits such little
concern.
 Interest in other aspects of women’s experiences and social position has
been very substantial, and has included almost every ‘type’ of sociologist.
 The differences between male and female offending have also long been
noted, and these differences appear to occur with the kind of regularity
and uniformity that normally attracts the interest of the social scientist.
 Studies: ‘treating delinquency as normal made female delinquency
problematic because it was both statistically unusual and also deemed role-
inappropriate’ (1996:129). Delinquency is viewed as unfeminine, precisely
because it is male behavior.
 Heidensohn argues it was not just that male sociologists were concerned to
study male delinquency that was important; less no. of female offenders.
Thank you