Chapter 2

Schools of Criminology

Pre-Classical Perspectives on Crime and Punishment1

For the vast majority of human history, people believed that criminal activity was caused by
either supernatural or religious factors. Some primitive societies believed that crime increased
during thunderstorms or droughts. Most primitive cultures believed that when people engaged
in behavior that violated the rules of the tribe or clan, the Devil or evil spirits were making
them do it. For example, in many societies, if a person had committed a criminal act, it was
common to perform an exorcism or primitive surgery, such as breaking open the offender’s
skull to release the demons thought to be lodged there. Of course, this almost always resulted
in the death of the accused, but it was seen as a liberating experience for the defendant.

Exorcism was just one form of dealing with criminal behavior, but it epitomizes the nature of
primitive cultures’ understanding of what causes crime. However, the Catholic Church,
among other religious institutions, still uses exorcism in extreme cases. Exorcisms are
performed in the 21st century by representatives of a number of religions, including
Catholicism, “to get the Devil out.” For instance, in June 2005, a Romanian monk and four
nuns acknowledged engaging in an exorcism that led to the death of a 23-year-old woman.
During the procedure, the woman was chained to a cross, had a towel stuffed in her mouth,
and was deprived of food for three days. When the monk and nuns were asked to explain why
they did this, they were defiant and said they were trying to take the devils out of the woman.
Although they were prosecuted by Romanian authorities, many governments around the
world still believe in and condone such practices and may not have prosecuted in this case.

One of the most common supernatural beliefs of primitive cultures was that the moon, in its
fullest state, was a trigger for criminal activity. Then, as now, there was much truth to that
theory. But in primitive times, this influence was believed to be caused by higher powers,
such as the “destructive influence” of the moon itself. Modern studies have shown that this
connection between the full moon and crime is primarily due to a Classical School theoretical
model: There are simply more opportunities to commit crime when the moon is full.
Specifically, there is more light during the full-moon phase, which means there are more
people on the streets and more opportunities for crime. Also, nighttime is well established as
a higher-risk period for adult crime, such as sexual assault.

Some of the primitive theories of crime had some validity in determining when crime was
more likely to occur; however, virtually none of the primitive theories accurately predicted
who would commit the offenses. During the Middle Ages and before, nearly everyone was
part of the lower classes, and only a subsection of that group engaged in offending against the
normative society. So, for most of human civilization, there was close to no rational
theoretical understanding for why certain individuals violated the laws of society.

Thus, for most of human history, people believed that crime was caused by supernatural or
religious factors, leading to theories of crime such as “the Devil made them do it.” There
1
Source: Extracted from Introduction to Criminology: Why Do They Do It? Pamela J. Schram and Stephen G.
Tibbetts, Sage, 2021.
were many variations on this perspective, such as crime caused by the full moon or excessive
thunder. Due to the assumption that evil spirits were driving the motivations for criminal
activity, punishments for criminal acts—especially for those deemed particularly offensive to
the norms of a given society—were often quite inhumane by modern standards.

For example, during the Middle Ages (Dark Ages), common punishments included
beheading, torturing, burning alive at the stake, drowning, stoning (still used by many Islamic
courts in portions of Africa and the Middle East), and quartering (in which the limbs of a
convicted criminal are tied to four horses and then the horses are made to run in opposite
directions, ripping limbs from the torso). These punishments seem harsh by contemporary
standards, but given the context of the times, they were fairly standard and widely accepted.

Although most Americans would find such forms of punishment and execution quite
barbaric, many societies still practice them. Recent examples can be seen among Islamic
court systems (as well as in other religious/ethnic cultures), which often carry out executions
and other forms of corporal punishment. For instance, in 2005, in Aceh, Indonesia (a highly
conservative Muslim region of that country), a number of offenders were publicly flogged
(i.e., caned) for what is considered a relatively minor crime —or no crime at all—in most of
the United States: gambling.

It is interesting that a Gallup Poll addressing the practice of caning (i.e., publicly whipping)
revealed most of the American public would support it. More extreme forms of corporal
punishment, particularly the methods of public execution carried out by many religious courts
and countries—such as stoning, in which persons are buried up to the waist and local citizens
throw small stones (not large stones, as those would lead to death too quickly)—are drawn-
out and painful compared with modern forms of punishment in the United States. In most of
the Western world, such brutal forms of punishment and execution were done away with in
the 18th century due to the impact of the Age of Enlightenment.

The Classical Reaction2

The combination of both a rising landowning middle class as well as an escalating crime rate
led the philosophical leaders of the classical movement to demand double security for their
newfound wealth. They needed protection against the threat from the “dangerous” classes,
symbolized by the growing crime rates. They also coveted protection against threats from
above, the aristocracy that still held the reins of government power and legal repression. The
middle classes saw a solution to their dilemma in a reformed legal system that “would defend
their interests and protect their ‘rights and liberties’ against the arbitrary power hitherto
wielded exclusively by the landed classes and the Crown” (J. Young 1981, 253). In reality, to
be free to move up the class hierarchy, reformers needed a new legal concept of humans that
would limit the power of the old, aristocratically run state and liberate the freedom, safety,
and security of the individual to create and keep wealth. This emerged in the concept of
universal rights to liberty and freedom that would apply equally to all people (though many
classes beneath the middle classes were excluded). Universal rights demanded predictability
and calculatedness, neither of which was present in the existing system of arbitrary justice.

Thus, the primary focus of utilitarian philosophers was to transform arbitrary criminal justice
into a fair, equal, and humanitarian system. They sought to do this by aligning the law and its
2
Source: Extracted from Essential Criminology, Mark M. Lanier, Stuart Henry, Desire' J.M. Anastasia,
Routledge, 4th edition, 2015.
enforcement and administration with both logical and rational principles. These principles
were harmonious with the emerging concept of humans as individuals and were most
eloquently expressed by the philosophers Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham, along with
several other contributors.

Cesare Beccaria

Perhaps the most influential protest writer and philosopher of the period was the Italian
marquis Cesare Bonesana Marchese di Beccaria (1738–1794), or as he is more popularly
known, Cesare Beccaria. Beccaria’s ideas were shaped by his friends, the Milanese political
activist brothers, Pietro and Alessandro Verri. These intellectuals formed a radical group
called the “Academy of Fists,” which was “dedicated to waging relentless war against
economic disorder, bureaucratic petty tyranny, religious narrow-mindedness, and intellectual
pedantry” (Paolucci 1963, xii). With considerable prodding and much editorial help from
Pietro Verri, in 1764, Beccaria published a small book on penology translated into English as
On Crimes and Punishments at the age of twenty-six. It gained much notoriety after the pope
banned it for what he alleged to be highly dangerous, heretical, and extreme rationalism
(Beirne 1991). Anticipating just such a reaction, Beccaria had originally published the book
anonymously. His modest work became highly influential, first in Paris, then worldwide. The
book justified massive and sweeping changes to European justice systems. The founding
fathers of the United States relied on it and Thomas Jefferson used it as “his principal modern
authority for revising the laws of Virginia” (Wills 1978, 94). The writers of the US
Constitution and the Bill of Rights utilized it as a primary source. In addition, its impact
remains distinct in contemporary US judicial and correctional policy.

There was so much reaction to Beccaria’s book because his motivation for writing it was
rooted in the resentment he felt toward the authoritarian aristocracy into which he was born.
Unquestionably, it was fueled by his friends’ radical ideas about the state of Italian society
and particularly the abuse and torture of prisoners. Arguably, the book drew together, in a
readable, poetic way, all the main intellectual ideas of the era, providing a standard for
change. Expressed alone, these ideas had little power. Expressed together, as part of a logical
framework, they were revolutionary.

Beccaria challenged the prevailing idea that humans are predestined to fill particular social
statuses. Instead, he claimed, they are born as free, equal, and rational individuals having
both natural rights, including the right to privately own property, as well as natural qualities,
such as the freedom to reason and the ability to choose actions that are in their own best
interests. Drawing on the ideas of Hobbes’s and Rousseau’s “social contract” and Locke’s
belief in humans’ inalienable rights, Beccaria believed that government was not the automatic
right of the rich. Rather, it was created through a social contract in which free, rational
individuals sacrificed part of their freedom to the state to maintain peace and security on
behalf of the common good. The government would use this power to protect individuals
against those who would choose to put their own interests above others’. As a modern-day
example, we give up the right to drive where and whenever we want at whatever speed we
want and submit to government traffic laws designed to promote rapid and safe
transportation. Some individuals are tempted to disregard these laws. When they do so, the
government, through its agents of enforcement, punishes or removes these individuals so that
we may all travel with relative predictability and peacefulness.
Undeniably, part of the government’s role in maintaining individual rights is to ensure that
governing itself does not become excessively powerful and that citizens’ voices are always
represented.

Taken together, these assumptions led to the principle of “individual sovereignty” (Packer
1968). This means that individual rights have priority over the interests of society or the state.
This was especially important in the exercise of law to protect individuals. Thus, Beccaria
was opposed to the practice of judges making laws through the interpretation of their intent.
Instead, he insisted that lawmaking and resolving legal ambiguities should be the exclusive
domain of elected legislators who represented the people. He believed that the wisest laws
“naturally promote the universal distribution of advantages while they resist the force that
tends to concentrate them in the hands of the few.” Beccaria argued that laws should always
be designed, like government itself, to ensure “the greatest happiness shared by the greatest
number” ([1764] 1963, 8).

Beccaria also altered the focus of what counted as crime. Rather than defining crimes as
offenses against the powerful, he saw them as wrongdoings against fellow humans and thus
against society itself. He believed that crimes offended society because they broke the social
contract, resulting in an infringement on others’ freedom.

It was in the administration of justice that Beccaria saw individual sovereignty most at risk,
so he sought reforms that would guarantee justice. He argued that the law, the courts, and
especially judges have a responsibility to protect the innocent from conviction and to convict
the guilty, but to do so without regard to their status, wealth, or power. The only basis for
conviction was the facts of the case. This led to the principle of “the presumption of
innocence” (Packer 1968), designed to protect individual rights against excessive state power
or corrupt officials. Several procedural elements were necessary for a system of justice to
ensure this protection, including procedural restraint over arbitrary power, protection of the
accused defendant against abuses and error, and minimizing discretion or arbitrariness by
rules that limit police power and govern what constitutes acceptable evidence.

Beccaria also believed that individuals would be best protected through an adversarial trial in
which the accused had the right to be represented and was ensured equality of inquiry and
equality before the law. Moreover, this trial should be judged not by the government but by a
jury of the accused’s peers (with half of the jury made up of the victim’s peers), and the
procedures should provide the accused the right to appeal to an independent body.

When it came to crime prevention, Beccaria did not believe that the best way to reduce crime
was to increase laws or increase the severity of punishment, since doing so would merely
create new crimes and “[embolden] men to commit the very wrongs it is supposed to
prevent” ([1764] 1963, 43). Instead, he argued, laws and punishments should be only as
restrictive as necessary to just deter those who would break them by calculating that it would
not be in their interests to do so.

To maximize the possibility of justice and deterrence, Beccaria believed that punishments
should be proportionate to the harm caused; thus, the severity of the harm determines the
level of punishment. Punishment should not affect others or influence their future offending.
According to Beccaria, “general deterrence,” which means using the punishment of one
individual to discourage others from committing crime, should be replaced by individual or
“specific deterrence,” which encourages each individual to calculate the costs of committing
the crime. The level of punishment would be assessed by relating punishment to what an
offense warranted. This is the principle of “just deserts,” which means that convicted
offenders deserve punishment that is proportionate to the seriousness of the harm they
caused. This punishment is sentenced for the specific offense they committed and not for any
other reason, such as to teach others a lesson or because they had committed other crimes in
the past and so might be more likely to in the future.

In order for deterrence to work, three things must occur: certainty, severity, and celerity.
Beccaria argued that if punishments are to be an effective deterrent in individual calculations,
they must be certain, since “the certainty of punishment, even if moderate, will always make
a stronger impression than the fear of another which is more terrible but combined with the
hope of impunity” (ibid., 58). “Certainty” refers to a high chance of apprehension and
punishment. Beccaria believed that it was more important that potential off enders know
certain punishment would follow a crime than that they merely associate crime with severe
sanctions. If the severity of punishment is high but the likelihood of apprehension and
punishment low, then people are still likely to commit the act.

“Severity” of punishment means that the level of punishment must be appropriate. In other
words, the severity of the punishment should outweigh the benefit derived from the crime. If
the punishment is too severe (e.g., death for minor offenses), it is counterproductive and
results in a lack of respect for the law. If the punishment is too lenient, it will not serve as a
deterrent. The optimum punishment is a combination of sufficient certainty (that people
calculate they are more likely than not to get caught) and sufficient severity (that the
punishment seems impartial rather than excessive).

Finally, for punishment to appear as a deterrent to potential off enders in relation to the
offense committed, then it must also occur swiftly after apprehension, that is, with “celerity.”
As Beccaria wrote, “The more promptly and the more closely punishment follows upon the
commission of a crime, the more just and useful will it be” (ibid., 55).

Jeremy Bentham

An influential social philosopher and a supporter of Beccaria’s ideas was the Englishman
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832). Bentham expanded on Beccaria’s initial contribution by
offering the notion of the “hedonistic, or felicity, calculus” as an explanation for people’s
actions. This calculus states that people act to increase positive results through their pursuit of
pleasure and to reduce negative outcomes through the avoidance of pain. Bentham’s
conception of pain and pleasure was complex, involving not just physical sensations but also
political, moral, and religious dimensions, each of which varied in intensity, duration,
certainty, and proximity ([1765] 1970; Einstadter and Henry 2006, 51). Bentham believed
that people broke the law because they desired to obtain money, sex, excitement, or revenge.
Like Beccaria, Bentham saw law’s purpose as increasing the total happiness of the
community by excluding “mischief ” and promoting pleasure and security. He believed that
for individuals to be able to rationally calculate, laws should ban harmful behavior, provided
there is a victim involved. Crimes without victims, consensual crimes, and acts of self-
defense should not be subject to criminal law, because they produce more good than evil.
Laws should set specific punishments (pain) for specific crimes in order to motivate people to
act one way rather than another. But since punishments are themselves evil mischief, the
utility principle (the idea that the greatest good should be sought for the greatest number)
justifies their use only to exclude a greater evil, and then only in sufficient measure to
outweigh the profit of crime and to bring the offender into conformity with the law ([1765]
1970). Bentham argued that punishments should be scaled so that an offender rationally
calculating whether to commit a crime would choose the lesser offense. For example, if rape
and homicide were both punished by execution, the rapist might be more inclined to kill the
victim. Doing so would reduce the risk of identification and execution. But if harsher
punishment resulted from murder than rape, the off ender would be more likely to refrain
from the more harmful crime.

In contrast to Beccaria, Bentham believed that, in the case of the repeat offender, it might be
necessary to increase the punishment to outweigh the profit from offenses likely to be
committed. Also, Bentham introduced the notion that different offenses required different
types of punishment, ranging from confinement for failure to conform to the law, such as
nonpayment of taxes, to enforced labor in a penal institution for those guilty of theft. Like
Beccaria, he rejected the death penalty because it brought more harm than good and therefore
violated his utility principle. Instead, Bentham preferred fines and prison. Judges could
equalize fines and stage them in progressive severity as well as vary the time served and set
terms at different levels for different offenses. Indeed, Bentham was responsible for designing
the ultimate disciplinary prison, the Panopticon (meaning “all seeing”), designed “to control
not only the freedom of movement of those confined but their minds as well” (Shover and
Einstadter 1988, 202; Foucault 1977; Semple 2003). Bentham’s prison was a circular
structure organized so that a guard in the center could see into each cell without being seen by
the prisoner, with the result that prisoners would believe they were under constant
surveillance. Pennsylvania and Illinois constructed Panopticon-type prisons, but England did
not. Bentham believed that this disciplinary system should also extend to factories, hospitals,
and schools.

Limitations of Classical Theory

Although radical and influential at the time, the ideas discussed here were not without certain
contradictions. First and foremost was the assumption that people were equal. Would
individuals be treated equally based on intellectual ability, age, mental capacity, and gender at
this time? Second, how could a system designed to allow some people to create more wealth
than others, and therefore to become materially unequal, maintain that in law all persons were
formally equal? How could there be equal punishments for equal crimes without taking into
account differences in wealth? Third, why do some people commit more crimes than others,
if they are all equally endowed with reason? It soon became necessary to revise classical
ideas to fit emerging realities.

Positivism and Criminology3

Classicism had been the dominant approach to thinking about crime for about a century. In
the late nineteenth century it came under sustained attack as a particular form of ‘scientific
criminology’ emerged alongside many other scientific developments. Darwin’s great works
had been published between the 1850s and the 1870s and had a profound impact both on
scientific thought and, more generally, on the ways in which human behaviour was viewed.
In his books, On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, Darwin outlined his ideas
concerning evolution in which he proposed a theory of human development based on natural
selection rather than, say, the influence of a god or gods. In general terms, scientific thought
now placed increased emphasis on ideas asserting that human behaviour was determined by
3
Source: Extracted from Criminology, Tim Newburn, 3rd edition, 2017.
factors such as biology and physiology. In this period, writers such as Auguste Comte laid the
foundations for what they hoped would be the scientific study of society: sociology.
Similarly, positivist criminology is very much a product of this era – an era in which it was
assumed that progress was to be gained as a result of the dispassionate study of cause and
effect (including in human conduct). It was during this time that the first criminal statistics
started to be collected regularly, and in which scientists like Quetelet began to use such
statistics as the basis for research inquiry. For some of its key proponents, the mission of such
positivistic criminology was the creation of a better society through the application of
scientific principles. According to one of its foremost advocates, Enrico Ferri:

“The historical mission of the [Classical] School consisted in a reduction of punishment . . .

We now follow up the practical and scientific mission of the classical school with a still more
noble and fruitful mission by adding to the problem of the diminution of penalties the
problem of the diminution of crimes.” (quoted in Taylor et al., 1973: 10)

Defining positivism

So the mission of positivism was the reduction, or even elimination, of crime. What,
however, is meant by positivism? This is a term that causes much confusion within
criminology. Bottoms (2000: 25–27) summarises the main assumptions of positivist or the
‘scientific approach’ to criminology as follows:

i. The methods of the natural sciences should be applied, and could be applied, to the social
world.
ii. The foundation of our knowledge of the world (our epistemology) is data derived from
observation. The basis of scientific knowledge is ‘facts’ collected dispassionately by the
scientist.
iii. Facts must be distinguished from values.
iv. The core method involved the collection of data, the development of hypotheses, and the
testing of these for verification or falsification (hypothetico-deductive reasoning).
v. The combination of natural scientific methods and deductive reasoning led to a ‘powerful
preference’ for quantitative over qualitative data.

Now such assumptions, as we will see, have been severely criticised and, in some cases,
completely rejected. Indeed, the whole idea of ‘positivism’ has become surrounded by a
certain controversy and the term is sometimes used in books almost entirely disparagingly.
This is not necessarily helpful, and before moving on to consider early positivist criminology
in more detail, it is important to be reminded of why it is necessary to think carefully about
this, as indeed, all philosophies of approach and method. In this regard Bottoms (2000: 29)
provides a sensible reminder:

“In some criminological circles, the term ‘positivism’ is now never used without strongly
pejorative connotations. This is descriptively unhelpful, but more importantly it can serve to
deflect attention from the strengths of the so-called ‘scientific approach’ in criminology.
Whatever the defects of positivism (and it has many), it has bequeathed to contemporary
criminologists a fine tradition of careful observation of the natural and social worlds, and a
tradition also of the scientist’s duty to report his/her data dispassionately, even if he/she finds
them personally unwelcome. For those of us who argue that there is an external world which
is in principle capable of being described (albeit not without difficulties), these are important
legacies.”
In many respects therefore such ‘positive’ criminology was very different from many of the
classical ideas that had preceded it, not least in the focus it gave to the importance of causes
beyond the individual human actor. And although the contrasts between the two approaches
are arguably more important than any similarities, it would be an exaggeration to treat them
as ‘opposites’, for both are concerned with the causes of crime and, indeed, many
commentators have argued that it is perfectly possible to see important continuities between
the classical and positivist approaches (Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1987; Beirne, 1993).

Early biological theories of criminality focused on physical attributes and appearance (you
may well see such work referred to as ‘biological positivism’ – to distinguish it from
‘psychological positivism’). In particular, criminality was associated with abnormality or
defectiveness, the assumption being that it was those that were somehow biologically inferior
who were most likely to become involved in deviant activities. The best known approaches to
such activity are probably physiognomy and phrenology…

The assumption in phrenology was that the external shape of the skull was indicative of the
size, shape and nature of the brain inside. Both approaches assumed that conclusions could be
drawn from such study – of faces or skulls – about the behaviour of the individuals
concerned. An Austrian physician, Joseph Gall (1758–1828), argued that the size and nature
of the brain, as well as the contours of the skull, provided many clues to understanding
criminality and, at one stage, even identified what he argued was a ‘murder organ’ in the
brains of murderers and a ‘theft organ’ in those of convicted thieves. Phrenology remained
popular in some circles into the twentieth century, and phrenological analyses of the famous –
such as Napoleon Bonaparte – were undertaken and published.

Cesare Lombroso

Positivism in criminology is associated with writers like Cesare Lombroso, someone who has
been referred to as ‘the father of modern criminology’ but whose work is now largely
discredited. His most famous works were published in the second half of the nineteenth
century: The Criminal Man in 1876 (though it wasn’t translated into English until the early
1900s) and The Female Offender in 1895. Some of his early work resulted from autopsies he
had performed on male criminals, though for his subsequent work he relied on examinations
of living respondents – in the case of one of his most famous works, L’uomo delinquente
[The Criminal Man], on an examination and comparison of almost 400 non-criminal Italian
soldiers and 90 ‘lunatics’.

As Marvin Wolfgang (1960: 168) noted, ‘In the history of criminology probably no name has
been eulogised or attacked so much as that of Cesare Lombroso.’ A psychiatrist, Lombroso
viewed criminals as throwbacks to a more primitive stage of human development – this
atavism being found both in a variety of inferior physiological features associated with lower
primates, and with biological regression involving a less civilised form of mentality and
behaviour. Such an idea had previously been proposed by Darwin, who argued, ‘With
mankind some of the worst dispositions which occasionally without any assignable cause
make their appearance in families, may perhaps be reversions to a savage state from which
we are not removed by many generations’ (quoted in Taylor et al., 1973: 41). For Lombroso
the criminal was almost a separate species exhibiting a variety of mental and physical
characteristics setting them apart. These included:
“…deviation in head size and shape from the type common to the race and religion from
which the criminal came; asymmetry of the face; excessive dimensions of the jaw and cheek
bones; eye defects and peculiarities; ears of unusual size, or occasionally very small, or
standing out from the head as do those of the chimpanzee; nose twisted, upturned, or
flattened in thieves, or aquiline or beaklike in murderers, or with a tip rising like a peak from
swollen nostrils; lips fleshy, swollen, and protruding; pouches in the cheek like those of some
animals…” (quoted in Wolfgang, 1960: 186)

As the passage indicates, Lombroso’s approach was to assume that being criminal was
somehow to be explained through identifying particular characteristics of individuals. In such
a view, criminals were born, not made. As such there is a link between Lombroso’s ideas and
earlier work in the field of phrenology, in which the shape of the head was held to offer a
guide to the personal characteristics of the individual. In fact Lombroso went beyond the
straightforward idea of atavism to explore the possibility that other pathological conditions
might explain criminal and other behaviour, eventually settling on epilepsy as the ‘uniting
bond’ linking the criminal and the moral imbecile. Where his early work had focused
primarily on biological factors, as it developed, he also incorporated greater consideration of
broader environmental factors. Lombroso identified a series of different types of criminal
including the epileptic criminal, the insane criminal and the born criminal, being those with
atavistic characteristics. To these he added occasional criminals (divided into three sub-types:
pseudo-criminals, who commit crimes involuntarily through passion or some other emotion,
criminaloids, for whom opportunity to commit crime plays a greater part than for other
criminal types, and habitual criminals, who have few, if any, serious anomalies but, rather,
fall into primitive tendencies because of factors such as poor education and training).

Women were held by Lombroso and Ferrero (Lombroso ’s son-in-law) to be less advanced
from their primitive origins than men and, consequently, to be morally more defi cient and
have greater evil tendencies than men.

Ferri and Garofalo

Lombroso’s work was continued and elaborated by two other Italian scholars, Enrico Ferri
(1856–1929) and Raffaele Garofalo (1852–1934)… In his work with Lombroso, Ferri
broadened the search for the causes of crime. Very much in the classical tradition, these were
not to be found in the choices made by rational individuals:

“How can you still believe in the existence of free will, when modern psychology, armed
with all the instruments of positive modern research denies that there is any free will and
demonstrates that every act of a human being is the result of an interaction between the
personality and the environment of man? . . . The positive school of criminology
maintains . . . that it is not the criminal who wills: in order to be a criminal it is rather
necessary that the individual should find himself permanently or transitorily in such personal,
physical, and moral conditions, and live in such an environment, which become for him a
chain of cause and effect, externally and internally, that disposes him toward crime.” (Ferri,
1917: 54)

The third of the major figures of the Italian school of criminology was Raffaele Garofalo.
Like Ferri he was convinced of the importance of scientific methodology to the study of
crime. His book, Criminology, was published in 1885, when Garofalo was 33 years old, and
was described by Allen (1960: 255) as a ‘product of certain important intellectual currents
which profoundly affected social thought during the last half of the nineteenth century’.
These were ‘social Darwinism’ (a form of social survival of the fittest associated with writers
like Herbert Spencer), a belief in the inevitability of social progress and an assumption of the
essentially benign nature of political power. In the book he introduced the notion of ‘natural
crime’, which was defined by two essential characteristics: offending the moral sentiment of
pity (revulsion against the voluntary infliction of suffering on others) and probity (respect for
others’ property rights).

The identification of natural crimes was, for Garofalo, the basis upon which the important
task of identifying criminals was to be based. Given that crime is essentially the transgression
of basic moral sentiments, the criminal in Garofalo’s terms was someone who is lacking in
concern for others and in this, and possibly other ways, may be considered developmentally
deficient – particularly with regard to their ‘altruistic sensibilities’. He then identified four
classes of criminal: the murderer (in whom altruism is wholly lacking); the violent criminal
(characterised by a lack of pity); thieves (characterised by a lack of probity); and, finally,
lascivious criminals such as some sexual offenders (characterised by a low level of moral
energy and deficient moral perception).

Garofalo, Allen (1960) argues, worked very much in the positivist tradition. He was
convinced of the importance of scientific method, and was much more concerned with social
interests than individual rights. And, yet, in his writing he also reflected elements of the
classical tradition. He paid close attention to the nature of the penalties that should attach to
particular types of crime or criminal, thought that these penalties should be ordered in some
manner, and was also a qualified supporter of the idea of deterrence. Garofalo’s work, among
other things, therefore, is a good illustration of the simple but important point that positivism
was never a complete replacement for classicism. Strains of both traditions can be found
running through much criminology.

Charles Goring

Lombroso’s work gave rise to strong feelings, and led him to throw down various challenges
to his most vociferous critics. Charles Goring, author of The English Convict, first published
in 1913, distanced himself from some of the cruder ideas of criminal anthropology, but
espoused ideas clearly influenced by eugenics. His study, which took 13 years, examined
3,000 English convicts together with a control group of non-convict males, and concluded
that there were no significant physical differences between the two groups…However, he
continued to argue that measured differences in stature and body weight meant that criminals
were biologically inferior.

The impact of positivism

Positivism within criminology has been enormously influential and comes in for substantive
and sustained criticism. Critics of individual positivism such as David Matza (1964) argue
that it draws on three problematic sets of assumptions (Tierney, 1996):

Determinism – The assumption that there are things beyond the individual that impel or
constrain people in ways that lead to crime. These factors may be biological, psychological or
social. The problem with such views is that they fail to take account of human
decisionmaking, rationality and choice. In policy terms it tends to lead to an emphasis on
treatment and to avoid consideration of individual responsibility.
Differentiation – The assumption that offenders can be separated from non-offenders; that
they have some characteristic(s) that will help identify them as criminal or noncriminal
(much positivist criminology has focused around the search for precisely these
characteristics).

Pathology – The assumption that the difference between offenders and non-offenders is the
result of something having gone wrong in the lives or circumstances of the former.

In the early decades of the twentieth century much positivist criminology was dominated by a
concern with attempting to understand genetically determined psychological characteristics
such as ‘feeble-mindedness’ and ‘moral degeneracy’ (Tierney, 1996). As we have seen, work
by Charles Goring in the first decade of the century concluded that, in contrast to the views of
Lombroso and others, there was no identifiable ‘physical criminal type’. Nevertheless, he
largely rejected the possibility that social inequality or other environmental factors might
have explanatory power so far as criminality was concerned. Similarly, research on youth by
Cyril Burt in the 1920s, which had sought to explore and predict delinquency, was also
strongly supportive of the argument that hereditary factors were crucial in explaining how
some people rather than others came to be offenders. Though cruder forms of individual
positivism have declined in popularity and influence, the search for characteristics that will
allow us to separate offenders from non-offenders has continued to dominate criminological
thought for much of the twentieth century.

A Sociological Theory of Criminal Behavior4

THE PROBLEM FOR CRIMINOLOGICAL THEORY

If criminology is to be scientific, the heterogeneous collection of multiple factors known to

be associated with crime and criminality must be organized and integrated by means of
explanatory theory which has the same characteristics as the scientific theory in other fields
of study. That is, the conditions which are said to cause crime should be present when crime
is present, and they should be absent when crime is absent. Such a theory or body of theory
would stimulate, simplify, and give direction to criminological research, and it would provide
a framework for understanding the significance of much of the knowledge acquired about
crime and criminality in the past. Furthermore, it would be useful in minimizing crime rates,
provided it could be “applied” in much the same way that the engineer “applies” the scientific
theories of the physicist.

There are two complementary procedures which may be used to put order into criminological
knowledge. The first is logical abstraction. Blacks, males, urban-dwellers, and young adults
all have comparatively high crime rates. What do they have in common that results in these
high crime rates? Research studies have shown that criminal behavior is associated, in greater
or lesser degree, with such social and personal pathologies as poverty, bad housing, slum-
residence, lack of recreational facilities, inadequate and demoralized families, mental
retardation, emotional instability, and other traits and conditions. What do these conditions
have in common which apparently produces excessive criminality? Research studies have
also demonstrated that many persons with those pathological traits and conditions do not
commit crimes and that person in the upper socio-economic class frequently violate the law,
although they are not in poverty, do not lack recreational facilities, and are not mentally
4
Source: Extracted from Criminology, Edwin H. Sutherland and Donald R. Cressey, 10th ed., 1978.
retarded or emotionally unstable. Obviously, it is not the conditions or traits themselves
which cause crime, for the conditions are sometimes present when criminality does not occur,
and they also are sometimes absent when criminality does occur. A generalization about
crime and criminal behavior can be reached by logically abstracting the conditions and
processes which are common to the rich and the poor, the males and the females, the blacks
and the whites, the urban and the rural-dwellers, the young adults and the old adults, and the
emotionally stable and the emotionally unstable who commit crimes.

In developing such generalizations criminal behavior must be precisely defined and carefully
distinguished from noncriminal behavior. Criminal behavior is human behavior, and has
much in common with noncriminal behavior. An explanation of criminal behavior should be
consistent with a general theory of other human behavior, but the conditions and process said
to produce crime and criminality should be specific. Many things which are necessary for
behavior are not important to criminality. Respiration, for instance, is necessary for any
behavior, but the respiratory process cannot be used in an explanation of criminal behavior,
for it does not differentiate criminal behavior from noncriminal behavior.

The second procedure for putting order into criminological knowledge is differentiation of
levels of analysis. The explanation or generalization must be limited, largely in terms of
chronology, and in this way held at a particular level. For example, when renaissance
physicists stated the law of falling bodies, they were not concerned with the reasons why a
body began to fall except as this might affect the initial momentum. Galileo did not study the
“traits” of falling objects themselves, as Aristotle might have done. Instead, he noted the
relationship of the body to its environment while it was falling freely or rolling down an
inclined plane, and it made no difference to his generalization whether a body began to fall
because it was dropped from the hand of an experimenter or because it rolled off the ledge of
a bridge due to vibration caused by a passing vehicle. Also, a round object would roll off the
bridge more readily than a square object, but this fact was not significant for the law of
falling bodies. Such facts were considered as existing on a different level of explanation and
were irrelevant to the problem of explaining the behavior of falling bodies.

Much of the confusion regarding crime and criminal behavior stems from a failure to define
and hold constant the level at which they are explained. By analogy, many criminologists and
others concerned with understanding and defining crime would attribute some degree of
causal power to the “roundness” of the object in the above illustration. However,
consideration of time sequences among the conditions associated with crime and criminality
may lead to simplicity of statement. In the heterogeneous collection of factors associated with
crime and criminal behavior, one factor often occurs prior to another (in much the way that
“roundness” occurs prior to “vibration,” and “vibration” occurs prior to “rolling off a
bridge”), but a theoretical statement can be made without referring to those early factors. By
holding the analysis at one level, the early factors are combined with or differentiated from
later factors or conditions, thus reducing the number of variables which must be considered in
a theory.

A motion picture made several years ago showed two boys engaged in a minor theft, they ran
when they were discovered; one boy had longer legs, escaped, and became a priest; the other
had shorter legs, was caught, committed to a reformatory, and became a gangster. In this
comparison, the boy who became a criminal was differentiated from the one who did not
become a criminal by the length of his legs. But “length of legs” need not be considered in a
criminological theory because it is obvious that this condition does not determine criminality
and has no necessary relation to criminality. In the illustration, the deferential in the length of
the boys’ legs apparently was significant to subsequent criminality or noncriminality only to
the degree that it determined the subsequent experiences and associations of the two boys. It
is in these experiences and associations, then, that the mechanisms and processes which are
important to criminality or noncriminality are to be found.

TWO TYPES OF EXPLANATIONS OF CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR

Scientific explanations of criminal behavior may be stated either in term of the processes
which are operating at the moment of the occurrence of crime or in terms of the processes
operating in the earlier history of the criminal. In the first case, the explanation may be called
“mechanistic,” “situational,” or dynamic”; in the second, “historical” or developmental”.
Both types of explanation are desirable. The mechanistic type of explanation has been
favored by physical and biological scientists, and it probably could be the more efficient type
of explanation of criminal behavior. As Gibbons said: “In many cases, criminality may be a
response to nothing more temporal than the provocations and attractions bound up in the
immediate circumstances. It may be that, in some kinds of lawbreaking, understanding of the
behavior may require detailed attention to the concatenation of events immediately preceding
it. Little or nothing may be added to this understanding from a close scrutiny of the early
development of the person.”

However, criminological explanations of the mechanistic type have thus far been notably
unsuccessful, perhaps largely because they have been formulated in connection with an
attempt to isolate personal and social pathologies among criminals. Work from this point of
view has, at least, resulted in the conclusion that the immediate determinants of criminal
behavior lie in the person-situation complex.

The objective situation is important to criminality largely to the extent that it provides an
opportunity for a criminal act. A thief may steal from a fruit stand when the owner is not in
sight but refrain when the owner is in sight, a bank burglar may attack a bank which is poorly
protected but refrain from attacking a well-protected bank. A corporation which manufactures
automobiles seldom violates the pure food and drug law, but a meat-packing corporation
might violate these laws with great frequency. But in another sense, a psychological or
sociological sense, the situation is not exclusive of the person, for the situation which is
important is the situation as defined by the person who is involved. That is, some persons
define a situation in which a fruit-stand owner is out of sight as a “crime-committing’
situation, while others do not so define it. Furthermore, the events in the person-situation
complex at the time a crime occurs cannot be separated from the prior life experiences of the
criminal. This means that the situation is defined by the person in terms of the inclinations
and abilities which he or she has acquired. For example, while a person could define a
situation in such a manner that criminal behavior would be the inevitable result, past
experiences would, for the most part, determine the way in which he or she defined the
situation. An explanation of criminal behavior made in terms of these past experiences is a
historical or developmental explanation.

The following paragraphs state such a developmental theory of criminal behavior on the
assumption that a criminal act occurs when a situation appropriate for it, as defined by the
person, is present. The theory should be regarded as tentative, and it should be tested by the
factual information presented in the later chapters and by all other factual information and
theories which are applicable.
DEVELOPMENTAL EXPLANATION OF CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR

The following statements refer to the process by which a particular person comes to engage
in criminal behavior:

1. Criminal behavior is learned. Negatively, this means that criminal behavior is not inherited,
as such; also, the person who is not already trained in crime does not invent criminal
behavior, just as a person does not make mechanical inventions unless he has had training in
mechanics.

2. Criminal behavior is learned in interaction with other persons in a process of

communication. This communication is verbal in many respects but includes also “the
communication of gestures.”

3. The principal part of the learning of criminal behavior occurs within intimate personal
groups. Negatively, this means that the impersonal agencies of communication, such as
movies and newspapers, play a relatively unimportant part in the genesis of criminal
behavior.

4. When criminal behavior is learned, the learning includes (a) techniques of committing the
crime, which are sometimes very complicated, sometimes very simple; (b) the specific
direction of motives, drives, rationalizations, and attitudes.

5. The specific direction of motives and drives is learned from definitions of the legal codes
as favorable or unfavorable. In some societies as individual is surrounded by person who
invariably define the legal codes as rules to be observed, while in others he is surrounded by
person whose definitions are favorable to the violation of the legal codes. In our American
society these definitions are almost always mixed, with the consequence that we have culture
conflict in relations to the legal codes.

6. A person becomes delinquent because of an excess of definitions favorable to violation of

law over definitions unfavorable to violation of law. This is the principle of differential
association. It refers to both criminal and anticriminal associations and has to do with
counteracting forces. When person become criminal, they do so because of contacts with
criminal patterns and also because of isolation from anticriminal patterns. Any person
inevitably assimilates the surrounding culture unless other patterns are in conflict; a
southerner does not pronounce r because other southerners do not pronounce r. Negatively,
this proposition of differential association means that associations which are neutral so far as
crime is concerned have little or no effect on the genesis of criminal behavior. Much of the
experience of a person is neutral in this sense, for instance, learning to brush one’s teeth. This
behavior has no negative or positive effect on criminal behavior except as it may be related to
associations which are concerned with the legal codes. This neutral behavior is important
especially as an occupier of the time of a child so that he or she is not in contract with
criminal behavior during the time the child is so engaged in the neutral behavior.
7. Differential association may vary in frequency, duration, priority, and intensity. This means
that associations with criminal behavior and also associations with anticriminal behavior vary
in those respects. Frequency and duration as modalities of associations are obvious and need
no explanation. Priority is assumed to be important in the sense that lawful behavior
developed in early childhood may persist throughout life, and also that delinquent behavior
developed in early childhood may persist throughout life. This tendency, however, has not
been adequately demonstrated, and priority seems to be important principally through its
selective influence. Intensity is not precisely defined, but it has to do with such things as the
prestige of the source of a criminal or anticriminal pattern and with emotional reactions
related to the associations. In a precise description of the criminal behavior of a person, these
modalities would be rated in quantitative form and a mathematical ratio would be reached. A
formula in this sense has not been developed, and the development of such a formula would
be extremely difficult.

8. The process of learning criminal behavior by association with criminal and anticriminal
patterns involves all of the mechanisms that are involved in any other learning. Negatively,
this means that the learning of criminal behavior is not restricted to the process of imitation.
A person who is seduced, for instance, learns criminal behavior by association, but this
process would not ordinarily be described as imitation.

9. While criminal behavior is an expression of general needs and values, it is not explained by
those general needs and values, since noncriminal behavior is an expression of the same
needs and values. Thieves generally steal in order to secure money, but likewise honest
laborers work in order to secure money. The attempts by many scholars to explain criminal
behavior by general drives and values, such as the happiness principle, striving for social
status, the money motive, or frustration, have been, and must continue to be, futile, since they
explain lawful behavior as completely as they explain criminal behavior. They are similar to
respiration, which is necessary for any behavior, but which does not differentiate criminal
from noncriminal behavior.

It is not necessary, at this level of explanation, to explain why persons have the associations
they have; this certainly involves a complex of many things. In an area where the delinquency
rate is high, a boy who is sociable, gregarious, active, and athletic is very likely to come in
contract with the other boys in the neighborhood, learn delinquent behavior patterns from
them, and become a criminal; in the same neighborhood the psychopathic boy who is
isolated, introverted, and inert may remain at home, not become acquainted with the other
boys in the neighborhood, and not become delinquent. In another situation, the sociable,
athletic, aggressive boy may become a member of a scout troop and not become involved in
delinquent behavior. The person’s associations are determined in a general context of social
organization. A child is ordinarily reared in a family; the place of residence of the family is
determined largely by family income; and the delinquency rate is in many respects related to
the rental value of the houses. Many other aspects of social organization affect the
associations of a person.

The preceding explanation of criminal behavior purports to explain the criminal and
noncriminal behavior of individual persons. As indicated earlier, it is possible to state
sociological theories of criminal behavior which explain the criminality of a community,
nation, or other group. The problem, when thus stated, is to account for variations in crime
rates, which involves a comparison of the crime rates of various groups or the crime rates of a
particular group at different times. The explanation of a crime rate must be consistent with
the explanation of the criminal behavior of the person, since the crime rate is a summary
statement of the number of persons in the group who commit crimes and the frequency with
which they commit crimes. One of the best explanations of crime rates from this point of
view is that a high crime rate is due to social disorganization. The term social disorganization
is not entirely satisfactory, and it seems preferable to substitute for it the term differential
social organization. The postulate on which this theory is based, regardless of the name, is
that crime is rooted in the social organization and is an expression of that social organization.
A group may be organized for criminal behavior or organized against criminal behavior. Most
communities are organized for both criminal and anticriminal behavior, and, in that sense the
crime rate is an expression of the differential group organization. Differential group
organization as an explanation of variations in crime rates is consistent with the differential
association theory of the processes by which persons become criminals.

Merton, anomie and strain5

One of the most enduring and influential attempts to provide a broad sociological framework
for the understanding of deviant behaviour (including crime) is Robert Merton’s theory of
anomie. First outlined in 1938 and subsequently developed by Merton in a number of places,
it has been a source of research and theory ever since, whether being praised, criticised,
added to or modified by subsequent generations of criminologists. Borrowing and modifying
the concept of anomie from the famous French sociologist Emile Durkheim, it was an attempt
to explain why rates of deviant behaviour vary between societies, and between different
groups in the same society, thereby tackling what was seen as the traditional sociological
task. It was an explicit attempt to explore the sources of deviance within the wider society,
rather than locating them in ‘biological drives’ or ‘individual malfunction’. For Merton,
deviant behaviour could even be seen as a normal (i.e. typical) response to an abnormal
situation. Merton makes an important distinction between the cultural goals of a society and
the institutionalized means (or legitimate avenues) for achieving those goals. The sources of
high rates of deviant behaviour lie in a disjunction between these two elements. Merton
suggested that the United States in particular (and other societies which were structured in
similar ways) was characterised by such a disjunction.

American society places great stress on the cultural goal of success, usually in terms of
money. The culture also includes an ideology of equality of opportunity – that success goals
are open to all-comers, regardless of origins. In reality, access to the success goals through
the institutionalized means is not an equal opportunity game: there is inequality of
opportunity. Certain groups in particular find themselves often losing out the in race for
success. They therefore experience the disjunction more acutely than others: ‘it appears from
our analysis that the greatest pressures towards deviation are exerted upon the lower social
strata’ (Merton 1957: 144). This, of course, concurred with the knowledge that, according to
official statistics, offenders tended to come from the lower social classes. According to
Merton, a number of different adaptations are open to those experiencing this disjunction
between goals and means.

• Conformity: in spite of the disjunction, people still maintain allegiance to both cultural
goals and means.
• Innovation: the cultural goals continue to be embraced, while the institutionalized means are
replaced by technically more efficient means for achieving the goals, some of which may
well be illegitimate.
5
Source: Extracted from Introducing Criminology, Clive Coleman and Clive Norris, Routledge, 2011.
• Ritualism: in response to the frustrations inherent in the quest for success, the cultural goals
are no longer stressed, but the institutionalized means continue to be followed. There is a
feeling of resignation, of ‘playing safe’.
• Retreatism: the goals and the institutionalized means are abandoned, such as with heavy
drinkers and drug addicts.
• Rebellion: allegiance is withdrawn from both cultural goals and institutionalized means and
new ones substituted in their place.

Merton (1957: 157) thus speaks of a ‘strain toward anomie’ where the culture and the social
structure do not mesh together, with anomie itself seen as normlessness, a breakdown of the
norms, ‘a breakdown of the regulatory structure’ in which, at the extreme, ‘calculations of
personal advantage and fear of punishment are the only regulating agencies’. This idea of
strain has resulted in commentators calling this an example of a sociological strain theory.

Despite its success, Merton’s theory has received much criticism over the years. Much of it
has suggested that the theory is incomplete and undeveloped as a theory of deviant behaviour
– a limitation that Merton has readily accepted since the earliest statements of the approach
(Merton 1938: 682). For example, it has often been said that it fails fully to account for
different outcomes: why do some still conform when experiencing acutely the disjunction?
how do we account for different kinds of deviant behaviour adopted? Albert Cohen (1965)
pointed out that the framework was individualistic, neglecting group processes and their role
in deviance, and ignored the role of the social reaction to deviance in shaping it. Cloward and
Ohlin (1960) maintained that not only were legitimate opportunities unequally distributed in
society, so too were illegitimate opportunities, making a difference in what kind of deviance,
if any, the individual might turn to when subjected to strain. A further comment was that
Merton perhaps gave undue weight to social class in his explanation. After all, any theory of
rates of deviant behaviour might be expected to be able to account for the more dramatic
variations in rates according to gender and age, but Merton is silent on these issues.

These and other criticisms failed to silence the theory, which, although subject to the
changing fads and foibles in criminology and sociology, continued to appear in various forms
over the years. Steven Box (1983) adapted Merton’s concept of anomie for the study of
corporate crime, arguing that such organizations are profit-seeking institutions in an uncertain
environment, leading to the exploration of alternative, and perhaps illegal, means that will
reduce that uncertainty. A similar argument is used by Passas (1990), also in relation to
corporate deviance. Market capitalism, which promotes the pursuit of profit by the most
technically efficient means, while encouraging appetites and consumption irrespective of the
capacity for their fulfilment, does appear to be a recipe for the strain toward anomie in the
way that Merton suggested.

Messner and Rosenfeld (1994) in their ‘institutional anomie theory’ broadly follow Merton’s
framework in accounting for high rates of crime in the USA, adding that economic
institutions are so dominant in that society that people are less socialized or constrained by
values, commitments and beliefs other than those of the market place. Agnew (1985), on the
other hand, has pressed the claims for a strain theory which is more social psychological in
approach, arguing that ‘negative relationships’ of various kinds create negative emotions in
the person. Whether crime and delinquency or some other adaptation results from this strain
depends on a variety of constraints. Some evidence seems to suggest that delinquent
behaviours are associated with various negative relationships and life events (Agnew and
White 1992).
Lea and Young (1984), in what they call their ‘left realist’ approach, stressed the role of
relative deprivation in creating crime – a level of perceived unfairness in one’s allocation of
resources. More recently, Jock Young (1999) has argued that the rise in crime in the second
half of the twentieth century is due to the combination of relative deprivation and rising
individualism, in a society that has become more socially exclusionary, while culturally
inclusionary (through the mass media) – thus fostering expectations that the society cannot
satisfy in significant groups in the population, precisely what Merton had in mind.

In the global context, Rock (1997: 239) suggests that the concept of anomie, in the sense of
chronic deregulation, is appropriate to a number of places around the world which are
tottering on the brink of chaos and lawlessness, where the state is struggling or has withdrawn
from the battle to maintain order. Merton’s account of anomie, which was developed within
the context of the USA at a particular time, will not necessarily apply there. Finally, Merton’s
theory became a major element in some subcultural theories of delinquency, to which we now
turn.