MAIN THEORIES AND TERMS FOR ADVANCED CRIMINOLOGY EXAM
With examples, limitations, tables and pictures to make clear
Classical School - Beccaria & Bentham (18-19th century)
- People are rational actors, weighing benefits/costs to crime/punishment
- Punishes the offense, not the state of the offender
- Capital punishment, torture and corporal punishment has declined
- second half of 18th and 19th century saw the establishment and growth of prison >
take punishment away from the body and instead punish the mind and soul
- Beccaria: he was a strong supporter of the social contract and his theory of criminal
behavior is based on free will and hedonism. He proposes that all human behavior is
essentially purposive and based on the pleasure-pain principle. He also was a strong
supporter of the ‘social contract’ theory: people live together in society in accordance
with an agreement that establishes moral and political rules of behavior.
- Bentham: Very similar to Beccaria and had a utilitarian. People are rational
creatures who will seek pleasure while trying to avoid pain. He designed the
Panopticon, a type of prison designed to work through constant surveillance.
- Rational Choice Theory (Clarke & Cornish, 1986): the benefits would definitely
outweigh the costs. If the perceived cost of committing the crime is outweighed by the
benefit, people will be more likely to offend.
➔ Example: He really liked Peters watch and needed money, so he stole it, only 2
minutes of his life and would make him a rich man
, - Routine Activity Theory (Cohen & Felson, 1979): takes the circumstances into
account, while making an economic/rational decision when there is no surveillance
around. “Potential offender, a suitable target, and the absence of a capable guardian”
➔ Example: Peter passes by everyday waving around his wallet in a quiet area.
➔ Limitations of classical school:
1. Are individuals treated equally on the basis of intellectual ability, age, mental capacity
and gender today?
2. Does this fit in a system in which a number of people receive more prosperity while
all persons are formally equal? So can we treat everyone as equal?
3. Why do some people commit more crimes than others, when they would all have the
same sense?
Positivist School
- Rooted in scientific method and empirical evidence, fact based
- Punishes the offender
- Presumes criminal behavior is caused by internal and external factors, often outside of
an individual’s control
➔ There are 3 positivist subsections:
1. Biological - Cesare Lombroso = internal factors
2. Psychological - Sigmund Freud = internal factors
3. Sociological - Emile Durkheim = external factors
Biological - Cesare Lombroso (end of the 19th century)
- Conducted and experiment in order to attempt to prove the idea of the ‘born
criminal’
- Looked at people’s biological features, based on your atavistic anomalies, we could
determine whether or not someone was a born criminal
- Italian School of Criminology: founded by Cesare Lombrose, Enrico Ferii and
Raffaele Garofalo, known for: ‘atavistic born criminal’
4 types of criminals from Lombroso:
1. Born criminal
2. Insane criminals
3. Occasional criminals
4. Criminals of passion
➔ Research and experiment was not good, because limitations:
1.Methodological weaknesses - had no sample group
2.no experiment on people outside the prisons (control group)
3.conceptually limited - criminal is a legal definition, not biological
4.ideas were rooted in sexist, racist and classist beliefs of crime
5.new 'biosocial criminological theory' is more complex and
embedded in multiple disciplines within (neuro)psychology
➔ When can you be ‘born criminal’?
- ADHD, ADD, ASS
, - Mother was an addict
Psychological - Sigmund Freud (end of the 19th century)
- Freud focuses primarily on the ‘unconscious mind/thinking’ > id
Psychoanalytic theory (Freud): tells us that human personality is the result of three
different but fundamental structures – the id, the ego, and the superego
- He suggests that between the ages of 2-4 things that happened you can’t really
remember, but in your unconsciousness will influence your behavior later in life
➔ Example: when you are abused in early state of life, this increases your risk of
engaging in abuse as an adult
- Behavioral learning theory: theories that believe that humans learn through their
experiences by associating a stimulus with either a reward or a punishment
- Classical conditioning (Pavlov, 1897): In simple terms, two stimuli are linked
together to produce a new learned response in a person or animal
- Operant conditioning (Skinner, 1937): Through operant conditioning, an association
is made between a behavior and a consequence (whether negative or positive) for that
behavior. So an animal or person has to do something to get rewarded or punished
➔ The main difference between classical and operant conditioning is that classical
conditioning associates involuntary behavior with a stimulus while operant
conditioning associates voluntary action with a consequence
