Lecture 1 – What is criminology?
What is criminology?
- At its origins an applied science: governmental concerns directed the research agenda
- Criminology as an object science
- Criminology as an interdisciplinary science
Origins of criminology
- Classical criminologist (18th century): crime as a result of free will and cost-benefit analysis.
Not yet an established discipline, focused on crime and punishment
- First criminologists (19th century) are positivists: what contributing factors explain people
committing crimes or what makes a criminal different from a civilized individual? From here
the discipline established itself with psychologists, criminal law scholars etc. contributing to
the field. Positivism refers to contributive factors of crime/positive idea that with the help of
science, we could (re)make the world
Criminology as an autonomous interdisciplinary field (20 th century)
- Criminography (descriptive, measuring, historical, etc.)
- Aetiology (causes of crime: why it occurs)
o Critical approaches (questioning definition of crime, power, inequalities, working of
criminal justice system etc.)
- Response to crime:
o Crime prevention
o Penology (different kind of punishments)
- Victimology
What is crime?
1. Legal definition
a. An intentional act or omission in violation of criminal law (statutory and case law),
committed without defense or justification, and sanctioned by the state as a felony or
misdemeanor.
2. Sociological definition
a. Thorsten Sellin: we need a scientific (not a legal) criminology and a scientific
definition of crime
b. Search for universalities in norms and rule transgression: what things do societies
generally believe to be wrong?
c. Moral/social component: crime as a sociological problem
d. Deviant behavior as topic of study
3. Social constructivist definition
a. Howard Becker: why is some behavior criminalized and other not?
b. What is seen as crime is a product of the dynamics of a given society: Social groups
create deviance by making rules whose infraction creates deviance and by applying
those rules to particular people and labeling them as outsiders. Crime is behavior
defined by the agents and activities of the powerful
c. Louk Hulsman: abolitionism
i. Categories of crime are given by the criminal justice system rather than by
victims of society in general. This makes it necessary to abandon the notion
of crime as a tool in the conceptual framework of criminology. Crime has no
ontological reality and is not the object but the product of criminal policy
, 4. Human rights definition
a. Schwendinger: human rights as a threshold: non-respect of these rights constitutes
crime: individuals who deny these rights to others are criminal. Imperialism, racism,
sexism and poverty can be called crimes according to the logic of our argument
b. Nowadays we call this social justice
c. Definition takes power inequalities into account. Politically loaden definition, like the
social constructivist definition.
5. Harm definition
a. Crime is a legal construct (power) and is anthropocentric (too much focused an the
human species)
b. Crimes is the harms done to the environment, animals etc.
Thus what constitutes crime depends on the definition used. The power struggles at play and the
time and place. What is punishable by law in one era is not necessarily criminal in another time.
Differences between sociological and social constructivist in line of definition
- Sociological definition: looks at the norms that are transgressed (the norm itself is
unproblematized or taken for granted): what norm is transgressed
- Social constructivist: looks at why social norms exist/came to be as they are: who defines
(and why this person?) Or: why is the norm there in the first place?
Who is the criminal?
- Cesare Lombrose (positivist, 19th century) thought you could recognize a criminal by his/her
looks
- Lombroso’s work – he took photos of prison population and measured their facial
propensities (size of the forehead, space between the eyes etc. – craniology) and then
concluded that ‘criminals’ have some defining traits in common (high forehead, strong jaw
line etc.) Theory has been falsified. Can you point out some weaknesses in his research?
Whereas Lombroso’s ideas might sound obsolete, nowadays we still see research that has
developed from this tradition: neo-positivist research into, for example, how genetic factors,
hormonal imbalances or other biological aspects can influence criminal behavior. We also can
recognize in some of this research (namely the badly executed part of this research) the
mistake of reductionism, stereotyping and tunnel vision.
Biases and gazes in criminology
- We tend to overly focus on certain kind of offender (criminological gaze)
o Men rather than women, young rather than old, poor rather than rich, ethnic
minorities rather than ethnic majority, ugly rather than pretty etc.
- As well as a certain kind of victim (ideal victim)
Lecture 2 – Assumptions, biases, and realities
Classical school: child of enlightment
- Late 18th and 19th century
- Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham
- Legal and philosophical underpinnings, rational and bureaucratic approach to crime
- Crime: result of free will, decision based on circumstances. Focus on the crime
- Hedonistic calculation (we calculate what will give us pleasure, how can I maximize my
pleasure and minimize pain) and utilitarianism
- Punishment: rational, civilized, certain, swift, severe
, - Neo-classical school (late 19th and 20th): focus pivoting to liability (and those who cannot be
considered liable)
Posvitism and individual pathologies: the criminal man
- Late 19th and early 20th centuries
- August Comte and the positivist approach: social science as hard science
- Focus on the criminal, not the crime (treatment/rehabilitation or containment/isolation).
- Lombroso: atavism and the biological/psychological traits of the criminal woman/man
- Freud: ego/superego/id
Social pathologies and sociological posivitism: broading the scope
- 20th centry (first half): world war 1, financial crisis
- Crime explained by considerations of societal structures and community dynamics
- Anomie and strain
- The Chicago school: were you live in a society is important in how and in what ways crime is
affective in your life. The more you move to the center, the more crime.
- Neutralization techniques: how you can neutralize the responsibility
- Typologies, steps, maps, graphs etc.
Critical perspectives: questioning structural inequalities
- 20th century (mid and second half)
- Karl Marx: the far-reaching ramifications of capitalist organization (proletariat vs. bourgeoisie)
- Questioning fundamentals: class, criminal justice system, criminalization
- Problematizing: inequity, power, feminism, patriarchy, hegemonic masculinity – thus
politicizing the study of crime
- Schools of thought: conflict/radical, critical, left realism, feminist, post colonial
- Social constructivism
Lecture 3 – Philosophies of punishments
Basics of contemporary punishments:
- aims of punishments
o Retribution: criticized as brutal and ineffective by emergent classical school
o Deterrence: classical school – for the individual and society as a whole (special and
general)
o Rehabilitation: in line with positivism (dealing with individual pathologies)
o Incapacitation: both classicist (incapacitation as specific deterrence) and positivist
(when rehabilitation proves ineffective)
o Restorative justice and reparations: involving communities affected by war and state
atrocities (see Chile, USA)
- Types of punishments
o Punitive: capital punishment, corporal punishment, imprisonment, fines and
sanctions, rehabilitative treatment
o Welfarist: community sentences, probation, welfare system policies, social policy
interventions
o Radical: restorative justice, decriminalization, abolitionism, structural adjustments
Philosophies and theories of punishments: penal-philosophical approaches
- Retributive justice: disinterested, proportional, consistent
