Advanced criminology
Chapter 3: classical, neoclassical, and rational-choice theories
Classical theory was prevalent before the “modern” criminology’s search for the causes of
crime, which did not begin until the nineteenth century. Classical theory did not strive to
explain why people commit crime; rather, it was a strategy for administering justice according
to rational principles.
A major transformation took place by the seventeenth century, and philosophers recognized
the injustices of the legal and political system of the time. Their resolution was legal and
judicial reform, which was about human rights and individual freedom, and they sought
philosophical justification for reform in the changing conception of humans as free-thinking
individuals.
Classical theory was originally a radical, rather than conservative, concept because it opposed
traditional ways, challenged the power of the state, deviated from the orthodoxies of the
catholic church, and glorified the common people. However, it was in some ways also
conservative in that it sought to expand the scope of disciplinary punishment, having it apply
to everyone, while ignoring the social conditions of the crime problem.
The preclassical era
By the sixteenth century, political power was consolidated in states whose monarchical rulers
aspired to complete domination. People were born into statuses of wealth and power,
positions that they claimed as their natural right. The law was the will of the powerful applied
to the subordinate members of society. This occurred in spite of a growth in scientific
knowledge throughout Europe and was sustained by the church.
First a person’s birth determined his or her place in life. By 1650, many governments adopted
the new mercantile system of trade, humans were now seen as capable of making a difference
in their lives and situations through acts of will. The concept of ‘the individual’ was thus
born.
England for example, the state had stripped feudal families of their land, and middle-class
land speculators were rewarded with property for their loyalty to the monarchy. As a result,
the middle class rose to form a new power elite, this was at the expense of farmers, laborers,
and the poor. At the same time urbanization was accelerating and cities were growing but also
becoming crowded. Those newly urban dwellers that could not survive the lack of work,
hunger, etc., roamed from town to town as homeless people begging and stealing. Concern for
the poor soon became mixed with fear of a threat to public order. Citizens wanted to protect
themselves from those parasites and demanded that something be done to make the streets
safe. In response to the rising fear of crime, European parliaments passed additional and
harsher penalties against law violators.
,The classical reaction
The combination of both a rising middle class as well as an escalating crime rate led the
philosophical leaders of the classical movement to demand double security for their wealth.
They needed protection from under but also from above, that still held the reins of
government power and legal repression. The primary focus of utilitarian philosophers was to
transform random criminal justice into a fair, equal, and humanitarian system. They sought to
do this by aligning the law with both logical and rational principles. These principles were
most expressed by the philosophers Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham.
Cesare Beccaria
He challenged the 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.
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.
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. This led to the principle of
- Individual sovereignty: individual rights have priority over the interests of society or
the state.
Beccaria argued that laws should always be designed, to ensure “the greatest happiness shared
by the greatest number”. He argued that the law, the courts, and the 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. This led to the principle of
- The presumption of innocence: designed to protect individual rights against excessive
state power or corrupt officials. Innocent until proven guilty.
When it came to crime prevention, Beccaria did not believe that the best way to reduce crime
was to increase laws or punishment, but that punishments should be proportionate to the harm
causes. According to Beccaria “general deterrence”, which means using the punishment of
one individual to discourage others from committing crime, should be replaced by “specific
deterrence”, which encourage each individual to calculate the costs of committing the crime.
In order for deterrence to work, three things must occur:
- Certainly. A high chance of apprehension and punishment. It was more important that
potential offenders know certain punishment would follow a crime than that they
merely associate crime with severe sanctions.
, - Severity. The level of punishment must be appropriate. The severity of the punishment
should outweigh the benefit derived from the crime.
- Celerity. The more closely punishment follows upon a crime, the more useful will it
be.
Jeremy Bentham
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 states that people act to
increase positive results through their pursuit of pleasure and to reduce negative outcomes
through the avoidance of pain. His conception of pain and pleasure involved not just physical
sensations but also political, moral and religious dimensions, each of which varied in
intensity, duration, certainty, and proximity.
Like Beccaria, Bentham saw law’s purpose as increasing the total happiness of the
community by excluding “mischief”. Laws should ban harmful behavior, provided there is a
victim involved. Laws should set specific punishments for specific crimes in order to motivate
people to act one way rather than another. Bentham argued that punishment should be scaled
so that an offender rationally calculating whether to commit a crime would choose the lesser
offense.
Like Beccaria, Bentham rejected the death penalty because it brought more harm than good
and therefore violated his utility principle.
Limitations of classical theory
There were some contradictions:
- The assumption that people were equal. Would individuals be treated equally based on
intellectual ability, age, mental capacity, and gender at this time?
- 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?
- Why do some people commit more crimes than others, if they are all equally endowed
with reason?
Neoclassical revisions
Pure classicism took no account for individual differences. The neoclassical position
recognized ‘age, mental condition and extenuating circumstances. Despite these changes, the
basic underlying assumptions – those humans are rational, calculating, and hedonistic –
remained the cornerstone of criminal justice policy.
, The application of scientific methods in criminal justice, driven by a growing government
role, resulted in increased state power and institutional discretion. There was a realization that
scientific solutions caused human suffering and social problems. By the 1970s there was a call
to challenge the state’s growing discretion, leading to a demand for a return to equality
standards. Two developments in this regard were particularly important.
- A conservative ‘law-and-order’ approach to crime control.
- Rational-choice theory.
Criminal justice implications: the move to ‘justice’ theory
Following 1859, Darwinist evolutionary ideas, science, and technology promised to liberate
humankind from the philosophical speculations of the enlightenment era. It changed criminal
justice policy to take into account both individual and social differences, especially in
sentencing practices. Offenders were diagnosed as having specific problems and were deemed
to need sentences (treatment) based on their diagnosed problems. Thus the emphasis shifted
from deterrence to treatment under what was termed ‘rehabilitative justice’. The outcome,
however, was the same before. Convicted offenders received different sentences for similar
crimes and different treatments depending on the diagnosis cause.
CHAPTER 3 NOT FINISHED
Chapter 4: born to be bad. Biologicval, psychological, and biosocial theories of crime.
The idea that crime is ‘in the blood’, that certain criminal behaviors are inherited, or innate, is
the hallmark of the biological approach to criminological explanation. Liberals tend to view
biological theories of crime as “efforts to shift responsibility away from social factors that
cause crime and onto criminal individuals”.
Biological and positivistic assumptions
The major emphasis of this applied science of criminology is that humans have unique
characteristics, or predispositions, that, under certain conditions, lead some to commit
criminal acts. In other words, something within the individual strongly influences his or her
behavior, but this will occur only under certain environmental conditions. Early biological
criminologists believed that the key to understanding crime was to study the criminal actor,
not the criminal act. Criminologists should study the nature of criminals as “kinds of people”
who would commit such acts.
Of central importance to these founding biological criminologists was how to study the
criminal. The approach adopted by these pioneers of scientific criminology is called the
“positivist” method, which argues that social relations and events (including crime) can be
studied scientifically using methods derived from the natural sciences.
