Introduction
Criminology refers to a body that focuses on crime as a social phenomenon. Criminology includes making the laws, breaking the laws, and reacting to the laws. Criminologists adopt several behavioral and social sciences and methods of understanding crime. In addition to this, they use several methods to measure the characteristics of victims, criminals, and crime. In the attempt to understand crime, criminologists have come to an agreement that while crime is deviant behavior, not all deviancies qualified as crimes. For example, in some instances, people contest mental illness as deviance. However, mental illness is not a criminal activity and a mentally ill person does not qualify as a criminal.
Discussion
The classical criminology school, which is associated with Jeremy Bentham and Cesare Beccaria, came up as a response to the barbaric criminal justice system and punishment in the 1780s. This school’s main concern was the issue of the free will and rationality of humans. The school’s major concern was studying the legal and law-making processes. Proponents of this school believe that individuals engaged in criminal activities out of their free will and thus should bear the consequences. In their view, the sole purpose of punishment is deterrence. Therefore, the pain of punishment should be of more weight than the pleasure of committing crimes. This school emphasizes that laws must provide a legal definition for crimes instead of focusing on what defines criminal activity. Beccaria argued that we could refer crimes to bad laws and not too bad people. Because of this, there was a need for a new criminal justice system that would serve everyone. Bentham, on the other hand, was concerned with Utilitarianism. Utilitarianism assumes the greatest happiness for the largest number of people.
Bentham believed that people believe in today’s probabilities and future pleasures against present and future pain. Because of this, individuals place these probabilities in a form of a mathematical equation in order to come up with a decision on whether to or not to commit a crime. Therefore, Bentham believed that punishment should be a little harder than the pleasures obtained from an act. The law’s existence serves to provide happiness for everyone and because punishment brings unhappiness, people can justify it only if the evil the law prevents is greater than the one it produces. Unlike the classical school, the positive school emphasized the explanation of the world around them. They argued that an individual’s behavior was determined by social, psychological, and biological traits. Positivists were aimed at a deterministic world approach, emphasizing criminal behavior. They paid little attention to the legal issues, crime prevention, and reformation of offenders. This school used scientific techniques, which required data collection in the explanation of different types of people as well as social phenomena.
Cesare Lombroso introduced the idea of determinism to replace free will and rationality idea. Positivists explain criminal behavior via experimentation and scientific research. Lombroso believed that criminals had no moral sense and lacked remorse. In addition to this, he added that economic and social factors were the major causations of crime, though these factors were second to biological and predetermined factors. Amongst the theories that the positivist based their arguments on are Psychological, Social, and Biological (Jacoby, 2009).
The psychological theories argue that individual behavioral differences predispose people to crime, while those who are not predisposed to crime are less likely to have criminal behaviors. Sigmund Freud, in Psychoanalysis, argues that humans have urges and natural drives in their unconscious minds, thus, everyone has the potential of being a criminal. However, through socialization, some individuals learn to curb these urges through inner control. In his hypothesis, Freud commented that the most profound element for criminality was faulty parent-child identification. Once this identification is faulted, the child may develop a queer personality through the development of inward or outward antisocial impulses. Outward direction leads to criminal behavior while inward direction leads to neurotic behaviors. Another psychological approach to criminality is cognitive development, which asserts that crimes are committed due to the ways that individuals organize their moral thoughts, as well as those of the law. Cognitive development also asserts the role of developing moral reasoning. The psychological perspective focuses on the criminal’s personality, which is formed through socialization and other environmental factors.
Biological, psychological, and sociological theories explain that certain types of people are predisposed to crime or anti-social behaviors since birth. In addition to this, certain personal attributes such as large ears, fat lips, and high cheekbones are also closely linked to criminals. Sociological theories explain that an individual’s social characteristics such as race, gender, values, education level, friends, socioeconomic status, and other environmental factors largely contribute to their behavior. They argue that certain social groups have fewer opportunities for achieving the goals that society considers most admirable. In their frustrations, these people usually turn to crime as a means of sustaining a livelihood, as well as the society’s social standards. in other explanations, biopsychological theories explain that criminal activities are the result of dysfunctional, abnormal, and inappropriate mental functions in a person’s character. This mental inappropriateness is due to a possible abnormality in hormones, brain waves, or the central nervous system.
The Canadian Criminal Code’s article on forfeiture of property acquired from criminal activities argue that the property of a convicted offender, once established that he/she acquired the property from criminal activities, will be forfeited to Her Majesty, or be disposed of as the Attorney General wishes. The positivists would not argue on this article because the concern of the positive school is not on how the law or the justice system treats criminal offenses or offenders. However, Bentham, who blamed the law for criminal activity, would disagree with this article on two grounds. His first argument is that the law drives people to commit a crime, and so, if an individual is aware that his/her property obtained from crime would be forfeited, they will devise ways of concealing it from the law. These ways may turn out to be criminal activities such as selling them illegally or in countries overseas.
Bentham also argues that people calculate the risks involved to the benefits before committing the crime. Because of this, the Canadian Code would not be successful in deterring this criminal from committing the crime. All the criminal has to think about is how to protect their property from the law. Secondly, the Classical school assumes the greater benefit from the largest number of people. By forfeiting a criminal’s property, the law does not help a large number of people, as it gives power to the Attorney General or Her Majesty, to decide on how to dispose of the property. The law should have let a large number of people benefit from this property (Agnew & Cullen, 2003).
The peace sureties’ article states that; an individual with credible information that another individual will cause injury to her/him, his child, or spouse, may present this information to justice. If the evidence provided satisfies the justice, then the justice orders an entrance into a recognizance by the defendant to maintain good behavior and keep the peace for at least twelve months. The defendant does this with or without sureties, though it contains reasonable conditions. Another option that the justice has is to place the defendant in prison for the utmost twelve months. The condition set in the recognizance is that the defendant should possess no firearm. The positive school of thought would argue against this article because in this case, the law assumes that the defendant’s behavior would change after one year if he/she were put in prison. Because the positivists have researched on the behavior of a criminal and ascertained that this behavior is because of several factors, most of which, the criminal cannot just decide to abort, then this law does not protect either the perceived victim or the defendant. This is because when the defendant is placed back to the environment or placed in a situation that would be difficult for them to deal with the same factors, there are possibilities for them to behave in the same way. Instead of ordering a recognizance of good behavior, the law should have sought ways of correcting the behavior, probably through counseling and Freud’s free association. This way, the law shall have helped both the victim and the offender.
Conclusion
In conclusion, both the classical and positive schools of thought came up with a decision to modernize the perception and treatment of crimes and criminals. By incorporating new ways of treating and viewing crimes and criminals, the schools have challenged the barbaric ways in which criminals were treated, as well as the justice systems. The positive school focuses more on the behavior of the criminal while the classical school focuses on the justice system. In their approaches, the positivists used several theories to explain their arguments. These theories include psychological, biological, and social theories of human behavior. Understanding human behaviors require an application of all these theories, as one theory is insufficient in explaining it.
References
Agnew, R., & Cullen, F. (2003). Criminological theory: past to present: essential. New York: Roxbury Park.
Jacoby, E. J. (2009). Classics of criminology. New York: Waveland Press.