![]() The earliest positivistic criminologists believed that much crime could be traced to biological sources. Instead they argued that human behavior was “determined behavior,” that is, the product of forces simply not in the control of the individual. Conspire noun free#The positivists, those who believed that the scientific means was the preeminent method of answering this and other questions, also believed that human behavior was not a product of choice nor individual free will. In the mid-nineteenth century the early “scientific study” of human behavior turned to the question of why some people violate the law. Beccaria and Bentham believed that a “just desserts” model of criminal justice would fix specific punishments for specific crimes. The use of sanctions was meant to discourage criminals from committing future crimes and at the same time send the message to noncriminals that crime does not pay. Their answer to the second question is deterrence. In their tracts calling for reforms in how society sanctions rule-violators, we see the earliest attempts to explain two focal questions of criminology: Why do people commit crimes? How do societies try to control crime? The “classical school” of criminology’s answer to the first question is that individuals act rationally, and when the benefits to violating the laws outweigh the cost then they are likely to choose to violate those laws. With the capacity to finally decide which punishment fits which crime, classical school criminologists believed that deterrence could be maximized and the cost to societal legitimacy of harsh, capricious, and excessive punishment could be avoided. Bentham’s writings (1765) provided the philosophical foundation for the penitentiary movement that introduced a new and divisible form of sanction: incarceration. In contemporary terms, this would shift the balance in a cost/benefit calculation, and would perhaps deter some crime. Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishments (1768) made an appeal for a system of ”justice” that would define the appropriate amount of punishment for a violation as just that much that was needed to counter the pleasure and benefit from the wrong. The Classical School of criminology (Beccaria 1764 Bentham 1765) began as an attempt to bring order and reasonableness to the enforcement of the social contract. The history of sanctions clearly demonstrates the extreme and frequently arbitrary and capricious nature of sanctions (Foucault 1979). ![]() In the event of minor violations, sanctions such as ostracism or limited participation in the community for a time were administered. Early societies punished violations of the social contract by removing the privilege of living in society through banishment or death. What happens though to those who do not make, or choose to break, this covenant? Societies enforce the contract by punishing those who violate it. Locke and Rousseau, philosophers who are not considered criminologists, argued that society is possible because we all enter into a “social contract” in which we choose to give up some of our freedom to act in our own self-interest for the privilege of living in society. Criminologists are concerned with discovering answers to this basic question. The question then, as now, focuses on how is it possible for us to live together. Those who want more and are powerful can simply take from the less powerful. ![]() If we are all free to maximize our own self-interest we cannot live together. If this is so, the very existence of society is problematic. ![]() The roots of modern criminology can be found in the writings of social philosophers, who addressed Hobbes’s question: “How is society possible?” Locke and Rousseau believed that humans are endowed with free will and are self-interested. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |