Criminology

In simple words criminology can be defined as the study of crime, its perpetrators, and its cases; and related, an interest in its prevention, and in the deterrence, treatment, and punishment of offenders. Approaches and theoretical traditions are diverse. Thus, criminology as the study of crime will be interested in the distribution of crime, and in the techniques and organization of crime. Criminology as the study of criminals might seek explanations for criminal beahaviour in biology, psychology, or in the political economy of the society. The related sociology of law may be interested in the process of making and breaking laws and in issues such as proportionally making the punishment fit the crime. During the 1960s and 1970s, a sociology of deviance developed as a source of sociological opposition to the law-enforcement and establishment orientation or traditional criminology, and as an epistemological critique of unquestioned assumptions about what constitutes crime or deviance. In 1970and 1980s external and internal influences on criminology encouraged the development of critical criminology and feminist criminology. The latter drew attention to the near invisibility of women in criminological work and gave significant impetus to rectifying the past neglect of victims of crime. Critical criminology is also termed as radical criminology, this perspective viewed and explained crime as a product of the social and the historical processes related to capitalism. It is based on conflict perspective of Marx and focuses upon the oppressive power of the state, its control over the definition and the prosecution of crime, and the exploitation of the powerless by capital. Feminist criminology is a self-conscious corrective to mainstream criminology and deviance theories and one with the triple goals of critique, research, and reformulation of the field of inquiry. It emerged in 1970s partly as an outgrowth of both the women's movement and feminism, but also as a response to the s0-called new deviance theory and critical criminology, which, whilst aiming to be radical and innovative, had continued to ignore women. Sometimes seen as sub-field of sociology, sometimes as a discipline in itself, criminology is clearly mixed but dynamic enterprise, drawing on sociology, economics, history, psychology, and anthropology. Some commentators have suggested that its principal concern ought to be the study of the production and distribution of order, in other words, control rather than crime. Over the past two centuries, various schools of criminology have flourished. A school of criminology is a system of thought that consists of a theory of crime causation integrated with policies implied in the theory. One of the first schools of criminology was the classical school which developed in Europe during the eighteenth century through the efforts of Cesare Beccaria and Jermy Bentham. The classical school views crime as a rational means for maximizing self-interest. It maintains that individual will choose to engage in crime when they determine that crime offers the most pleasure and least pain relative to other course of action. It also follows that to control crime, the state need only convince the people that crime will entail more pain than pleasure, and it can accomplish this by increasing the punishment of crime. When people realize that crime is less pleasurable, they will choose to engage in more satisfying action. The positive school of criminology developed during the nineteenth century largely through the work of Cesare Lomborso and his followers. Grounded in physical science, the positive school of thought views crime as the product of personal defects or disorder. It maintains that the physical constitution influences behavior and that defects in biological structure or process engender criminal behavior. The positive school insists that punishment will not control the crime, because criminals do not calculate the pleasure and pain of alternative actions and chose those that maximize pleasure. Rather, it contends that the only reasonable way to control crime is to discover and manipulate its causes. It follows that best way to control crime is to treat personal defect or disorder. This school fell from favour in the early twentieth century with the rise of the sociological school, which views crime as the function of social environment. The sociological school has evolved over the course of the twentieth century, and it has come to dominate scholarly efforts to explain crime. The sociological school was developed primarily in the United States. In the late nineteenth century, criminology was accepted as a field of study by the growing university department of sociology, and since that time systematic studies of crime and criminals have been made mostly by sociologists.