Criminology

Criminology was born as one of the theoretical fields of social sciences or sociology because crime and criminal behavior are social phenomena with direct impacts on societies. The efforts to understand not only the social determinants of criminality, but also the possible biological, moral, and psychological factors involved when someone commits a crime attracted researchers from other academic fields, such as anthropology, medicine, and psychiatry. As a consequence, a great variety of criminological theories have gradually developed in the last three centuries. In more recent years, criminology acquired an even wider scope, with the inclusion of new scientific fields such as forensic science, criminal psychology, and analysis of crime statistics.

The concept of crime is itself an object of study, as definitions of crime vary across cultures and change throughout history. For instance, for many centuries the practice of torture of prisoners, the destruction of civilian populations and cities by invading armies, child labor exploitation, and the capture and selling of human beings as slaves were almost universally practiced and accepted worldwide. These activities were part of the customs and values of previous times. As societies change and evolve, the moral standards also change to reflect the new social conventions. In consequence of such changes, some previously condemned behaviors may become accepted, whereas others, until then considered legally and morally justified, may be rejected as barbaric or criminal practices. Laws and penal codes reflect the values of a given historical period and tend to be amended or abolished to meet new emerging social and scientific consensus.

Criminological theories may be classified according to historical/cultural periods, or by the scope of their investigations. Some theories are developed around the psychological traits of criminal subjects, as well as the crime incidence among the general population or among a particular ethnic group or social strata. Other theories investigate the relation between socio-economic contexts and crime incidence, or between abuse and neglect in childhood and juvenile criminality, while others discuss the legal definition of crime, legal and social methods of punishment and rehabilitation, or means of crime prevention. The main theoretical schools of criminology are the classical school, positive school, and the Chicago school. However, criminological theories are more recently also classified according to scopes, such as biological, psychological, disorganization-ecological, learning, control, labeling, radical-conflict, feminist, middle-class, and integrated theories.

The classical school is considered the cradle of modern criminology, and was basically a product of philosophers and physicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The classical school was a consequence of both the preceding Renaissance cultural movement and the social and humanistic ideals of the time, such as individual rights, egalitarianism, and democracy, which led to the American and French revolutions. Criminality was viewed as the result of free will and individual choice, as all human beings were considered to be endowed with natural rationality. The emphasis of the classical school was therefore, not the analysis of criminal behavior, but in the social and legal definition of crime, on the need of consensus between society's best interests, and the role of the state and laws in the protection of the common good.

The mainstream premise behind the Classical School was the existence of a natural and implicit social contract between the individuals of a society and their government. Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794), author of a seminal book of this school On Crimes and Punishment explained criminality as a consequence of bad and unjust legislation. Like Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Beccaria and others professed that men, in their natural state, are rational beings, always pursuing pleasure and self gratification and trying to escape suffering. Such pursuit inevitably led to the conflict between individuals' interests, thus preventing the maintenance of social peace and the individual fruition of happiness.

According to Hobbes, government was a natural necessity to protect society and to define the social common good and moral standards to be forcefully followed by all. In contrast to Hobbes, who was essentially a totalitarian (e.g., government dictates the rules), Beccaria insisted that governments should not suppress individual liberties but instead, be their guarantor. When government failed the expectations implied in the social contract or created oppression and injustice, social unrest and increased criminality would be the result. Beccaria declared that legal equality to all citizens was essential to the success of the social contract, but laws and regulations should be kept to an optimum minimum to avoid unnecessary restriction of individual liberties.

Another influential thinker of this school was Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), with his utilitarian approach, in which individuals were believed to always consider the overall utility of government or of a law through the benefits it could yield in the present or in the future, weighted against those painful results or pleasures that could result from breaking the law or the social contract. The greater the benefits promoted by the government for the greater number of individuals, Bentham reasoned, the lesser the tendency of breaking the law among the population. Historical examples of the social contract application are the premises that justified the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.

The positive school was born inside the positivist movement that rapidly dominated academic thought after the French Revolution, with the separation between science and religion. The positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte (1798–1857) was the cornerstone of this movement, whose emphasis was the systematization of scientific investigation, the consolidation of a scientific methodology, and the construction of rational hypothesis through the empirical observation, quantification, and analysis of facts or of natural phenomena. The positive school of criminology sought, therefore, to explain criminality as a human phenomenon whose probable causes were to be identified in both the human nature and/or in the social determinants. Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), an Italian physician, is considered the founder of positivist criminology because he rejected criminality as a result of free will and rational decisions on the premises that criminal subjects should be studied in both their biological and social contexts. However, Lombroso assumed that biological diseases, such as epilepsy or some mental illnesses, were the main causes of criminal behavior, with socio-economic factors acting as secondary triggers. Lombroso and others studied the psychological and physical characteristics of thousands prisoners and mental hospital patients in an attempt to identify common features associated to criminal tendencies.

Lombroso described two main criminal types: the "born criminal type," whose compulsion to commit violent crimes was beyond the individual's control, and the "criminoid" type, a less dangerous (often harmless) and treatable and/or preventable pathological condition. Among the psychological features of born criminal types, Lombroso reported that they were incapable of remorse (an emotional process), displayed absence of moral values, lack of self-control, with many showing various degrees of mental illness. Therefore, Lombroso considered born criminals as psychopaths who needed to be isolated from society, as their condition was untreatable. Contrary to the general assumption, Lombroso never denied the social and cultural determinants, such as poverty, demographic density, educational deficiencies, childhood maltreatment and adolescence trauma, etc. as contributing factors or even direct causes to criminality, especially in the case of criminoid types. He also proposed several institutional solutions for the rehabilitation of criminoids, such as a reform in the prison system, with less emphasis on punishment and the introduction of educational and professional programs for those convicted of lesser crimes, along with social, medical, and educational policies to prevent criminality in problematic urban areas. However, his comparative anthropometrical study of physical morphological features between criminals and non-criminal individuals, a theory now widely discredited, is the best known and the most often cited of all Lombroso's theories.

The theory of social and environmental determinism (e.g., social conditions as the causal root) of criminal behavior gained force in the United States after 1910 with the Chicago school. This theory especially took hold after World War I. The concept of cultural relativism of moral values in opposition to the existence of human-inherent universal values was an emerging paradigm in American sociology as a result of immigration, fast and disorganized urban growth, economic crisis, and the industrialization boom, which attracted to the cities an ever-growing numbers of people from rural areas. These combined factors were seen as disruptive to the social organization of urban communities. Social organization was defined as a socially developed consensus about ethical norms and moral values that determined the regularity of behavior in a given community. The ensuing augment of crime incidence and the appearance of new types and styles of criminal behavior in certain "disorganized" local urban areas posed new questions to criminologists and sociologists.

Social scientists W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki published in 1920 the result of a comparative social study between Polish rural populations and the process of cultural assimilation of Polish immigrants in the slums of Chicago. They concluded that in contrast to the older immigrants, who had lived in rural communities in Poland and whose social values and cultural traditions were well established and assimilated, the younger Polish generations in Chicago (who had never lived in those rural communities) were in a kind of socio-cultural limbo. They could not identify with the values of the older generation and were not assimilated by the socio-cultural values of their present urban environment and country. The authors associated this state of socio-cultural limbo to the increasing incidence of crime and delinquency among the Polish-descendant youth of Chicago.

Inspired by this study, social scientists created the Chicago concentric zone model of Chicago, dividing the city into five "natural urban areas," as follows: zone 1, the central business district; zone 2, the transitional zone (the area where recent immigrant groups lived in an environment of deteriorated houses and poor sanitation, among abandoned buildings, and factories); zone 3, the working class zone, where working families lived in apartment buildings at low rental rates; zone 4, the residential zone, where the middle class population owned single-family homes with garages, surrounded by back and front yards; and zone 5, the commuter zone, or suburbs. The scientists analyzed each zone in terms of family income, types of economic activities, community infrastructure and organization, and ethnic predominance. They called such sets of characteristics "the natural ecological habitat" of each of those populations. In other words, it was defined as the environmental conditions wherein a given urban community lived and related to one another. These social scientists established a direct relation between higher crime incidence, gang organization, and juvenile delinquency and the more impoverished and precarious urban environments. They proposed that as the residents of zone 2, for instance, progressed and moved to zone 3, other immigrants took their place in zone 2. As they moved farther from the center, crime incidence dropped.

The model was also used to study juvenile delinquency in the various zones of Chicago, when data was collected from 56,000 court records of juvenile delinquency between 1900 and 1933. The group also concluded that higher crime rates were associated to the more central zones, where immigrants, nonwhites, and low-income families lived. These and other theorists of the Chicago school viewed poverty, population high density, and industrialization as the main factors inducing the deterioration of family ties and community relationships, which led to social isolation and juvenile delinquency. The group interpreted the results as showing that delinquency was the result of a defiant rejection of the established cultural norms and social values, which tended to grow through proximity and direct exposition of new individuals to delinquent groups.

Disorganization and criminality were, therefore, more prevalent in the central zones and tended to decrease with distance towards the suburban areas. In 1947, Edwin H. Sutherland published the theory of differential association, which he elaborated using elements from prior studies. Sutherland also introduced new data gathered from studies of patterns of learned behaviors through the relationship between the individual and his intimate group, which led him either to accept or reject criminal behavior, depending on which set of values is more emphasized by such influential groups or persons. In brief, Sutherland's theory proposed that: 1), criminal behavior is learned; 2), is learned through the interaction with other individuals or groups close or significant to the individual; 3) together with criminal behavior, individuals also learned techniques to commit specific forms of crime; 4), the choices, motivation, and preferences to commit certain types of crime derived from the quantity of exposition to accepted criminal behaviors in his/her relationships, whose definitions of behaviors that are justifiable, in spite of their illegality, and which are not justifiable, played an important role in criminal behavior.

Because human societies and human beings are both complex and dynamic entities, hardly a single-approach theory, or even a partially-integrated one, will offer the final answer to multi-sided human and social problems to which multiple contributing factors can be associated. Social theories tend in general to contain a variable degree of bias because the prevailing premises and implicit paradigms of their own cultural and personal backgrounds, as well as of their political beliefs in general influence the researchers of each generation. Theoretical criminology is a vast arena where a constellation of these and other recent studies, each tending to explain criminal behavior or its causes through different and often mutually excluding view points, are constantly fueling the academic debate.