Standard textbook accounts find two scriptural beginnings to the history of criminology: the ‘classical school’ and the ‘positivist school’, each one marking out a somewhat different fate for the discipline. More sophisticated criminologists have rewritten this history (Beirne 1993; Garland 1985; 1994) but the conflict between these two trajectories still remains a useful way of understanding the shape of a discipline conventionally defined as ‘the scientific study of crime and its control’.
The classical trajectory dates from the mid-eighteenth century and tells of the revolutionary contribution of Enlightenment thinkers like Beccaria and Bentham in breaking with a previously ‘archaic’, ‘barbaric’, ‘repressive’ or ‘arbitrary’ system of criminal law. For these reformers, legal philosophers and political theorists, the crime question was predominantly the punishment question. Their programme was to prevent punishment from being, in Beccaria’s words, ‘an act of violence of one or many against a private citizen’; instead it should be ‘essentially public, prompt, necessary, the least possible in given circumstances, proportionate to the crime, dictated by laws’.
Classicism presented a model of rationality: on the one side, the ‘free’ sovereign individual acting according to the dictates of reason and self interest; on the other hand, the limited liberal state, contracted to grant rights and liberties, to prescribe duties and to impose the fair and just punishment that must result from the knowing infraction of the legal code and the knowing infliction of social harm.
This ‘immaculate conception’ of the birth of the classical school as a humanistic reform has been challenged by revisionist histories of law and the state. Dates, concepts and subjects have been reordered. Classicism is now more likely to be conceived in terms of the broader rationalization of crime control associated with the emergence of the free market and the new capitalist order. But whatever their origins, the internal preoccupations of classicism—whether they appear in utilitarianism, Kantianism, liberalism, anarchism or indeed any political philosophy at all—have never really disappeared from the criminological agenda. This is where the subject overlaps with politics, jurisprudence and the sociology of law.
A century after classicism, though, criminology was to claim for itself its ‘real’ scientific beginning and a quite different set of influences. This was the positivist ‘revolution’, dated in comic-book intellectual history with the publication in 1876 of Lombroso’s Delinquent Man. This was a positivism which shared the more general social-scientific connotations of the term (the notion, that is, of the unity of the scientific method) but which acquired a more specific meaning in criminology. As David Matza (1964; 1969) suggests in his influential sociologies of criminological knowledge, criminological positivism managed the astonishing feat of separating the study of crime from the contemplation of the state. Classicism was dismissed as metaphysical speculation. The new programme was to focus not on crime (the act) but on the criminal (the actor); it was to assume not rationality, choice and free will, but determinism (biological, psychic or social). At the centre of the new criminological enterprise was the notion of causality. No longer sovereign beings, subject to the same pulls and pushes at their fellow citizens, criminals were now special creatures or members of a special class.
The whole of the last century of criminology can be understood as a series of creative yet eventually repetitive variations on these late nineteenth-century themes. The particular image conjured up by Lombroso’s criminal type—the atavistic genetic throwback—faded away, but the subsequent structure and logic of criminological explanation remained largely within the positivist paradigm. Whether the level of explanation was biological, psychological, sociological or a combination of these (‘multifactorial’ as some versions were dignified), the Holy Grail was a general causal theory: why do people commit crime? This quest gave the subject its self-definition: ‘the scientific study of the causes of crime’.
At each stage of this search, criminology strengthened its claim to exist as an autonomous, multidisciplinary study. Somewhat like a parasite, criminology attached itself to its host disciplines (law, psychology and, dominantly, sociology) and drew from them methods, theories and academic credibility. At the same time—somewhat like a colonial power landing on new territory—each of these disciplines descended on the eternally fascinating subjects of crime and punishment and claimed them as their own. In this fashion, the theories, methods and substance of criminology draw on Freudianism, behaviourism, virtually every stream of sociology (the Chicago School, functionalism, anomie theory, interactionism, etc.), Marxism, feminism, rational choice theory and even post-modernism. Each of these traces can be found in any current criminological textbook; it would be difficult to think of a major system of thought in the social sciences which would not be so represented.
All the time, however, that this positivist trajectory was being established, criminologists retained their interest in questions of punishment and control. If, in one sense, all criminology became positivist, then also all criminology has always been concerned with classical matters. But instead of thinking about the limits and nature of the criminal sanction, this side of criminology (sometimes called penology) took this sanction as politically given. True, there was (and still is) an important debate about whether the discipline’s subject matter should be confined to conventional legal definitions of crime or broadened to include all forms of socially injurious conduct. And the criminalization versus decriminalization debate is still very much alive, in areas such as corporate wrong-doing, pornography and drug abuse.
Questions of punishment and social control, however, became part of a more scientific discourse: the construction of empirical knowledge about the workings of the criminal justice system. Research findings were built up about the police, courts, prisons and various other agencies devoted to the prevention, control, deterrence or treatment of adult crime and juvenile delinquency. The structure and ideologies of these agencies are analysed, their working practices and relations to each other observed, their effectiveness evaluated. This is now a major part of the criminological enterprise.
Behind this work, the classical tradition remains alive in another sense. Modern criminologists became the heirs of the Enlightenment belief in rationality and progress. Their scientific task was informed by a sense of faith: that the business of crime control could be made not only more efficient, but also more humane. As reformers, advisers and consultants, most criminologists claim for themselves not merely an autonomous body of knowledge, but also the status of an applied science or even profession.
It is this simultaneous claim to knowledge and power that links the two sides of the criminological discourse: causation and control. In positivism, this is an organic link: to know the cause is to know the appropriate policy. But the history and status of this link is more complicated. The early nineteenth-century penitentiary system was dependent on theories of rehabilitation, behaviour modification and anomie well before their supposed ‘discovery’ by scientific criminology. There is a lively debate about Foucault’s characterization of criminological knowledge as wholly utilitarian, an elaborate alibi to justify the exercise of power.
In the general climate of radical self-scrutiny which descended on the social sciences in the 1960s, criminology too began to fragment. There were three major attacks against what was visualized as the positivist hegemony. Each in its own peculiar and quite distinct way represented a revival of classicist concerns.
First, labelling theory—a loose body of ideas derived from symbolic interactionism—restated some simple sociological truths about the relativity of social rules and normative boundaries. Crime was only one form of that wider category of social action, deviance; criminology should be absorbed into the sociology of deviance. Beyond such conceptual and disciplinary boundary disputes, the whole quest for causality was regarded with scepticism. In addition to the standard behavioural question (why do some people do these bad things?) there were a series of definitional questions. Why are certain actions defined as rule-breaking? How are these rules applied? What are the consequences of this application? These definitional questions took causal primacy: it was not that deviance led to control, but control to deviance. Social control agencies—the most benevolent as well as the most punitive—only made matters worse. Sympathy and tolerance for society’s outsiders were preferable to the conformity and scientific pretensions of mainstream criminology.
Second, this liberal criticism became harder in the 1960s onslaught on mainstream criminology. This came from what was labelled variously as conflict, new, critical, radical or Marxist criminology. Combining some strands of labelling theory and conflict sociology with classical Marxist writing about law, class and the state, this critique moved even further from the agenda of positivism. Traditional causal inquiries, particularly individualistic, were either dismissed or subsumed under the criminogenic features of capitalism. Legalistic definitions were either expanded to include the ‘crimes of the powerful’ (those social harms which business and the state license themselves to commit) or subjected to historicist and materialist enquiry. Labelling theory’s wider category of deviance was refocused on law: the power of the state to criminalize some actions rather than others. The analytical task was to construct a political economy of crime and its control. The normative task was to eliminate those systems of exploitation that cause crime.
The third critique of the positivist enterprise came from a quite different theoretical and political direction, one that would prove more enduring. Impressed by the apparent failure of the causal quest and of progressive policies such as treatment, rehabilitation and social reform (‘nothing works’ was the slogan), loose coalitions appeared in the 1970s under such rallying calls as ‘realism’, ‘back to justice’ and ‘neo-classicism’. Some of this was neo-liberalism—sad disenchantment with the ideals and policies of progressive criminology. Some was neo-conservativism—satisfaction about the supposed progressive failures. But politics aside, all these criminologists began turning back to classical questions. The notion of justice allowed liberals to talk of rights, equity and fairness and to advance the Kantian-derived ‘just-deserts’ model of sentencing. In the face of massively escalating crime rates throughout the west, conservatives (and just about everyone else) talked about law and order, social defence, deterrence and the protection of society. The traditional positivist interest in causation seemed less important than devising rational crime control policies.
By the beginning of the 1990s, the fragmented discourse of criminology was settling into yet another pattern. The original labelling and radical moments all but disappeared, most of their cohort denouncing its own earlier romantic excesses in favour of what is called ‘left-realist criminology’. This is more receptive to reformist social policy and more interested in victimization and causation. ‘Victimology’ has become a major subfield in itself. The mainstream non-positivist position has become highly influential in various forms of managerial or administrative criminology. These emphasize ‘situational crime prevention’ (designing physical and social space to reduce criminal opportunity) and rest on an image of the new ‘reasoning criminal’ (Cornish and Clarke 1986) derived from rational choice theory. At the same time, traditional positivist inquiry remains very much alive in the form of massive birth cohort or longitudinal studies about the development of criminal careers. A more theoretically innovative direction comes from Braithwaite’s neo-Durkeimian theory of reintegrative shaming (Braithwaite 1989).
Most criminologists now work in what has been separated off in the USA as the applied field of criminal justice studies. Basic theoretical debates—whether about the nature of the subject or the nature of criminality—are still alive but less prestigious. The subject remains ethnocentric: seldom engaging with the less developed world or with crimes of the state or with political violence.
The diversity in modern criminology arises from two tensions. First, crime is behaviour, but it is behaviour which the state is organized to punish. Second, crime raises matters of pragmatic public interest, but it has also created its own theoretical discourse.
Stanley Cohen
Hebrew University, Jerusalem
References
Beirne, P. (1993) Inventing Criminology: The Rise of ‘Homo Criminalis’, Albany, NY.
Braithwaite, J. (1989) Crime, Shame and Reintegration, Cambridge, UK.
Cornish, D.B. and Clarke, R.V. (eds) (1986) The Reasoning Criminal: Rational Choice Perspectives on Offending, New York.
Garland, D. (1985) Punishment and Welfare, Aldershot.
——(1994) ‘Of crimes and criminals: the development of criminology in Britain’, in M.Maguire et al. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, Oxford.
Matza, D. (1964) Delinquency and Drift, New York.
——(1969) Becoming Deviant, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
Further reading
Christie, N. (1981) Limits to Pain, Oxford.
Cohen, S. (1988) Against Criminology, New Brunswick, NJ.
Gottfredson, M. and Hirschi, T. (1990) A General Theory of Crime, Stanford, CA.
Maguire, M., Morgan, R. and Reiner, R. (1994) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, Oxford.
Sutherland, E. and Cressey, D. (1989) Principles of Criminology, Philadelphia, PA.
Young, J. and Mathews, R. (eds) (1992) Rethinking Criminology: The Realist Debate, London.
