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Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham are credited with establishing what is known as the Classical School of Criminology. According to Beccaria, people have free will to choose either legal or illegal acts. A fear of punishment will deter the majority, but it is up to society to make sure this punishment is severe enough to deter them. Classical Criminology came about during the mid-nineteenth century. During this period of time, law, punishment and justice were dealt out very harshly. Some have referred to it as barbaric as torture to obtain confessions were common place. People could have been thrown in prison for the most petty of “crimes”. Crimes such as disobedience to your parents was included. Other times, people were put in jail for simply no reason at all (Adler, 2013). Beccaria is most known for his notes, oddly enough, that were taken during his tenure at the Academy of Fists. In July of 1764, a publication titled On Crimes and Punishment detailing his notes. With this publication, he was now known as the father of modern criminology (Adler, 2013).
Beccaria’s view of bad laws, not bad people took the world by storm and shed an entirely new light on the laws. A few of these are: punishment should be based on the act, not the actor; punishment should be based on the pleasure/pain principle; and capital punishment should be abolished (Adler, 2013).
Classical criminology stood the tests of time for many years until scholars began to think that criminal behavior was not a choice, but rather engrained in people’s DNA. Cesare Lombroso rode the coattails of Charles Darwin in stating that criminal behavior is embedded, not a choice. His Positivist school of thought taught that there was no free will with criminal behavior, but rather people were born and bred that way. Lombroso argued that people’s physical characteristics proved how a person was, criminally. He said, that if a person had abnormally large jaw structure, strong canine teeth, arm span greater than their height, etc., that they are more likely to be a criminal (Adler, 2013). This “inherited criminality” has later been proven that the methodology was flawed and many conclusions were simply fabricated. One of Lombroso’s colleagues, Enrico Ferri claimed that criminals were not capable of being held morally responsible but committed crimes based on their lives conditions. Another associate said “an individual who has an organic deficiency in these moral sentiments has no moral constraints against committing these crimes”- Raffaele Garofalo (1851-1934) (Adler, 2013).
In all, there have been many theories as to what makes people commit crimes. Ultimately, we may never know for sure. However, through the years it has proceeded from moral anomalies in the late 1800s to replacing moral responsibility with social accountability in the early 1900s. That idea stood from then until 1950s when it was replaced by hereditary inferiority, and the somatotype in the middle 60s. Lastly William Sheldon has attributed body type to illegal behavior in the 1970s. Who knows what the “experts” will come up with next?
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