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Chapter 4 The Early Schools of Criminology

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“Lisa” is a 30-year-old mother of three children aged 8, 6, and 4. Her husband left her a year ago for another woman, and his present whereabouts are unknown. Because Lisa has only a 10th-grade education, and because she cannot afford child-care costs, she was forced onto the welfare rolls. When Christmas rolled around, she had no money to buy her children any presents, so she took a temporary Christmas job at the local Walmart store where she earned $1,200 over a two-month period. Lisa did not report this income to the welfare authorities as required by law; a welfare audit uncovered her crime. The terrified and deeply ashamed Lisa pled guilty to grand theft, which carries a possible sentence of 2 years in prison, and was referred to the probation department for a presentence investigation report (PSI) and sentencing recommendation.

“Chris” is a 30-something male with a record of thefts and other crimes committed since he was 10 years old. Chris also pled guilty before the same judge on the same day and was likewise referred for a PSI. Chris had stolen money and parts totaling $1,200 from an auto parts store during one of his very brief periods of employment.

These two cases point to a perennial debate among criminal justice scholars, with one side favoring the so-called classical school position and the other favoring the positivist position. Both positions are ultimately about the role of punishment in deterring crime, but the classical position maintains that punishment should fit the crime and nothing else; that is, all people convicted of similar crimes should receive the same punishment regardless of any differences they may have. Both Lisa and Chris freely chose to commit the crimes, and the fact that Chris has a record and Lisa does not is irrelevant. The positivist position is that punishment should fit the offender and be appropriate to rehabilitation. Lisa’s and Chris’s crimes were motivated by very different considerations, and Lisa and Chris are very different people morally. Blindly applying similar punishments to similar crimes without considering the possible consequences is pure folly. Think about these two cases as you read about classical and positivist thought about human nature, punishment, and deterrence.

Learning Objectives

❖ Understand the assumptions about human nature held by the classical school ❖ Know the elements of punishment outlined by Beccaria ❖ Understand Bentham’s “sovereign masters” concept and what it means in terms of understanding criminal behavior ❖ Understand the differences between the classical and positivist schools ❖ Know the ideas put forth by Lombroso and how they have influenced modern criminology ❖ Understand specific and general deterrence in the context of perceptual deterrence theory ❖ Be able to expound on the legacies of the classical and positivist schools

Preclassical Notions of Crime and Criminals As discussed in Chapter 1, prior to the 18th century explanations for a wide variety of phenomena, including criminal behavior, tended to be of a religious or spiritual nature. Good fortune and disaster alike were frequently attributed to good or evil supernatural forces. A simple extension of this worldview was to define crime as the result of demonic possession or the evil abuse of free will. Because of the legacy of original sin, all humans were considered born sinners, and so it made no sense to ask questions like “What causes crime?” The gift of the grace of God kept men and women on the straight and narrow, and if they deviated from this line it was because God was no longer their guiding compass. That being so, it made sense to “beat the devil out of them” by the most hideous and sadistic means to save their immortal souls.

Demonological explanations for criminal behavior began to wane during the 18th century with the beginning of a period historians call the Enlightenment, which was essentially a major shift in the way people began to view the world and their place in it. This new worldview questioned traditional religious and political values such as absolute monarchy and demonic possession. In their place it substituted humanism, rationalism, and a belief in the primacy of the natural world over the supernatural world. Enlightenment thinkers believed in the dignity and worth of the individual, a view that would eventually find expression in the law and in the treatment of criminal offenders.

Enlightenment: A major intellectual shift in the way people viewed the world and their place in it, questioning traditional religious and political values and substituting humanism, rationalism, and naturalism for supernaturalism.

The Classical School: The Calculating Criminal Modern criminology is the product of two main schools of thought: the classical school originating in the 18th century and the positivist school originating in the 19th century. You may ask yourselves why a discussion of the “old masters” is necessary; after all, you don’t see such discussions in physics, chemistry, or biology texts. The reason for this is that unlike those disciplines that have long solved the issues that perplexed their founders, modern criminology is still battling the same problem that confronted its pioneers. That issue, of course, is the problem of explaining crime and criminality in a way that satisfies everyone regardless of his or her sociopolitical ideology. Thus the works of the criminological pioneers are of more than passing interest to us.

The father of classical criminology is the Italian nobleman and professor of law, Cesare Bonesana, Marchese di Beccaria. In 1764, Beccaria published a call for the reform of judicial and penal systems throughout Europe called On Crimes and Punishment (1764/1963). The book is a passionate plea to reform the criminal justice system, humanize and rationalize the law, and make punishment more just and humane. Beccaria emphasized the idea that citizens give up certain rights in order to gain protection from the state (the so-called social contract). Although laws are supposed to be compacts between citizens and the state, they were often arbitrary and cruel. Beccaria believed that equals should be treated equally and unequals should be treated unequally according to relevant differences. By equal and unequal, he was referring to the crimes offenders had committed, which was the only “relevant difference” to be considered, not their social standing or any other aspect of their lives. Under this principle, Lisa would be punished exactly the same way as Chris in our opening vignette. Beccaria also believed that judges should not have the authority to interpret laws; they should simply apply the punishment for a given offense statutorily defined by the legislature.

Photo 4.1 Cesare Beccaria, father of classical criminology/criminal justice.

Kean Collection/Getty Images

Beccaria (1764/1963) felt that the responsibility of determining the facts of a case should be placed in the hands of ordinary citizens, not simply a judge who had little idea what life was like for the ordinary person: “I consider an excellent law that which assigns popular jurors, taken by lot, to assist the chief judge … that each man ought to be judged by his peers” (p. 21). He was also very much against the practice of using torture to obtain confessions and other information from suspects and was against the use of capital punishment (but believed corporal punishment was appropriate for violent offenders). Capital punishment could not be an effective deterrent, according to Beccaria, because it was too quick. Life imprisonment would be more effective.

Beccaria (1764/1963) made no effort to plumb the depths of criminal character or motivation, arguing that crime is simply the result of “the despotic spirit which is in every man” (p. 12). He also argued that the tendency of man to give in to the “despotic spirit” had to be countered by the threat of punishment, which had to be certain, swift, and severe enough to outweigh any benefits offenders get from crime if they are to be deterred from future crime. He elaborated on these three elements of punishment as follows:

Certainty: “The certainty of punishment, even if it be moderate, will always make a stronger impression than the fear of another which is more terrible but combined with the hope of impunity” (p. 58).

Swiftness: “The more promptly and the more closely punishment follows upon the commission of a crime, the more just and useful will it be” (p. 55).

Severity: “For a punishment to attain its end, the evil which it inflicts has only to exceed the advantage derivable from the crime; in this excess of evil one should include the … loss of the good which the crime might have produced. All beyond this is superfluous and for that reason tyrannical” (p. 43).

Jeremy Bentham and Human Nature

Another prominent figure of the classical school was British lawyer and philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Bentham was a major figure in most reform movements of the 18th and 19th centuries such as the abolition of slavery, the death penalty, and punishment for homosexual acts. His major work, Principles of Morals and Legislation (Bentham, 1789/1948), is essentially a philosophy of social control based on the principle of utility, which prescribed “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” The principle posits that any human action should be judged moral or immoral by its effect on the happiness of the community. Thus the proper function of the legislature is to pass laws aimed at maximizing the pleasure and minimizing the pain of the largest number in society—“the greatest good for the greatest number” (p. 151). If legislators are to legislate according to the principle of utility, they must understand human motivation and behavior. For Bentham this was easily summed up: “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought

to do, as well as to determine what we shall do” (p. 125). In other words, if we are to understand any form of behavior and what motivates it, we have to do so with reference to the “sovereign masters,” that is, our efforts to maximize our pleasure and minimize our pain, whether in conforming or deviant ways. This is what we refer to as the “classical” or “constrained” view of human nature.

Principle of utility: Posits that human action should be judged moral or immoral by its effect on the happiness of the community and that the proper function of the legislature is to promulgate laws aimed at maximizing the pleasure and minimizing the pain of the largest number in society—“the greatest good for the greatest number.”

The classical explanation of criminal behavior and how to prevent it can be derived from the Enlightenment assumption that human nature is hedonistic, rational, and endowed with free will. Hedonism is a doctrine whose central idea is that happiness (pleasure) is the main goal of life. All other life goals are seen only as instrumentally desirable; that is, they are desirable only as means to the end of achieving pleasure or avoiding pain. Thus hedonism is the greatest single motivator of human action. Of course, happiness and how to achieve it means different things to different people.

Hedonism: A doctrine assuming that the achievement of pleasure or happiness is the main goal of life.

Rational behavior is that consistent with logic. People are said to behave rationally when we observe a logical “fit” between the goals they strive for and means they use to achieve them. The goal of human rationality is self-interest, and self-interest governs our behavior whether in conforming or deviant directions. The issue of rationality is an important one in criminology and is addressed further in Chapter 5.

Rational: Rational behavior is consistent with logic; a logical “fit” between the goals people strive for and means they use to achieve them.

Photo 4.2 British lawyer and philosopher Jeremy Bentham, one of the seminal theorists of the classical school of criminology.

Stock Montage/Getty Images

Hedonism and rationality are combined in the concept of the hedonistic calculus, a method by which individuals are assumed to logically weigh the anticipated benefits of a given course of action against its possible costs. If the balance of consequences of a contemplated action is thought to enhance pleasure and/or minimize pain, individuals will pursue it; if not, they will not.

Hedonistic calculus: Combining hedonism and rationality to logically weigh the anticipated benefits of a given course of action against its possible costs.

Free will enables humans to purposely and deliberately choose to follow a calculated course of action. Therefore, if people seek to increase

their pleasures illegally, they do so freely and with full knowledge of the wrongness of their acts, and thus society has a perfectly legitimate right to punish those who harm it.

Free will: That which enables human beings to purposely and deliberately choose to follow a calculated course of action.

It follows from these assumptions about human nature that if crime is to be deterred, punishment (pain) must exceed the gain (pleasure) resulting from it. Criminals will weigh the costs against the benefits of crime and desist if, on balance, the costs exceed the benefits. Bentham went somewhat further than Beccaria by devoting a great deal of energy (and his own money) to arguing for the development of prisons as punitive substitutes for torture, execution, or transportation to overseas penal colonies. He designed a prison called the panopticon (“all seeing”), which was to be a circular “inspection house” enabling guards to constantly see their charges, thus requiring fewer staff (see drawing of the panopticon in Photo 4.3). Because prisoners could always be seen without seeing who was watching them or when they were being watched, the belief was that the perception of constant scrutiny would develop into self-monitoring. Bentham felt that prisoners could be put to useful work and thus pay for their own upkeep with the hoped-for added benefit that they would acquire the habit of honest labor.

The Rise of Positivism Classicists defined criminal acts as natural consequences of the unrestrained human tendency to seek pleasure—simple hedonistic abuses of free will. The problem with such an explanation, if accepted without qualification, is that it provides little possibility of further investigation. During the 19th century, criminologists began to move away from the classical assumptions, especially the assumption of free will as it is commonly understood, and toward a more scientific view of human behavior. This is not to say that hedonism, rationality, and free will are mythical human attributes. Rationality and free will may define the “essence” of human nature because they are the attributes that most distinguish humans from other animals, but to accept these constructs in pure form poses difficulties for science, a method of inquiry that seeks measurable “causes” of phenomena that can be verified (replicated) by different scientists.

Photo 4.3 Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison design.

Bentham, 1843, vol. 4, pp. 172–173

simply means that events have causes that precede them. As noted in Chapter 1, determinism does not mean that if X is present, Y will occur; that is strong determinism, which has all but disappeared from science. Determinists say only that if X is present, then Y has a certain probability of occurring. The adherents of such probabilistic determinism were known as positivists.

Determinism: The position that events have causes that precede them.

Photo 4.4 Charles Darwin, the man who forever changed our view of human nature.

Photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron, in Library of Congress's PH Filing Series Photographs http://www.loc.gov/pictu res/item/2004674431/

Just as the spirit of reason during the 18th century ushered in the classical school, the spirit of science during the second half of the 19th century ushered in the positivist school. The term positivism in the social sciences is used to designate the extension of the scientific method— from which more positive knowledge can be obtained—to social life. Positivists in the human sciences insisted on divorcing science from metaphysics and morals and looking only at what is and not what ought to be. The writings of natural scientists, particularly those of Charles Darwin on evolution, generated a major new way of thinking about human nature just as revolutionary as the writings of the Enlightenment philosophers a century earlier. The flattering image of humans that emerged from the Enlightenment gave way to the evolutionary view that we are different only in degree from other animal forms and that science could explain human behavior just as it could explain events in the nonhuman world. Positivist criminologists were more concerned with discovering biological, psychological, or social determinants of criminal behavior than with the classical concerns of legal and penal reforms.

Positivism: An extension of the scientific method—from which more positive knowledge can be obtained—to social life.

Enrico Ferri, one of the early positivists, gives us perhaps the best short description of the differences between classical and positivist criminology. Note that even back then criminologists from different schools of thought were taking jabs at one another (“We are empirical scientists; you lot are just armchair speculators”):

For them [the classicists] the facts should give place to syllogisms [reasoning from a taken-for-granted premise to a logical

The increasingly popular view among criminologistsThe i his period was that crime resulted from internal and/or external forces impinging on individuals, biasing or even completely determining their behavioral choices. This position became known as determinism. Determinism

conclusion]; for us [positivists] the facts govern and no reasoning can occur without starting from the facts. For them science only needs paper, pen, and ink and the rest comes from a brain stuffed with … abundant reading of books…. For us science requires spending a long time in examining the facts one by one, evaluating them, reducing them to a common denominator, [and] extracting the central idea from them. For them a syllogism or an anecdote suffices to demolish a myriad of facts gathered by years of observation and analysis; for us the reverse is true. (in Curran & Renzetti, 2001, p. 16)

Bentham: A Bridge Between the Classical and Positivist Schools

There is not always the sharp discontinuity between the classical and positivist schools that we are sometimes led to believe. For instance, although traditionally placed firmly in the classical camp, the work of Bentham may be considered a bridge between the two schools. Despite Bentham’s classical view of human nature, he never lost sight of its intricacies. While always maintaining the freedom of the will, he argued that it was moved by “motives” arising from the “bodily senses,” which were differentially felt by people according to certain internal and external factors. Estimates of the value of pleasures and pains are to be considered with reference to four circumstances: intensity (severity), duration, certainty, and propinquity (how soon pleasure or pain is forthcoming after the crime) (Bentham, 1789/1948, p. 151). In expressing these views, Bentham added to Beccaria’s insight by showing how they cohered with human nature as classical scholars viewed it. He devoted an entire chapter of A Fragment on Government to 32 biological, psychological, and social factors (e.g., intelligence, temperament, personality, gender, age, education, occupation) that he thought of as “circumstances influencing sensibility” (Chapter VI). Although he devoted only a single paragraph to each one, the fact that he recognized internal and external constraints on free will and rationality leads us to believe that Bentham may have been both the last of the classical criminologists and the first of the positivist criminologists.

Cartographic Criminology

Some of the earliest positivist attempts to leave the armchair and collect facts about crime in order to understand it came from cartographers. Cartographers are scholars who employ maps and other geographic information in their research, and those who employ these methods to study crime are called cartographic criminologists. Rather than exploring why individuals commit crimes, cartographic criminologists are more interested in where and when criminal behavior is most prevalent. Cartographic criminology is an early version of modern crime mapping discussed in Chapter 2.

Cartographic criminologists: Criminologists who employ maps and other geographic information in their research to study where and when crime is most prevalent.

The first publication of detailed statistics relating to criminal activity for an entire country occurred in France in 1827, more than 100 years before the publication of the first edition of the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) in the United States. This work was used by two scholars to make statements about crime and its causes that anticipated by about a century those of theories we explore in Chapter 6. The first was a Frenchman named André-Michel Guerry, and the other was a Belgian named Lambert-Adolphe-Jacques Quetelet. Quetelet compared crime rates in France across ages, sexes, and seasons. He saw the same reflections in his data that we see today in the American UCR—that is, young males living in poor neighborhoods commit a disproportionate amount of crime. He thought sociologically about crime before the discipline officially existed, writing that “society prepares the crime, and the guilty are only the instruments by which it is accomplished” (in Vold & Bernard, 1986, p. 132).

Both Quetelet and Guerry discounted the idea that crime is caused by poverty per se, noting that the wealthiest regions of France had the greatest level of property crime. However, Guerry noted that the overall level of wealth in a region does not necessarily correspond to the level of wealth among all its citizens and that being poor amid riches (as in urban France), not being poor per se (as in rural France), is the condition that produces the most “misery” (today we call this relative deprivation). He also noted that among the factors affecting crime are areas “where a frequent mixture of people takes place, and where the inequality of fortune is most felt” (in Rennie, 1978, p. 36).

Guerry produced many fine-shaded ecological maps to represent crime rates in different areas. This method of presenting data crossed the English Channel to influence British researchers Henry Mayhew and Joseph Fletcher. Using British crime data from the 1830s to 1840s, both men independently mapped out the concentration of various kinds of criminal activity across England and Wales as well as other factors such as population density and rates of out-of-wedlock births. They came to many of the same conclusions that U.S. researchers would later come to (e.g., crime and delinquency are concentrated in poor neighborhoods undergoing population changes). Many British cities were experiencing the same demographic changes during the early 1800s that American cities were to experience during the early 1900s. Rural people flocked to the big cities to obtain work in the new factory system, and in the obscurity of these cities of strangers social bonds weakened, morals declined, and crime flourished (Levin & Lindesmith, 1971).

Given the many conclusions of the cartographic school that are consistent with modern ecological criminology, it is surprising that more attention is not paid to it. The influence of the school declined during the latter part of the 19th century as interest started to focus more on the individual criminal and less on his or her environment. It would reemerge in Chicago during the early 20th century as human social ecology.

Biological Positivism: Cesare Lombroso and the Born Criminal

Five years after Darwin shocked the world with the publication of his theory of evolution, an Italian army physician named Cesare Lombroso (1876) published Criminal Man, which is considered the first book devoted solely to the causes of criminality ever written. Lombroso is widely

acclaimed as the father of modern criminology, although he is often criticized for the views put forth in his book. His basic idea was that many (not all, as is commonly assumed) criminals are born criminal and that they are evolutionary “throwbacks” to an earlier form of life. The term used to describe the appearance of organisms resembling ancestral (prehuman) forms of life is atavism. Lombroso was influenced by Ernst Haeckel’s famous biogenetic law, which stated that ontogeny (individual development) recapitulates phylogeny (evolutionary development of the species). Criminals were thus considered “throwbacks” to a more primitive stage of evolution and could be identified by a number of measurable physical stigmata. These stigmata included protruding jaws, drooping eyes, large ears, twisted and flattish noses, long arms relative to the lower limbs, sloping shoulders, and a coccyx that resembled “the stump of a tail” (Lombroso-Ferrero, 1911/1972, pp. 10–21).

Photo 4.5 Part of Lombroso’s skull collection. Note the markings indicating where specific traits or talents were thought to be located.

Sailko, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Istituto_di_anatomia_patologica,_museo,_scheletri,_cranio_lombrosiano_02.JPG? uselang=it#/media/File:Istituto_di_anatomia_patologica,_museo,_scheletri,_cranio_lombrosiano_02.JPG

Atavism: Cesare Lombroso’s term for his “born criminals,” meaning evolutionary “throwbacks” to an earlier life form.

The concept of atavism highlights an important point of difference between the classical and positivist schools: While the classicists viewed criminals and noncriminals as essentially similar beings who simply chose different pathways in life, positivists viewed them as being quite different beings. Lombroso was just one of many who sought to understand behavioral phenomena with reference to the principles of evolution as they were understood at the time. If humankind was just at one end of the continuum of animal life, it made sense to many people that criminals—who acted “beastly” and lacked reasoned conscience—were biologically inferior beings belonging to an earlier “uncivilized”

evolutionary period.

In addition to the atavistic “born criminal,” Lombroso-Ferrero (1911/1972) identified two other types: the insane criminal and the criminaloid. Although insane criminals bore some stigmata, they were not born criminals; rather, they become criminals as a result of “an alteration of the brain, which completely upsets their moral nature” (p. 74). Among the ranks of Lombroso’s insane criminals were alcoholics, kleptomaniacs, nymphomaniacs, and child molesters. Criminaloids had none of the physical peculiarities of the born or insane criminal and were considered less dangerous. Criminaloids were further categorized as habitual criminals, who become so by contact with other criminals, the abuse of alcohol, or other “distressing circumstances”; juridical criminals, who fall afoul of the law by accident; and criminals by passion, hotheaded and impulsive persons who commit violent acts when provoked.

Criminaloid: One of Lombroso’s criminal types. They had none of the physical peculiarities of the born or insane criminal and were considered less dangerous.

Insane criminal: One of Lombroso’s criminal types. Insane criminals bore some stigmata but were not born criminals. Among their ranks were alcoholics, kleptomaniacs, nymphomaniacs, and child molesters.

Although Lombroso is best remembered for his concept of the atavistic born criminal, in his later work, Crime: Its Causes and Remedies (Lombroso, 1911/1968), he listed a bewildering variety of possible “causes,” including unlikely candidates such as tobacco, hair color, and “goitrous districts.” Notwithstanding Lombroso’s recognition that crime has multiple causes, he still argued that “organic causes” accounted for 35% to 40% of the “fatal influence” on crime.

Raffaele Garofalo: Natural Crime and Offender Peculiarities

Lombroso and two of his Italian contemporaries, Raffaele Garofalo and Enrico Ferri, founded what became known as the Italian school of criminology. Both Garofalo and Ferri were lawyers who accepted the positivist notion that behavior has discoverable causes. Garofalo (1885/1968), who coined the term criminology in 1885, is perhaps best known for his efforts to formulate a “natural” definition of crime. Classical thinkers accepted the legal definition of crime uncritically—crime is what the law says it is. This appeared to be rather arbitrary and “unscientific” to Garofalo (like the Anglo-American system of linear measurement), who wanted to anchor his definition of crime in something natural (like tying linear measurement to the circumference of the earth, as in the metric system). Garofalo felt that definitions of crime should be anchored in human nature, by which he meant that a given act would be considered a crime only if it was universally condemned, and it would be universally condemned if it offended the natural altruistic sentiments of probity (integrity and honesty) and pity (compassion and sympathy). The hallmarks of criminality were the relative lack of the altruistic sentiments for Garofalo.

Italian school of criminology: Positivist school of criminology associated with Cesare Lombroso, Raffael Garofalo, and Enrico Ferri.

As we saw in Chapter 1, Garofalo’s “natural crimes” are evil in themselves (mala in se), whereas other kinds of crimes (mala prohibita) are wrong only because they have been made wrong by the law. Garofalo rejected the classical principle that punishment should fit the crime, arguing instead that it should fit the criminal. Under this principle, Lisa and Chris in our vignette would be treated quite differently. Garofalo believed that criminals have little control over their actions. This repudiation of moral responsibility and fitting the punishment to the offender would eventually lead to sentencing aimed at the humane goals of treatment and rehabilitation. But treatment and rehabilitation were of no concern to Garofalo, for whom the only question to be considered at sentencing was the danger the offender posed to society judged by what he referred to as offenders’ peculiarities, which were essentially the degree to which they lacked probity and pity.

Garofalo developed four categories of criminals, each meriting different forms of punishment: extreme, impulsive, professional, and endemic. Society could be defended from extreme criminals (who completely lacked the altruistic sentiments) only by swiftly executing them regardless of the crimes for which they were being punished. Impulsive criminals, a category that included alcoholics and the insane, were to be imprisoned. Professional criminals were psychologically normal individuals who use the hedonistic calculus before committing their crimes and thus require “elimination,” either by life imprisonment or transportation to a penal colony overseas. Endemic crimes, by which Garofalo meant crimes peculiar to a given region (mala prohibita crimes), could best be controlled by changes in the law.

Enrico Ferri and Social Defense

Ferri, like Garofalo, dismissed the notion of free will as myth, and he derived the same policy implications from its dismissal. Prepositivist notions of culpability, moral responsibility, and intent were to be subordinate to an assessment of the offender’s strength of resistance to the criminal impulse, with the express purpose of averting future danger to society. Ferri (1897/1917) believed that moral insensibility and lack of foresight, underscored by low intelligence, were the criminal’s most marked characteristics: The criminal has “defective resistance to criminal tendencies and temptations, due to that ill-balanced impulsiveness which characterizes children and savages” (p. 11).

Ferri’s primary concern was social preservation, not the nature of criminal behavior. Along with Lombroso and Garofalo, Ferri was instrumental in formulating the concept of social defense as the rationale for punishment. This theory of punishment asserts that its purpose is not to deter or rehabilitate but rather to defend society from criminal predation. Ferri reasoned that the characteristics of criminals prevented them from basing their behavior on rational calculus principles, so how could such behavior be deterred and how could born criminals be rehabilitated? Given the assumptions of biological positivism, the only reasonable rationale for punishing offenders is to incapacitate them for

as long as possible so that they no longer pose a threat to the peace and security of society. This theory of punishment provides us with an excellent example of how our assumptions about human nature drive our policies for dealing with crime and criminals.

Social defense: A theory of punishment asserting that its purpose is not to deter or to rehabilitate but to defend society against criminals.

Theory in Action: Giuseppe Villella: Atavism, Ideology, and Racism Very little is known about Giuseppe Villella, who is often referred to as a “notorious brigand,” other than that he was born in 1803 in Saint Lucia Motta, in southern Italy, and died in prison in 1872. We know that he was sentenced three times for theft and arson, but Italian records indicate that he was only “suspected” of brigandage (robbery). However, Villella became immortalized because the central idea of Lombroso’s work resulted from an autopsy Lombroso performed on his body, particularly his skull. As Lombroso explains,

At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek bones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle-shaped or sensile ears found in criminals, savages and apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh and drink its blood.

As Lombroso contemplated Villella’s skull, the feature that got him most excited was a depression or indent on the occiput (the back of the skull), which he called the median occipital fossa, which essentially means an “indentation in the middle of the brain’s occipital lobe.” This indentation was in a space normally occupied by something called the occipital crest. This anatomical feature reminded him of the skulls of “inferior races and the lower types of apes, rodents, and birds.” This is the origin of Lombroso’s use of the term atavism to describe criminals with physical characteristics supposedly resembling prehuman forms of animal life.

We can see from Villella’s picture that he wasn’t exactly an Italian maiden’s dream, but the picture was taken in prison when he was 69 years old and suffering from tuberculosis and scurvy. Furthermore, there was never any indication that Giuseppe ever killed anyone, never mind “[mutilating] the corpse, tear[ing] its flesh and drink[ing] its blood.” Modern Italian historians see Lombroso’s characterization of Villella as politically motivated at a time just after the unification of Italy, when prosperous northern Italians looked down on the peasantry of southern Italy. There had been a lot of intermittent fighting among and between various regions of what is now Italy for 60 years prior to Italian unification in 1870, and many atrocities were committed by northern Italian troops, particularly in the area from which Villella came. Consequently, many people labeled as “brigands” were actually people who actively resisted northern troops. Because of this, the people of Saint Lucia Motta have demanded the return of Villella’s remains (now on display in the Lombroso Museum) to be given a Christian burial.

Public domain

Lombroso’s theory strongly illustrates what was said about the role of ideology in formulating theories about human behavior. Northern and southern Italians had been at each other’s throats for decades, and atrocities had been committed by both sides. Lombroso (subconsciously or not) may have wanted to both blame the atrocities committed by the southern Italians on their “animal” natures and excuse those committed by the northern Italians. He even considered northern and southern Italians to be of different races, so his ideas may also be considered racist. Thus, while Lombroso did criminology a service in one sense, he is still considered the archetypical example of how ideology and personal prejudices can infect supposedly scientific theories.

Discussion Questions

1. Look up “minor physical anomalies” on any search engine and determine if these anomalies could be the “stigmata” that Lombroso wrote about. 2. Do you think there is such a thing as a “born criminal”? Look up “psychopathy” and see what leading scholars in this area think. 3. Although Lombroso was very wrong about many things, in what way can he be said to have done criminology a service?

Sources: Gibson, 2002; Jones, 2009

Deterrence and Choice: Pain Versus Gain Deterring criminal behavior is a major concern of both the classical and positivist schools of criminology. That people respond to incentives and are deterred by the threat of punishment is taken for granted by almost everyone and is the philosophical foundation behind all systems of criminal law. Deterrence theory can be encapsulated by the principle central to a school of psychology called behaviorism (or operant psychology) stating that behavior is governed by its consequences. That is, if a behavior is followed by something rewarding, the behavior tends to be repeated; if it is followed by something unpleasant, it tends not to be repeated. A positive consequence of crime for criminals is that it affords them something they want for little effort; a negative consequence is the possible punishment attached to their crime.

Deterrence is the prevention of criminal acts by the use or threat of punishment and may be either specific or general. Specific deterrence refers to the effect of punishment on the future behavior of the person who experiences the punishment. For specific deterrence to work, a previously punished person must make a mental connection between an intended criminal act and the punitive consequences suffered as a result of similar acts committed in the past. Unfortunately, such connections, if made, rarely have the socially desired effect, either because memories of the previous consequences were insufficiently emotionally strong or because the offender discounted them.

Specific deterrence: The effect of punishment on the future behavior of the person who experiences the punishment.

Deterrence: The prevention of criminal acts by the use or threat of punishment; deterrence may be either specific or general.

Committing another crime after previously being punished for one is called recidivism (“falling back” into criminal behavior). Recidivism is a lot more common among ex-convicts than repentance and rehabilitation. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS, 2007), about 33% of released prisoners in the United States recidivate within 6 months of release and more than 66% recidivate by the third year after release. These are just the ones who are caught, so we can safely say that there is very little specific deterrent effect attached to punishing people with imprisonment. Released offenders accumulated 4.1 million arrests before their imprisonment and another 744,000 arrests within 3 years of release. The highest recidivism rates were for robbers (70.2%), burglars (74%), larcenists (74.6%), auto thieves (78.8%), and those possessing, using, or selling illegal weapons (70.2%). The offenders least likely to recidivate were rapists (2.5%) and murderers (1.2%). According to the BJS (2007), these recidivism rates are quite stable from year to year.

Recidivism: Refers to “falling back” into criminal behavior after having being punished.

The effect of punishment on future behavior also depends on the contrast effect, which is the distinction between the circumstances of punishment and the usual life experience of the person being punished. The prospect of incarceration is a nightmarish contrast for those who enjoy a loving family and a valued career. The mere prospect of experiencing the embarrassment of public disgrace threatening families and careers is a strong deterrent for people embedded in a prosocial lifestyle. For people lacking these things, punishment has minimal effect because the negative contrast between the punishment and their everyday lives is minimal. Like many other things in life, the irony is that specific deterrence works best for those who need deterring the least and works least for those who need deterring the most.

Contrast effect: The effect of punishment on future behavior depends on how much the punishment and the usual life experience of the person being punished differ or contrast.

General deterrence is the preventative effect of the threat of punishment on the general population, that is, on potential offenders. Punishing offenders serves as an example to the rest of us of what may happen if we violate the law. As Radzinowicz and King (1979) put it, “People are not sent to prison primarily for their own good, or even in the hope that they will be cured of crime…. It is used as a warning and deterrent to others” (p. 296). The threat of punishment for law violators doubtless deters a large but unknown number of individuals who might commit crimes if no such system existed. Of course, most people probably never seriously think of committing crimes and thus never consciously think of punishment. They simply habitually ignore criminal opportunities because the contrast effect is subconsciously part and parcel of their very being.

General deterrence: The assumed preventive effect of the threat of punishment on the general population; i.e., potential offenders.

Perceptual Deterrence Theory

Perceptual deterrence theory is concerned with how individuals respond to the perceived cost properties as opposed to the objective cost properties of their criminal decisions. A statutory punishment, however certain, swift, and severe it may be, will not deter a potential criminal if he or she does not perceive its existence or the possibility of being caught and convicted. Put otherwise, the objective properties of punishment can be effective only if potential offenders consciously realize and understand their presence and the risk attached to their activities.

Perceptual deterrence theory: A theory of deterrence that refers to offenders’ perception of the likelihood of arrest and how severe they believe the punishment will be for a crime if caught.

Criminals are certainly aware that they will be punished for their crimes if caught, but the issue explored by perceptual deterrence theory is their awareness of changes in criminal justice policy that lead to increased or decreased probabilities of being apprehended or of changes in the severity of the punishment for a given crime. The more offenders commit a crime and get away with it, the more they downgrade punishment probabilities; the more they are caught and punished, the more they upgrade them.

Take drunk driving as an example of perceptual deterrence. In 1982 there were 9.1 alcohol-related fatalities per 100,000 people, and in 2008 there were 3.9 per 100,000, an impressive 57% decrease (National Highway Traffic Safety Commission [NHTSC], 2014). The NHTSC attributes this welcome reduction in fatalities to drastically increased penalties for drunk driving, increased police emphasis on enforcing driving under the influence (DUI) laws, and campaigns to inform the public that society is no longer treating drunk driving lightly but rather is treating it as a serious crime that could lead to deaths.

The Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment (Buzawa & Buzawa, 2003) is another application of perceptual deterrence theory. In this study, police officers were randomly assigned to respond to domestic violence calls in one of three ways: (a) separating parties and ordering one party to leave, (b) informing both parties of alternatives to violence such as attending dispute resolution centers or counseling, or (c) arresting the abuser. It was shown that 24% of those ordered to leave, 19% of those advised of alternatives, and 10% of those arrested engaged in further domestic violence. Arrests apparently perceived as “cracking down” thus had more of a deterrent effect than the other two less intrusive alternatives.

These examples provide strong support for perceptual deterrence theory (i.e., people are less likely to break the law if they become aware of

punitive changes in the law’s stance), but the spoiler is that just about all adult Americans drive and many also partake of alcohol. Then there is the domestic violence data. According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (2009), there are more than 1.3 million cases of reported domestic violence in the United States each year, but many of the most serious cases are never reported for fear of reprisal. Many domestic violence calls may thus be the result of relatively minor events committed by otherwise law-abiding citizens. What we see with these studies are examples of general deterrence affecting people aware that they have a lot to lose (shame, embarrassment, hefty fines, lawyer fees, loss of license, insurance rate increases, and perhaps even a stint in jail).

What about the effect of perceptual deterrence on people who lack all these things and who see jail as little more than an occupational hazard, in other words, the effect on individuals who are seriously criminally involved? Paternoster (2010) cites a number of studies demonstrating that 20% to 30% of the crime drop from its peak during the early 1990s is attributable to the approximately 52% increase in the imprisonment rate in the United States. As he put it, “There is a general consensus that the decline in crime is, at least in part, due to more and longer prison sentences, with much of the controversy being over how much of an effect” (p. 801).

Paternoster (2010) also cites a large number of studies, however, that find the correlation between objective punishments and subjective perceptions of them to be negligible. If this is so, by what mechanism has the objectively increased likelihood of imprisonment in the United States resulted in the crime drop? The problem is that we cannot determine from the correlation between raw incarceration rates and dropping crime rates if we are witnessing a deterrent effect (has crime declined because more people have perceived a greater punitive effect?) or an incapacitation effect (has crime declined because more people are behind bars and thus not at liberty to commit crimes on the outside?). Incarcerating chronic offenders indisputably has an incapacitation effect, but the impact of it in terms of deterring others aware of their incarceration is far from certain. Paternoster concludes his massive review of the deterrence literature:

Finally, while there may be disagreement about the magnitude, there does seem to be a modest inverse relationship between the perceived certainty of punishment and crime [as certainty goes up, crime goes down], but no real evidence of a deterrent effect for severity, and no real knowledge base about the celerity [swiftness] of punishment. (p. 818)

An example of deterrence from a certainty-of-punishment rather than a severity-of-punishment point of view is the jaw-dropping decrease in crime in New York City beginning during the early 1990s. From 1990 to 2009, the homicide, robbery, and burglary rates dropped 82%, 84%, and 85%, respectively, while the city’s incarceration rate decreased by 28% (Zimring, 2013). These decreases are more than twice the national average, so how were they achieved? Beginning in 1990, New York City decided to invest in smart preventative policing rather than reactive incarceration, adding more than 7,000 new police officers and training them to be more aggressive and to focus on high-crime settings. This is known as “zero-tolerance” policing and involves stops and pat-downs looking for weapons and not tolerating minor infractions. Some have criticized this as targeting minorities, but it has been the minority communities that have benefitted most from smart and aggressive policing. It is very hard to argue with success rates such as those Zimring (2013) provides. Zero-tolerance policies ended in January 2014, with some conflicting effects on crime. According to CompStat data from the NewYork City Police Department (2016), murders rose 12.1% from January 1, 2014, to August 21, 2016; during that same period, rapes rose 13.0% and felonious assaults rose 4.3%. However, other less serious crimes actually decreased during that period. We cannot make any kind of causal connection here since many other factors are at play. Other cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, and Milwaukee saw far greater increases in violent crime over the same period.

Research Snippet: Deterrence Isn't Rock Solid All Western criminal justice systems are based on deterrence theory. The theory assumes that would-be criminals are responsive to the threat of punishment. However, recent research has cast doubt on this assumption. For deterrence to occur, a potential criminal must be deterrable. Jacobs (2010) argued that there is much variation in sensitivity to the risk of punishment, meaning that not all people are equally deterrable, which is obviously true. Instead, some people are not as responsive to deterrence threats as the criminal justice system would like. Jacobs explained that career criminals, the small cadre of committed criminals responsible for the bulk of all crimes, are typically not engaging in the risk/reward calculus or at least are not as sensitive to the risks of punishment. This fact helps us to understand why deterrence theory is not a very good theory to explain serious criminal behavior, but the vast majority of law-abiding people do avoid criminal acts because of fear of punishment (the contrast effect) and are thus deterred. In a recent meta-analysis examining the empirical status of deterrence theory, Pratt, Cullen, Blevins, Daigle, and Madensen (2006) found that deterrence was a much weaker performing theory than other mainstream criminological theories.

Jacobs, B. (2010). Deterrence and deterrability. Criminology, 48, 417–441.

Pratt, T., Cullen, F., Blevins, K., Daigle, L., & Madensen, T. (2006). The empirical status of deterrence theory: A meta-analysis. In F. T. Cullen, J. P. Wright, & K. R. Blevins (Eds.), Taking stock: The status of criminological theory (pp. 367–396). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Deterrence and the Death Penalty

Nowhere is the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of deterrence more passionately argued than in the case of the death penalty. The death penalty is unique in that it is the only punishment required to demonstrate its deterrent effect to validate its constitutionality. We take it for granted that penalties applied to other crimes have a general deterrent effect if not necessarily the desired specific effect. It is obvious that the threat of the death penalty fails every time a murder is committed, and we can easily document the number of these failures. On the other hand, it is just as obvious that we cannot count the times the death penalty threat may have succeeded since we cannot count nonevents. That is, we cannot know how many people (if any) who might otherwise have committed murder did not do so for fear of losing their own lives.

The deterrence argument is divided between those who state “conclusively” that it deters and those who also state “conclusively” that it does not. Deterrence studies going back to 1925 have looked at homicide rates in neighboring states with and without the death penalty or homicide rates before and after abolition in states that abolished capital punishment. These studies almost always show that the death penalty had no discernible effect on reducing homicides and that most abolitionist states had lower homicide rates than most death penalty states (Nagin & Pepper, 2012). This is illustrated in Figure 4.1. However, we cannot say that most non-death penalty states had lower homicide rates in 2014 (or any other year) than death penalty states because they did not have the death penalty. Some non-death penalty states had higher homicide rates than some death penalty states, and perhaps some death penalty states retain the death penalty because they have high homicide rates.

Figure 4.1 Murder Rates in States With and Without the Death Penalty in 2014

Source: Death Penalty Information Center, 2015

The opposing sides in the deterrence argument tend to be sociologists and criminologists on one side and economists on the other. “In contrast to economics studies, most of the sociological studies find no deterrence,” asserts Joanna Shepherd (2005, pp. 214–218). Similarly, Bushway and Reuter (2008) tell us that “economists and criminologists have actively butted heads over the topic of deterrence almost since economists began studying the topic [and] have clashed heatedly over empirical research on the death penalty since the 1970s” (pp. 390–391). The deterrent effect of punishment is thus taken for granted by economists, who share the classical view of human nature (Kirchgassner, 2011), but most criminologists are sociologically trained (Cooper, Walsh, & Ellis, 2010) and tend to either be agnostic about human nature or deny that such a thing exists.

Although no studies could be found assessing the opinions of a wide range of economists on the death penalty, in Radelet and Lacock’s (2009) poll of 77 prominent criminologists asking them if they believed the death penalty to be a deterrent to further murders, 88.2% agreed or strongly agreed that it was not. Likewise, a poll of 500 police chiefs found that 63% disagreed with the statement that “the death penalty significantly reduces the number of homicides” (Dieter, 2009).

It is difficult to tease any deterrent effect out of the death penalty because of its rarity; only about 2% to 6% (depending on jurisdiction) of murders are tried as capital cases (Berk, Li, & Hickman, 2005), and only 15% of people sentenced to death since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 have actually been executed (Nagin & Pepper, 2012). If a person is sentenced to death, the time lapse between conviction and execution has increased from an average of 14.4 months during the 1950s to an average of 174 months (14.5 years) in 2010 (Snell, 2011). Thus, while the death penalty is certainly severe, it is far from being certain or swift.

The confusion over the issue led to the National Academy of Science convening a subcommittee (the Committee on Deterrence and the Death Penalty [CDDP]) of criminologists, sociologists, economists, and statisticians to try to reach a conclusion. The CDDP examined the results of all credible death penalty studies up to 2011 and concluded that the evidence is “inconclusive.” The committee also recommended that deterrence studies not be used to influence judicial deliberations. The committee’s conclusion reads,

The committee concludes that research to date on the effect of capital punishment on homicide is not informative about whether

capital punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates. Therefore, the committee recommends that these studies not be used to inform deliberations requiring judgments about the effect of the death penalty on homicide. Consequently, claims that research demonstrates that capital punishment decreases or increases the homicide rate by a specified amount or has no effect on the homicide rate should not influence policy judgments about capital punishment. (Nagin & Pepper, 2012, p. 102)

Critical Thinking Rape is a heinous crime. Some have reported that they would rather be murdered than raped because they do not want to live with the trauma and shame of being raped. Needless to say, rape is a very serious crime that deserves very harsh punishment. Brock Turner was a student athlete at Stanford University. In March 2016, he was convicted of felony sexual assault for violating an unconscious woman, which carried a potential prison term of up to 14 years. Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky handed down a sentence of 6 months in jail, 3 years of probation, and mandatory participation in a sex offender rehabilitation program and required Turner to register as a sex offender. Comparatively speaking, this sentence was lenient and many critics considered it a slap on the wrist for such a serious offense. Put yourself in the victim’s shoes. Did this punishment fit the crime or was it a miscarriage of justice? Do you think a sentence such as Turner’s provides enough of a deterrent threat to dissuade sexual assault? Are rapists or potential rapists responsive to such deterrence threats? Why or why not?

So, What About Deterrence? Is the United States Hard or Soft on Crime?

The United States is perceived to be soft on crime by many laypersons, and therefore its punishments are not likely to have much of a deterrent effect. But if we define hardness or softness in terms of incarceration rates, the numbers do not support that perception because the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Figure 4.2 shows incarceration rates per 100,000 for selected countries in 2012. Using incarceration rates per 100,000 citizens is not the same as the rate per 100,000 criminals, however. The greater incarceration rate in the United States may be justified if the United States has more criminals than these other countries. Of course, no one knows how many criminals any country has, but we can get a rough estimate from a country’s crime rates. For instance, the U.S. homicide rate is about five times that of England and Wales, which roughly matches the United States’ five times greater incarceration rate. However, when it comes to property crimes, the United States is about in the middle of the pack of nations in terms of the probability of being victimized by property crimes (less than in England and Wales, incidentally). This fact notwithstanding, burglars serve an average of 16.2 months in prison in the United States, compared with 6.8 months in Britain and 5.3 months in Canada (Mauer, 2005), which makes the United States harder on crime than its closest cultural relatives and suggests that we may be overusing incarceration to address our crime problem. Alternatively, from a crime control perspective, these other nations can be seen as excessively soft on crime at the expense of rising crime rates, although crime has fallen in those countries since the 1990s also.

Figure 4.2 Incarceration Rates per 100,000 Population for Selected Countries, 2012

Source: Walmsley, 2015

If we define hardness/softness in terms of alternative punishments and/or the conditions of confinement, the United States is “soft” on crime, although a better term would be humane. For instance, although we see that China has an incarceration rate more than five times lower than the United States, it is by far the world’s leader in the proportion of its criminals it executes each year (Stohr & Walsh, 2012). In addition, punishment in some Arab Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia often includes barbaric corporal punishments for offenses considered relatively minor in the West. For instance, the British embassy in Saudi Arabia issues a publication called Information Pack for British Prisoners in Saudi Arabia to British nationals arrested there informing them of what the British government can and cannot do for them. This publication lists the punishments individuals may expect if convicted—not exactly reassuring material to read in one’s cell:

The Saudi courts impose a number of severe physical punishments. The death penalty can be imposed for a wide range of offences including murder, rape, armed robbery, repeated drug use, apostasy, adultery, witchcraft and sorcery and can be carried out by beheading with a sword, stoning or firing squad, followed by crucifixion. (British Foreign Office, 2015, p. 11)

So, is the United States softer or harder on crime than other countries? The answer obviously depends on how we conceptualize and measure the concepts of hardness and softness and with which countries we compare ourselves. Compared with countries that share our democratic ideals, we are tough on crime (some would even say barbaric because of our retention of the death penalty); compared with countries most distant from Anglo-American ideals, we are extremely soft, and for that we should be grateful. But regardless of hardness or softness, we have to remember that the effects of deterrence depend far more on the certainty and swiftness of punishment, not on its severity, and most assuredly on the contrast effect.

Evaluation of the Classical and Early Positivist Schools The classical school is a school of philosophical jurisprudence bent on establishing a set of reformist moral values in criminal justice, not a school of empirical data collection and analysis attempting to build a theory of criminality. Regardless of their influence on criminological theory, the influence of the classical theorists on the legal and penal systems of Europe and North America was huge. Many European monarchs of the 18th century were moved to adopt their principles, and the U.S. Constitution and the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man were very much influenced by them.

Classical school: The classical school of criminology was a nonempirical mode of inquiry similar to the philosophy practiced by the classical Greek philosophers.

All criminal justice systems in the world assume the classical position that persons are free agents who deserve to be punished when they transgress the law. We may also recognize many of the ideas championed by Beccaria in such rights as freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, the right to a speedy trial, and the right to confront one’s accusers contained in the Bill of Rights and other documents at the heart of Western legal systems today. The emphasis on rationality, free will, and personal responsibility within the modern legal system reflects the once radical image of humans posited by the great Enlightenment thinkers. We see in the next chapter that disenchantment with positivism during the latter quarter of the 20th century led some criminologists to reembrace classical principles in their theorizing.

Because it embraces scientific principles, the positivist school is highly influential in criminology today. Although Lombroso tends to be reviled and ridiculed as a biological determinist today, some criminologists, while acknowledging Lombroso’s many errors in logic, research design, and measurement and his elitist and sexist ideas, insist that his contributions are both misunderstood and undervalued. His methodology, although very badly flawed by modern standards, was an improvement over previous attempts to understand criminal behavior (Gibson, 2002). Lilly, Cullen, and Ball (2011) sum up Lombroso’s legacy: “He took the logic of the causes of crime away from sin and placed it in the realm of science, where it remains today” (p. 25). From Lombroso onward, there has been an enduring commitment to sort, sift, and measure all sorts of biological, psychological, and social variables in an attempt to get to the bottom of criminal behavior.

Table 4.1 summarizes major differences between the classical and positivist schools.

Policy and Prevention: Implications of Deterrence Theories The answer to crime for classical deterrence theorists is to increase the certainty of apprehension and the swiftness of punishment and to assess whether the severity of punishment for a given crime really outweighs the benefits criminals obtain from it. More police on the streets and increased efficiency in processing criminals through the system from arrest to the imposition of punishment might be a recommendation to improve certainty. However, the swiftness aspect would certainly run up against constitutional issues in a system purposely designed to make it as difficult as possible to convict suspects (Walsh & Hemmens, 2011).

“Get tough on crime” messages are the kinds of simple, easily implemented solutions that policymakers love—build prisons and fill ‘em up. This takes care of the severity aspect. But getting tough is expensive, as many legislative bodies have found out. Many states started putting more and more offenders behind bars for longer periods and implemented mandatory sentencing laws during the 1980s but soon found their prisons so overcrowded that the courts intervened. This resulted in the repeal of some states’ mandatory sentencing laws and the institution of

early release programs. Thus, releasing offenders to the streets became the solution to a current problem, but that solution was the problem a few years earlier (Gilsinian, 1990). This goes to show how remarkably complicated and even perverse policy decisions can be and why we should not judge a criminological theory based on its impact (or lack thereof) on public policy.

The methods resulting in the remarkable success in crime reduction in New York City are obvious policy recommendations derived from deterrence theory. At the heart of these methods is CompStat (COMParative STATistics), a police management and accountability process that has been implemented across the nation. CompStat employs computer-based systems that map crime to geographic areas and identify problems, thus enabling police administrators to devise strategies and tactics to reduce crime and solve a variety of other problems. Its major function has been to provide senior police administrators with ammunition enabling them to hold precinct commanders and other senior officers accountable for problem areas under their jurisdiction identified by CompStat. To take full advantage of this system requires well- trained and educated administrative police officers and sufficient manpower to implement the strategies and tactics they devise.

Summary ❖ The classical school of criminology began during the Enlightenment with the work of Cesare Beccaria, whose aim was to reform an arbitrary and cruel system of criminal justice. ❖ Jeremy Bentham, best known for his concept of the hedonistic calculus, was another leading figure. The hedonistic calculus summarized the classical notion of human nature as hedonistic, rational, and possessed of free will. ❖ The positivist school aimed at substituting the methods of science for the armchair philosophizing of the classicists; that is, it sought measurable causes of behavior. ❖ The cartographic criminologists such as Guerry, Quetelet, Mayhew, and Fletcher were among the first positivists. These scholars studied maps and statistics to pinpoint where and when crime was most likely to occur. ❖ Cesare Lombroso is widely considered the father of criminology. His work was much influenced by evolutionary thought as he understood it. Lombroso saw criminals as atavistic “throwbacks” to an earlier evolutionary period who could be identified by a number of bodily stigmata. ❖ Other early positivists included Raffael Garofalo and Enrico Ferri. Garofalo was interested in developing a “natural” definition of crime and in generating categories of criminals for the purpose of determining what should be done with them. Ferri was instrumental in formulating the concept of social defense as the only justification for punishment. ❖ Deterrence theories are concerned with the prevention of crime. They differentiate between specific deterrence (the effect of punishment on those directly experiencing it) and general deterrence (the effect of the threat of punishment on the general population). ❖ Perceptual deterrence theory posits that before an objective punishment can affect an offender’s behavior, he or she must be consciously aware that it exists. Awareness of increased penalties strongly influences the behavior of the general public (general deterrence) but does not seem to affect the behavior of the criminally involved. ❖ Our discussion of the death penalty noted the difficulty inherent in showing whether or not it constitutes a deterrent. It is rarely imposed and even more rarely carried out. Studies by economists tend to show that it is a deterrent, while studies by sociologists and criminologists tend to show that it is not. The Committee on Deterrence and the Death Penalty concluded that the issue has not been settled either way. ❖ The question of whether the United States is “hard” or “soft” on crime depends on what countries we compare it with. We may be harder on crime than other Western nations if our measure is incarceration rates, but we are softer than non-Western countries that practice barbaric punishments.

Exercises and Discussion Questions 1. If humans are primarily motivated by the hedonistic calculus, is simple deterrence the answer to the crime problem? 2. What advantages (or disadvantages) does positivism offer us over classicism? 3. Is Ferri’s social defense rationale for punishment preferable to one emphasizing rehabilitation of offenders? 4. Use any search engine and type in “Beccaria preventing crime.” How do Beccaria’s ideas compare with those of the positivists on

preventing crime? What is Beccaria’s idea of “real crime” and how does it compare with Garofalo’s? 5. What is it that prevents most people from committing serious crimes that does not prevent criminals from doing so? 6. Would you like to see the criminal penalties applied by the Chinese and the Saudi Arabians applied in the United States in order to

reduce crime to a minimum?

Useful Websites Classical School. https://russiarobinson.wordpress.com/2014/06/03/classical-school-of-criminology-a-foundation-of-todays-criminal-justice- system

Positivist criminology. http://criminotheory.blogspot.com/2012/10/positivist-criminology.html

Chapter Terms CompStat: A police management and accountability process that has been implemented across the nation.

Atavism 70

Cartographic criminologists 69

Classical school 79

CompStat 81

Contrast effect 73

Criminaloid 70

Determinism 68

Deterrence 73

Enlightenment 65

Free will 67

General deterrence 74

Hedonism 67

Hedonistic calculus 67

Insane criminal 70

Italian school of criminology 70

Perceptual deterrence theory 74

Positivism 68

Principle of utility 66

Rational 67

Recidivism 73

Social defense 71

Specific deterrence 73

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