Contemporary crime studies: Three disparate views

Abstract

Criminology as a discipline traces its historical roots to the writings of several 18th-century European thinkers. In one manner or another, these early writers on penal and criminal justice reform premised their views on Rousseau's (1712-1778) notion of the social contract. Under Rousseau's theory, the state emerges because citizens are willing to surrender some of their absolute freedom for the security and tranquility that may be secured by cooperative public order. Beccaria (1738-1794) and Bentham (1748-1832) adopted this rational view of human behavior and association to urge that the purpose of punishment in the criminal law should simply be to prevent the criminal from continuing criminality and to deter others in society from perpetrating similar acts. This school of thought in which the emphasis is placed on the nature of the crime and the uniform application of that level of punishment sufficient to deter it has since been denoted the classical school of criminology. A neoclassical school, also premised upon free will and rational choice assumptions, permitted mitigation based upon factors found in either the individual or the circumstances of the crime.