Classical and Positivist Criminology: Theories and Impacts
Classical Criminology and the Positivist Revolution
Classical Criminology Theory
Classical criminology theory can be summarized as follows:
- All individuals may commit crimes.
- There is a consensus on protecting private property and personal welfare.
- Individuals hold a contract with the state to preserve peace.
- Penalties should be used as a deterrent.
- Penalties should be proportional to the interests violated.
- Each person is responsible for their actions, and all are equal before the law.
Classical theory is primarily a social control theory that gained the support of the bourgeoisie. It assigns the highest value to personal achievement rather than inherited status. While it was thought that all were equal and had equal powers of reason, they could not be considered equal in all other respects. This rationale would allow individuals to understand the beneficial nature of consensus. It was sentencing that discouraged offending. The great advantage of positivism was that it established a procedural framework easier to apply, with the law fixing a penalty for each offense and degree. However, in practice, it was very different. Criminal motivation was not equal for everyone. Thus, crime is an irrational choice or may result from factors that prevent a rational choice.
Neoclassical Revisionism
The contradictions of classicism manifested when trying to implement universal penal measures. In practice, it was impossible to ignore circumstances and individual differences. Neoclassical criminology took into account mitigating circumstances. The background and situation of each individual affect the possibility of reform. It opened the door to other kinds of experts, who were not lawyers, to give their explanations of behavior, which led to a widening range of penal measures. The sentence would have different effects depending on the individual characteristics of offenders, so the sentence was first imposed in accordance with its rehabilitative value.
The Positivist Revolution
Positivism seeks practical purposes, such as the elimination of antisocial behavior, but free of useless beliefs and philosophical, ethical-religious, and punitive considerations. It tried to develop precise and measurable units of crime and deviant behavior as a preliminary step to generalization. The problem was to distinguish crime and deviant behavior from normal behavior that could be measured. The solution was to resort to crime statistics, but this was in vain. This brings up liberal positivism and radical positivism.
Liberal Positivism
Liberal positivism acknowledges the defects of statistics on crime but believes that with certain modifications, they might serve. They believe that the most serious offenses and crimes are reflected in the statistics. Their answers are based on the idea that there is a consensus on morality and that it can be quantified.
Radical Positivism
Radical positivism has two branches:
- An attenuated version, which means that legal rules represent a consensus and can gather statistics themselves, but whether the police and the judicial system do so.
- A stronger version, whose statistics are based on a consensus that differs significantly from that set by law. The law provides a moral standard, and statistics represent approximately a) the willingness of individuals to admit having committed an act or b) the extent to which the police can and will arrest the criminals they discover.
The difficulty created by this design is that the offense is to be represented everywhere. However, some positivists think that not all antisocial behavior is prohibited by law and that not all conduct that violates the codes is truly antisocial. For positivists, the deviant is a person with different morality or rationality, an individual who is under-socialized and has not internalized the morality of the system. Radical positivists thought to separate themselves from the vagaries of judicial and police statistics to create a science of crime and “real” correctional activities. Their task is to discover the true consensus. They target the interests of the people as a whole, against the minority and the minority in criminal justice. The interests of power and wealth do not represent the collectivity. The positivist (liberal or radical) is concerned with the causes of deviant behavior and crime, and so is by environmental and psychological reasons that prevent a person from internalizing the standards of the majority system. Thus, criminology has focused on the offender (in his psychology, his unique environment, and so on) rather than criminal law. The explanation of crime can be found in the motivations and behavior of offenders. The “pursuit of objectivity” in positivism then reduces to the mediation of particular conditions and circumstances. To investigate what drove the offender to commit a crime, make a diagnosis of it, and mark the appropriate therapeutic regimen.