In an effort to provide background for my final project discussion concerning the depiction and experience of crime in Modern Poetry, this blog post will decipher the Classical period of Criminology and the way poets of the time were exploring its social significance.
In Criminology: The Essentials, Anthony Walsh states:
“Criminology…a young discipline, although humans have probably been theorizing about crime and its causes ever since they first made rules and observed others breaking them…how people thought about crime and criminals…was strongly influenced by the social and intellectual currents of their time” (10).
The definition of criminology is simply an interdisciplinary science that collects and deciphers data on the many aspects of criminals, delinquents, and antisocial behavior, but in practice, anything but simple. Although the term criminology was not officially coined until 1885 by Italian law professor Raffaele Garafolo, as periods of humanity progressed, so did its conceptions of the world around it. We are all familiar with the Renaissance advances in art, literature, music and philosophy, which carried human thinking away from an absolute authority towards an avenue that lead to the scientific method. Enlightenment remolded human thinking associated with mathematics, science, and individuality that led to criminal justice system reforms throughout Europe. Walsh summarizes the transition from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment best: “the Renaissance provided a key to the human mind and the Enlightenment opened the door” (10).
Cesare Beccaria’s work, On Crime and Punishment (1764), paved the way for the Classical School of Criminology responsible for emphasizing human rationality and free will when studying criminals. Beccaria pleaded to reform the criminal justice system, humanize and rationalize laws, as well as their corresponding punishments. To him, citizens engaged in a social contract with the state: in order to gain protection of the state, citizens gave up certain rights. As a way of deterring crime, the protections secured by the government, the laws should be certain, swift and severe, depending on the severity of the offense. As demonstration of the support the classical school received, the ideals were implemented into constitutions still in existence today…we already know this stuff backwards and forwards.
Another important figure in the classical school of criminology, Jeremy Bentham, adds social control based on the utilitarian concept principle of utility, whereas the acts of individuals should be judged moral or immoral by its effect on the happiness of the community. Thus, the study and practice of the criminal justice system should be focused on weighing maximum pleasure and minimal pain for an individual against a population, seeking the greatest good for the greatest number. Bentham believed hedonism is life’s central purpose being pleasure and hedonistic calculus is the approach of weighing anticipated pros and cons of a course of action and determining which would result, again concentrating on the greatest pleasure and lowest pain. Central to Bentham’s theory was the assertion that humans are rational and possessed free will. One of his contemporaries, William Wordsworth agreed with Bentham’s claims and sought to, as Quentin Bailey with San Diego State University praises, “imagine a way of relating to the vagrant and criminal poor,” while society and lawmakers at the time were creating agencies and offices to “tackle criminality and establish a disciplined and obedient workforce” (Excerpt from Bailey’s Wordsworth’s Vagrants).
In “Thoughtless Cruelty,” Charles Lamb explores the repercussions and other possible explanations as to why a man named “Robert” would murder something as harmless as a fly. The speaker attempts to appeal to the criminal’s sense of reason and logic by suggesting Robert was “devoid/ Of thought and sense, to have destroy’d/ A thing in which no way you annoy’d” (lines 5-7). While appealing to the criminal’s rationality, the speaker enlists other possibilities for the fly’s early demise, but argues for every “creature’s pain by small or great” (27).
Philosophers and writers of every discipline frequently wrote about criminal behavior, but not many approached the angle of criminal rationality, or as sociologists referred to as criminality. Writers such as Wordsworth and Lamb were helping to continue a broader discussion that sociologists and philosophers, like Bentham, had already created. However, Beccaria and Bentham were not the first to introduce the idea of human rationality. In 1690, John Locke defined “the self” as:
…that conscious thinking thing, (whatever substance, made up of whether spiritual, or material, simple, or compounded, it matters not) which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends (Locke, An Essay).
The more we understand man and womankind, the better we understand crime and the role crime plays in literature, particularly Modern Poetry.
Modern History of Criminology
- Positivism
- more scientific view of human behavior replaces classical assumptions (application of scientific method from more positive knowledge)
- determinism: events have causes that preceded them
- Cesare Lombroso
- Criminal Man (1876) – many criminals are evolutionary throwbacks to an earlier form of life
- atavism – organisms resembling ancestral pre-human forms of life
- identified by physical characteristics (protruding jaws, drooping eyes, large ears, twisted and flat noses, etc.)
- people who acted beastly and lacked reasoned conscience were thought to be biologically inferior beings belonging to an early time in evolution
- atavism – organisms resembling ancestral pre-human forms of life
- most extreme views were not supported very well, so he modified to include two other types
- insane criminals – not born criminals; became criminal as a result of an “alteration of the brain, which completely upsets their moral nature” (46)
- criminaloids – no physical peculiarities of born or insane criminals; “habitual criminals” bc they became so by contact with other criminals and “distressing circumstances”; “judicial criminals who fall afoul of the law by accident”; “criminal passion, hot headed and impulsive persons who commit violent acts when provoked” (46)
- Criminal Man (1876) – many criminals are evolutionary throwbacks to an earlier form of life
- Italian School of Criminology by Raffaele Garofalo and Enrico Ferri
- Garofalo coined term “criminology” and formed a “natural” definition of crime, wanting to anchor it to human nature
- crime is an act is universally condemned, and would be condemned such if it offended altruistic sentiments (integrity, honesty, compassion, and sympathy)
- natural crimes are evil in themselves (mala in se); crimes wrong only because they violate law (mala prohibita)
- punishment should fit the criminal, not crime
- peculiarities – characteristics that place offenders at risk for further criminal behavior (4 categories)
- extreme = execution
- impulsive (alcoholics and the insane) = imprisioned
- professional = “elimination” either by life imprisonment or transportation to penal colony
- endemic (crimes committed peculiar to a given region and mala prohibita crimes) = changes in law
- Enrico Ferri (1879)
- moral insensibility combined with low intelligence were the biggest criminal characteristics
- rationale for punishment was social defense – purpose is not to deter or to rehabilitate but to defend society from criminal predation
- if criminals could not base behavior on rationality, how could they be deterred?
- criminals should be locked up for as long as possible so they no longer pose a threat to society
- Neoclassicalism: Return of Choice and Deterrence
- swing back from ideals of positivist school towards classical notion (offenders are free actors responsible for their own actions)
- “soft” determinists – believe that criminal behavior is ultimately a choice made in context of personal and situational constraints and opportunities; substitute extremes of the classical free will concept (actions are free of any causal chains) for that of human agency (concept that maintains humans have capacity to make choices and the moral responsibility to make moral ones regardless of internal or external constraints on one’s ability to do so)
- rationality the quality of thinking and behaving in accordance with logic and reason so one’s reality is an ordered and intelligible system
- rational choice theorists view crime in terms of Bentham’s principle of max pleasure and min pain
- we are not all equally at risk to commit crimes – takes into account temperament, intelligence, class, family structure and neighborhood impacts
- ignores how these aspects play into consciousness of offending
- Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson (1979)
- routine activities theory
- helps to explain high crime rates in different societies and neighborhoods w/out invoking individual differences
- routine activities are recurrent and prevalent activities which provide for basic population and individual needs (day-to-day things that characterize particular community)
- artists/writers portray events, ideals, and activities of their surroundings and blend them into a physical or literary representations of activities
- crime is a result of motivated offenders, meeting suitable targets that lack capable guardians
- victimization is most likely to occur in poor, disorganized communities where there is never a shortage of motivated offenders, with a lack of capable guardians for either persons or property that discourages motivated offenders from committing the acts
- many poems give feeling of questionable/unsafe environments
- Garofalo coined term “criminology” and formed a “natural” definition of crime, wanting to anchor it to human nature