Criminology: Why Should People Commit A Crime?

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Criminology is a very broad and complex speciality, which can be easily involved in various areas, it can simply say that this area of study has been studied for over a thousand years since Plato and Aristotle had demonstrated how to define the standard of crime and punishment (Criminology: Intellectual History, 2017: no page number). Despite their theories had been justified after a few centuries. To say it another way, Newburn noted that criminology is a study of wrongdoing, how are the criminals be trailed or judged and find out who will normally be breaking the law (Newburn, 2017: 6). It is also a branch of sociology. To figure out why people commit crime are the core issue in criminology. Many scholars have developed several theories to explain why people would like to take the risk. And in this essay, it will mainly focus on studies of people to break the law and commit a crime, why people are encouraged to commit a crime, and how should offenders be punished to prevent crime.

To start off, there are already studies concerning people who committed crime centuries ago, to say …show more content…

The classical school of criminology is based on the Philosophy of the Enlightenment. People are generally considering what they can benefit after they have committed a crime, they have their free will to choose to commit or not, after balancing the chance of being caught, individuals will decide on to commit or not. Delinquency is an immoral form of behaviour which will weaken the society. To prevent crime, Taylor, Walton and Young (1973) highlighted the following to punish the criminals, they say the punishment is act as deterrent by encouraging the individual to follow the law, punishment must be proportional to the interest violated by crime itself, and certainty and swiftness of punishment is measured to be an effective punishment comparing to the severity of the

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