In a small café on a cool frosty night, in a remote Italian town. It is here at the back of the room with a flickering candle in the middle of the table where we notice a small gathering of theorists sitting around a small table. It is here that Cesare Beccaria, Emile Durkheim, and Cesare Lombroso have come to discuss crime, punishment, and their theories regarding this topic. They recount their history, thoughts, and the processes underlying what they had discovered.
Lombroso: Good Evening Emile and Cesare, I hope you are both well?
[Durkheim and Beccaria nod an acknowledgement to Lombroso]
Beccaria: Good Evening Emile and Cesare, I am well for a man of retirement age! How are both of you?
Durkheim: Good evening, fellow theorists … I am well, and have been looking forward to this meeting tonight… It is a wonderful opportunity to debate and discuss our positions.
Lombroso and Beccaria [nod in agreement]. Yes… Yes…
Durkheim: well I shall start this reminiscing about our theories and sociological understandings discoveries… As you are aware, I am more of a social thinker. In my studies, I looked more at the biological build of our human race. In addition, how this relates to the crime our societies have been witness too (Turner, 2006). To me this behaviour occurs when there was a break down in society and as such, a rapid change within it occurred But Lombroso, we all know that you were the first to consider the human behaviour, and it was you who made me want to look at this further and delve deeper into it.
Lombroso: Thank-you for that Emile... and so true I have been interested in the behaviour of the individual and how this manifests in society. With my research, I have come to believe that there are three t...
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REFERENCES
Beccaria, C. (1767/1994). On Crimes and Punishment. In C. Beccaria, Classics of Criminology (pp. 227-86). Prospect Hills,IL: Waveland Press.
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Durkheim, E. (Orig. 1895; Reprint, 1994). The Normal and the Pathological. In Reprinted in Joseph E Jacoby, Chap 13 The Rules of the Sociological Method (pp. 84-88). Prospect Hills, IL: Waveland Press.
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Lombroso, C. (1911). Introduction. In Criminal Man (pp. 21-30). Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith.
Turner, B. (2006). The Cambridge dictionary of sociology. University press: Cambridge.
Walklate, S. (2007). Understanding Criminology 3rd ed. Open University Press: England.
Durkheim Emile Durkheim (1858 - 1917), believed individuals are determined by the society they live in because they share a moral reality that we have been socialised to internalise through social facts. Social facts according to Drukhiem are the “manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him [or her].” Social facts are external to the individual, they bind societies together because they have an emotional and moral hold on people, and are why we feel shame or guilt when we break societal convention. Durkheim was concerned with maintaining the cohesion of social structures. He was a functionalist, he believed each aspect of society contributes to society's stability and functioning as a whole.
Adler, Patricia A., and Adler Peter. Constructions of Deviance: Social Power, Context, and Interaction. 6th ed. Belmont: Thomas/Wadsworth, 2009.
Deviance is a natural part of and necessary for stability and social order in society, this according to functionalist theorist Emile Durkheim (MindEdge, Inc., 2016). Traditionally, society is generally successful in providing motivation for individuals to aspire for goals of some sort, whether through wealth, prestige or perceived power (Henslin, 2011). However, from a functional perspective, theories have been developed in identifying when lawful and equal access is not afforded to certain individuals in the process of obtaining such goals. This restriction and inequality to opportunity for access in the quest to achieve success is what is now referred to as structural strain theory, which was developed by sociologist Robert Merton (Henslin,
Chapt6 [2] Haralambos and Holborn 2002 [3] Merton. R 1968 [4] Hagedorn 1996 new perspective in criminology, chapter 13
Durkheim was concerned with studying and observing the ways in which society functioned. His work began with the idea of the collective conscious, which are the general emotions and opinions that are shared by a society and which shape likeminded ideas as to how the society will operate (Desfor Edles and Appelrouth 2010:100-01). Durkheim thus suggested that the collective ideas shared by a community are what keeps injustices from continuing or what allows them to remain.
In the 1800s Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), Italian criminologist, wrote in his book L'Uomo Delinquente (187...
Maguire, M., Morgan, R., and Reiner, R. (2012) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology. 5th ed. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
Some flaws exist in Durkheim’s thought. One minor flaw is that Durkheim failed to collect his own data, using outside sources collected by others. Furthermore, Durkheim has been criticized for his failure to take individual into account properly. This can be seen in a flaw in his legendary sociological work, Suicide. Many have criticized Durkheim for trying to explain micro events using macro statistics; however, Van Poppel and Day (1996) state that this isn’t a fallacy, but rather an empirical mistake as how suicides were described by Protestants and Catholics were described differently, which Durkheim failed to account
Pollock, J. M. (2012). Crime & justice in America: An introduction to criminal justice (2nd ed.). Waltham, MA, USA: Anderson Publishing (Elsevier).
Gaylord, Mark S and John F. Galliher. (1988). The criminology of Edwin Sutherland. Transaction, Inc
This paper provides an exhaustive analysis, from a Nihilistic perspective, of the novel, Crime and Punishment. The paper is divided into many sections, each with a self-explanatory title in capital letters, such as the section that immediately follows this sentence.
Williams, F., & McShane, M. (2010). Criminological Theory, (5th Edition). New Brunswick, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Williams, F., & McShane, M. (2010). Criminological Theory, 5th Edition. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc.
Merton disagreed with the theory that social problems such as crime arose from individuals. He said that The United States places extraordinary emphasis on economic success, holds this up as a universal goal for all to achieve and yet its social structure limits access to these goals through legitimate means. This disjuncture between the goals or desires, and the means of achieving them is what places large segments of the population in a state of anomie. While Durkheim theorised that for many the only escape from the uninterrupted and unappeased agitation is suicide, Merton argued that it merely produces an intense pressure for deviation. In this way Merton’s theory proposes that it is society and the way that it is structured that causes
The Classical School of Criminology generally refers to the work of social contract and utilitarian philosophers Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham during the enlightenment in the 18th century. The contributions of these philosophers regarding punishment still influence modern corrections today. The Classical School of Criminology advocated for better methods of punishment and the reform of criminal behaviour. The belief was that for a criminal justice system to be effective, punishment must be certain, swift and in proportion to the crime committed. The focus was on the crime itself and not the individual criminal (Cullen & Wilcox, 2010). This essay will look at the key principles of the Classical School of Criminology, in particular