According to tradition, the beginning of crime dates back to the sons of Prophet Adam, Habil and Qabil, when one brother killed the other. The meaning of this tradition is that crime is as old as human society itself.
Rules and regulations, and their violation, are part of human nature. On this basis, crime is a social phenomenon. In narratives of good and evil, discussions about crime and criminals—such as sin, misconduct, wickedness, and deviation—led to the formulation of broad generalizations to explain character. These are found in myths, cosmology, theology, and metaphysics in the form of accounts about obedient and deviant human beings.
Some writers have independently discussed criminology through recurring themes related to lawbreakers. This type of criminological thinking begins with the very dawn of human civilization. Whether or not these discussions were based on scientific methods, they do show that the phenomenon of crime could be examined in different ways, and such discussions also included the knowledge of criminology itself.
The narratives presented in the works of ancient and medieval philosophers, the traditions of the Roman Church and the Protestant Church, the medieval cosmologies based on magic, and modern legal thought did not explicitly claim to be criminology, yet their central ideas were related to the same themes that modern criminology discusses. However, when we go into the details of these earlier discussions, the similarities between medieval thought and modern criminology appear weak.
Concepts such as fate or destiny, original sin, ghosts and spirits, human wickedness, greed, and desire are products of the thinking of those times, but they have no real connection with modern criminology.
However, this traditional way of thinking on the subject is not very distant from the thinking of our own time. In both ancient and modern literature, themes of crime and criminals, virtue and vice, and good and evil have been very common. The Panchatantra of India, Hitopadesha, Kathasaritsagara, and above all the Mahabharata and Ramayana; in the Middle East, Alf Laila, Kalila and Dimna, Sheikh Saadi’s Gulistan and Bustan; and in later times works such as Taubat-un-Nasuh, Umrao Jan Ada, Tarahdar Laundi, and Fasana-e-Azad are all filled with matters of good and evil and are rich in moral lessons.
Modern English literature, biographies of criminals, accounts of the criminal world during the Renaissance, such as the rogue pamphlets of the Tudor period, the dramas of the Elizabethan era, the comedies of Jacobean times, Thomas More’s Utopia, and the novels of Defoe contain fundamental statements about crime that shed light on the causes of deviance. These include bad company, force of habit, greed, neglected children, unloving parents, addiction to alcohol, laziness, avoidance of work, bad reputation, difficulties in obtaining employment, poverty, despair, and greed—factors that lead individuals toward crime. This is the material from which modern theories began to develop.
In this material, there was little emphasis on purely worldly matters or materialism. Its main shortcoming was the lack of clear explanations or causal analysis. It was generally assumed that crime results from ever-present temptation and that all humanity is exposed to it. But the question remained: why do some people succumb to this temptation while others remain unaffected? Thus, these explanations remained incomplete, and no answer could be found except fate, destiny, the will of God, or divine decree.
Accordingly, when criminology began to emerge as a discipline, the fundamental question was: why is it that some people commit crimes while the majority obey the laws of society? In response to this question, criminology has developed various theories.
During the Middle Ages, punishments were extremely harsh and arbitrary. There was no proportionality between crimes and their punishments. Often, it depended on who the complainant was and who the accused was, and punishments were given accordingly. History of the Middle Ages shows that the death penalty was commonly imposed for various crimes. In many European countries, even the smallest offenses were punishable by death. In England, there were many minor offenses for which the punishment was death. If a person failed to repay a debt, he was imprisoned until the debt was paid. Similar laws existed in our region fifty or sixty years ago. These punishments were often arbitrary and cruel, leaving no room for leniency. They involved a great deal of violence and inflicted severe suffering on the accused.
In Europe, the eighteenth century was an age of enlightenment. The Italian thinker Beccaria (1728–1791), who was also an economist, was influenced by this movement. He had no practical experience of the criminal justice system, but at the age of twenty-six he published a book on this subject in 1781 titled Dei Delitti e Delle Pene. It was the first systematic document on the subject and caused a great stir in the fields of law and justice. Its impact was felt throughout almost all of Europe. Within six months, seven editions of the book were published. It was translated into several European languages including English, German, French, Spanish, and Dutch. J. A. Farrer published its English translation in 1780 under the title On Crimes and Punishments. Being the first organized and significant work on the principles of criminal justice, this book shook the criminal justice systems of many countries to such an extent that its influence is still felt today.
Many of the ideas presented in this book were already known to some of Beccaria’s contemporaries in intellectual circles. He drew upon them and acknowledged their influence. Nevertheless, his book was a major advancement in the field of criminology. The core of his arguments was the philosophy of utilitarianism, whose aim is the greatest good for the greatest number of people. It is possible that this philosophy itself was influenced by, or derived from, the Islamic concept of promoting greater good.
In that era, Beccaria made a harsh yet truthful criticism of the cruel and barbaric punishments given to criminals, the secret judicial proceedings, and the dishonesty and bribery of magistrates and judges. His argument was that the basis of the criminal justice system is the certainty of punishment, not its severity. He strongly insisted that there must be a logical proportionality between crimes and punishments. He was the first writer of the modern age to protest against the death penalty and to demand its complete abolition. He was the pioneer of the movement against capital punishment that is active in Western countries today.
Beccaria’s ideas influenced the whole of Europe. In England, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham widely propagated his ideas. Bentham’s disciple and Member of Parliament, Samuel Romilly, during his political career, tried to limit the death penalty to only a few crimes. The impact of this book was also felt in Russia, Sweden, and the Habsburg Empire, where legal reforms were introduced. In several American states as well, the principles formulated by Beccaria were kept in view during legislation.
Although Beccaria’s influential and authoritative book and the efforts of his followers did not directly give rise to the science of criminology, they certainly created such conditions and an environment for its intellectual development that the path ahead for this discipline became largely smooth. Through the efforts of Beccaria, Bentham, and his disciples such as Romilly and Austin, a new field of knowledge began to emerge, and these individuals performed the role of pioneers for this discipline.
Markets had come into existence in cities and were exposed to the risks of crime. Beccaria and his associates tried to find intellectual solutions to these dangers. They believed that they were seeking solutions to new problems that did not exist in the old traditional society.
It is important to note that thinkers like Beccaria, Bentham, and Howard presented purely secular and material analyses and set aside theological methods of reasoning on this subject.
They were sure that their thinking is highly objective, and he discusses the subject in a very scientific manner, whereas earlier it was dominated by conjectures, illogical reasoning, and prejudices.
The proponents of positivist thought considered his work to be unscientific, based on speculation rather than observation, and therefore termed it the Classical School.
Due to Beccaria’s book and the efforts of his followers, a new era of reforms began in the nineteenth century. Reforms were introduced in prisons and in the criminal justice system. During this period, much more was written on the subject which, although part of the history of criminology, does not correspond to the modern concept of this discipline. Criticism of Beccaria’s ideas shows that this school of thought was influenced less by metaphysical concepts of free will and more by Locke’s empirical psychology and the anthropology developed under the Scottish Enlightenment (Science of Man).
In the nineteenth century, new concepts of human character and behavior were developed. Most of this progress occurred in the fields of medicine and psychological studies. The art of physiognomy was developing, having begun in Europe in the seventeenth century. This art closely resembled our own practice of reading facial features, through which one could identify signs of good and evil and estimate a person’s character from their facial structure.
In the nineteenth century, C. Lavater played a significant role in the development of this field and attempted to place it on scientific foundations through his writings. At the beginning of this century, F. J. Gall presented the concept of craniometry, and J. C. Spurzheim made similar claims regarding phrenology. Their focus was on the human skull, which they believed reflected human character and behavior externally. They thought that an individual’s mental faculties consisted of distinct abilities, each located in a specific region of the brain, and that the size of that region—apparently reflected in the shape of the skull—was proportional to the development of that particular faculty.
By 1830, both of these sciences had lost their appeal and scientific credibility and became confined to charlatans. However, the search for relationships between physical structure and psychological character gave research a new direction. This shift led to the emergence of the science of psychiatry.
In the eighteenth century, due to the establishment of newly founded asylums and shelters for reform, a new medical specialization developed. It was initially called alienism. Later, it came to be known as psychological medicine, and eventually it was termed psychiatry.
The staff of mental health institutions began to record their observations of patients. These included observations on the behavior of patients admitted to these institutions, their histories prior to insanity, and effective methods of treatment. This marked the beginning of a new tradition of scientific research and also provided a large amount of raw material for the later development of criminology. Through this new approach to research, the relationship between psychological tendencies and physical structure assumed the form of a lasting tradition. In these asylums, extensive material was collected through observations of long-term residents, including case histories, irregularities related to their insanity, and experimental responses to medical treatments.
Such studies cannot be separated from studies related to markets, morality, or poverty. The aim of all of them was to strengthen the control of the state over the population. However, when specialization became widespread, administrative matters became separated from issues of crime. The work of nineteenth-century phrenologists and psychiatrists can also be viewed in this context. These disciplines analyzed human behavior in scientific terms, identified different patterns of human character, and studied pathological behavior. However, the criminal had not yet become the focus as a distinct human type. By the late nineteenth century, the study of criminology began to separate from administrative and medical fields.
The second important phase of this line of thought once again began with an Italian scholar named Lombroso (Verona 1835 – Turin 1909). He was primarily a psychiatrist. His book The Criminal Man was published in 1876. In its first edition, the book consisted of only 252 pages, but by 1895, its fifth edition had expanded into three volumes totaling 1,202 pages.
Since Lombroso was essentially a psychiatrist, his theory was that criminals are born, or they are individuals whose mental development is arrested. They are unable to keep pace with the evolution of society and fall behind, failing to reach the level of mental development that society has attained.
According to his theory, criminals can be identified from their physical features and facial structure. Most of this scholar’s academic and professional life was spent at the University of Turin, where he served as a professor of criminal psychology. He believed in humane treatment of criminals and their reform.
The idea of criminology as a distinct discipline emerged from intellectual efforts and from the interaction between a particular social context and those efforts. As often happens, when it was realized that certain concepts and research were related to fields that had previously been ignored, a major shift occurred in the history of ideas. The scientific research that guided Lombroso in laying the foundation of criminology as a science—and which later became a central subject in modern criminology—was, in fact, not originally related to criminology at all.
Lombroso’s approach involved measuring the physical features of human beings through methods of anthropometry and craniology, and studying humans and their types from a biological perspective. He was influenced by the ideas of Paul Broca and by Darwin’s theory of evolution. His study of Italian military recruits and patients in asylums was essentially an effort to collect information on different racial types and to classify human beings into various categories.
The emergence of criminology through Lombroso was largely accidental. Terms or types such as genius, epileptic, and mad indicate that racial anthropology had begun to dominate powerful social debates around 1870. These human types were more related to social issues than to evolutionary processes. In reality, this development was an extension of an already established research tradition and a clearer and more explicit expression of the observations of earlier scholars such as Maudsley, a psychiatrist, and prison doctor Bruce Thomson.
Although Lombroso’s discovery was not entirely new, its significance was remarkable. The identification of a distinct criminal type led to an idea that had not previously occurred to anyone—that of a separate science devoted to criminals. This idea, that the criminal is a naturally occurring type, guided Lombroso toward a science that would focus on this being, identify its distinguishing features, trace its stigma, point out its abnormality, and ultimately discover the causes that make one person a criminal while another becomes a law-abiding, normal individual.
There were flaws in this theory, but it soon gained popularity because it offered the possibility of identifying criminals through scientific methods. Lombroso’s book L’Uomo Delinquente was published in 1876, and within a few years this theory had taken the form of an international movement. New associations began to be formed, international congresses were held, specialized journals started to be published, and new schools of thought regarding crime emerged among different nations of Europe. In Europe and America, basic material for the study of criminals by relevant officials began to be collected.
Within a few years of the publication of the book, Lombroso’s followers launched a journal, La Scuola Positiva, to disseminate this new research and its practical implications. However, other disciples such as Enrico Ferri and Raffaele Garofalo were not satisfied with merely propagating their teacher’s initial ideas. They introduced considerable diversity and refinement into the early Italian school of thought. Criminological studies were expanded to examine legal aspects and human characteristics. The internal distinctions within this research were broadened, and competing schools of thought began to emerge.
Two schools became particularly prominent. The first was the French school, which emphasized the environmental and social determinants of crime and attempted to downplay fixed biological traits. The second was the German school, which focused on the development of technique.
In 1882, the International Congress that was convened gave great impetus to these disputes. This also created considerable bitterness between the parties, and amendments were made to Lombroso’s claims. Modifications were also introduced in his implications regarding the concept of the born criminal and the idea of reform.
As a result of these activities, and especially due to the efforts of Ferri, Garofalo, and Van Hamel, a movement emerged which, in fact, was far more systematic and far more practical than criminal anthropology. Thus, after amendments, revisions, and reconstruction of Lombroso’s ideas, criminology developed in a more acceptable manner. This occurred around 1890. After that, the science of criminology was no longer synonymous with criminal anthropology; rather, it became a neutral term that abandoned the bias of the original terminology and distinguished itself from fields such as criminal sociology, criminal biology, and criminal psychology.
The distinguishing features of criminology that emerged in the last decade of the nineteenth century were:
The ideas of this thinker and his followers came to be known as the Positivist school of criminology.
The Classical and Positivist schools of thought have been subjected to considerable criticism and still remain topics of debate. The efforts of these two thinkers did not bring the science of criminology into full existence, but they certainly advanced it in that direction. The Classical school focused its attention on crime and punishment, whereas the Positivist school concentrated not on the crime but on the criminal. Their methods were also different. Beccaria’s method was deductive; he attempted to find relationships between economics and crime. In contrast, Lombroso’s method was empirical, and therefore closer to the scientific approach. Most of the conclusions of these two schools have now been rejected, but they still hold their own importance in criminology, or at least in its history. The echo of Beccaria’s protest against capital punishment can still be heard today, and Lombroso’s biological research is now being examined more closely by modern scholars. These were important steps in the early development of criminology. As mentioned earlier, the books of these thinkers initiated widespread debate on the subject, and discussions from other disciplines—such as sociology, anthropology, economics, biology, statistics, ethics, psychology, and law—began to be incorporated into it.
However, despite this integration, a new field of knowledge soon emerged that was distinct from other discussions on crime. Its fundamental questions were: What is criminology? What are its central features? And what are the political and cultural contexts of its study?
In light of the above historical facts, criminology consists of discussions and research related to crime and the criminal. This newest branch of the human sciences has emerged only in modern times. It claims to be an empirical science. Although its central theme is crime, its position is quite distinct from other social, moral, and legal disciplines, because the objectives of those fields are broader, and criminal law does not encompass them entirely. Many scholars, however, do not accept this claim.
According to these thinkers, all social sciences, to some extent, stand in opposition to the rigidity of criminal law, yet they have not been able to form a united front against it. Psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and to some extent psychology, focus their attention on the individual, whereas sociology and anthropology deal with society and its institutions. The subject matter of all these disciplines differs from one another, and their methods are also distinct. Their terminologies are separate as well, and these differences are so significant that a student of one discipline is often unwilling to recognize another as a science.
The aim of criminology is to provide a neutral platform for all these fields—for discussion, problems, and their solutions—but the experts of these disciplines are not yet ready to unite. However, with the establishment of institutions, international conferences, and the publication of specialized journals related to criminology, conditions in favor of criminology have improved somewhat in the twentieth century. In many countries, those associated with this field have risen above the role of mere spokesmen and coordinators, and are now counted among theorists, researchers, and contributors to the advancement of knowledge.
It must be acknowledged that, alongside the science of punishment (Penology), the nature of research in the field of criminology is also practical. In many ways, it is felt that the results of research in criminology can prove highly useful for judges, plaintiffs, other concerned parties, legal experts, and prison officials. They now award punishments while keeping human values in view and treat prisoners in a better and more humane manner within prisons. In this approach, the role of criminologists was to collect facts impartially, leaving the task of deriving practical conclusions to government officials. However, signs of change are now beginning to appear here as well. Criminologists are now starting to take on the responsibility of drawing conclusions from these facts themselves. For example, based on their findings, these experts now wish to campaign against capital punishment. But in order to abolish the death penalty, their findings must also be considered within political, religious, moral, and social contexts, and the final decision should be left to those associated with political institutions.
With the expansion of the field of criminology, another question arises: should practical or applied sciences such as investigation, photography, fingerprints, and toxicology (the study of poisons) also be included within criminology? These subjects are called Criminalistics. In Austria, Belgium, and at the University of California in the United States, these subjects are considered part of criminology.
If these practical disciplines are excluded from this field of knowledge, criminology does appear as a complete academic discipline; however, its partial dependence on its original sources—such as sociology, psychology, and other sciences—creates considerable intellectual confusion regarding its place in the academic curriculum. Although European universities are fully aware of its academic status, they generally consider it a part of other disciplines. At Cambridge University in Britain, the Institute of Criminology is part of the law faculty. In other British universities, it is regarded as part of sociology, social administration, law, or psychiatry. In South America, it is dominated by anthropology and medical sciences. In the United States, there are some exceptions, but in most cases criminology is also considered a branch of law.
In view of this situation, where criminology appears to be integrated into other disciplines, it is not surprising that its experts consider themselves primarily specialists of other fields and only secondarily criminologists. In their view, the status of criminology is secondary. This field is also part of postgraduate education.
Other disciplines such as psychology, psychiatry, history, sociology, and social anthropology also initially faced a similar situation and passed through the same path before attaining the academic status they hold today.
Research in criminology is still ongoing. It has three objectives: descriptive, analytical, and normative.
The aim of descriptive research is to collect necessary and reliable facts, analyze them, and then draw conclusions from them. Facts are gathered in a systematic manner. First, a hypothesis or proposition is formulated so that the researcher may have some idea of the expected results.
This hypothesis brings order and discipline into research. As facts continue to emerge, the researcher gradually comes to know whether his hypothesis is correct or not. If the facts support the hypothesis, the research continues to progress; otherwise, amendments and changes are made to the hypothesis. Sometimes, the hypothesis has to be abandoned altogether or replaced with a better one. Throughout the history of criminology, many examples of such changes can be found. Lombroso began his research with the hypothesis of the born criminal, but even during his lifetime he had to revise it several times. In the end, he concluded that only one-third of criminals are born criminals, while the remaining two-thirds are the product of other factors such as poverty, moral weakness, improper upbringing, and a criminal environment. Today, no criminologist is willing to use the concept of the born criminal.
In analytical research, the causes of crime are investigated. It examines the relationship between one set of facts and another set of facts. One of these sets is called the cause, and the other the effect. Although this objective has somewhat receded into the background, it has not disappeared from view. Theories regarding the causes of crime can prove very useful for the prevention of crime.
The place of normative research in criminology is somewhat doubtful. All attempts to discover laws governing the phenomenon of crime have so far failed for various reasons, and there appears little hope of success in the future as well. What experts at one time declare as a law later turns out to be merely a trend. There is a significant difference between a law and a trend. Therefore, there seems to be little scope for normative research in criminology.
We can define criminology in these words: criminology deals with discussions related to crime. These discussions include the concept of crime, its types, its causes, its prevention, punishment, the duration and extent of punishment, its methods, the treatment of individuals involved in different crimes, and the system of justice.
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