Any account of the development of criminology should begin by looking back to Europe in the late 18th century

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Any account of the development of criminology should begin by looking back to Europe in the late 18th century.  This was a time of great social upheaval and change.  Science was beginning to be a new force and, for the first time, it began to challenge the doctrines of established religion in seeking to explain social phenomenon including crime and deviance.  Up until this point any thoughts or discussions on crime and deviance had mainly centred on the Christian church’s belief that criminals were no different from ‘ordinary’ people, but that their deviant behaviour was merely evidence of mans inherent ‘sinful state’. (The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 2002)

Beccaria’s book ‘Of Crime and Punishment’ published in 1764, was one of the first books to attempt to analyse criminal behaviour using this new scientific approach.  He wrote a critique of the existing legal systems claiming that they were unfair.  He said they were unfairly biased towards privileged members of society.  He was also one of the first so suggest that punishments should be appropriate to the crime committed and claimed that this would help ‘rational’ people to make decisions not to commit crime.  In a way this idea can be seem as a precursor to some psychological theories, for example those that discuss reinforcement and conditioning.

Since then, there have been many different theorists and theories.  These can be broadly categorised into individual theories and social (or environmental) theories.  These categories can each be broken down further into many other theories.

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One of the first individual theories proposed was a biological theory put forward by Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909), an Italian doctor who worked with (amongst others) the army in the late 18th century.  He published ‘On Criminal Man’ (1875) in which he claimed that is was possible to distinguish between criminals and non-criminals by looking at their physical make up.  Taking his ideas from Darwin’s theory of evolution, Lombroso claimed that criminals were less evolved than ‘ordinary’ people, he called this state being ‘atavistic’, meaning less evolved.   He said that there were four classifications of criminal. He described these as; Born ...

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