The Meaning of the Term "Positivist Criminology"
In the early 1800s, it was customary practise to carry out executions in public. It was hoped that people in society would modify their behaviour out of fear of the public shame that accompanied dishonesty because of this concept. This justification for the use of punishment is consistent with the philosophy known as utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is a philosophy that states people are driven by the desire for pleasure and the fear of pain; hence, punishments have the potential to be effective in preventing criminal behaviour. Around the middle of the 1800s, various conceptions of offenders and their punishments began to emerge. Positivist criminology, which is the study of criminal behaviour based on elements in the environment, started to gain popularity about this time.
The Theory of Positivism
The core tenet of the positivist school of criminology is that criminals are born to be criminals rather than growing up to become criminals. To put this another way, criminal tendencies are a product of a person's innate characteristics rather than the environment they were raised in. In addition, the role of free will in criminal behaviour is not typically investigated by positive criminologists since they believe it has no bearing on criminal behaviour.
Cesare Lombroso is a well-known example of a positive criminologist. During the middle of the 1800s, he conducted research on cadavers with the goal of determining the physiological underpinnings of criminal behaviour. Lombroso made a distinction between several kinds of criminals, such as "born criminals" and "criminaloids," among other categories. Studies that Lombroso published suggested that people who were born into criminal families shared comparable facial characteristics. These characteristics included huge canine teeth, large jaws, low-sloping foreheads, high cheekbones, and others. Criminaloids, on the other hand, did not have the outward appearance of a person who was born a criminal but instead developed into one over the course of their lives as a result of environmental influences. It was believed that criminaloids were responsible for fewer serious offences than other categories of criminals.
Positive criminology theories were popular during the 1960s and 1970s, and they hypothesised that defective chromosomes were to blame for criminal tendencies. According to one hypothesis, which was referred to as the XYY theory, guys who committed violent acts had an additional copy of the Y chromosome, which increased their propensity to commit crimes. On the other hand, this notion was debunked at a later date.
A prominent psychologist by the name of Philippe Rushton came up with a new idea in the 1990s. His hypothesis proposed that people from East Asia had larger brains, higher levels of intelligence, slower rates of development, and a greater propensity to obey the law in comparison to people from Europe or Africa.
In spite of these most recent findings, positivist criminology isn't as widely used as it once was. This is because other schools of thought in criminology place more of an emphasis on the ways in which environmental factors influence criminal behaviour and on the various methods by which criminals can be rehabilitated. Because it has moral repercussions, people are also less likely to subscribe to the theory that a person's outward appearance can be used to infer their propensity toward criminal behaviour. After all, you probably wouldn't like it if someone judged you to be a bad person based solely on the way you look. As a result, this line of thinking is seen to be discriminatory by certain individuals.
Conclusion
The goal of positivist criminology is to provide an explanation for why criminal acts occur, and it relies its theories on the assumption that every individual is born with a particular predisposition for criminal behaviour. Furthermore, positivist beliefs do not support the assumption that criminal acts are logical activities; rather, criminal acts are predisposed based on a person's make up and are beyond the person's ability to exercise self-control. Many of these ideas have lost ground in recent years in favour of approaches that seek to rehabilitate prisoners and better comprehend the relationship between environment and criminal behaviour.
Outcomes of Reading
After you have completed everything, you ought to be able to:
- Remember the ideas that drove the development of the positivist school of criminology, which focused on the relationship between punishment and incentive.
- Explain the essential tenet of the positivist approach to criminology.
- Discuss some of the hypotheses that positivist criminologists have put out in order to explain why people engage in criminal conduct.