Essay on Classical Tradition of Criminology

The classical school of criminology was developed in the eighteenth century, predominantly by Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham, where this idea of classical thinking emerged as a way to explore the nature of criminal justice as well as to diagnose the nature of criminal behavior as before the eighteenth century there was no secular theory or specialist body concerned with this. Criminology as a whole is based on modern ideas that led to the Enlightenment, these Enlightenment thinkers championed many new radical concepts that had never been thought of before. According to Beccaria classical criminology assumes that people have free will and are therefore ultimately responsible for their own actions, this is in conjunction with the concept of ‘rational principles’, which make sure the penalties of the crime will outweigh the advantages, so we are steered away from self-interest and towards a person moral reasoning (Radzinowicz, L. 1966).

The Enlightenment plays a key function in understanding where criminology collectively is derived from and Foucault (1975) argues this change of popular attitudes towards physical punishment and therefore crime and criminal justice was the result of the influence of this set of ideas known as the Enlightenment. The radical new concepts involved anti-clericalism which meant these thinkers opposed the rights of the church and religion to tell us what is good or bad, true, or false and moral or immoral, this is because they believed the authority of the church was being used to reinforce superstition and irrationality inside of people’s heads, such as demons, devils, and virgin births. A second radical concept was rationalism; the idea that the knowledge we have should be based on observation, experiment, and induction rather than being based on faith, speculation or on the holy books. Lastly, Enlightenment thinkers were part of a political movement of legal and constitutional reform which undermined sovereign power, and gave us a new political language of rights, citizenship and provided us with the idea that people were not subjects of power and authority, but they are individuals with natural rights. This movement in political language allowed people to not see themselves as subjects i.e., people who existed simply to serve the sovereign. These ideas were important for the development of criminology as Enlightenment thinkers were the very first people to define society as a specific object of study and regard the community as something you can understand rationally, through observations and the collection of data. The thinkers argued that society was not mysterious or the product of God’s plan, rather society was something which had objective natural causes. These ideas mark out the start of a scientific approach, which without the Enlightenment would not be possible, therefore without this we would not have the understanding we do today of crime and the criminal justice system.

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Classical criminology is predominantly concerned with explaining crime rationally, thus naturalistically, so it gives us the very first natural understanding of crime as coming from natural sources, hence the first secular understanding therefore one which is not religious based (Blaikie, D., 2014). Before the 18th century people explained natural disasters as punishments from God or from the spirits from their various wrongdoings, this is known as spiritualism. Secondly, those who committed crimes were often thought to be possessed by evil spirits or demons, this concept arose from the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. Spiritualism was also the most dominant view in the feudal period, where these spiritualistic beliefs became integral to criminal justice and to an elaborate range of judicial methods, which were used to deal with people who were accused of committing crimes. This leads onto the fact that in the premodern world, the understanding that the world was ultimately run by supernatural forces gave rise to specific methods of trial and punishment (Vold, G. B., and Bernard, T. J., 1979) These methods were comprised of trial by combat, trial by ordeal and compurgation, all which involved God finding you innocent. Trial by combat consisted of the victim or their family members to fight the offender or a representative of the offender, and it was believed that the victory would go to the innocent, if they believed and trusted in God, therefore God protecting the virtuous. Trial by ordeal was where the accused would be subjected to life threatening situations in order to discover their innocence or guilt, this could be through trial by fire, whereby the accused would have to handle a hot stone and carry it over a certain distance, if the wound they received healed within a certain time frame the person would be innocent as God intervened and assisted with the healing process. Lastly, compurgation allowed the accused to have a respected member of society such as a high ranking noble, or local vicar swear under oath that the person must be innocent, the idea behind this was that no one would swear under oath because of their fear of gods punishment (Oppenheim, J., 1985) Classical criminology therefore replaced all these ideas to do with spiritualism into naturalistic explanations of crime (Vold, G. B., 1958). The classical perspective states that there are two natural impulses built into human beings, these are reason under which morality falls, and passion under which egoism falls, the free will philosophy also sets forth that criminals will voluntarily place ‘passion’ before ‘reason’, thus meaning the criminal justice system whilst is based on reason, is fundamentally about deterrence. Deterrence is all to do with making sure the penalties of crime will outweigh the advantages, so we are steered away from self-interest and towards moral reason. In our knowledge and understanding today of crime and the criminal justice system we still adopt many of the ideas that were contributed by the classical tradition. An example of this would be the presumption of innocence, and that it should be a guidance of justice, meaning the prosecution has to establish the guilt of the accused beyond a reasonable doubt, this concept is a main factor in our criminal justice system today. The idea of utility or retribution without gratuity, we adopted over time, due to the trial by ordeal combat in the medieval times through to the death penalty being abolished in 1965 in the UK to now in our CJS where we truly endorse the concept that the severity of the punishment should be limited and should not go beyond what is useful for the purposes of retribution, therefore avoiding unnecessary cruelty but still being harsh enough.

Overall, the classical tradition of criminology unequivocally provided us with the first modern understanding of crime and criminal justice, from the Enlightenment period through to Cesare Beccaria introducing and being the most influential classical theorist. Without the contribution of classical criminology for our understanding of crime and the criminal justice system, we would not be where we are today when dealing with criminals. Although we still have further to come within the CJS, classical criminology played an extensive role in where we are in present-day society.