Criminology cooperates with many disciplines to prevent and eradicate crime. Examples of such disciplines include criminal law, which studies responsibility for the commission of crimes and the punishment that will follow a committed crime. Moreover, criminology cooperates with forensic medicine, which provides the necessary forensic statistics (Hagan and Daigle 6). In addition, criminology interacts with sociology, which studies society and its processes, and psychology, which studies the inner life of people and their behavior. Criminology has a direct connection with all of these and many other sciences.
In criminology, there are two schools that have specific ideas on which their teachings are based, and it is called Classical and Neoclassical schools. The idea of the Classical School is that people have free will when making decisions, and punishment is a deterrent for them when committing a crime. The teachings of the Neoclassical school are based on the fact that they consider the motives and other circumstances of the commission of a crime, which make it possible to reduce or increase the penalties.
Situational crime prevention aims to reduce opportunities and incentives for committing criminal acts. This is done by maximizing the risk of being detected. In addition, situational crime prevention minimizes the benefits for criminals from committing illegal actions. It helps to assist victims of crimes, as well as correctly organizes the environment in public places. The crime prevention strategy is aimed at improving the well-being of certain groups. Furthermore, this strategy increases the availability of social benefits for the population, such as healthcare, education, employment, and others.
There are many different theories of crime that have been proposed by various authors to explain the reasons for which crimes are committed. One such idea is the biological theory of crime which was created by the Italian forensic psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso (Dunnage 1). This theory lies in the fact that people have certain innate anatomical and psychophysiological features, which as a result, lead them to commit criminal acts. However, biological theories do not have reliable confirmation, and natural causes are part of many other general theories. In the modern world, the biological approach to crime is not used in the investigation of crimes committed, as it is not entirely reliable.
From a biosocial point of view, a person has a dual essence. Since humans are social beings, they regularly enter into social relationships. Besides being social creatures, humans are also biological organisms. The joint presence of both signs in humans forms an integral entity that has its own biological and physiological characteristics. Criminological, the biosocial essence of a person is expressed in violence, that is, the desire to hurt other people.
There are various theories of the commission of a crime, but they are all different and have their characteristics. Psychological theories of crime basically contain the idea that the urge to commit a crime is dictated by the psychology of people and that all people are deviants by nature. The fact is that all people have different degrees of deviance. The difference with other theories is that psychological theories investigate the personality directly and associate the cause of the crime with it. Other approaches focus on the motives of the committed crime.
There are also types of people who are capable of committing crimes. For example, there are such terms as psychopath and antisocial personality. A psychopath is a person who demonstrates psychopathic traits, manifested in the inability of an individual to repent and show empathy towards others. An antisocial personality is a person who is opposed to any person, group, or activity that helps other people improve. The difference is that a psychopath has no empathy for other people, and an antisocial personality with a negative attitude prevents other people from becoming better.
There is an opinion that society cannot exist without crime. According to Durkheim’s theory of social disorganization, crime is a normal phenomenon in society, which is unpleasant, but without which the existence of humanity is impossible (Bellair 2). This is because crime is connected with the social life of people, which means that it allows law and ethics to develop and improve. This idea is used to this day, as it has a significant impact not only on criminology but also on sociology.
Strain theory considers that the tension that was caused by certain factors in society, such as low wages or the unavailability of a good education, is a factor that encourages people to commit crimes. Classical theories draw attention to disadvantaged segments of the population, in which the inability to have enough means of subsistence, and the lack of desire to receive it, leads to the desire to commit crimes. For example, people whose incomes put them below the poverty threshold could not realize common, socially acceptable ambitions through legal means. Therefore, they were forced to take the path of criminal behavior to achieve their goals. Later, a new deformation theory was proposed, which demonstrated the weaknesses of previous theories. In addition, it included incorrect justifications of crimes committed by middle-class people and discrepancies between their desires and the expected result after their decision.
Works Cited
Bellair, Paul. Social Disorganization Theory. Oxford University Press, 2017.
Dunnage, Jonathan. “The Work of Cesare Lombroso and its Reception: Further Contexts and Perspectives.” Crime, History & Societies, vol.22, no.2, 2018, pp. 1-19. Web.
Hagan, Frank and Daigle Leah. Introduction to Criminology. Sage, 2020.