Sociological theories of crime 1000 (1007)

Do human beings perpetrate evil deeds because they will it or because they cannot help

themselves? Sociological theories of crime seek an answer to this vital question by looking at

criminogenic elements in social structure, such as poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, alcoholism,

social disorganization, as opposed to psychological theories, focusing on individual upbringing and

familial influences, and biological theories, studying the natural causation of crime like atavism,

constitutional inferiority, heredity, genetics, and so forth. Two of the earliest instances of

sociological theorizing of crime were a remark by Socrates that evil is the consequence of

ignorance, and therefore that offenders do not know better, and one by Flavius M. A. Cassiodorus

(A.D. c. 490 - c. 575), a jurist and counselor under king Theodoric, who held that “poverty is the

mother of crime.” The central assumptions of this class of theories are that humans are rational

beings inclined to avoid pain and pursue pleasure, with an innate potential for both good and evil,

and that environmental forces affect their conduct. Among sociological criminologists, there are

some (Social Control Theory) who maintain that such forces are largely beyond their control, and

call starkly into question the idea that crime is the result of individual moral failure. Like biological

determinism, this brand of structuralist-functionalist determinism is likely to destroy the notion of

free will, consolidating the idea that criminals are at once less responsible for their actions and more

dangerous, together with the view that the only legitimate and viable purpose of criminology is the

protection of society by indoctrination and systemic bias. Others (Classical School, Strain Theory)

counter that elements of the social milieu ought to be viewed as simply facilitating factors and that

individuals remain able to exercise their free will and bring their impulses under control. A shared

feature of these theories is that criminals are made, not born, that there is no such thing as an

inescapable genetic factor unfailingly leading to a life of delinquency and that, as a result,

delinquents can be rehabilitated as society is reformed.

It is worth noticing that, owing to the traditionally hierarchical structure of human society, it

was only by the end of the eighteenth century, that Cesare Bonesana, Marquis of Beccaria,

published his enormously influential, Enlightenment-inspired “Dei delitti e delle pene” (“An essay

on crime and punishments”, 1764), in which he deplored the customary fixation with the “predatory

poor” and convenient oversight of the crimes committed by the “predatory wealthy”. He wrote:

“Against the life and liberty of a citizen are crimes of the highest nature. Under this head we

comprehend not only assassinations and robberies, committed by the populace, but by grandees and

magistrates; whose example acts with more force and at a greater distance, destroying the ideas of

justice and duty among the subjects, and substituting that of the right of the strongest, equally

dangerous to those who exercise it, and to those who suffer.” This marked the beginning of Conflict

Theory, with its emphasis on the exploitation and manipulation of subordinate groups by dominant

ones. It was the equivalent of a Copernican Revolution in criminology, for it expressed the

resentment and impatience of the rising bourgeoisie with the unrestrained and callous pursuit of

power of part of the aristocracy and the clergy. Beccaria’s ideas would exercise a considerable

influence on the drafters of the American Bill of Rights, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and

the 1790 French Constitution.

During the nineteenth century, Europe and the United States experienced growing anxiety

about a perceived rise of antisocial behavior, due to widespread industrialization, population

displacement, urbanization and the growth of the proletariat. Recently devised statistical tools were

deployed to gather all sorts of numerical data (age, gender, occupation, schooling, etc.) in order to

find out about possible patterns, trends and law-like regularities (e.g. why some countries, regions

and towns are more violent than others?). Belgian statistician Lambert-Adolphe-Jacques Quételet

(1796-1874) went so far as to claim that “We can tell beforehand how many will stain their hands

with the blood of their fellow-creatures, how many will be forgers, how many poisoners, almost as

one can foretell the number of births and deaths.” Quételet was one of the founders of those

ecological perspectives on criminal behavior that would be most famously developed in France by

Émile Durkheim and, in the United States, starting in the late 1910s – early 1920s, by the Chicago

School of urban sociology of Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, Nels Anderson, Clifford Shaw and

Henry McKay. The pioneering surveys of Quételet and his French colleague André-Michel Guerry

made it possible to discover that criminal behavior was not necessarily linked to absolute poverty

and illiteracy: the poorest French departments were, on the average, the most moral, noted Quetelet.

Instead, there was a clear and direct correlation between delinquency, violence, inequality in wealth

and sudden and sharp fluctuations of income, leading to the conclusion that “each society has the

criminals it deserves.” This finding is corroborated by historical records showing that the transition

from agrarian to industrial society went hand in hand with a decrease in the homicide rate in

Europe, but not in the United States.

Even though the abundant empirical evidence pointing to the complexity of human nature

and social processes should have ruled out fate as a determinant of anti-social, violent and

aggressive behaviour, together with oversimplified solutions to long-standing problems, the

inability or unwillingness of policy-makers to reform capitalist society are causing current

criminological trends to become increasingly driven by a monist and radically intolerant doctrine of

social order, cohesion, harmony ideology, and fear of personal liberties. I am referring to the

propensity to take the principle of social protection to its logical extreme, namely a “minority report

scenario” where law-enforcers are expected to act even before someone has committed a crime.

This would import a radical change in the relations between citizens and authorities and in the

fabric of society itself: surveillance, preventive detention, and the selective incapacitation of certain

categories of citizens would become ubiquitous features of modern life.

For more information:

Beirne, Piers. Inventing Criminology: Essays on the Rise of ‘Homo Criminalis’. Albany: SUNY

Press, 1993.

Monkkonen, Eric. “Homicide: explaining America’s exceptionalism,” American Historical Review,

2006, 111(1): pp. 76-94.

Rennie, Ysabel. The search for criminal man. A conceptual history of the dangerous offender.

Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1978.

Rose, Nikolas. “The biology of culpability: pathological identity and crime control in a biological

culture,” Theoretical Criminology, 2000, vol. 4 (1): pp. 5-34.

Stefano Fait, Fondazione Museo Storico del Trentino, Trento, Italy.