ABSTRACT
Crime was one form of that wider category of social action, deviance; criminology should be absorbed into the sociology of deviance. There are two scriptural beginnings to the history of criminology, each marking out a somewhat different fate for the study of crime and its control. The whole of the past century of criminology can be understood as a series of creative, even brilliant, yet eventually repetitive variations on these late-nineteenth-century themes. The particular image conjured by Lombroso's criminal type – the atavistic genetic throwback – faded away, but the subsequent structure and logic of criminological explanation remained largely within the positivist paradigm. Most criminologists are employed at the core of the enterprise, busy either describing, classifying, and explaining crime or else analyzing, evaluating, and advocating policy. But whether positivist or neo-classical, radical or conservative, detached intellectuals or disguised policemen, criminologists confront the same questions.
