ABSTRACT
The received history of criminology as a discipline of study often starts with influential figures and their links with landmark theoretical perspectives such as classicism in the eighteenth century and positivism in the nineteenth. This chapter provides an introductory account of criminology’s development, starting with the writings of criminal law reformers in the eighteenth century, particularly Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham.These writers drew upon Enlightenment ideals and characterized the offender as a rational, free-willed actor who engaged in crime in a calculated way and was responsive to the deterrent penalties that these reformers advocated.This classical school of criminology was then challenged in the late nineteenth century by writers of the positivist school, including Cesare Lombroso, Enrico Ferri and Francis Galton, who adopted a more empirical, scientific approach to the subject and investigated the criminal using the techniques of anthropology, anthropometry and other new human sciences. The positivist school claimed to have discovered the existence of ‘criminal types’ whose behaviour
was determined rather than chosen, and for whom treatment rather than punishment was appropriate. Subsequent work has refuted many early positivist claims but the project of ‘scientific criminology’ continues today.
