Critical criminology Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Critical criminology - Essay Example Plato, for example was in favour of a penal system which was curative, seeking to reform wrongdoers, and spoke out against retribution because it only increases suffering and brings no good result. (Bauman: 1996 , p. 3) Increasingly, laws were created to sustain a dominant view of society and silence any resistance to this from people who would rather escape such tight regulation. An increasing reliance on scientific methods, using all the benefits of new scientific discoveries such as magnification, fingerprinting and evidence based practice had the advantage of rooting out superstition and religion as judicial tools, but it had the disadvantage of subjecting human beings to ever tighter systems of control and regulation. Eventually critical criminology emerged to take issue with the free will argument and look instead at a much wider range of issues which contribute to the way people behave in society. In modern western societies these different views coexist in the academic litera ture and in society at large, because there is no agreement on one single view of how to define crime, its causes, its remedies and the way society should deal with it. Mainstream Criminology and its main assumptions. The fundamental basis of mainstream criminology is the thinking of utilitarianism developed by writers like Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). It is no coincidence that these ideas developed at a time when European society was becoming more urban and industrialized. (Morrison: 1995, pp. 71-76) The close proximity of large numbers of people, often in poor housing conditions and relative poverty, resulted in repeated crime waves and instability in society. This very rational approach to crime assumes that the needs of individuals must be balanced with the needs of society in general, and this results in a suppression of â€Å"deviant† behaviour which harms the majority. One of the good outcomes of this kind of criminology is that it clarifies what is sanctioned by societ y and what is not, and it provides a basis for setting up a universal legal and penal system that aims to treat people fairly. A less positive outcome is a tendency to promote the views and interests of powerful patriarchal figures, focusing on the maintenance of the status quo, and allowing people in law enforcement to abuse their power, often in institutionalised ways which become an inbuilt part of the system. The persecution of black people in America and the outlawing of gay people in most countries until very recently are examples of rules which set out deliberately to benefit one segment of society at the expense of another. Van Swaaningen believes that there are two major belief systems that have been at work in mainstream criminology since the Second World War and these are neo classicism and positivism which he explains as follows: â€Å"the first views crime as the moral lapse of the freely willed individual; the second, as a pathological determinism of individuals cause d by genetic, family or social defects.† (Young: 1997, p. vii) What these two approaches have in common is that they focus on the individual human being as the source of the problem, and they assume that dealing with crime is a matter of dealing with that person. This kind of criminology uses statistical evidence to build up a picture of how when and where crime occurs, and it focuses on methods of prevention and methods of detection and control of offenders. One big