Schools of criminology and their penal policies
Penology and Victimology · Unit I · Topic 2 of 17 · 5 min read
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1. The pre-classical (demonological) school
Before the eighteenth century, crime in Europe was explained in religious terms: the offender was possessed by evil spirits or had yielded to the devil. Crime and sin were not separated. Punishment followed from that view. It was meant to drive out the evil, appease the deity and terrify others, so it was public, bodily and severe: torture, mutilation, branding and death for a long list of offences. Procedure was secret and judges had wide, arbitrary discretion. This is the system the classical writers attacked.
2. The classical school
The founder is Cesare Beccaria, whose On Crimes and Punishments (1764) argued that:
- people act from free will and calculate pleasure and pain, so they choose crime when it pays;
- punishment is justified only to the extent it prevents crime; anything more is tyranny;
- punishment must be proportionate to the harm done to society, fixed in advance by the legislature, and the same for everyone who commits the same act;
- certainty and promptness of punishment deter better than severity;
- torture and secret accusations should be abolished, and the death penalty is neither necessary nor useful.
Jeremy Bentham built the same idea into utilitarianism. His “felicific calculus” asked that the pain of punishment just exceed the pleasure of the crime. He also designed the Panopticon, a prison in which every inmate could be watched from one point.
Penal policy. Fixed penalties, proportion to the act, legality (no crime or punishment without prior law), and deterrence. The classical school gave us the principle of legality and the idea of a written penal code, both of which the IPC and now the BNS reflect. Its weakness was that it looked only at the act and ignored the actor: a first offender, a child and a habitual criminal received the same punishment for the same act.
3. The neo-classical school
The French Penal Code of 1810 applied classical rigidity and produced obvious injustice. Its revision in 1819 and the writings of Rossi, Garraud and Joly introduced the neo-classical modification: free will is accepted, but it can be impaired by age, insanity, intoxication, provocation or circumstance. The judge was therefore given some discretion to individualise within the legislative range, and mitigating circumstances entered the law. The general exceptions in the BNS (infancy, unsoundness of mind, intoxication) and the practice of fixing a maximum and leaving the actual sentence to the judge are neo-classical in origin.
4. The positive (Italian) school
The positive school rejected free will and applied scientific method to the offender.
- Cesare Lombroso (L'uomo delinquente, 1876) claimed the born criminal was an atavistic type, a throwback to an earlier stage of evolution, recognisable by physical stigmata such as an asymmetrical skull and large jaw. Later research, notably Charles Goring's study of English convicts (1913), found no such type, and Lombroso himself came to accept the role of social factors.
- Enrico Ferri classified causes into anthropological, physical and social factors, and classified criminals into born, insane, habitual, occasional and passionate. He proposed “penal substitutes”: social measures such as free trade, street lighting and cheap housing that remove the causes of crime.
- Raffaele Garofalo introduced the idea of natural crime, the violation of the basic sentiments of pity and probity, and argued for measures according to the dangerousness of the offender.
Penal policy. Treatment should fit the offender, not the offence. Punishment should be individualised, indeterminate where necessary, and aimed at the protection of society. Dangerous offenders should be incapacitated; others should be reformed. Probation, the juvenile court and the indeterminate sentence all draw on this school.
5. The sociological school
Sociologists shifted the cause of crime from the body to society. Durkheim treated crime as normal in every society and linked it to anomie, a breakdown of norms; Robert Merton explained crime as a response to the gap between culturally approved goals and the legitimate means available to reach them. Edwin Sutherland, author of the prescribed book Principles of Criminology, gave the differential association theory: criminal behaviour is learned in interaction with others, chiefly in intimate personal groups, and a person becomes delinquent when definitions favourable to breaking the law outweigh those unfavourable to it. Sutherland also coined the term white-collar crime.
Penal policy. If crime is learned and socially produced, prison can worsen it by placing offenders among other offenders. The sociological school therefore favours prevention through social reform, community treatment, and keeping first offenders out of prison: the basis for probation, open prisons and community service.
6. The clinical school and modern penology
No single cause explains all crime. The modern view, sometimes called the clinical or multiple-factor approach, studies each offender individually, combining psychological, medical and social assessment, and chooses the treatment that fits. Sentencing reports, the mitigation investigation the Supreme Court now requires in capital cases, and classification of prisoners in the Model Prison Manual, 2016 all rest on that approach.
7. What the schools mean for Indian law
- Classical: legality, written offences and maximum penalties in the BNS.
- Neo-classical: general exceptions and judicial discretion within a range.
- Positive: the Probation of Offenders Act, 1958, the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, and individualised sentencing.
- Sociological: community service under the BNS, open prisons, and crime prevention through social measures.
How this is examined
Schools of criminology are not named in the Unit I syllabus line, but older papers set them, and the material is needed to answer “theories of punishment” and “crime prevention” questions well. Use the cause-and-cure format above. For a 10-mark essay, give each school a short paragraph on its view of crime, its leading writers and its penal policy, and end with section 7. For a short note on any one writer (Beccaria, Lombroso, Sutherland), give the main idea, the criticism and its legacy in Indian law.
Now try the real questions: Penology and Victimology past question papers.