Positive Criminology

POSITIVE CRIMINOLOGY 1
Positive Criminology
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Student’s Name

POSITIVE CRIMINOLOGY 2
Positive Criminology
There are two theories of criminology namely; firstly the positivists theory and secondly the
classical theory. These theories form the basis of the historic perspective of criminology. The paper
aims to review the theory of positivism that suggests criminals are a result of nature, and not
nurture. In other words, it can be understood that criminals are born and not made into criminals.
The suggested theory is the positive criminology and the purpose of the paper is to affirm the theory
and its respective supporters.
Clarence Ray Jeffery (1959) in his paper ‘The Historical Development of Criminology’
attempts to review the ideas of pioneers of the field of criminology in relation to the positivist
school of thought, by understanding the ideas held by the pioneers. The historical account of
criminology would be value-less unless we relate it to the current trends (Jeffery, 1959). He further
suggests that criminology can be viewed as comprising three varying types of problems: The
problem relating to the individual who broke the law, problem relating to custody as well as the
treatment of the lawbreaker upon judgment, which is the challenge of accounting for the crime
empirically. Positivists suggest that the causes of criminality are actually beyond the offender’s
control (Jeffery, 1959). The positive school of thought disregards the legal definition. It focuses
more on the psychological grounds behind such criminal activities, and the methodology to analyze
such factors leading to a particular crime.
Positivism had influenced the justice deliverance in the criminal justice system by
supporting many research thesis from varied disciplines like psychology, physiology, social work,
psychiatry and so on. Positivism has accepted a scientific approach to the study of criminology. The
subjective perception of the school involved much determination of the role played by the offender,
which may include his or her personality, intelligence, body structure, family background, family
and social relations, and the group to which the individual belongs and so on. Lombroso is one of
the pioneers of positivistic theory and has explained that in order to assess a crime, assessment of

POSITIVE CRIMINOLOGY 3
the human behavior that may have led to the commission of such crime is very important. This
embarks the mentality and the motive of the person, which is one of the most important elements of
a crime.
In the late nineteenth century, the classical school of thought was challenged by the
positivists, led primarily by three eminent scholars; Cesare Lombroso, Enrico Ferri and Raffaele
Garofalo. It has been laid down that the significance of the positivistic theory is its assessment of
deterministic and scientific methodologies while assessing a crime. The individual offenders are
individually studied scientifically to extract the hidden motive of the person or the circumstances
under which then crime was committed. However, the positive school also orients that study of law
and society is not of much use because such criminals can never be reformed. The theory of
positivism denies the concept of intuition, reasoning for the commission of crime, theological and
metaphysical knowledge of the consequences of such act. The basic difference between both the
schools is that while the classical school establishes free will for the commission of a crime, and
that the crime is one’s choice whereas, the positivist school affirms that crime is not a choice but it
is imbibed within a person’s personality right from his or her birth. The theory of criminal justice
system stands on the discipline that criminology is a science and it cannot be successful until it is
able to reform a criminal. Hence, the main challenge of this school is the social defenses, which
means that the professional service providers thriving for the reformation of a criminal should have
fulfillment of their requirements to ensure their access to the up-to-date tools for managing and
reforming them.
The concept of Social Defense or the Professional Service providers towards the reformation
of an offender is an infusion of both the schools of thoughts where, a person’s mind is studied to
bring out his or her motive behind the action, along with the consequences and its knowledge that a
person chose to ignore while committing a crime. The purpose of these defenses is to extract the
findings from the human science and apply the same to re-examine the background that hails the