Essay Compare And Contrast The Biological And Sociological Explanations Of Crime
Compare and contrast biological and psychological explanations of crime with sociological explanations of criminality.
Theories are useful tools, which suggest the way things are and not the way things ought to be, we can use them to help us to understand the world around us. In terms of criminal and deviant behaviour the theories proposed in this subject area set out to try and give reason as to why an individual commits criminal or delinquent acts. In this essay I will be using biological, psychological and sociological explanations of criminality to suggest why individuals take part in criminal behaviours.
Biological theories such as positivist criminology, view criminal behaviour as the result of a defect in the individual. This defect can be biological or genetic in nature, and serves to separate the criminal from law-abiding citizen. Cesare Lombroso has been seen as the founder of modern criminology, introducing the positivist movement in the late nineteenth century and thus providing a more scientific approach to criminology. The positivist approach to researching and understanding criminality introduced the idea of empirically researching crime, and has produced many illustrious theories and …show more content…
This view of the criminal as an “evolutionary mismatch” (Morrison et al, 1995) advocates social Darwinism and thus promotes eugenics as a method of ‘treatment’. A disadvantage of Lombroso’s study is that his sample was unrepresentative of the population as a whole as he only studied those in prison and only looked at deceased bodies. It is more than likely that the features that he identified as being criminalist would have also been found in those in the general public however he was known to often overlook individual differences between people (Bohm et al,
Theories are useful tools, which suggest the way things are and not the way things ought to be, we can use them to help us to understand the world around us. In terms of criminal and deviant behaviour the theories proposed in this subject area set out to try and give reason as to why an individual commits criminal or delinquent acts. In this essay I will be using biological, psychological and sociological explanations of criminality to suggest why individuals take part in criminal behaviours.
Biological theories such as positivist criminology, view criminal behaviour as the result of a defect in the individual. This defect can be biological or genetic in nature, and serves to separate the criminal from law-abiding citizen. Cesare Lombroso has been seen as the founder of modern criminology, introducing the positivist movement in the late nineteenth century and thus providing a more scientific approach to criminology. The positivist approach to researching and understanding criminality introduced the idea of empirically researching crime, and has produced many illustrious theories and …show more content…
This view of the criminal as an “evolutionary mismatch” (Morrison et al, 1995) advocates social Darwinism and thus promotes eugenics as a method of ‘treatment’. A disadvantage of Lombroso’s study is that his sample was unrepresentative of the population as a whole as he only studied those in prison and only looked at deceased bodies. It is more than likely that the features that he identified as being criminalist would have also been found in those in the general public however he was known to often overlook individual differences between people (Bohm et al,