The Routledge Companion to Criminological Theory and Concepts

Avi Brisman, Eamonn Carrabine, Nigel South, Avi Brisman, Eamonn Carrabine, Nigel South

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138819009
• eBook ISBN: 9781317593515
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

A comprehensive one-stop reference text, The Routledge Companion to Criminological Theory and Concepts (the 'Companion') will find a place on every bookshelf, whether it be that of a budding scholar or a seasoned academic. Comprising over a hundred concise and authoritative essays written by leading scholars in the field, this volume explains in a clear and inviting way the emergence, context, evolution and current status of key criminological theories and conceptual themes.

The Companion is divided into six historical and thematic parts, each introduced by the editors and containing a selection of accessible and engaging short essays written specifically for this text:

• Foundations of criminological thought and contemporary revitalizations
• The emergence and growth of American criminology
• From appreciation to critique
• Late critical criminologies and new directions
• Punishment and security
• Geographies of crime

Comprehensive cross-referencing between entries will provide the reader with signposts to later developments, to critiques and to associated theoretical developments explored within the book, and lists of further reading in every entry will encourage independent thinking and study. This book is an essential reference work for criminology students at all levels and is the perfect companion for courses on criminological theory.

Part 1
Foundations of criminological thought and contemporary revitalizations

Part 1 Introduction

The earliest theories of crime reflected religious and spiritual beliefs – ideas based on theological understanding of the battle between Good and Evil. Crime was thought to be the result of supernatural forces: people engaged in crime because they were possessed by forces of Evil or had submitted to the temptations of Satan. According to such a ‘demonic perspective,’ crime was considered an offence against God (or gods or some other deity or deities) and brutal, corporeal punishment was inflicted in order to ‘purify’ those guilty of crime.

This approach continued into the 1700s, when it was challenged by Enlightenment thinkers Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham (often considered the father of utilitarianism). Drawing on the ideas of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, what has become known as the Classical School of criminology criticized the demonic perspective and its attendant forms of punishment, arguing instead that: individuals exercise free will in making their decisions; individuals are rational beings who pursue their own interests by attempting to maximize their pleasure and minimize their pain; and individuals may engage in crime in pursuit of their self-interests unless they are deterred by the threat of swift, certain and appropriately severe punishments.

Classical criminology predominated for about a century – from the late 1700s to the late 1800s. Rising crime rates (despite changes in the legal system and punishment inspired by the Classical School) and emerging evidence that punished offenders might be more, rather than less, inclined to continue their criminal ways led to criticisms of classical criminology. Most notably, Cesare Lombroso, an Italian physician, argued that criminals are anything but normal, rational individuals who choose to offend in pursuit of their self-interests. Rather, drawing on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Lombroso contended that criminals are ‘atavistic’ in their origin – savages living in a primitive state. Through physical examinations of criminals, Lombroso developed a list of traits that, he maintained, could be employed to differentiate ‘born criminals’ from others.

Lombroso’s individualistic theory of crime held sway into the first half of the twentieth century, when changing demographics in the United States caused criminologists and sociologists to examine social environments. Subsequent trait studies also failed to find that physical features could distinguish criminals from non-criminals, and that biological factors could lead directly to crime. For these reasons, along with concerns over the policy implications of Lombroso’s ideas (eugenics through selective breeding and sterilization), biological theories fell out of favour. By the mid-1950s, sociological theories had come to dominate criminology, and, by and large, most attempts to explain crime are sociological in orientation (see Part 2: The emergence and growth of American criminology).

In the intellectual history of criminology, the popularity of various theories has tended to ebb and flow. While both Beccaria and Lombroso argued that crime is caused by natural rather than supernatural forces, and while both Beccaria’s classical criminology and Lombroso’s biological explanations became unfashionable, their influence endures.

Beccaria’s assertions that offenders are rational thinkers who freely elect to engage in crime serve as the basis for many legal systems. The aspiration of ‘blind justice’ – that the law should be applied equally to everyone – also comes from classical criminology, as do contemporary attempts to enhance the certainty and severity of punishment. Moreover, criminological research and scholarship in the mid-1980s to the present has revived interest in classical theory (see the essays on ‘Rational choice’ and ‘Deterrence’ in this part), while many ‘control’ theorists (see Part 2) regard classical theory as essentially early control theory.

Although no serious criminologist would consider criminals to be ‘genetic throwbacks’ à la Lombroso, positivist criminologists owe much to the path forged by Lombroso. Use of a scientific approach to the study of criminals has become one of the primary strategies employed by contemporary criminologists. In addition, technological innovations in brain imaging and genetics have contributed to the re-emergence of biological and individual trait theories of crime. A growing number of criminologists today have endeavoured (and continue) to attempt to consider background and situational factors across an individual’s lifetime in their explanations of crime, as well as interweaving biological, psychological and sociological theories.

1.1
Religion, spirituality and crime

Stephen Pfohl

The earliest theories of crime are religious theories – ideas rooted in theological beliefs about warring supernatural forces in a cosmic battle between good and evil. God-fearing people who obey divinely ordained laws are pictured as pious or saintly, while criminals who transgress God’s commandments are viewed as sinners. Religious viewpoints also envision the causes of lawbreaking in supernatural terms. Evildoers are imagined as succumbing to demonic temptation and deserving of divine punishment. Sinful criminal acts have also occasionally been attributed not to the guilty mind (mens rea) of an offender but to the notion that she or he has become ‘possessed’ by a demonic spirit. In such cases, religious officials may perform rites of exorcism to expel the demon rather punish the possessed offender. While rooted in a religious theory of demonic ‘indwelling,’ the idea that someone may commit a crime because he/she is possessed foreshadows later secular criminological viewpoints, particularly the idea that ‘criminally insane’ offenders, ‘labouring under a defect of reason’ when committing a crime, should be committed for psychiatric treatment rather than held legally responsible and punished.

Another feature of religious theories involves crime’s cosmic consequences. This is due to the fact that crime, like everything else, is believed to take place in an enchanted world of invisible spiritual connections. Crime’s effects are thus never limited to individual injury, but impact the universe as a whole. Especially egregious crimes may throw the entire cosmic order out of balance until evildoers are brought to justice and spiritual communion is restored. Religious viewpoints on crime such as this, while hegemonic in medieval thought, found little currency in the modern capitalist/colonial era. Indeed, from the late eighteenth century to the present, a plethora of criminological theories, while competing for influence with each other, have each explained crime in unabashedly secular terms.

While naturalistic theories are today taken for granted by most criminologists, religious interpretations have not disappeared entirely. Think only of how crime is theorized by media-savvy evangelical Christian organizations such as the US-based The Moral Majority. For decades, groups like the Moral Majority have painted a picture of crime, delinquency, drug abuse and mass incarceration as signs of immorality and widespread spiritual malaise. Accordingly, for crime control to be effective, society must first undergo widespread spiritual revival. Messages to this effect are repeated daily in fundamentalist Christian churches and media, and by televangelists such as Reverend Jerry Falwell, a founder of the Moral Majority and Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. For 50 years Falwell hosted the weekly Old Time Gospel Hour, a highly influential conduit for conservative Christian thought and politics, watched by millions.

Falwell’s fierce religious criminology was nowhere more on display than in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011. Conversing on TV with Reverend Pat Robinson, another influential televange-list, Falwell interpreted the attacks as a sign that God had lifted his ‘curtain of protection’ and allowed the United States’ enemies ‘to give us what we probably deserve.’ Robinson concurred, pointing the finger with Falwell at those ‘who’ve got to bear some of the burden of this’ – people who ‘mock God’ but ‘God will not be mocked’: ‘abortionists,’ ‘pagans,’ ‘feminists,’ ‘gays and lesbians,’ civil libertarians and secular humanists of various stripes.

For further evidence of the continuing influence of religious theories one need venture no further than the other side of the 9/11 attacks. The attacks were, after all, accounted for in explicit religious terms by the jihadists who perpetrated them. Citing the ‘evils’ of a US foreign policy that allegedly targeted Muslims, Al-Qaeda theorist Osama Bin Laden claimed that the attacks were carried out with God’s blessing in defence of Islam. Although Bin Laden’s theology of terror has been condemned by leading Islamic scholars the globe over, Salafist justifications for extreme violence against ‘infidels’ are again being offered by terrorists aligned with Daesh or the self-declared Islamic State (IS/ISIS).

See Chapter 4.19 Institutional/anti-institutional violence

Conservative religious interpreters of the three Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – often cite related scriptural grounds for harsh punishment of criminals. Consider the Old Testament precept of ‘an eye for an eye’ or lex talionis, a principle advocated by righteous adherents of all three monotheistic religions – although dispensed with by Jesus’ New Testament proclamation of God’s love and forgiveness. Thus, a thief’s hand should be cut off, as should the penis of a rapist; and the tongue of a liar and the heart of a traitor should be cut out. Someone who takes another’s life is said to deserve the same. Bloody punishments of this sort convey strong religious messages and were said to give criminals a glimpse of the hell that awaited them in the afterlife (Newman 1978: 46).

See Chapter 4.26 Patriarchy and crime

The predominant story of crime told by Abrahamic religions has also been a patriarchal story; and the orthodox legal codes of Jews, Christians and Muslims are replete with negative images of women as second-class citizens in the spiritual realm or, worse yet, as temptresses who lead men to sin. The opening chapters of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, provide a template for this criminological displacement of women. Eve – seduced by the wily Serpent (a pre-monotheistic Mesopotamian symbol of the Earth as a sacred ‘Mother of All the Living’) – tempts Adam with fruit from the tree from which God had forbidden them to eat. Eve’s treachery, we are taught, resulted in humankind’s first crime – and banishment from Paradise. In this way, making Eve an archetype figure for ‘original sin’ casts a negative theological shadow on women, making women a target for men’s religious fears and fervours, resentments and suspicion. But nowhere in Occidental history was criminal law used more viciously in the service of patriarchy than during the so-called ‘witch craze’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

See Chapter 3.7 Folk devils

Medieval Christianity had for centuries coexisted with popular animistic beliefs revering nature as a sacred mother or goddess. While Christians residing in royal courts and urban enclaves typically embraced a more doctrinaire version of monotheism, peasants everywhere across Europe mixed the ‘old religion’ of ‘Mother Earth’ with the newer rites of ‘God the Father.’ This changed drastically in the late fifteenth century as inquisitors at the helms of church and state joined in a war against the crime of ‘witchcraft.’ The resulting campaign of terror took its theory from a papal bull issued by Innocent VIII in 1484 and was buttressed by the 1487 publication of the Malleus Maleficarum, a notorious guide for hunting witches authored by two Dominican monks. Citing the depiction in Genesis of Eve’s primordial temptation of Adam, Malleus Maleficarum took aim at women, claiming, as did St. Augustine, that women’s sexuality represented a pernicious ‘gateway to the devil’ (Kramer and Sprenger 1487/1971). For two centuries this misogynous handbook guided the persecution of European animists. A related religious logic was used to justify violence against the original inhabitants of Europe’s colonies, where, under the auspices of ‘cross and crown,’ conquerors likened the animism of indigenous people to devil-worship and dealt with it accordingly, sometimes by genocidal means.

See Chapter 4.13 Genocide and ecocide

Eighty per cent of those accused, tortured and burnt at the stake for witchcraft in Eur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• About the editors
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• A rendezvous subject? A fragmented discipline? An introduction to The Routledge Companion to Criminological Theory and Concepts
• Part 1 Foundations of criminological thought and contemporary revitalizations
• Part 2 The emergence and growth of American criminology
• Part 3 From appreciation to critique
• Part 4 Late critical criminologies and new directions
• Part 5 Punishment and security
• Part 6 Geographies of crime
• Index