Essay On Criminology

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Criminology is the study of crime in general and the study of criminals.It focuses on the effects of crime on people and the society and helps criminologists and other agencies to identify what made an individual commit a crime and also how to prevent criminal behaviour within our communities. To begin with, crime was defined as evil between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and offenders used to be punished in a very barbaric way. The systems of punishments used to be bloody and inhuman due to the fact that criminals would get punished in public by different methods such as ; burning of their hands, whipping, hanging and in more serious cases like murders, the criminal would be burned alive or beheaded in public for his/her …show more content…

Campaigns for individual rights, the American and French revolutions and the increase of industrial production and exchange, changed the way of how crime was seen and defined and with the help of famous and educated philosophers, scientists and writers such as; Beccaria and Bentham , authorities and states started to understand that not all people are criminals, but that criminals make rational decisions and that crimes are committed in order to satisfy an individual’s needs for things like money, power or …show more content…

In this essay, Beccaria requested a different approach towards punishment and argued against the barbaric methods of punishment and the use of torture on criminals. Beccaria’s classical approach viewed criminals as free agents who make rational decisions when they commit crimes and not because they are evil. He believed that the punishment that criminals would receive ,should be proportional to the crime and the harm they have caused to someone and that the law should be applied equally to all people. Torture and capital punishment was brutal and cruel for Beccaria because his goal was to prevent people for committing crimes and not to punish them by using these methods. ( An introduction to criminological theory - Roger Hopkins Burke

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