Origins of Criminology

In Garland's view, there were two strong and generally accepted belief systems dominating the upper layers of Western societies at the turn from the 19th to the 20th century. Belief systems, which in their combination led to the emergence of this new academic discipline. The first one was the conviction that there was an urgent need for improvements in the police and criminal justice system in order to cope with ever-growing social unrest and criminal gangs fed by poverty, dissatisfaction, and a spirit of anarchist or socialist revolt; in this context, there were high hopes that the introduction of new scientific methods could make the work of the police, the courts, and the prisons much more effective in combatting crime. That was what Garland calls the governmental project. The second belief system – also a conditio sine qua non for the birth of the discipline – was what Garland baptized the Lombrosian project, i.e. the positivist conviction that it had to be possible to scientifically identify the causes of crime, and, more specifically, to do so by looking at the physical differences between law-abiding citizens on the one and delinquent individuals like robbers, rapists, murderers and the like, on the other hand (with each category revealing different properties specific for the kind of offenses they were prone to commit). The widespread belief that – just like in the case of “real geniuses” – “real criminals” were not made, but had to be naturally born ones, had been successfully propagated by a man who had called himself a medical doctor, a psychiatrist, and at times a criminal anthropologist, but never a criminologist, Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso’s ideas gained force for a number of reasons, among which his stupendous work itself should not be forgotten – but there was also the triumph of Comte and Darwin, and of the visible progress that was being made on an almost daily basis due to the rise of positivist science. The hope that the discovery of the laws of nature could be followed by the discovery of similar laws of human behavior and social life in general, was widespread enough to make the scientific explanation of criminal tendencies plausible. – As is well-known, most of the assumptions that had led to the foundation of criminology later proved wrong.