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The Schools of Criminology


2) crime may be controlled by the fear of punishment. 3) crime is attractive when it promises great benefits with little effort. 4) punishment that is or is perceived to be severe, certain, and swift will deter criminal behavior.
             According to Beccaria and Bentham, "human nature is characterized by three central features: 1)People are not bound by original sin but have freedom of choice. 2) people are rational and are capable of using reason to govern their lives. 3) people are motivated to pursue their own self-interests at the expense of others. " They believed that the people are reasonable and free, due to this in a democratic society people would refrain from crime and preserve the social order and conduct. .
             The main difference of the two schools is how classical and positivists schools classify how a person is more likely to commit a crime than others. While classical school believes people commit crime on their own free will well aware of their own actions and "people are nature self seeking and liable to commit a crime ", Positivists school believes that the person that is committing the crime is outside of the persons control. This means that it is based off the persons physical characteristics. For example, Lombroso did a study of the physical size of the head of the criminal and concluded that people that are born with larger heads are more likely to engage in a life of criminality. Positivism searches for that cause of a crime that lay within the person or the social setting in which the person lived in. .
             In Lombroso's early books on positivism crime, he states that criminals represent a peculiar physical type distinctively from that of noncriminals. He described criminals as atavistic, throwbacks to an earlier form of evolutionary life. For example, he thought that ears of an unusual size, sloping foreheads, excessively long arms, etc, were indicative of physical characteristics found among criminals.


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