CRIMINOLOGY: A Branch of Social Science

A branch of social science embracing elements of sociology, psychology, and economics, devoted to the scientific study of crime. The term first became current in the 1880s, derived from an Italian version used by Rafaele Garofalo. The science is intimately associated with technologies facilitating the detection and prosecution of crime, considered herein under the heading of forensic science. Its spectrum of concern extends into the politics of punishment, whose philosophies are sometimes aggregated under the rubric of penology, as pioneered by Cesare Beccaria’s Dei Delitti e delle Penne (1764) and subsequently summarised in H. M. Boles’ The Science of Penology (1902).

Crime is a legalistic concept that corresponds roughly with the religious idea of sin; the attempt by early social scientists to find a term that was not so deeply impregnated by value judgments resulted in its frequent reclassification as ‘‘deviance’’, but that term inevitably inherited similar evaluative overtones. The tension between different interpretations of the causes of deviance, in terms of the contrasted vocabularies of morality and causality, continue to vex contemporary arguments about the purpose and effectiveness of social responses to crime, in terms of punishment, deterrence, and rehabilitation.

There is a similar tension between different scientific models of criminological explanation, neatly summed up in an old joke: ‘‘The difference between psychology and sociology is that, when a man beats up and robs his neighbour, psychology blames the man and sociology blames the neighbour’’. The enigma is equally difficult to resolve in a theological context; the hypothesis of original sin has always been controversial within the Christian tradition, and the philosophical discipline of theodicy has long wrestled with the conundrum of how and why evil exists in a universe created by an omnipotent and good God. In a literary context, the question of how some people come to do bad things, and how other people ought to respond, is more than a central topic of interest. Because writing is a process of ‘‘secondary creation’’ the author occupies a problematic position akin to that of the God of theodicy, solely responsible for the innate and inescapable moral order of the text.

The author is not only the actual designer of all the deviant acts within the text but the administrator of ‘‘poetic justice’’ who must decide whether, and how, some characters are to be rewarded for their virtue while others are to be punished—or not—for their crimes. The vast and rich genre of ‘‘crime fiction’’ is, therefore, far more than a mere reflection of the development of criminological ideas. The originator of the phrase ‘‘poetic justice’’—the Shakespearean critic Thomas Rymer—proposed that it was an author’s moral duty to ensure that all fictional criminals receive their just desserts while all virtuous characters achieve happy endings (thus condemning all tragedy and much satire as morally defective) and there is a very obvious pattern of reader demand endorsing that opinion.

It is arguable that one of the key psychological functions of modern fiction, especially of popular fiction, is to provide insistently repetitive accounts of the appropriate punishment of crime, by way of offering some compensation for the fact that the justice systems of the actual world are so woefully ineffectual. This supplemented rather than replaced the traditional function of exemplary popular fictions as agents of moral terrorism, invoked by parents and priests alike in the attempt to persuade their charges to be good—a tradition that called forth a backlash in the form of picaresque fiction, which reached a peak in eighteenth-century glamorisations of highwaymen, pirates, and bandits, many of whose names became legendary as a result. Actual legal systems in the Western world have made a gradual transition, within the fundamental context of Roman law, towards a more pragmatic attitude to and treatment of offenders.

This trend was greatly assisted by the development of the scientific outlook and by the emergence of particular criminological theories, but its reflection in literature has been decidedly ambivalent; whereas actual legal systems have made significant attempts to set aside the sense of outrage that victims of crime and horrified onlookers routinely feel in favour of more objective considerations, much literary work has reacted against that policy, seeking instead to produce, flatter, and exploit exactly such a sense of outrage, and to give it free rein in the depiction of unusually horrible crimes and exceedingly dramatic compensatory moves.

Even the most superficial comparison of the ‘‘world of fiction’’ formulated by twentieth-century books and visual media with the actual world reveals a very marked discrepancy between the frequency and nature of the criminal acts committed there, and in the regularity and nature of the retribution meted out in consequence.

Several early scientific studies of crime focused on the phenomenon of ‘‘juvenile delinquency’’—a term coined in the 1840s and subjected to analysis in Mary Carpenter’s Juvenile Delinquency (1853)—and the psychopathology of crime, as investigated in such texts as J. C. Bucknill’s Criminal Lunacy (1856). Psychological analyses of crime as madness and the sociological notion of ‘‘deviance’’, were, however, undermined by the fact that all known societies seemed to play host to criminality and the suspicion that the perfectly law-abiding citizen was a fabulous rarity. The intrinsic irony of this observation is manifest in Karl Marx’s consideration of crime as a kind of service industry, ‘‘producing’’ the criminal law, police forces, and tragic literature and operating as a crucial balancing factor in protecting bourgeois life from stagnation, in the first volume of Theorien u ¨ber den Mehrwert (written ca. 1863; published 1905).

Marx cites Bernard Mandeville’s crucial contribution to economic theory in The Fable of the Bees in arguing that, from the point of view of encouraging the circulation of goods and money, crime can be seen as socially useful. Subsequent economists were routinely forced to concede that embarking upon a criminal ‘‘career’’ can qualify—at least in some circumstances—as a perfectly rational economic decision. Thomas Byrnes published his pioneering study of Professional Criminals of America in 1886. The notion of crime as deviance entered a new phase of ‘‘criminal anthropology’’ when Cesare Lombroso’s L’Uomo delinquente (1876) attempted to identify the criminal ‘‘type’’ in terms of measurable criteria. Initially carried forward by Lombroso’s compatriots Enrico Ferri and Rafaele Garofalo, this version of criminology was exported via such texts as Havelock Ellis’ The Criminal (1890).

Such attempts slotted comfortably into the context of race theory, using the methods of physiognomy and craniometry to demonstrate the essential inferiority of the criminal class. New fashions in explanation eventually redirected attention to other kinds of measurements—first to measurements of intelligence and later to genetic analysis—but the quest to find a physical basis for deviance never entirely let up. Fiction thrived on such notions, sustained by the need to construct and characterise ‘‘villains’’ in order to serve the ends of melodrama, although the requirements of ingenious plotting often required the production of deceptive villains whose appearance was the exact opposite to the criminal type, and whose intelligence was sufficiently acute to pose worthy opposition to that of a detective genius. In fiction, ‘‘criminal types’’ are abundant, but are often relegated to minor roles as hirelings and servitors of politely masked masterminds. Socioeconomic explanations of crime in terms of poverty and poor education became a significant force in calls for political reform in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, extravagantly represented in the works of such philosophical novelists as Jean Jacques Rousseau and William Godwin, and in the Utopian fiction of the period.

Novels attempting to investigate the causes and attempted remedies of crime with the aid of social scientific theories are very numerous, the most notable including Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1930) and Eugene Aram (1832), Charles Dickens’ The Chimes (1844), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), Victor Hugo’s Les Mise ´rables (1862), and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Prestupleniye i nakazaniye (1866; trans. as Crime and Punishment).

Within the literary arena socioeconomic hypotheses regarding the causes of crime gradually lost ground to psychological ones, more for reasons of literary convenience than scientific plausibility. The trend was inevitably exaggerated as the novel became steadily more introspective under the linked influence of Henry James and his psychologist brother William. The melodramatic potential of psychological arguments, and their capacity to overtake and reinvent traditional notions of good and evil, is extravagantly displayed in such literary accounts of ‘‘split personality’’ as Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘‘William Wilson’’ (1839) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and in the analyses of literary works undertaken by such psychoanalysts as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

Psychology’s increasing interest in and dependence on the sexual impulse is clearly reflected in crime fiction’s increasing interest in and dependence on ‘‘sex crimes’’. Once Poe and Stevenson had prepared the way for psychological theory to produce new kinds of monsters, many traditional types of monstrousness—including vampirism and lycanthropy—were co-opted by the burgeoning field of abnormal sexual psychology mapped out in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). Many of Krafft-Ebing’s paradigmatic examples of sexual psychopathology, including sadism and masochism, took their names and symptoms from literary sources. The growth of a more pragmatic attitude to criminology in the twentieth century, reflected in such texts as Clarence Darrow’s Crime: Its Causes and Treatment (1922), was echoed in a literary context by the growth of anxieties regarding the possible social effects of crime fiction.

The accusation that crime fiction glorified crime and might itself be a cause of crime was strenuously rebutted by writers and publishers—although it resulted in the suppression of violence in crime comic books by the Comic Book Code in the 1950s—but many writers became anxious about the stigmatisation of villains. In much nineteenth-century fiction it had been taken for granted that anyone foreign was a suitable candidate for casting as a villain, but growing suspicions about the tacit promotion of xenophobia and racism gradually eroded that policy, while parallel anxieties questioned the association of villainy with particular social classes and modes of employment. The slack generated by this anxiety was taken up by the widespread appropriation into fiction of two key criminological terms: ‘‘sociopath’’ and ‘‘psychopath’’.

Characters of these types—whose evil tendencies are conveniently innate, whether imparted by nature or nurture—were villains by definition, and late twentieth-century crime fiction made extravagant use of the opportunities they presented. Particularly prolific use was made of psychopathic ‘‘serial killers’’ whose crimes were perfectly fitted to the necessities of plot development. The important archetype provided by Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959; film, 1960), loosely based on the case of Ed Gein, pioneered two significant subgenres.

A ‘‘true crime’’ genre updating such eighteenth-century legendary constructions as Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard in the distinctively modern mould of ‘‘Jack the Ripper’’ became highly significant as a form of narrative nonfiction, while the subgenre of fiction that attributed iconic status to such characters—Thomas Harris’ psychiatrically trained cannibal genius, Hannibal Lecter, is a cardinal example—generated numerous best-sellers. As the characterisation of fictitious criminals became increasingly elaborate in psychological and sociological terms, their adversaries in police forces were forced to become better educated in the relevant sciences.

Writers of crime fiction were similarly required to intensify their research, as Colin Wilson did in composing his recherche ´ crime novels Ritual in the Dark (1960), Necessary Doubt (1964), and The Killer (1970), which are derived from the same substance as his nonfiction works Encyclopedia of Murder (1961, with Patricia Pitman), A Criminal History of Mankind (1984), and The Killers Among Us (2 vols., 1996–1997). Speculative fiction never had any shortage of criminal villains, but from Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo onwards they were distinguished more by the hi-tech apparatus with which they committed their crimes, or the exotic quality of the logical puzzles they set their adversaries, than by any application of scientific theory to their motivation.

Penological theory is more prominently featured in science-fictional contes philosophiques than any other aspect of criminology; notable thought experiments include Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘‘Coventry’’ (1940), Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore’s ‘‘Private Eye’’ (1949; by-lined Lewis Padgett), Damon Knight’s ‘‘The Analogues’’ (1952), Robert Sheckley’s ‘‘Watchbird’’ (1953), Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man (1953), William Tenn’s ‘‘Time in Advance’’ (1956), Robert Silverberg’s ‘‘To See the Invisible Man’’ (1963), John J. McGuire’s ‘‘Take the Reason Prisoner’’ (1963), and Lucius Shepard’s ‘‘Jailwise’’ (2003). Futures in which applied criminology has succeeded in eradicating crime are rare, except for perfectly ordered dystopias desperately in need of mischievous relief. Science fiction writers have been more creative in the matter of inventing new crimes for their agents to combat than in hypothesising new criminological theories.

The subgenre of time police series gave rise to a new criminal class of would-be history-changers, called ‘‘degraders’’ in E. B. Cole’s stories of the Philosophical Corps (launched 1951), who use advanced technology to set themselves up as gods on barbarian worlds for purpose of pillage. The sophistication of biotechnology and the opening of the arena of cyberspace both opened opportunities for the evolution of new crimes, but accounts of their execution and investigation rarely break new criminological ground; such works as K. W. Jeter’s Dr. Adder (1984) and Kim Newman’s The Night Mayor (1989) are primarily exceptional in terms of their grotesquerie.