Classical and positivist philosophers of the 19th century had an important impact on the emergence and development of modern crimonology. Current policies of crime and punishment can be traced to these schools of thought.
Classical Theorists
Cesare Beccaria was the leading theorist of the classical school. His most significant contribution to crimonology was his underlying philosophy of free will. He posited that human behavior was purposive and based on hedonism, or the pleasure-pain principle. Humans rationally choose actions that will bring them pleasure and avoid actions that will bring them pain. The person who chooses to commit a crime, therefore, deserves to be punished because they chose to freely to commit a wrongful act. Accordingly, Beccaria believed that the degree of punishment assigned to a crime should be painful enough to outweigh any pleasure that would be derived from committing the crime in the first place. In other words, the punishment should fit the crime. His contribution to the concept of justice was that the law should be impartial--all people are equal under the law. Furthermore, judges are instuments of the law. They are only to determine innocence or guit and to impose the penalties that are prescribed by law.
The Positive School
Cesare Lombroso was the leading theorist of the positive school. He
believed that punishment hould fit the criminal instead of the magnitude
of the crime, thereby rejecting the strict tenets of the classical school.
The positivists supplanted the doctrine of free will with the doctrine
of determinism. According to the doctrine of determinism, people's actions
are determined by the enviroment and their inhereted physical characteristics.
They posited that the causes of crime were economic, social or biological.
Thus, positivists emphasized the importance of conducting empirical research
and developed methods for scientifically investigating these causes of
criminal behavior. The positive school contributed to the concept of justice
indeterminate sentencing (punishment should fit the criminal instead of
the crime) and the philosophy of rehabilitation. That is, people should
be incarcerated until they have been rehabilitated.