Before I talk about this, I'll have to tell you that this topic has stressed a whole lot out of me. I didn't sleep all through last night because I was researching on this and preparing for an exam on it. Well, the exam has been successful written. I'll just have to wait for the effort to pay off.

So, this is me deciding to share with you a little of what I did today in exam hall.

Criminology has to do studying crime and why people commit same. According to Edwin Sutherland, "it is the study of crime as a social phenomenon. It also involves the study of the process of making laws, breaking laws and societies reaction to the breaking of laws". 

The word criminology was coined by a man named Raffaele Garofalo, one of the leading proponents of the positive school of criminology. According to him, what causes crime is the lack of probity and pity in some individuals. Probity means respect for people's right especially right to own property, while pity means compassion for people going through pain. A person lacking probity and pity does not care about you feeling pain neither does he care about you loosing your property. A person might lack pity and have probity and lack probity, or lack probity and have pity. He can lack both. 

To him, criminals have psychic anomaly. This means that they are base humans, savages, incomplete people. They are a throwback to human evolution. Psychic anomaly is hereditary and so these people should be eliminated. Same applied to murderers.

There are other key players in positive school of criminology, they are Cesare Lombroso and Enrico Ferri. 

The classical school of criminology sees crime as a product of freewill. People commit crime after they have weighed the pleasure and the pain in that act and discovered that the pleasure they will experience outweighs the pain they will experience in the future. Proponents of this school are Cesaro Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham. To them, punishment should be made to fit the crime. The punishment should be severe enough to outweigh the pleasure derived from committing the crime but it should not be too severe. A person should not also be punished for a crime if he has not been found guilty. Punishment should only be for crimes stipulated by the legislature.

There is also the neoclassical school which says that in punishing people for crimes, regard should be had to individual differences. Some people may go to prison and end up being hardened criminals. Also, people may have valid defences as to why they committed the particular offence. So defences like, insanity, intoxication, mistake, infancy etc should be made available.

In all these theories, I agree more with a positivist criminologist, Enrico Ferri. To him, attention should not be focused on punishment of criminals alone, but on society. He advocates for looking into those societal factors that makes a person commit crime. It might be done by reduction in the cost of living expenses, providing employment, reduction in taxes, etc. Focusing attention in punishment alone will not reduce crime because those things that push people to committing crime still exists. The way forward should be solving the problem from the root.