According to Beccaria, any form or degree of punishment that exceeded the comparative seriousness of the crime or the functional purpose of effectively deterring that crime was excessive, purposeless, and cruel. Based on that philosophy, Beccaria proposed that penal consequences should be designed to be sufficiently harsh to cause individuals contemplating criminal behavior to re-evaluate that choice on a rational basis and to avoid (rational) choices to perpetrate crime as a direct result of their awareness of the risks of specific kinds of punishment that corresponded to those crimes (Lynch, 1999).
The Contributions of Lombroso to Criminal Justice
Unlike Durkheim and Beccaria, Lombroso rejected the societal and functional dynamics of criminality as primary contributors to deviance and crime in society. Lombroso specifically argued that crime was substantially the result of innate difference in individuals that predisposed certain people to deviance and criminality beyond their conscious control, and certainly, beyond the dynamics of any rational-choice-based motivation (Lynch, 1999). This theory of criminal atavism (i.e. "from the father") suggested that criminality was largely a function of inheritable characteristics that ran in families and were transmitted from generation to generation in the same manner as physical characteristics such as height, eye color, and hair color.
In his time, Lombroso's theories could not necessarily contribute productively to criminal justice, simply because they were inconsistent with a deterrent or punitive approach to reducing criminal...
However, his general assumptions about the organic nature of personality, temperament, and behavioral inclinations have enjoyed a resurgence in the modern age of biological sciences, psychobiology, and modern genetics (Nagin, 1998). Today, contemporary criminologists and psychologists routinely incorporate biologically-based concepts and factors to help understand the extent to which human behavior generally and deviance and criminality more particularly are sometimes heavily influenced by organic processes (Nagin, 1998). As Lombroso originally suspected and argued, certain elements of personality and temperament are indeed dictated or at least heavily influenced by idiosyncratic differences among individuals, many of which are functions of heritability. What Lombroso probably never imagined is the manner in which his theory would also apply to the developmental cognitive and psychobiological processes.
References
Akers, R.L. And Sellers, C.S. (2004). Criminological Theories: Introduction,
Evaluation, and Application. California: Roxbury Publishing Company.
Lynch, M.J. (1999). "Beating a Dead Horse: Is There Any Basic Empirical Evidence for the Deterrence Effect of Imprisonment?" Criminal Law & Social Change, Vol.
31.
Nagin, D.S. (1998). "Criminal Deterrence Research at the Outset of the Twenty-First
Century." Crime and Justice, Vol. 23.
Schmalleger, F. (2009) Criminal Justice Today: An Introductory Text for the 21st
Century. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
