Positivist Criminology And The German School Of Three...

Positivist criminology represents the first systematic and scientific study of crime (Bradley Walters, 2011), and this emergence of positivist criminology is associated with the Italian School of three scholars: Cesare Lombroso, Enrico Ferri and Raffaele Garofalo (Bradley Walters, 2011). Positivist criminology radically proposed that crime was a non-rational product of under socialisation and could be studied, via clinical and statistical methods, in the same way scientists studied the natural world (McLaughlin, Muncie Hughes, 2003). The Italian School maintained that criminality had multi-factor explanations. The explanation for criminality was seen as a non-social defect of individuals (Maguire, Morgan Reiner, 2002) and one of the early explanations of crime prioritised in positivism were biological causes (McLaughlin et al., 2003). Biological positivism, as the name suggests, implies that crime is caused by biological or physical characteristics, and criminals are viewed as be ing inferior biological beings (Bradley Walters, 2011). Muncie (2001), argues that the basic premise of biological positivism is that certain people are born to be criminals through inheritance of a physiological or genetic tendency to crime. Environmental conditions are not ignored but are viewed as potential triggers of the biological influence, criminality lies beyond individual control (Muncie, 2001). Positivists argued that criminals were different types of people to non-criminals, and