Criminology as science

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Criminology as science

• Science
• Causality

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Course website

• http//cooley.libarts.wsu.edu/soc3612/

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http//cooley.libarts.wsu.edu/soc3612/
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http//cooley.libarts.wsu.edu/soc3612/
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Criminology

• Sutherland and Cressey (1978)
• Criminology is the a body of knowledge regarding
  juvenile delinquency and crime. It includes the
  process of making laws, of breaking laws, and of
  reacting to the breaking of laws
• Criminology is the scientific approach to
  studying criminal behavior

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What is science?

• Science is derived from
• the Latin scire, to know
• Science is a social enterprise that attempts to
  provide answers to our questions about state of
  the world
• Judged on this basis, science is no different
  from philosophy, religion, or even some forms of
  magic

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Science

• Science employs scientific method
• None of the mentioned sources of knowledge apply
  scientific method
• Causality statements
• Determinism

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Elements of Scientific Method

• Reliance on the senses (empiricism is a core
  element)
• A priori statement of hypothesis
• Replicability (repetition of experiments or
  studies utilizing the same methodology)
• Communicability of results
• Institutionalized skepticism
• Potential to falsify any hypothesis

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How do we know what we know?

• World is round
• Its cold on the dark side of the moon (your
  physics instructor told this, or maybe you read
  it on the NASA Web page)
• People speak Chinese in China (You may have
  read National Geographic )
• Vitamin C prevents cold (You may have read
  Health magazine)
• We know all these things because somebody told
  them to us, and we believed what we were told

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There two ways to know things

• Agreement (we cannot learn through personal
  experience all you need to know)
• Direct experience-observation (possible conflict
  between something everyone else knows and what
  you experience)

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Example

• Party with excellent food (one meal is especially
  zesty)
• Your experience provided you with this knowledge
• You were told that you have been eating breaded,
  deep-fried worms
• Your response is dramatic your stomach rebels,
  and you throw up all over the living room rug

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Point of the story

• Both your feelings about the meal are real
• Initial liking was your own experience
• Feeling of disgust was strictly a product of the
  agreement with those around you that worms arent
  fit to eat
• What is wrong with worms?
• How do you know whether worms are really good or
  really bad to eat?

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More scientific example

• The particle nature of light dominated the field
• There was an agreement
• Diffraction (bending'' of light waves around
  obstacles in its path) could not be explained
• Light is waves

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Agreement vs Experiment

• Most of what we know is a matter of agreement
• Little of it is based on personal experience and
  discovery
• Process of learning is to accept what everybody
  around you know (this is secondhand knowledge)

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Sources of secondhand knowledge

• Tradition (can both assist and hinder human
  inquire)
• Authority (we trusts in the judgments of people
  who have special training, expertise, and
  credentials)
• Example political leader with no biochemical
  expertise who declares that importance and danger
  of a particular drug, professors who are trained

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Goal of science

• Combine deductive logic with precise empirical
  observations of individuals behavior in order to
  discover and confirm a set of causal laws that
  can be used to predict general pattern of human
  activity
• Can criminology be called a science?
• When we talk about science we
• think of natural sciences

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What is different about people?

• Criminology studies people
• Human beings are qualitatively different from the
  objects of study in the natural sciences (rocks,
  stars, chemical compounds, etc)
• Humans think and learn, have an awareness of
  themselves and their past
• These unique human characteristics are the reason
  for the debate how criminology should look like

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Determinism and people

• August Comte (1798-1857)
• Positivism
• Aimed toward understanding and elimination of
  crime through the systematic application of the
  scientific method
• Comte claimed to have invented the new science of
  sociology

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Positivistic Criminology

• Focus on the actor not the act
• The individual is not responsible for his or her
  actions
• The criminal is radically different form the
  non-criminal
• The criminal is moved by forces which s/he is
  unaware.
• Punishment is inapplicable

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Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909)

• Observed the physical characteristics
• (head, body, arms, and skin) of Italian
• prisoners and compared them to Italian
  soldiers
• Asymmetry of the face or head, large monkey-like
  ears, large lips, twisted nose, excessive cheek
  bones, long arms, excessive skin wrinkles
• The male with five or more of these physical
  anomalies is marked as a born criminal
• Female criminals are also born criminals, but
  they may be identified with as dew as three
  anomalies

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Frontispiece of Criminal Man

• Lombroso claimed that to the trained eye, the eye
  of the detective, these people would clearly be
  organized into categories
• Those in group "A" are all shoplifters, "B" are
  swindlers, "H" are purse snatchers, "E" are
  murderers, etc.
• And supposedly you can see a man's real character
  at a glance.

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The New Sciences of Detection

• By the 1880s, urban police forces began
  developing new techniques for keeping track of
  criminals, especially new techniques of
  record-keeping
• Most of these techniques were heavily influenced
  by criminology

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Mug Shots

• The mug shot originated in the 1880s, in studies
  designed to explore the relationship between
  appearance and criminal behavior
• These men are all forgers. The New York Police
  Department compiled this record in part to see if
  all forgers looked alike, or all murderers looked
  alike, or if all burglars had the same facial
  features.

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Policy implications of Lombrosos theory

• Theories of genetic superiority call for policy
  in which whole peoples are to be eliminated from
  the genetic stock of the world in order to
  prevent crime.
• These theories call for castration of those said
  to be habitual criminals in order to prevent
  their producing more defective children who,
  presumably will be criminals.

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Commitment to Criminology

• B. Frankel (1986) about two continuums on the
  social science commitment
• Pluralistic approach (Qualitative)
• Singular approach (Quantitative)
• Compromise
• P. Maxim (1999)

Qualitative approach
Quantitative approach
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Qualitative vs. Quantitative approach

• Qualitative research uses soft data
  (observations, pictures, interviews, newspapers,
  stories, interpretative approach)
• Quantitative research uses hard data (statistics,
  causality)

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Causality

• Controversial issue in criminology
• David Hume (1748) stressed that causality could
  never been directly observed
• Causality is an interpretation of observables
  (causal statements are always inferential)
• Rooster and the Sun

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Causality in criminology

• Can we be certain making any kind of causal
  explanations in criminology?
• Poverty causes crime
• Social class is related to crime

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Example of different causal explanations

• Hirschi (social bond theory) stated that
  attachment to significant others decreases
  chances of criminal behavior
• Empirical research has shown that attachment to
  delinquent friends/parents in reality increases
  chances of being involved in crime
• On contrary, social learning theory argues that
  association and imitation of the friends
  behavior is responsible for an individuals
  criminal behavior

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Causality

• How do we know if A causes B?
• Time
• Association
• No other factor causes both (spuriousness)

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Spuriousness
Deviant behavior
Watching TV
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Spuriousness
Lack of supervision
Deviant behavior
Watching TV
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Causality

• Requires some assumptions about the world
• Reality is real, it exists out there and waits
  to be discovered
• Kant argued that reality exists independently of
  peoples perception about it
• Flower or tree will not change depending on what
  we think of them

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Assumptions for Causality

• Reality is ordered (not chaotic)
• Behavior of humans is patterned
• Without this assumption the logic and predictions
  would be impossible
• Reality is stable, but knowledge about it is
  additive

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Controversy

• Not all scholars agree with those assumptions
  about reality
• Reality can be changed (delinquency and
  supervision)
• People can change the history (reality)
• One person can change a lot (Hitler)
• Interpretative approach

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Interpretative approach states

• Social reality is largely what people perceive it
  to be
• Reality is fluid and fragile (it is not waiting
  out there)
• People possess an internal sense of reality
  (subjective reality)
• We can only study peoples definitions and
  interpretations of reality but not reality itself

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Examples of subjective realities

• Elephant and blind men
• One dollar bill
• Eating dogs

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More examples (four temperaments)

• The same situation
• evokes absolutely
• different reactions
• Four models of behavior,
• How can we make
• predictions?

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Thomass theorem (1928)

• Another argument against causality
• If people define situation as real, they are
  real in their consequences
• This theorem is related to the subjectivity of
  reality
• Examples?...
• What do you think of causality in sociology now?

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How to solve the problem of causality?

• Interpretative approach does not say that social
  behavior is chaotic
• There is some pattern in human behavior
• But this pattern is not due to the causal laws
• It is created out of the system of social
  conventions people generate during their
  interactions

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Closer view at Causality

• Suppose we agreed upon possibility of causation
• There are two types of causal relationships
  deterministic and probabilistic

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Causality in Natural Science

• Cause-and-effect model (Deterministic
  perspective)
• To be a cause, event X must be both a necessary
  condition and sufficient condition for the
  event Y
• necessary condition- in the absence of X, Y
  will not occur
• sufficient condition Y always occurs in the
  presence of X

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Example of deterministic relationship

• Gravity causes objects to fall down
• Gravity is a necessary and sufficient condition
  for something to fall down
• Look at the following statement
• Good grades cause high occupational attainments
• Are good grades a necessary condition for high
  occupational attainment?
• Are they a sufficient condition?

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Causality in Sociology

• Deterministic perspective is not sufficient for
  criminology
• Probabilistic perspective is more appropriate

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Probabilistic perspective

• The presence of X renders the occurrence of Y
  more probable
• The probabilistic concept of causality suggests
  that human behavior is neither completely
  determined by external forces nor completely
  outcome of the unfettered exercise of free will
  choices
• Behavior is best understood from"
  soft-determinism perspective

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Soft Determinism

• Various factors influence and limit actions but
  leave room for individuals choices that cannot be
  completely predicted

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Why some scholars are against causation in
criminology?

• Humans are not predictable whereas natural
  objects are
• This view is based complete ignorance of the
  substance of the natural sciences
• Subatomic particles are governed by relationships
  that are inherently stochastic
• Indeterminacy is an essential feature of the
  subatomic physical world
• Heisenbergs Uncertainty principle

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Against Causality?

• One does not have to accept the deterministic
  worldview to do science indeed, a deterministic
  worldview is no longer tenable
• Humans are goal-oriented
• Ironically, this view serves to simplify the task
  of finding the pattern in human behavior