Austin Steers
Intro to Criminal Justice 1AH
Mr. Whitfield
Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana
February 27, 2013
In this paper I hope to explore the concept of the comparisons of the two different fields of criminal justice and criminology, and learn more about it myself. I plan to explore the history of both, and compare them primarily by that. Criminology as defined by Webster’s is the scientific study of crime and criminal behavior and law enforcement. The textbook defines criminal justice as the law of criminal procedure, and the array of procedures and activities having to do with the enforcement of this body of law.
As anyone can tell you, crime has been …show more content…
However Lombroso is considered by many to be the founding father of modern criminology, and has had more written about him than any other criminologist (Wolfgang,1961) .
The Criminal Man, Lombroso’s most important work, he taught of atavism, a reversion to a more primitive state of mind and how it was cause and the effect was a propensity towards crime. He also taught how a propensity towards crime could be seen in physical characteristics, not that they caused crime but they revealed the propensity.
Now in the mid 20th century, independent criminology had begun to take root and set iself apart from the modern schools of thought. There were institutions already in existence such as the American Society of Criminology, these began to grow and prosper and new instittutions such as the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences were able to form along with a number of journals of criminology. This happened due to an increase in government …show more content…
“Whether the Genesis account of Cain and Able is accepted as historical fact or allegory, the principle of retributive justice is as old as recorded history.” (Sterling,1999) This relates to before the first phase of criminology, because up until then, punishments and explanations for crime were based on the bible, and from a criminal justice perspective, that’s not a very good thing.
The textbook established the ideas of mens rea which is a guilty mind and actus reas which is a guilty act,and that it takes the both of them as components of crime and (Sterling,1999) states around what time this originated in english common law and how long it was faithfully used even up into modern American law. He also states how the American Jurisprudence has slowly been moving away from requiring those two components of crime. The reasons being that efforts were made to make the criminal justice system more uniform and predictable, to marginalize the element of