penology

penology, the division of criminology that concerns itself with the philosophy and practice of society in its efforts to repress criminal activities. As the term signifies (from Latin poena, “pain,” or “suffering”), penology has stood in the past and, for the most part, still stands for the policy of inflicting punishment on the offender as a consequence of his wrongdoing; but it may reasonably be extended to cover other policies, not punitive in character, such as probation, medical treatment, and education, aimed at the cure or rehabilitation of the offender; and this is, in fact, the accepted present sense of the term.

The principal aims of penal science are: to bring to light the ethical bases of punishment, along with the motives and purposes of society in inflicting it; to make a comparative study of penal laws and procedures through history and between nations; and, finally, to evaluate the social consequences of the policies in force at a given time. Thus conceived, penology represents a grouping of studies, some of which, dealing with the aims and the moral or social justifications of punishment, date from a remote past, while others, having to do with the wider social implications of the system, have scarcely yet made a beginning.

Modern penology dates from the publication of Cesare Beccaria’s pamphlet on Crimes and Punishments in 1764. This represented a school of doctrine, born of the new humanitarian impulse of the 18th century, with which Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and Montesquieu in France and Jeremy Bentham in England were associated. This, which came afterwards to be known as the classical school, assumed every criminal act to be a deliberate choice determined by a calculation of the prospective pleasures and pains of the act contemplated. All that was needed to overcome the criminal purpose was to provide for each and every crime a penalty adequate to overbalance its assumed advantages. Excessive penalties, such as death, were unnecessary and therefore unjust.

The classical school was followed, a generation later, by the neoclassical school of the revolutionary period in France, which modified Beccaria’s rigorous doctrine by insisting on the recognition of varying degrees of moral, and therefore of legal, responsibility, as in the case of children and the insane, as well as of mitigating circumstances in general. The doctrine of the “individualization of punishment”—that is to say, of the punishment of the individual rather than of the crime committed by him, which is of commanding importance in present-day penology—is only a development of this fundamental principle of the neoclassical school.

This normal historical development of penology was interrupted during the last quarter of the 19th century by the widespread acceptance of the theory of crime and its treatment promulgated by Cesare Lombroso and his disciples. This, at first known as the Italian, or continental, school of criminology, was later named the positive school, so-called because it pursued the positive methods of modern science. Its fundamental doctrine was that the criminal was doomed by his inherited traits to a criminal career and was therefore a wholly irresponsible actor. Society must, of course, protect itself against him, but to punish him as if he were a free moral agent was as irrational as it was unethical.

Although the enthusiasm for the doctrines of the positive school waned and the alleged facts on which they were based were largely discredited, it nevertheless left a valuable legacy of influence. To it must be given much of the credit for the present active tendency to make the mental study of the criminal an essential part of his diagnosis, a fact that has given the psychologist and, particularly, the psychiatrist a leading place in the development of modern penological theory. From studies such as these, criminologists discovered that there was no single formula that accounted for all violators of the penal code, while the policy of the individualization of punishment took on the form of individualization of treatment.

Indeed, the emphasis turned to research—research into the factors, whether individual or social, that determine criminal activities and research into the resources of the community for making such disposition of the offender as will effectually protect the former without destroying the latter.