Tracing the Evolution of Criminal Justice Research: A Historical Overview

Criminal justice research did not begin in a university laboratory or a government think-tank. It began with philosophers debating why people break the law and what society should do about it. Over nearly three centuries, that debate evolved from armchair philosophy into rigorous empirical science – shifting its focus from the act of crime, to the actor, and finally to society itself. Understanding this journey is not merely an academic exercise; it reveals why we study crime the way we do today and why the methods researchers use are inseparable from the theories that inspired them.

The pre-scientific era: crime as sin and spectacle 🔗

Before the 18th century, explanations for criminal behaviour were rooted largely in theology and superstition. Crime was understood as moral failure, spiritual corruption, or even demonic possession. Punishment was public, brutal, and arbitrary – designed more for spectacle than deterrence. There was no systematic attempt to study crime; it was simply condemned. The absence of any research tradition during this period is itself revealing: when crime is treated as a theological problem, empirical inquiry becomes irrelevant.

This began to change during the Enlightenment, when European thinkers started questioning inherited institutions and demanding that governance – including criminal justice – be grounded in reason.

The classical school: rationality, free will, and the birth of criminology 🔗

Cesare Beccaria’s 1764 treatise Dei delitti e delle pene (On Crimes and Punishments) is widely regarded as the founding document of modern criminological thought. Beccaria argued that the objective of any penal system should be to devise penalties only severe enough to achieve security and order – and that anything beyond this was tyranny. He was also the first modern writer to advocate the complete abolition of capital punishment. This was a radical departure from the punitive norms of his time.

Both Beccaria and the English classical theorist Jeremy Bentham argued that people are rational beings who exercise free will in making choices, and that the dominant motive in those choices is seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. They therefore argued that punishment should fit the crime in such a way that the pain of potential punishment outweighs any pleasure derived from committing it.

This pleasure-pain calculus became the theoretical backbone of the classical school. Its implications for research were significant: if crime is a rational choice, then research should focus on the structure of laws and the certainty of punishment – not on the biology or psychology of individual offenders. In Europe and America, the classical principle that punishments should be appropriate to the nature of the crime became a foundation for modern criminal justice systems, and its influence contributed to a decline in the use of capital punishment, torture, and corporal punishment.

The limits of classical thinking 🔗

Despite its influence, the classical school had a crucial weakness: it treated all offenders as equally rational and free-willed, ignoring social conditions, mental health, and circumstance entirely. It told us what a just system should look like but did little to explain why people actually commit crime. This gap set the stage for the next major shift.

The positivist school: science enters criminology 🔗

The 19th century brought with it a fascination with natural science and the idea that human behaviour – like physical phenomena – could be measured, classified, and explained. This spirit gave birth to the positivist school of criminology, which replaced philosophy with empirical observation.

In 1876, the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso published Criminal Man, in which he reported observations of criminals made while working as a doctor at a local prison. This book transformed how people thought about criminals. Drawing on physiognomy, degeneration theory, psychiatry, and Social Darwinism, Lombroso argued that criminality was inherited and that someone “born criminal” could be identified by physical defects – confirming a criminal as atavistic, or evolutionarily primitive.

This was a dramatic methodological step forward in one sense: unlike Beccaria’s classical school, the positivist school uses a more scientific approach to studying crime – employing methods from the natural sciences such as systematic observation, accumulation of evidence, objective facts, and a deductive framework. Lombroso measured skulls, documented facial features, and compiled anthropological data in ways that had never been applied to the study of crime before.

However, Lombroso’s research methods were clinical and descriptive, but he did not engage in rigorous statistical comparisons of criminals and non-criminals. His conclusions – that criminals were biological throwbacks identifiable by their appearance – were eventually discredited. His notions of physical differentiation between criminals and non-criminals were seriously challenged by Charles Goring in The English Convict (1913), who made elaborate comparisons and found the differences statistically insignificant.

Ferri, Garofalo, and the broadening of positivism 🔗

Enrico Ferri and Raffaele Garofalo were major contributors to the positivist school alongside Lombroso, and together they adopted a deterministic view of criminal behaviour – the idea that criminals are born, not made. Ferri, however, went further than Lombroso by incorporating social and economic factors, moving positivism slightly toward a more multidimensional analysis. His work on criminal sociology influenced penal reforms in South America and helped bridge biological positivism with later sociological approaches.

Early positivist criminogenic theories were primarily biological and psychological. Later sociological theories – which evolved concurrently – can be divided into control, cultural deviance, strain, and symbolic interaction theories. The historical trajectory, in other words, was moving steadily away from individual biology toward social structure.

From armchair to the field: the sociological turn 🔗

The most consequential shift in criminal justice research methodology came in the early 20th century, when researchers stopped speculating and started observing. This shift was largely driven by the Chicago School of Sociology.

The Chicago School of Criminology emerged from the University of Chicago in the early 20th century and played a significant role in shaping the field by focusing on the impact of social and environmental factors on crime, as opposed to individual traits or predispositions. Chicago, with its explosive population growth and rapid industrialisation, became a living laboratory for sociological study.

Robert Park and Ernest Burgess took the approach that humans, like animals or plants, could be studied in their “natural habitat” – but instead of a forest or a lake, people naturally appear in neighbourhoods. In time, the term “social ecology” came to characterise the ideological premise that the important level of observation for human behaviour is at the neighbourhood or community level.

Empirical methods replace theorisation 🔗

The Chicago School generated a distinct approach to studying the social world rooted in empirical investigation and a focus on contextual and relational thinking. Research at the school mined official data including census reports, housing and welfare records, and crime figures, and related the data spatially to different geographical areas of the city. Criminologists Shaw and McKay created statistical maps – spot maps demonstrating the location of social problems, rate maps dividing the city into blocks showing population characteristics, and zone maps demonstrating that major problems clustered in the city centre.

This was a revolution in method. Where Lombroso had measured skulls in prisons, Chicago School researchers mapped neighbourhoods, conducted life-history interviews, and correlated crime rates with social conditions like poverty and residential instability. Their findings highlighted the role of poverty, immigration, and residential instability in increasing crime rates, leading to a broader understanding of the social factors contributing to criminal behaviour.

The sociology of criminology: moving beyond the individual 🔗

The sociology of criminology, a development largely of the 1950s, argues against positivistic assumptions and the study of individual offenders. It maintains that legal criterion is the only standard distinguishing the criminal from the non-criminal, but diverges from this tenet into two distinct branches.

The first branch, functionalism – championed by thinkers like Émile Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown, and Robert Merton – views criminal law and criminal behaviour as having common roots in the customs of society. Durkheim’s concept of anomie, the breakdown of social norms during periods of rapid change, became a powerful explanatory framework for rising crime rates in industrialising societies.

The second branch, rooted in conflict theory and Marxist thought, suggests that society is an arena in which struggles over scarce commodities take place, and that criminal law – a tool of the ruling class – provides the state with coercive force to repress the ruled. This perspective gave rise to what is sometimes called the “new criminology” of the 1970s, which questioned the very legitimacy of criminal justice systems and the laws they enforce.

From single-factor to interdisciplinary research 🔗

The search for the causes of crime passed through four distinct phases of theoretical development: single-factor reductionism, systemic reductionism, multidisciplinary theories, and finally interdisciplinary theory – which today stands as the dominant model for explaining crime.

Single-factor reductionism characterised early positivism – the idea that one root cause (biology, psychology, or social disorganisation) could explain all crime. Multidisciplinary and eventually interdisciplinary approaches acknowledged that crime is shaped by the interaction of biological, psychological, social, economic, and political forces. Modern criminal justice research reflects this complexity: researchers combine quantitative data analysis with ethnographic fieldwork, use longitudinal studies to track crime trajectories, and draw on sociology, law, psychology, economics, and public health simultaneously.

The institutionalisation of criminal justice research 🔗

It would not be until the 1940s that the signs of a new science of crime and justice would emerge. The American Society of Criminology was founded in 1941 as an association of police professors, and the first American School of Criminology was opened in 1950 at the University of California, Berkeley. The society’s initial efforts focused on scientific crime detection, investigation and identification, crime prevention, law enforcement administration, administration of criminal justice, and probation.

This institutionalisation marked the formal recognition that criminal justice research was a discipline in its own right – one that needed dedicated academic programmes, professional associations, and peer-reviewed scholarship. In India, similar institutionalisation came later, with the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPR&D) established in 1970 to promote scientific research into policing and criminal justice, and academic departments in law and social sciences beginning to incorporate criminology into their curricula through the latter decades of the 20th century.

What this history tells us about research methodology 🔗

The evolution traced above is not merely a story of changing theories – it is a story of changing methods. Classical thinkers used philosophical argument and legal analysis. Positivists introduced clinical observation and anthropometric measurement. The Chicago School brought fieldwork, mapping, and statistical analysis. Later scholars added survey research, longitudinal cohort studies, and eventually computational methods.

Each methodological shift reflected a deeper theoretical conviction about what kind of thing crime is. If crime is a rational choice, you study the incentive structures of the law. If it is a biological trait, you measure bodies. If it is a social phenomenon, you study communities. The method always follows the theory – which is why understanding this history is indispensable for any serious student of criminal justice research. As IResearchNet’s overview of criminology history notes, criminology today rests on two foundations: the interdisciplinary explanation of crime, and the analysis of the fairness and effectiveness of the criminal justice system – both informed by empirical research that Beccaria, Lombroso, and the Chicago scholars each, in their own way, called for.

What do you think? The shift from biological positivism to sociological criminology dramatically changed what researchers look for and how they look for it – but does focusing on social structures risk overlooking individual responsibility? And as Indian cities rapidly urbanise, how relevant do you find the Chicago School’s insights about neighbourhood-level social disorganisation to understanding crime in contemporary Indian contexts?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Cesare-Beccaria
2. https://bprd.nic.in/
3. https://criminal-justice.iresearchnet.com/criminology/history-of-criminology/