Criminology, Deviance and Sociology

Charting the relationships between criminology and sociology as they have developed in Britain is not an easy or straightforward task. Although there are numerous histories of criminal justice institutions - courts, legislation, policing, prisons, and so on, there is relatively little on the history, or the sociology, of criminology. Textbook accounts ritually invoke the same cast of characters typically beginning with Beccaria (1764/1986) as the originator of the ‘classical school’ and contrasting this with Lombroso’s ‘positivist’ search for the ‘criminal type’ over a century later. How these ideas shaped actual practices at the time, or were related to other intellectual currents and institutional settings, is rarely traced in any depth. A sociology of criminological knowledge that examines its structure as an academic and cultural field in which individuals and institutions interact in a web of creative and competing relationships is also largely absent.