Criminology Development in the United States
Development of Criminology: Modern Criminology in the United States
Introduction to Criminology Development
Scholars in the United States soon became interested in European thought and writing in the field of criminology. Two important events in the early development of scientific criminology in the United States were the National Conference on Criminal Law and Criminology held in Chicago, Illinois, in 1909 and the establishment of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology. The institute translated several important European works not previously available to the English-reading audience. Thereafter, criminology became a recognized subspecialty of study in many U.S. universities and in public and private research agencies.
Much of the development of modern criminology beyond that of the Italian school took place in the United States. The disciplines of psychology and sociology dominated criminological thought and research throughout the first half of the 20th century. Scholars developed theories of criminal behavior that were offshoots of more general psychological and sociological theories. For example, theories of crime that attributed criminal behavior to the social disorganization of urban areas developed as part of more general theories regarding the relationship of humans to their environment (see Ecology). The same general theories were used to explain the distribution of other social phenomena such as mental illness.
During this time period criminologists developed a diverse collection of theories of criminal behavior based upon very different disciplinary assumptions. Eventually, sociology came to dominate the emerging field of criminology in the United States. Most of the work in criminology was done by sociologists, and most of the more popular theories emphasized the role of social factors in encouraging criminal behavior.
The dominance that social science disciplines had over the evolution of criminology in the United States led to a much greater emphasis on empirical testing than theorizing. The members of the Italian school and their successors in Europe did very little empirical testing of theories. Scholarship in Europe followed methods of deduction and argument. Practitioners of the emerging social sciences in the United States adopted a more scientific approach to building theory, emphasizing the collection and analysis of data on the social causes of criminal behavior.” (1)
Resources
Notes and References
- Information about Criminology Development in the Encarta Online Encyclopedia
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