Criminology- compare 2 key thinkers, cesare beccaria and cesare Essay

Criminology- compare 2 key thinkers, cesare beccaria and cesare lombroso, and their competing ideologies - Essay Example During the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the notion of studying crime as well as criminals was linked to that of making governance more efficient. Intellectuals from Europe considered the unpredictability and brutalities of authoritarian rule as threats to the social order. Cesare Beccaria who was among the Italian illuministi further developed these views. He vehemently and concisely developed the argument that the punishment of lawbreakers should be done publicly, is compulsory and should be the minimum possible depending on the circumstances and the proportion of the crime that has been committed. At around 1830, efforts to explain government societal regulation using the law supported research on what was considered the dangerous classes. This lead to Cesare Lombroso’s quest for the people who had been born criminals as well as the representing of associations between crime and a variety of pointers of ethical moral deficiency. This paper seeks to compare the conflicting and opposing philosophies that are associated with the two main theorists in criminology namely Cesare Beccaria and Cesare Lombroso. Cesare Beccaria was born in 1738 and puts emphasis on deterrence as the best way of preventing crime (Outram, 2006). He fits into the classical school of thought and wrote his work during an era when torture was utilized in obtaining information from people and capital punishment was used for any kind of offence. Punishment depended on retributive means in that the harm that was given to the offender was equal to the harm that had been caused by the perpetrator. In contrast, Cesare Lombroso considered the bodily and psychological attributes of the appearances of the person committing the crime. Lombroso was a doctor who was born in 1835 and he developed the opinion that some criminals were biologically determined, placing him in the positivist school of thought (Hayward, Maruna & Mooney, 2010). He research un derscored the