The Crisis in Criminology

In: Telos, Heft 92, S. 51-62

Abstract

Reflections are offered on the current state of criminology, focusing on reasons why the discipline has achieved so little progress in understanding & controlling crime. A brief history of criminology, beginning with its origins in Cesare Lombroso's (1912) Darwinian theory, is given, arguing that all "advances" in criminological theory in the last century -- eg, James Q. Wilson's & Richard Herrnstein's sociobiological approach (1985) -- have not gone much beyond Lombroso's theory. Reasons for the crisis in criminology include: lack of adequate data & funding, the "publish/perish" syndrome in academia, the overuse of quantitative methods, & a general theoretical poverty. Various solutions to the crisis in criminology are discussed, & it is concluded that criminology has failed mainly because the philosophical issues that it addresses do not lend themselves to the scientific method. W. Howard