NCJ Number
118240
Date Published
1979
Length
19 pages
Annotation
This historic overview of conceptions of the offender is presented as the basis for changing correctional strategies.
Abstract
Prior to the Enlightenment of the 18th century, views of offenders and their correction were rooted in a religious conception of human nature. Man was viewed as a moral agent capable of freely choosing between righteous and evil behavior. A system of punishments was constructed to weight the harsh consequences of doing evil. Under the influence of the Enlightenment, thinkers such as Bentham and Beccaria prescribed punishment as a last resort for correcting criminal behavior, preferring rewards and education as remedies for deviant behavior. The 19th century saw the development of early science, which reasoned that everything, including crime, had natural causes that could be understood and controlled. The positivist criminologists who emerged in this period objected to the classic school's view that punishment could be made to "fit the crime" by fixing sentences strictly according to the severity of the crime. In hunting for causes of crime, however, the positivists never really examined criminal behavior or offender perspectives, as they were only remotely interested in offender motives. In supplementing the positivist perspective, what must be recognized is that a factor cannot become a cause before it is a motive. The focus of contemporary research must be on individual offenders and the factors that combine to influence their deviant behavior. Such offenders may be grouped according to loosely similar characteristics for the purposes of treatment-offender matching to achieve attitudinal and behavioral change. 36 references.