One of the purposes of criminal law is to impress upon the public the necessity of acting in a manner that society or the state deems desirable. One way that the state achieves this purpose is to impose punishment on those found guilty of undesirable conduct (LaFave, 2000). Naturally, over the course of criminal law in human history, multiple theories of punishment have been developed. Two such theories are contained in the classical and positivist schools of criminological analysis. In order to understand the differences between these two schools, it is important to first understand some of their fundamental ideas about crime itself.
Under a classical theory, people participate in criminal activity based on their own free will and the rational choices made having free will. Accordingly, if a person believes that they can benefit from crime, and the rewards for participating in criminal activity, such as obtaining wealth, outweigh the risks, such as capture and arrest; then they are more likely to commit crimes. In short, everyone is born with a certain degree of greed and selfishness that influences make them want to obtain and maintain what they find enjoyable and positive. Consequently, if illegal activity can satisfy their desires, and there are little legal consequences for acting illegally, then most people will break the law. Conversely, positivists argue that people do not commit crimes based on their free will and rational decision-making abilities but rather as a result of social, psychological, and environmental factors that influence or force people into criminal activity. People, in essence, as generally born good but due to their background or the environment that they are in or were raised in; they had no choice but to act criminally.
The theoretical foundations of each school served to influence what each developed to be its theory of punishment. For the classical school, since the underlying belief was that people are rational, punishment should be crafted to focus that element of human thinking. That is to say, that punishment should not be imposed as a form of retribution, revenge, retaliation or restraint. To do so would ignore the fact that most people understand that if the act in an undesirable manner, they are most likely going to suffer the consequences if they are caught. The key point, for the classical school, was to stop or save people from ever having to face the consequences of criminal activity by persuading them not to participate in deviant behavior in the first place (Blomberg & Lucken, 2011). Accordingly, punishment for the classical school needed to be deter people from committing crimes. In short, punishment needed to rationally convince people that the risks involved in the perpetration of a criminal act greatly outweighed the benefits that one could achieve from it. To ensure this punishment should be suited to the offense rather the than the individual; it also need to be swift, guaranteed and proportional (Canals, 1960). If done in this way, the potential criminals in the world would be deterred by their fear that they would end up the same way. To be sure, under the classical school, punishment was much more than “inflicting harm on the offender” but instead was meant to serve the greater social purpose of preventing or deterring others from committing crimes so that the community was generally a safer and more secure place (Blomberg & Lucken, 2011).
Conversely, the positivist school rejected the classical reliance on the rationality of the individual as being reason underlying punishment. Under this argument, focusing on a person’s free will was wasteful because if punishment did not eliminate or alleviate the cause of the deviant behavior, it would always return eventually regardless of the individual’s will. Consequently, the purpose of punishment should be focused on helping the individual overcome the influences that have caused him to act in a criminal manner. In essence, the ultimate purpose of punishment was not retribution or deterrence, though they did have a role in it, but rather rehabilitation (Blomberg & Lucken, 2011). Indeed, punishment is necessary in order to “rehabilitate” the offender and “return him to society so reformed that he will not desire or need to commit further crimes” (LaFave, 2000). Accordingly, positivists considered the classical idea that severe and sure punishment as being too brutal and uncaring to really be effective of decreasing the occurrence of criminal behavior in society,
Despite the differences between the two schools of thought, they do share a few similarities. First, there is no definitive theory of the classical school that says punishment based social and psychological factors cannot be a deterrence. Second, there is no definitive theory in the positivist school that precludes punishment based on certainty and severity cannot be a means of affecting the occurrence of crime. Practically speaking, what this means is that classical and positivist theories of punishment are attempts understand the elements of human behavior that affect the occurrence of criminality (Canals, 1960). Moreover, they both can be used in conjunction with one another to form a more comprehensive theory of punishments that is applicable to a wider range of criminal behavior.
Upon consideration of the purpose of criminal law and the theories of punishment that each school advocates, the classical school seems the more reasonable and believable. While it is true that not everyone acts all the time in a rational manner, the majority of how life is organized from green lights telling drivers or pedestrians that it is alright to go to the understanding that airplane doors should not be opened during flight; is based on speaking to our rational decision-making abilities. Accordingly, basing punishment on rational choice seems the most effectively way to deter crime. Moreover, because punishment is, in a way mass implemented, it would be too difficult to administer a punishment system that would first need to determine the individual influences that affect each law-breaker before setting out the most suitable means of punishment. Lastly, the positivist theory of punishment seems inherently susceptible to abuse in the form of prejudicially classifying whole groups of people as criminals simple based on a particular stereotype.
References
Blomberg, T.G. & Lucken, K. (2011). American Penology: A History of Control, 2nd ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Canals, J.M. (1960). Classicism, positivism and social defense. Retrieved from http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4897&context=jclc
LaFave, W.R. (2000). Criminal Law, 3rd ed. St. Paul, MN: West Group.
