History of Criminology

A comprehensive survey of criminology, in all its variants, manifestations, and historical antecedents, has yet to be written. Several reasons can be adduced why the effort has yet to be undertaken. The first results from a professional orientation shared by all scientific endeavors. The most immediate imperative of science is to begin accumulating knowledge of the phenomena it wishes to comprehend. This mandate produces a professional orientation toward expertise. The premium placed on the esoteric over the general requires the scholarly community to direct the profession toward the dissection of smaller aspects of the larger, more complicated subject matter. It is presumed that documenting its own history is a secondary concern better left to historians. An additional impediment is an artifact of the field’s canon being fed by contributions from a wide spectrum of disciplines through the years, from political science, psychology, and biology to moral philosophy and economics and everything beyond. These peculiarities of an undisciplined emerging discipline present challenges for any historian attempting to determine the working identity of the study of crime and its control. Combining the multiple strands and facets of the field is a challenge not to be dismissed lightly; nevertheless, offering an outline of the field’s development is certainly not an impossible task. The bibliographic format, and the larger bibliographic effort of which this article is but a small part, offers an ideal opportunity to attempt a compilation of criminology’s history. The approach followed here will mimic that of an introductory criminology text, with a few modifications. Each theoretical school will be represented in the sequence in which it appears in the historical record, roughly considered, as seen in the publication of foundational works. The theoretical school that supersedes the earlier contributions will then be introduced. There are only two minor departures from the textbook-like formula. First, the article begins with a section dedicated to introducing a body of work that is about the field of criminology. Increasing attention has been given of late to chronicling its history. Second, a section is included that considers pre-professional criminology. These writings address the question of crime and its control prior to the field cohering around a professional identity. Because the article endeavors to provide a history capturing the seminal works in its canon readers interested in learning of recent theoretical developments beginning in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., career criminal research, life-course theory, self-control/general theory of crime, bio-social criminology) are encouraged to consult entries dealing with these topics found elsewhere in the Oxford Bibliographies Online collection. [Please note that many of the works cited here were originally published at much earlier dates.]