Question

What are the main differences between Beccaia's and Lombroso's explanations of the reasons people commit crimes? How do these explanations compare and contrast with everything that you have learned during your undergraduate studies? Provide at least two examples to illustrate your point of view.

Answer 1

What are the main differences between Beccaia's and Lombroso's explanations of the reasons people commit crimes?

According to Beccaria people commit crimes as a freely chosen behaviour based on the rational calculation of benefit and loss, pleasure and pain - that is, criminals commit crime because they believe crime pays.

Lombroso, by contrast, argued that criminality had an organic, hereditary basis; that it was a product not of rational, if perhaps erroneous, thought processes, but of a biological criminal tendency. He promoted the theory of ‘atavism’, which categorised criminals as developmental throwbacks, savages, reversions to more primitive stages of human evolution.

How do these explanations compare and contrast with everything that you have learned during your undergraduate studies?

As per my studies, criminal activities are not only due to theories or arguments proposed by Beccaria & Lombroso. Sometimes, circumstances also lead a person to commit crime.

Provide at least two examples to illustrate your point of view.

Example1: If some criminal has kidnapped a person's daughter, then that person will do crime as per instructions of the criminal to save his daughter.

Example2: If a person is poor, he may involve in theft.

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