POSITIVE SCHOOL

Sociologyindex, Verstehen, Positivism, Sociology Books 2011, Positive School

In criminology this refers to the first scientific school consisting of the Italian criminologists Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909), Raffaelo Garofalo (1852-1934) and Enrico Ferri (1856-1928).

They support the assumptions of positivism and argue that criminality is determined - the effect in a cause-effect sequence - and that the mandate of criminology should be to search for these causes.

It was believed that with the exception of those deemed to be ‘born criminals’, the discovery of the causes of crime would allow for effective treatment. This school therefore adopts a medical model (crime as sickness) and advocates rehabilitation of offenders, indeterminate sentences, and the dominance of professionals in correctional decision-making.

The Positive School would not hold the individual responsibility for crime, since they are determined by forces beyond his control. The old objects of punishment have been severely altered. Criminals are to be treated, not punished. Reformation is to be applied with discrimination to the various classes of criminals. Prevention of crime by discovering as early as possible those with characteristics likely to lead to delinquency, altering the external conditions which make for crime, and throwing around each person the influences which make for social behavior, is receiving primary emphasis. The shift from individual to social responsibility for crime has also resulted in the rise of Juvenile Courts, indeterminate sentences, probation, parole, education and recreation in prisons, and wider attempts at social control of crime.

The Positive School of Criminology by Enrico Ferri - The positive school of criminology, was born in our own Italy through the singular attraction of the Italian mind toward the study of criminology; and its birth is also due to the peculiar condition our country with its great and strange contrast between the theoretical doctrines and the painful fact of an ever increasing criminality.
 gutenberg.org/etext/10580

Changing Representations of the Criminal 
Dario Melossi, University of Bologna. - bjc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/40/2/296
I claim that, in the specific social-theoretical domain of‘crime and punishment’ (as well as in other areas of the social sciences), we should aim at overcoming both the de-coupling of concepts of‘structure’ and‘culture’, often lamented in post-Marxist social theory, and the sterile and uninteresting counterappositon between qualitative and quantitative styles of analysis. In this paper I suggest that we can achieve such a result by introducing the concept of‘representations’ of crime and criminals. 
Representations of crime and criminality are not random and unpredictable results of creative endeavours (though they are also this). Rather, they are conceptualizations deeply embedded within the main patterns of social relationships in a given society in a given period. I hypothesize that, in a somewhat cyclical fashion, at least since the inception of modernity and criminological thought in the nineteenth century, representations of crime and criminals have been oscillating between two different social attitudes. A sympathetic attitude toward criminals has emerged in social periods when good economic conditions, optimism, a tendency toward liberalism and low imprisonment rates, tended to prevail. At such juncture (at least some) criminals were seen as innovators fighting against an unjust and suffocating social order, and punishment as playing a rehabilitative and experimental role. In other periods, criminals were seen instead with antipathy, and portrayed as monstrosities, evil forces fighting the very foundations of a social fabric and a moral order that should be defended at all cost. In these periods of prevailing conservatism, social theorists saw their mission in responding against situations of socio-economic crisis, characterized by the necessity to‘tighten the belt’, and by higher imprisonment rates and harsher penalties. 
I give illustrations of such oscillating attitudes, as far as the domain of criminological thought is concerned, by considering more specifically: the Italian Positive School, the Chicago school of sociology and differential association theory, the‘labelling’ theorists of the 1960s/1970s, and what I term the‘revanche criminology’ of the‘crisis decades’ after 1973 

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