Economic Crime: Theory

The classical approach to crime originated in the Enlightenment and is evident in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean Jaques Rousseau, and others. According to this perspective, intelligence and rational thought are fundamental characteristics of people and the principal basis for their behavior. In other words, people have free will, make choices and pursue their own interests. In the late 1700s, philosophers Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham applied these ideas to crime, arguing that people freely chose to offend. According to Beccaria and Bentham, people's decisions to offend are guided by calculations that weigh the pleasure they hope to obtain from criminal acts against the potential pain they would receive if they were caught and punished for their crimes. This perspective, known as the classical school of criminology, maintains that people's calculations involve their knowledge of the law and their perceptions of the likelihood of punishment (based on their experiences and knowledge of the experiences of others). It proposes that crime can be most effectively deterred by punishments that are certain, swift, and proportional to the harm caused. Punishments that met these criteria would discourage offenders from re-offending and would encourage others to be law-abiding. This "deterrence" philosophy was the preeminent explanation of crime for over a hundred years; yet, by the start of the twentieth century its popularity was eclipsed by positivist explanations arguing that offenders differ from nonoffenders in important ways (e.g., socialization).