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Abstract
One of the many founding concepts of contemporary social science that arose during the Enlightenment was the idea that
society could control the behavior of its citizens by using formal mechanisms of social control. Theoretically, by manipulating the magnitude of punishment or pain guilty persons would experience for their deviant behavior, society could stop
offenders before they acted. More specically, since offenders acted in their own best interests, they would think about the
costs and benets of their behaviors prior to acting. Through punishment, society could make the costs of deviant or criminal
behavior outweigh whatever benets miscreants might otherwise accrue. Moreover, this would translate to more general
societal deterrence if the punishments individuals received were certain, swift, and severe. This article reviews the history of
these concepts through to the present day.
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 22
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03151-2
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inuenced signicantly by Comte. And, this shift in methodological stance marked such a tremendous change in the frame
of reference of theoretical discourse that it might be likened
to a revolution. In the earliest years of sociology, then, the study
of deviance was primarily the study of observable or empirically based causes of crime and deviance.
One example of early positivism is Cesare Lombroso
(18351909) who is viewed as the father of the positivist
school of criminology (Lombroso, 1876). Initially, Lombroso
examined several hundred Italian criminals and found they
had physical characteristics that suggested inadequacy and
degeneracy. Such characteristics were asymmetry of the face;
abnormally large or small head size; excessive jaw and cheekbone dimensions; ears of unusual size (e.g., small, protruding
from the head); abnormal nose (e.g., twisted, upturned, attened, beaklike, or having swollen nostrils); eshy, swollen,
and protruding lips; and pouches in the cheek like those of
some animals. These physical characteristics resembled the
appearance of lower or more apelike ancestors; thus the individuals having them were assumed to belong to these earlier
evolutionary forms. Even though Lombrosos theory of the
atavistic criminal has since been debunked, he is important
because he exemplies early efforts to combine theory and
science, the scientic generation of facts that can be explained
by theoretical interpretation. Additionally, later in his career,
he began including psychological and environmental factors
into his deliberations on the criminal man, thereby incorporating multiple factors into his theoretical development.
Another example of positivism was one that considered
more sociological explanations. During the late 1700s to early
1800s societies worldwide were undergoing massive transformations, and these changes led theorists to consider what
changes in deviance would occur due to emerging social
change. To elaborate, during the mid-1800s until the mid1900s American and European sociologists were studying the
large-scale social changes that were taking place (Websdale,
2010). These changes included such immense happenings as
urbanization, industrialization, capitalism, immigration or
emigration, family, and community. These massive social
changes inuenced societies, communities, and individuals in
equally large parts. For example, as the world became more
industrialized, more and more young adults left their families
farms and moved to the city in search of wage labor. This
increased the amount of urbanization, and population density,
which, in turn, changed the way people thought of community. The inux of immigration also changed the face of
communities and neighborhoods and cultural heterogeneity
increased. As more and more people were uprooted from their
traditional lives, many customs fell to the wayside, and people
were thrown into a new normless society. In the more traditional communities, family depended on their neighbors for
food or items they could not produce themselves. In the city,
people did not necessarily know their neighbors or interact
much with them. And, men and women were both seen as
making valuable and necessary contributions to the functioning of the family. But, with the onset of city life, the
close-knit communities that characterized farming areas fell
to the wayside and the economy shifted from one where
a man worked a job that (literally) provided the food and other
items his family needed to one where having a job that paid
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both individual and society level factors. This also suggests that
multimethod approaches will enhance our understanding of
deviance. Using observation or ethnography as well as surveys
or ofcial data can all be combined to provide more complete
accounts and descriptions of this important social phenomenon.
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