Different Interpretation of Criminology - Essay Example

Within such an understanding, the traditional and classical criminological perspective of the United States and many other Western nations developed to view criminals and crime as ultimate individuals that had made a series of wrong choices; individuals whose method of decision-making could ultimately be corrected by a sufficient level of punishment.

As a function of this interpretation, many carry-overs of this school of thought continue to be pervasively manifest in the United States criminal justice system; as well as many others around the globe. Before the development of the classical interpretation of criminology, rehabilitation was not even a term or idea that entered into the mind of most systems; rather, retribution was the main goal by which the system functioned. Seeking to expand some on the rather constrained classical interpretation of criminology which has been defined above, the positivist school sought to analyze and understand the way that internal and external factors, outside the control of the individual criminal, contributed to the actions that they perpetrated.

Before this interpretation, criminals and criminology had functioned under the presupposition that any crime was merely the result of poor rational choice and not the result of factors that were ultimately beyond the control of the criminal himself/herself. Finally, the neoclassical approach seeks to incorporate several of the aspects of the classical approach as well as more pertinent and recent theoretical approaches and responses to crime and criminology.