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By Kenneth D. Tunnell

The major issues explored through this study were the motivation to commit property crimes, alternatives to crime commission, neutralization of fears during criminal decision making, and decision making processes. During the analysis of the data, five basic themes emerged. Offenders typically decided to commit crimes by using one or more neutralization techniques, most frequently alcohol or drugs, that aided them in the decision making and in the actual crime commission. Persistent criminals did not give any thought to the potentially negative consequences of their actions. The decision making types explicated in this study characterize individuals who are problematic for society, the judicial system, and the other people whose lives they disrupt. The study found that offenders typically specialized in one type of crime for a period of time, then moved on to another specialty area. Finally, the results indicated that these offenders committed a disproportionate number of crimes because they lacked other alternatives. The author maintains that these findings dispute the generally accepted view of the effectiveness of deterrence and instead point to needed policy changes in the areas of wealth redistribution, educational reform, and structural changes in the criminal justice system.

Nelson-Hall Publishers / Chicago, 1992, 191p

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Translated from the Italian in the Author's Original Order With Notes and Introduction by David Young

On Crimes and Punishments is a seminal treatise on legal reform written by the Italian philosopher and thinker Cesare Beccaria between 1763 and 1764. The essays proposed many reforms for the criminal justice system, including prompt administration of clearly prescribed and consistent punishments, well-publicized laws made by the legislature rather than individual courts or judges, the abolition of torture in prisons and the use of the penal system to deter would-be offenders, rather than simply punishing those convicted. It is also one of the earlier, and most famous, works against death penalty. The main reason put forward against that measure is that the State, by putting people to death, was committing a crime to punish another one.On Crimes and Punishments is widely considered one of the founding texts of Classical Criminology.

Indiana. Hackett Publishing. 1986.

By Thomas G. Blomberg, Jennifer E. Copp, and Jillian J. Turanovic

The relevance of criminology to matters of public policy has been hotly debated throughout the history of the discipline. Yet time and again, we have borne witness to the consequences of harmful criminal justice practices that do little to reduce crime or improve the lives of our most vulnerable populations. Given the urgent need for evidence-informed responses to the problems that face our society, we argue here that criminologists can and should have a voice in the process. Accordingly, this review describes challenges and prospects for evidence-informed policymaking on matters of crime and justice. In terms of challenges, we review discourse on what constitutes evidence, issues with providing guidance under conditions of causal uncertainty, and practical constraints on evidence-informed policymaking. For prospects, we consider the important roles of institutional support, graduate training, and multiple translational strategies for the evidence-informed movement. Finally, we end with several considerations for advancing translational criminology through expanded promotion and tenure criteria, curricula revision, and prioritizing the organization of knowledge. More broadly, our goals are to stimulate disciplinary thinking regarding the ways in which criminology may play a more meaningful role in effectively confronting the ongoing challenges of crime in society.

Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 7, Page 143 - 162

By Coleman Phillipson.

THE following three essays are not intended to be considered as separate, independent studies; they are meant to be taken together as supplementing each other, and as constituting one whole. With this intention in view, the author has been able to avoid a good deal of overlapping and repetition, which would otherwise have been inevitable. Though three men and their works are here discussed, we are concerned with but one epoch, one movement, one phase in legal evolution, which represents in many respects a turning-point in European history, and is of the utmost importance in the development of our modern civilisation. Beccaria, Bentham and Romilly are among the greatest law reformers of modern times. In their assault on the folly, injustice and cruelty of the then existing criminal jurisprudence, in their trenchant criticism of outworn codes, obscurantist traditions, blind superstitions, dogmatic technicalities, oppressive fictions, and useless relics of the past, in their proposal of rational substitutes, in their pointing the way to the light, they were intimately united. Their resemblances, like their differences, are as striking in their work as they are in their personal characteristics. In the case of Beccaria—a diffident Italian youth, shrinking from the struggles _ of men, whose small work was almost forcibly extracted from . him by his friends, and whose guarded oracular utterances soon arrested the attention of the world—we shall see vital conceptions and principles of penology in the process of germination and crystallisation; we shall see them in their triumphant conflict with the prevailing régime of sanguinary laws and barbarous methods of procedure. In the case of Bentham—that myriad-minded man, the dauntless explorer of institutions, the arch-legislator ever ready, in his jealously guarded “‘hermitage,”’ to make laws for all the nations of the earth—we shall see a prodigious multitude of ideas, schemes and systems, lavishly given to the world from a rich mine that could, surely, never be exhausted; we shall see this prolific progenitor scattering them broadcast, infusing new life into many barren places…

London: J.M. Dent, 1923. 344p.

By Carl Murchison.

“This material is offered for the special consideration of lawyers, psychologists, siociologists, social workers, and all those who have to do with the formulation of criminal law, the treatment of criminals, and the molding of public opinion concerning the enemies of organized society…”

A Read-Me.Org Classic Reprint (1926) 483 pages.

By Arthur Train.

“The pleasant fiction of the innocence.”

New York Scribner’s (1912) 256 pages.