distinguishing feature of the various schools of positivism was that
they put far less emphasis than the classical school on the free will
of individuals, as they were interested in the underlying forces that
might drive people to criminality. Rawson (1839: 316) put the case
for the statistical analysis of crime in the early nineteenth century by
arguing that science could be used to examine ‘moral phenomena’:
Undeserved ridicule has been cast upon some attempts which
have been made to show that moral phenomena are subject to
established and general laws … Science has taught, and daily
experience proves, that the universe is regulated upon a uniform
and immutable system; that the several parts coexist and are
kept together by means of fixed laws. … Mankind is not exempt
from these laws. … Neither can it be denied that the mind is
subject to such laws.
There were, however, two distinct versions of positivism that had
very different views about the location of those forces. First, there
were the more sociological schools that looked to the social forces
that were propelling people toward criminality. Second, there were
schools of thought that took a more individualistic or ‘psychological’
perspective in assuming that the seeds of criminality could be found
in the make-up of individuals. Some people, they suggested, are
simply born with physical and psychological characteristics that
made crime much more likely.
A notable form of early sociological investigation that used maps
to trace the incidences of crimes in different locations will first be
discussed. In many ways, the findings prefigured many sociological
concerns with the influence of poverty on crime. Second, nineteenthcentury
biological criminology will be discussed. This work was
also influential in rather a different way, as the rather crude, and
exaggerated, claims of the significance of an individual’s physical
characteristics helped to marginalise those fields of enquiry that
assumed that the individual ought be the focus of research.
Early sociological work: the cartographic school
A great deal of early sociological work emphasised the social
conditions that might lead to crime. The first tool in to be used in
this task was that of ‘mapping’. There was considerable interest in
the statistics of crime particularly in the late nineteenth century, most
particularly in the geography of crime. A lot of this work took place