Індивідуальне завдання № 11

TASK 1. Read and translate the following text.

Modern Criminology: The Italian School

At the beginning of the 19th century, scholars began to apply the concepts and technologies of the rapidly developing biological and behavioral sciences to the study of crime. For the first time criminologists developed typologies of crime and criminals and attempted to identify patterns between these typologies and various biological, psychological, and social characteristics of offenders.

The founding of modern scientific criminology is generally credited to the socalled Italian school and to the work of its three principal exponents - Cesare Lombroso, Enrico Ferri, and Raffaele Garofalo. The first edition of Lombroso's most important work, L'uomo delinquente (The Criminal Man, 1876), attracted a great deal of attention because it appeared to demonstrate the feasibility of a genuinely scientific study of criminal behavior.Lombroso asserted that criminals are a distinct physical and biological type. He believed that the true criminal could be identified by observing certain physical traits, including a long lower jaw, asymmetric cranium, low forehead, high cheekbones, long arms, and other detectable conditions. For example, he said that lefthanded persons have a criminal instinct. These traits, according to Lombroso, did not cause criminal behavior, but they revealed an inherent propensity (inclination) to crime. Lombroso taught that the propensity toward crime was the result of atavism, a reversion to a more primitive state of human development.

One of Lombroso’s students, Enrico Ferri, accepted the existence of a criminal type but also focused on factors other than inherited physical characteristics as predictors of crime. He considered social factors such as population trends, religion, and the nature of the family. Ferri also proposed a more elaborate classification of criminal types, including the born or instinctive criminal, the insane criminal, the passionate criminal, the involuntary criminal, the occasional criminal, and the habitual criminal. According to Ferri, the last two types were not innate criminals but rather the products of unfortunate family or environmental circumstances.

Italian lawyer Raffaele Garofalo’s major contribution to modern criminology is the concept of natural crime. According to Garofalo, natural or true crime is conduct that, when evaluated against the average moral sense of the community, offends the basic altruistic (unselfish) sense of humankind. The true criminal is one who lacks the basic altruistic sentiments of pity and honesty. Garofalo believed that the true criminal is a distinct biological or psychic type and that the altruistic deficiencies were organic or inherited.

The Italian school made a valuable contribution to criminology by stimulating thought and writing about crime and criminals. It focused attention on the offender as an appropriate object of study, which the 18th-century reformers had not done.

TASK 2. Write down the Ukrainian equivalents for the words and expressions in bold type and memorize them.

TASK 3. Prepare in writing ( up to 250 words) your arguments for or against the statement “Criminality – Inborn or Acquired?”