Some Obstacles to Generalizing in Criminology

Abstract

In the years since criminology began, and especially since the decline of the “Biological School” near the beginning of the present century, the quantity of criminological research conducted in the United States has increased enormously, but adequate knowledge about crime causation has not increased proportionately. Particularly prior to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, most men who advanced theories about crime causation did so in an attempt to find a panacea for criminality. Few efforts were made to verify the many theological and moralistic assertions by actual investigations of factual situations; writers usually selected a general “cause” of all criminality and then sought to convince their readers that elimination of that cause would eradicate crime both by reforming criminals and by preventing future criminality. There was little or no attempt to “make sense,” in a logical generalization, of the known facts about variations in crime rates, despite the fact that Europeans such as Quetelet, Guerry, Joly, Liszt, Prins, Hamel, Fointsky, Tarde and others had compiled such facts and had attempted to generalize, in a preliminary way, about them.