THE CAUSES OF CRIME ARE REALLY IRRELEVANT AS FAR AS SITUATIONAL Essay

THE CAUSES OF CRIME ARE REALLY IRRELEVANT AS FAR AS SITUATIONAL REMEDIES ARE CONCERNED - DISCUSS - Essay Example In spite of this definition, some people persist in their behavior and thus commit crimes; the political society reacts by punishment, treatment or prevention.1 The hallmark of criminality is that, it is a breach of the criminal law. Lord Atkin in Proprietary Articles Trade Association v. A-G- for Canada2 stated that â€Å"the criminal quality of an act cannot be discerned by intuition; nor can it be discovered by reference to any standard but one; is the act prohibited with penal consequences?† Criminology is the scientific study of crime and criminals vis-à  -vis society. To know more about crimes they have to be measured and recorded. Measuring crime and Criminal Behavior is one of the most important functions of criminology. The availability and computing of crime statistics is a vital component of law enforcement. Crime statistics provide us with important facts that theories must then explain. Measuring crime and finding the crime rate is essential to discover the root causes of crime. The who, when, where, how of crimes is addressed by the quantitative techniques of measuring crime and which are vital in answering the why of crimes. Measuring criminal behavior is not just an academic exercise in futility, for it can fruitfully be used in evaluating criminal justice policy initiatives, policing, judicial and correctional administration amongst various other uses. The classicists4 believed that criminal behavior was a function of the human ability to choose an individual course of action. This school was based on hedonistic psychology. According to this psychology, man governs his behavior by considerations of pleasures and pains; the pleasures anticipated from a particular act may be balanced against the pains anticipated from the same act, or the algebraic sum of pleasure and pains from another act. The actor was assumed to have a free will and to make his choice