SOC205H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Penology, The Offence, Major Crimes Act
Document Summary
According to garland, "modern criminology, like other academic specialisms, consists of a body of accredited and systematically transmitted forms of knowledge, approved procedures and techniques of investigation, and a cluster of questions which make up the subject"s recognised agendas. " At the heart of the classical school of criminological thought is the assumption that the criminal is someone exercising free will and rationality. The emergence of classical conceptions of law and criminal justice can be seen as a product of the more general shift from feudal to industrial society. Feudal societies, based on landownership and the concentration of wealth concentration of wealth and power into relatively few hands, rested on a combination of tradition and harsh, repressive systems of justice. In the eighteenth century, so- called "classical" thinking emerged largely in response to the arbitrary and cruel forms of punishment that continued to dominate. Enlightenment thinkers in this area, both sought to limit the barbarity of eighteenth-century systems of justice.
