Some Notes on Research into Crime and Punishment in Nigeria
| Author | Oluyemi Kayode |
| DOI | 10.1177/000486587801100407 |
| Published date | 01 December 1978 |
| Date | 01 December 1978 |
AUST &NZ JOURNAL
OF
CRIMINOLOGY (December 1978) 11
(241-251)
SOME NOTES ON RESEARCH
INTO
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN NIGERIA
Oluyemi Kayode"
241
Introduction
The
discipline of criminology is a variegated one;
and
like
any
scientific
pursuit, its philosophical and theoretical orientations reflect
the
culture not only
of the period in which such views emerge
but
also its intellectual tradition. If one
runs through the list of pioneers of
modern
criminology, the
stamp
of their
contribution attests
the
reflection of cultural epochs
and
various intellectual
orientations.
The
vast majority of
the
seventeen pioneers discussed
by
Hermann
Mannheim
(1960)
were
of
European
extraction -with
the
English and Italian ones playing
prominent roles. Only two of them
were
Americans. Eight of these pioneers -
Cesare Becaria,
Jeremy
Bentham, Enrico Ferri, Raffaele Garofalo, Pedro
Montero, Gabriel
Tarde,
Hans Gross
and
Charles
Doe
-
were
lawyers. Five of
them, including Isaac Ray, Cesare Lombroso
and
Charles Goring were
physicians with primarily psychiatric interests.
And
as Bloch
and
Geiss
(1970:85)
further noted, of the lot, only Durkheim
and
Bonger
were
sociologists; Alexander
Maconochie was a naval officer while Haviland was an architect. What diverse
backgrounds!
Granted the fact that different approaches to the same subject
matter
are
discernible in almost all disciplines, the diverse orientations of the pioneers in
criminology make its subject
matter
particularly of interest to various fields of
knowledge psychology, psychiatry, biology, law, endocrinology,
anthropology, and sociology. Emphasis tends to
vary
from
one
country to the
other, although as has been observed, the orientation of
European
criminology
has been predominantly biological
and
legal while
that
of
the
United States has
been
sociological. Aconsequence
of
its
own
historical continuity, each
orientation is simply
one
approach "to the scientific study
of
crime
and
criminals" (Wolfgang et
aI,
1962).
Historically, criminology can be dated
back
to 1885when Raffaele Garofalo so
christened the discipline concerned "with the
study
of violations of the criminal
law and of those
who
commit
them". This is
not
to imply
that
some efforts on
the subject
matter
of crime
did
not antedate this appellation: in fact as early as
1764, Becaria published his essay later translated- Into English as "Essay on
Crimes
and
Punishment" (Bloch and Geiss, 1970:84); besides it is conventional to
regard
Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909) as
the
father of scientific criminology. The
essence of the"reference to Becaria, Garofalo
and
Lombroso is its relevance to
the relatively
tender
age
of criminology as a discipline.
• PhD, Department of Sociology, University of Ibadan, Nigeria.
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