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Early Origins
Criminology studies the phenomena of deviance, its actors, as well as its impact on society. Criminology, in the past, was described as the procedures to take care of criminal conduct. We can retrace this type of criminology to primitive societies as they already contained people that were deviant to the norms and rules in vigour. In Europe, during the late 1700s, there was a shift in the approach to criminology. A general concern emerged regarding the unfair treatments and poor living conditions of criminals in prison and courts. A common will to humanize the jurisdiction emerged.

The emergence of Criminology as a discipline
Seeing new tensions emerge at the beginning of 1800, to solve the problem, people decided they should try to understand the systems of deviance. Torture and punishment weren’t the unique solutions in criminology. Cesar Lombroso’s research during the early 1900’s suggesting that criminology should be worthy of study. He argued that there was a psychological aspect behind a criminal and deviance. Felonies are committed out of a free will. It was the origins of this free will that had to be investigated to improve a better jurisdiction.

Criminology: an independent discipline
Slowly, criminology started to develop itself as a subject in disciplines across different countries. For example, in Britain, criminology was studied for medical purposes, whereas in France, Durkheim used it to tackle sociological studies. Criminology relating to various subjects, made scholars realize they should consider it as an independent discipline. Institutions all over the world started considering criminology as a discipline. In the United-States, the first textbook “Criminology” was published by Maurice Parmelee in 1920. In Britain, the “Association for the Scientific Treatment of Delinquency” was inaugurated by the Kings College of London in 1942 and later on in 1941 Cambridge opened the Department of Criminal Science.

Today: Criminology as a discipline
Today the discipline of criminology has evolved. In Britain, we can nowadays count up to 80 criminology degrees. They focus on developing different ways to approach criminals and crimes. The study of deviance is now affected by the biological, sociological, political, environmental and psychological context it is set in. Examining new ways of preventing crimes and further understanding of the criminal world and the different subjects linked to it are also part of the discipline.