Discuss the significance of scientific racism for criminology.
Crime is a social phenomenon that accompanies humanity for as long as there is the society itself. The issue of crime has been covered more than once in the work of the thinkers of past centuries and its relations within the race has been widely explored since ancient times (Treadwell, 2012). However, a systematic interest in the study emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, when criminology began to form an independent scientific discipline. Criminology developed as a natural result of the evolution of theoretical ideas about crime and practical approaches to its prevention in the 19th century (Kerner, 1998). With the emergence of the Enlightenment and rationalism scientists employed knowledge to discover causes of crime and tried to
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However, long time before him many others divided people such as Carl Linnaeus, Samuel George Morton, Charles Darwin and others (Patel and Tyrer, 2011). This knowledge became known as scientific racism and tended to scientifically prove differences between people on basis of physical attributes. The 19th century was also significant with the first experienced science of society such as sociology. Thus, criminology was formed not aside from the mainstream of its modern scientific knowledge (Jackson and Weidman, 2004). However, this essay attempts to discuss the significance of scientific racism for criminology because it is clearly evident that, despite the full confirmation of the unscientific nature of racist theories, the ideas of racism and nationalism continue to actively live in contemporary society and tend to create the image of a criminal. Although Phillips and Bowling noted, that “race and ethnicity are commonplace in empirical criminology. As a key socio-demographic variable, empirical criminologists routinely use them to describe victims of crime and offenders and less commonly,