Evaluate the contributions made by the chicago school to our Essay

Evaluate the contributions made by the chicago school to our understandings of crime and the urban environment - Essay Example The Chicago School of Sociology moved the study of crime away from the basic and overly-simplified Biological and Physiological explanations of the 19th century onwards, promulgated by such positivist theorists as Lombroso1 which sought to explain criminal behaviour through ‘body type’ arguing that pathology was located in the individual. Fortuitously we live in an age where the Human Genome Project has nullified once and for all the idea that criminal behaviour can be explained categorically by ‘body type’. Whilst law enforcers may discriminate against certain physical features, theoretical law does not. Theoretical law concerns itself with the intention (mens rea) of the defendant who must also have undertaken a prohibited action (actus rea)a. It was increasingly apparent that such Biological and Physiological theories did not offer a universal theory for the existence of crime or its perpetrators. For example, those theories had no explanation to offer for ‘white-collar crime’ – undertaken by persons who had – and have - no apparent genetic, social or educational deprivation excuses for their ‘criminal’ behaviour. Edwin Sutherland’s studies in the 1940s of ‘White Collar Crime’ argued that white collar crime was rarely detected or prosecuted, as it appeared to be victimless crime and was committed by high net worth individuals. However in recent years there has been considerable focus on white collar criminals. A pertinent example is the former media mogul Conrad Black who is currently awaiting his turn on the witness stand. Pictures of the defendant clearly indicate that he does not have a low forehead. Besides raising significant counter-arguments to previous universally accepted criminological theories, the Chicago School opened a whole new avenue of empirical sociology research as they examined the impact of environment on behaviour setting out to answer the following question: Why is there