All Classical School and Rational Choice

The classical school and rational choice theory explain crime as a free and rational choice. Classical criminology grew from the Enlightenment and the social contract tradition, which implies that people capable of agreeing to a government can also deliberate about whether to obey the law, and that rational agency is what makes deterrence possible. Cesare Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments set out certainty, severity and celerity of punishment as core principles, and Jeremy Bentham added the felicific calculus and the panopticon. Rational choice theory carries the idea into the economics of crime, through Gary Becker's economic model and the work of Cornish and Clarke.