Cartographic School of Criminology

Kevin E. Courtright & Robert J. Mutchnick

The cartographic school focused primarily on the mapping of crime and the relationship between society and the physical environment. The school was most prominent between the years of 1830 and 1880, appearing after the classical school of criminology and overlapping the beginning of the positive school (Sutherland et al. 1992). The cartographic school (or method, as some have called it) represented an ideological shift, from a focus on biological conditions to one on social conditions as they relate to crime causation; it concentrated on examining the relationship between crime and the physical environment. In France, between the middle of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, there was a change in penal strategies. Prior to this time, penal strategies, based on the prepositivistic notion that people (and criminals) possessed “free will,” were “dictated by a discourse couched in rhetoric about the free legal subject, the transgressions of whom ...

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