Historical contributions to understanding the teaching of criminology in Brazil

Abstract

The article presents historical contributions to understanding the teaching of criminology in law schools in Brazil. It takes as its source the texts and documents produced by criminologists and penalists throughout the 20th century, and uses bibliographical and documentary research as its method. The aim is to understand some points about the teaching of criminology in law schools, such as the reason why this subject is mostly offered in law schools (and not in medicine or social sciences, for example), as well as the relationships of tension between criminology and legal teaching, especially with the teaching of criminal law. Thus, we demonstrate the way in which criminology came to occupy a space in the context of legal education, based on the relationships between legal and medical knowledge at the end of the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century, the heyday of positivist criminology. Next, we investigate the decline of criminological knowledge in legal education, a fact that resulted from the preponderance of the technicist conception of the criminal sciences. Finally, we analyzed the resurgence of criminology in legal education, which occurred in the wake of the development of critical criminology. We conclude that while criminology entered law school at the beginning of the last century with the aim of assisting criminal law in the "fight against crime", thanks to the combined efforts of doctors and penalists, today its space, although limited, can be used to critically understand the assumptions of law in general and criminal law specifically.