Parmelee, Maurice

Maurice Parmelee was one of the early pioneers in American criminology. He was trained as a sociologist, and throughout his career he held a number of positions in the academia and the government. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1909 and began his teaching career in University of Kansas before moving to University of Missouri. He left academia for the government in 1918, when he was appointed at the War Trade Board in London. He also worked for the Departments of State, Agriculture, Treasury, and Interior. He was appointed to the Bureau of Economic Warfare in 1941 but was forced to resign after being investigated for alleged socialist leanings. Throughout his long career, Parmelee wrote several books on a wide range of sociological topics including monographs on poverty, alcoholism, and human behavior. He also wrote some of the first texts in American criminology: The Principles of Anthropology and Sociology in Their Relations to Criminal Procedure and Criminology.

Parmelee believed that in order to understand criminal behavior, it was necessary to synthesize discoveries of both natural sciences and social sciences. He asserted that lawyers, jurists, and philosophers had hitherto dominated discussions on crime and there was little scientific understanding of this social phenomenon. Parmelee praised the Classical School in criminology as exemplified by the works of Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham in its effort to devise a penal system in preserving the fundamental rights and liberties of the individual along with the social need of deterrence of crime. However, Parmelee was skeptical of the theoretical and practical relevance of the doctrine of moral responsibility, and he thought that the fundamental weakness of this perspective is that it fails to see the abnormal and pathological nature of criminal behavior. In his opinion, rather than making a priori assumptions about “free will,” criminologists need to study the individual and social pathologies inherent in a criminal person and need to assume a holistic perspective that encompasses the psychological, physical, and sociological aspects of acts of crime. However, acknowledging the variation that exists between the various perspectives, he asserted in The Principles of Anthropology and Sociology in Their Relations to Criminal Procedure that criminologists should consider some of the essential elements of criminal acts, such as defiance of prevailing morality, social and individual harm as well as the penal reaction from the society without trying to formulate a single definition that may fail to acknowledge the complexity of these various elements.

Parmelee was influenced by the works of Cesare Lombroso and the Positivist School. While Parmelee acknowledged some of the criticisms leveled against the inherent biological determinism of Lombroso's theory, he praised Lombroso's effort to establish a science of criminology. Parmelee was particularly influenced by the works of Lombroso's follower Enrico Ferri, who called for an integration of different branches of knowledge including anthropology, psychology, statistics, and penology in the new science of “criminal sociology.” Parmelee asserted that the sociological and biological perspectives are [Page 682]very similar in their pursuit of scientific explanations for the “natural causes” of criminal behavior and should be effectively combined in the criminological discourse. The search for these so-called natural causes is manifested in Parmelee's propensity to essentialize criminal behavior as inherently deviant, and his belief that psychopathic and demented individuals dominate the ranks of criminals. Some of his statements regarding the innate inferiority of female criminals are viewed as reflecting contemporary prejudices, and may come across as seriously misinformed in our time.

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