Biological explanations

Question 1

Outline the biological/historical approach

Answer 1

Criminals are genetic throwbacks. A primitive subspecies who were biologically different from non-criminals. By today, this would have been speculative and naive.

Offenders lacked evolutionary development. Savage, untame nature, so can’t adjust to civilised society, and turn to crime. Lombroso proposed that offending behaviour was therefore not their fault, it was rooted in their genes.

Question 2

Describe Lombroso’s research and findings

Answer 2

Examined facial and cranial features of 4000+ convicts (383 of which were dead). 40% of offenders had the atavistic form.

Strong jaw, high cheekbones, asymmetric face, dark skin, unemployed.

Question 3

Describe some offender types

Answer 3

Murderers had bloodshot eyes, curly hair.
Fraudsters had thin and ‘reedy’ lips.
Sexual deviants had glinting eyes, swollen and fleshy lips.

Question 4

Strengths of the historical approach

Answer 4

• Lombroso’s legacy. A strength of his work is that it changed the face of the study of crime. He was hailed the ‘father of modern criminology’. He shifted the emphasis in crime research from moralistic discourse to a more scientific position. Also, describing how types of people are likely to commit types of crime, he heralded the beginning of offender profiling. HOWEVER, people of African descent were more often than not fitting the atavistic form (racist), fitting eugenic views of the time, influenced by periodic racial prejudice.

Question 5

Limitations of the historical approach

Answer 5

• Contradictory evidence - 3000 offenders, and 3000 non-offenders, no physical differences, but found there was correlation between crime and lower-than-average intelligence.
• Poor control - Lombroso’s methods of investigation were poorly controlled. Confounding variables were uncontrolled e.g. social conditions like poverty. He did not compare his offender sample with a non-offender control group.

Question 6

Describe the genetic explanation for offending behaviour

Answer 6

Twin and adoption studies

3500 twin pairs were studied in Denmark and it was found that concordance rates for offending behaviour were 35% for identical twins and 13% for monozygotic twins in males. Indicates that it may not be behaviour that is inherited but also the underlying predisposing traits.

Candidate genes

Genetic analysis of 800 Finnish offenders suggested 2 genes MAOA - associated with serotonin regulation and linked to aggressive behaviour - and CDH13 - linked to violent crime and substance abuse, and ADHD. Analysis found 5-10% crime attributable to these both.

Question 7

Describe the neural explanation for offending behaviour

Answer 7

• There are neural differences between the brains of offenders and non-offenders. A lot of the evidence has involved those diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, associated with reduced emotional response, a lack of empathy for the feelings of others.
• The prefrontal cortex regulates emotional behaviour. Adrian Raine found people with APD have reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex. He also found, alongside his colleagues in 2000, an 11% reduction in the volume of grey matter in the cortex of people with APD compared to controls.
• Recent research suggests that APD offenders experience empathy but more sporadically than the rest of us. Christian Keysers (2011) found that only when offenders were asked to empathise with a person in a film (experiencing pain) did their empathy reaction activate (controlled by mirror neurons in the brain). Suggests that APD individuals are not totally without empathy, but may have a neural switch that can be turned on and off, unlike the normal brain which has the empathy switch permanently turned on.

Question 8

Strength and Limitation of the genetic explanation

Answer 8

• Studies with twin evidence assume they experience the same environment as each other because they are twins - which may only be true in MZ twins, because they are treated similarly due to looking similar, which affects their behaviour. Higher concordance rates could just be because they are treated the same.
• Positive correlation between 13,000 Danish adoptees and conviction rate. 13.5% when neither biological/adoptive parents were convicted, 20% when biological, and 24.5% when both were convicted.

Question 9

Strength and Limitation of the neural explanation

Answer 9

• Brain Evidence - Support for the link between crime and the frontal lobe. Kandel and Freed (1989) reviewed evidence of frontal lobe damage and antisocial behaviour. People with such damage tended to show more impulsive behaviour, emotional instability, and an inability to learn from their mistakes. The frontal lobe is associated with planning, which supports the idea that brain damage may be a causal factor in offending behaviour.
• Intervening variables - Link between APD and neural differences may be complex. Farrington et al (2006) studied a group of men with high APD levels. They have experienced various risk factors during childhood e.g. being raised by a convicted parent/physical neglect and it could be these early childhood experiences that cause APD and neural differences associated with it, such as reduced activity in the frontal lobe, due to trauma. Suggests that the relationship between neural differences and APD and offending is complex, and there may be intervening variables that have an impact.