historical Flashcards
Atavistic form approach
A biological approach to offending that attributes criminal activity to offenders being genetic throwbacks or primitive subspecies ill-suited to conforming to rules of model society
Such features are cranial
How came up with it?
Lombroso - ‘L’Uomo Delinquente’
Historical approach
Criminals are ‘genetic throwbacks’, primitive subspecies different from non-criminals
Biological approach
Offending behaviour is innate, a natural tendency that the criminal cannot help and so should not be blamed
Offender types
Murderers had bloodshot eyes, curly hair and long ears
Sexual deviants had glinting eyes, fleshy lips and projecting ears
Fraudsters had thin lips
Lombroso’s research
Analysed the facial and cranial features of 383 dead criminals and 3839 living ones
Concluded that 40% of criminal acts could be explained by atavistic characteristics
EVAL - legacy
P - Strength of Lombroso’s work - changed the face of the study of crime
E - Hailed father of modern criminology - coined term criminology - credited as shifting the emphasis away from a moralistic discourse and towards a scientific position
E - trying to describe how particular types of people are likely to commit particular types of crime, theory heralded the beginning of offender profiling
L - Lombroso made a major contribution to the science of criminology
P - DeLisi questioned whether Lombroso’s legacy is positive
E - This is due to racist undertones of his work - many of features identified are most likely found among people of African descent
E - He suggested that Africans were more likely to be offenders, a view that fitted 19th C eugenic attitudes
L - Suggests that some aspects of his theory were highly subjective rather than objective - racial prejudices of the time
eval - evidence
P - Limitation - evidence contradicts link between atavism and crime
E - Goring set out to establish whether offenders were physically atypical - 3000 offenders and 3000 non-offenders
E - concluded no evidence that offenders are a distinct group with unusual facial and cranial characteristics
L - Challenges idea that offenders can be physically distinguished from the rest of the population and therefore un
eval - control
P - Limitation - Lombroso’s methods of investigation were poorly controlled
E - Failed to control important variables as did not compare offender sample with non-offender control group
E - could have controlled for an assortment of confounding variables that might have equally explained higher crime rates in certain groups of people - research has demonstrated links between crime and social conditions
L - Lombroso’s research does not meet modern scientific standards
eval - biology
P - Lombroso’s work raises question whether criminals born or made
E - Crime has a biological cause and is genetically determined
E - However, this does not mean this is a cause of their offending
L - Facial and cranial differences may be influenced by other factors such as poverty and diet - reductionism?
