Historical Approach A03

Question 1

Lombrosos legacy - strength

Answer 1

• been hailed as the father of modern criminology’ - he himself coined the term ‘criminology’ (Hollin 1989).
• He is also credited as shifting the emphasis in crime research away from a moralistic discourse in which offenders were judged as being wicked and weak-minded) towards a more scientific position (that of evolutionary influences and genetics where individuals are not to blame). Also, in trying to describe how particular types of people are likely to commit particular types of crime, Lombroso’s theory in many ways heralded the beginning of offender profiling.
• This suggests that Lombroso made a major contribution to the science
  of criminology.

Question 2

Counterpoint for lombosos legacy - Matt delisi

Answer 2

• questioned whether Lombroso’s legacy is entirely positive. Attention has been drawn to the racist undertones within Lombroso’s work.
• Many of the features that Lombroso identified as atavistic (curly hair, dark skin) are most likely to be found among people of African descent. In other words he was basically suggesting that Africans were more likely to be offenders, a view that fitted 19th-century eugenic attitudes.
• This suggests that some aspects of his theory were highly subjective rather than objective, influenced by racial prejudices of the time.

Question 3

Contradictory evidence - limitation - Charles goring (1913)

Answer 3

• (1913), like Lombroso, set out to establish whether there was anything physically atypical about offenders.
• After conducting a comparison between 3000 offenders and 3000 non-offenders he concluded that there was no evidence that offenders are a distinct group with unusual facial and craniai characteristics (though he did suggest that many people who commit crime have lower-than-average intelligence).
• This challenges the idea that offenders can be physically distinguished from the rest of the population and are therefore unlikely to be a subspecies.

Question 4

Poor control - limitation

Answer 4

• failed to control important variables within his research.
  Unlike Goring, he did not compare his offender sample with a non-offender control group.
• This could have controlled for an assortment of confounding variables that might have equally explained higher crime rates in certain groups of people.
• For instance, research has demonstrated links between crime and social conditions such as poverty and poor educational outcomes (Hay and Forrest 2009) - links that would explain why offenders were more likely, for example, to be unemployed.
• This suggests that Lombrosos research does not meet modern scientific standards.