Lombroso Flashcards
Lombroso
In 1876 Lombroso released his book the criminal man which is where he first developed his theory of criminal anthropology.
He said that born criminals would have certain physical characteristics or abnormalities- he named these “Atavistic” features
Atavistic features
The term attavistic means that the physical abnormalities that offenders have occured as the criminals were of an earlier stage of human evolution.
Where they all had primitive features and looked like Apes
Physicoloigcal theory
Reaserch
All his reaserch was Primary
He focused mainly on offenders and their bodys/ features and he documented the key characteristics.
They studied offenders, non offenders and people who are mentally ill.
He mainly measured height, wright, span of their body while seated, hand size, leg size, eye colour, ect
Findings
His findings showed that criminals werent non human they were just a different type of human and they had a variety of different characteristics that made them this way, examples of this were asymetrical face, large jaw, exessivly long arm and epilepsy.
He also thought you could tell the type of criminal they were with theives having different characteristics to violent criminals.
Evaluation
Positives
Scientific explanation of criminality- he was one of ther first to scientifically study criminality rather than rely upon subjective opinion.
Crime has a cause- he was able to prove that crime was caused by physiology which offerd an explanation for criminal behaviour as he was able to prove correlation between the features and criminals.
Evaluation
Negative
Lack of reliability- Lombrosos work has not been proven by any other scientists which impacts his reliability negatively
Ethnocentric veiws- Lombrosos work has been critisiced for focusing on features that are not typical of western cultures, this is seen as a form of racial profiling.
