Week Eight - History Of Biological Theories Of Criminal Behaviour Flashcards
Since the time of the earliest surviving records…
Since the time of the earliest surviving records, ugliness, disability, and deformity have been taken as reflections of evil and criminality
Egyptian papyri, the Bible and Homer’s Iliad all take the link as valid and this belief has survived to the present day
Ancient Greece..
Physiognomy (assessing personality from facial features) traces its roots to Ancient Greece where the concept that mind, morality, and body were intimately interrelated was widely accepted, even by Aristotle (perhaps the most scientific of the Ancient Greeks).
Socrates was condemned to death partly on the evidence of a physiognomist that his face showed him to be a cruel drunk
Medieval Europe..
In Medieval Europe physical imperfections, such as warts, moles and third nipples, were taken as proof of demonic possession (Einstadter and Henry, 1995) an in ordinary, secular, law if two people were under equal suspicion then the uglier were found guilty (Wilson and Herrnstein, 1985)
Della Porte (1535-1615)…
The pre-existing belief that appearance reflected inner worth was first woven into a more scientific version of physiognomy by Della Porte (1535-1615).
Della Porte studied dead bodies and claimed he found a connection between facial features such as small ears and large lips with criminal behaviour.
Later physiognomists such as Beccaria (‘On Crimes and Punishments’, 1764) and Lavater (‘Physiognomical Fragments’,1775) extended Della Porte’s theory
Gall (1758-1828)..
The increasing status of scientific methods encouraged the search for physical signs of moral degeneracy.
Phrenology was a theory adopted and publicised by Gall (1758-1828). It proposed that the surface of the skull was raised where it lay over parts of the brain that were more active than average. In many ways it prefigured our present view of the brain as made of many largely independent modules each with a specific task
Some of the ‘bumps’ that phrenologists linked with criminal behaviour actually have some empirical support..
Some of the ‘bumps’ that phrenologists linked with criminal behaviour actually have some empirical support.
The ‘destructiveness centre’ behind and above the left ear really is prominent in about 17 per cent of criminals, and there are others at the back of the skill that seem to reflect abnormalities of two parts of the brain, the hippocampus and amygdala.
You will see that these are thought to be important in violent anti-social or criminal behaviour. It may be that things that distort the development of our brains can also disturb the growth of the neighbouring bone, or vice versa. Injuries later in life certainly can damage the skull and the underlying brain tissue
Testing Gall’s theory..
The methods, and philosophical understanding, to test Gall’s theory did not exist in his lifetime and his attempts to get around these problems ended by invalidating the project.
Indeed, the popular success of phrenology led to a counter-movement that focused not only on the problems of testing its claims but also on the idea that our brain was built of largely independent systems
Lombroso…
The next major step on the road to current biological theories comes from Lombroso, one of the people who founded modern criminology.
Lombroso (1876) used Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection to argue that criminals were biological throwbacks (i.e. their looks, morality, and behavior were atavistic - or like their primitive ancestors).
He wrote a book called ‘The Criminal Man’ in which he studied 383 criminals looking for a set of signs (stigmata) that he argued showed avativism.
These included such things as a deviation in head size, asymmetry of the face, excessive jaw/cheekbones, eye defects, ear size and position and nose twisted/upturned. He found that over two in five had at least five signs.
On this evidence, he argued that five or more stigmata indicated that someone was born biologically destined to be a criminal.
His work was now largely discredited but has been influential
Ferri and Garofalo
Ferri and Garofalo were Italian scholars who continued the work of Lombroso.
Ferri emphasized the importance of social and environmental factors in explaining criminality.
Garofalo saw criminals as people who lacked concern for others and were ‘developmentally deficient’.
He identified four classes of criminal: Murderer (altruism wholly lacking), Violent Criminal (lack of pity), Thieves (lack of probity) and Lascivious criminals/sex offenders (low morals).
Believed in social interests over individual rights.
However also believed in some elements of classical tradition - concerned with penalties for certain types of crime/criminal.
Therefore positivism (pre-destined actor) wasn’t a direct replacement for classicism
Goring (1913)…
An English scientist responded to Lombroso’s claims with one of the earliest convincing tests of the atavism hypothesis.
Goring (1913) compared over three thousand habitual criminals with large, varied control groups over a decade: he used objective measures for 37 possible sign of atavism and found no differences other than that the criminals were, on average, two inches shorter and about five pounds lighter.
Goring took this as support for his own theory that criminal had inherited a poorer set of genes but it is also consistent with the hypothesis that if people grow up in impoverished environments then they are likely to be physically less developed and more likely to turn to crime
Sheldon (1949)..
The idea that looks and crime and somehow connected via biology continued to develop, and after the Second World War, Sheldon (1949) published a book that proposed a theory that body type was linked to personality.
He used scientific methods to support his hypotheses. There were three extremes: the round, chubby endomorph who is tolerant, extrovert and likes food and people; the ectomorph who is slender and artistic, sensitive and introverted; and the mesomorph who is muscular, shaped like a triangle pointing down, and aggressive, competitive, fearless and risk-taking.
If you imagine a triangle pointing down, and extreme at one point we all fall somewhere within it - few people are ‘pure’ mesomorphs, endomorphs, or ectomorphs - but the more a person approached the mesomorphic point then the more likely Sheldon thought they were to be criminal.
He produced data to show that convicted offenders are more mesomorphic on average than the rest of the population
Modern Period…
This takes us into the ‘modern’ period of biological thought on which the rest of this chapter concentrates.
As you will see, studies of the possible genetic basis of factors related to criminality had already been going on for decades.
A set of studies by Bohman (1996) are a milestone in the development of methods which highlighted the interaction between biological and social factors: the biosocial interaction model that is the most promising in this area.
Also, Wilson’s revolutionary book (1975) argued that human social behaviour had biological roots and was evolved
