Historical approach to offending:
- Suggested by Cesare Lombroso (1876)
- Offenders seen as lacking evolutionary development, savage and untamed nature meant they would find it impossible to adjust to civilised society and inevitably turn to crime.
- Lombroso saw criminal behaviour as a natural tendency, rooted in the genealogy of those who engage in it.
Atavistic Characteristics:
- Biological Characteristics – narrow sloping brow, prominent jaw, high cheekbones, facial asymmetry, dark skin, extra nipples, toes or fingers.
- Other aspects – insensitivity to pain, tattoos, unemployment, criminal slang
- Murderers – bloodshot eyes, curly hair, long ears
- Sexual deviants – glinting eyes, fleshy lips, projecting ears
- Fraudsters – thin and ‘reedy’ lips
- Other aspects – insensitivity to pain, tattoos, unemployment, criminal slang
Lombroso’s research:
- Examined skulls of 383 dead criminals and 3839 living ones
- Concluded that 40% of criminal acts could be accounted for by atavistic characteristics
| Useful contribution – credited as shifting focus on crime towards a more scientific realm, considered to herald the beginning of offender profiling – provided useful hypotheses for later psychologists and was a useful contribution towards offender profiling | Insufficient Evidence – Lombroso did not use a control group, cannot identify if presence of atavistic characteristics is different from general population, also failed to account for confounding variable as many criminals had a history of psychological disorders – theory is not supported by valid research.
Considered as racism – Matt DeLisi (2012) – draws attention to racial undertones in this theory, eg: curly hair, dark skin, and how they could be linked to people of African descent and perception of Africans as ‘uncivilised, primitive, savage’ – this could lead to unfair discrimination of people of African descent as criminal.
Contradictory Evidence – Charles Goring (1913) – conducted comparison between 3000 criminals and 3000 non-criminals, no evidence that criminals had distinctly unusual facial or cranial characteristics – brings validity of theory into question.
Third-Variable – facial and cranial differences may actually be caused by other factors such as poverty or poor diet – lacks validity |