Theories of Offending: Lombroso’s Theory of Atavistic Form - Forensic Psychology

Lombroso’s Theory of Atavistic Form (historical explanation):

A01:

Lombroso (1876) proposed that offenders were a biologically distinct group of people, exhibiting primitive characteristics.

He argued that criminals were born, not made (supports nature!), and that you could determine the type of criminal by the shape of their head and facial features.

He took physical measurements of Italian convicts and showed that they had physical anomalies, eg. large jaws and large ears.

Lombroso sampled 383 skulls of dead criminals, and the heads of 3,839 living ones – and whilst he didn’t suggest that all criminal acts were perpetrated by people with atavistic constitutions, he concluded that approximately 40% of crimes were.

A03:

A weakness is that there was no scientific foundation for his theory. Goring (1913) compared the physical features of 3,000 convicts to a control group of non-criminals, and found little support for Lombroso’s theory of distinctive facial and cranial characteristics and this therefore suggests this theory proposed by Lombroso was not an accurate or credible theory at all.

An additional point is that this theory had significant racial undertones – as ‘criminal characteristics’ were typical of people from an African origin – and similar racial views are still present nowadays. This suggests that this theory has had long-lasting negative implications, which is a major weakness.

Moreover, even if certain features occur more often in criminals, it doesn’t mean that there is a causal relationship – and instead, there could be other explanations. For example, people who have certain facial features may be stereotyped as being a ‘criminal’ which may lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy and therefore that it why certain features are supposedly more common in criminals – this suggests that the relationship is therefore indirect and demonstrates poor validity of this theory.

As  further weakness, this stereotyping of criminals looking a certain way could lead to prejudice and discrimination of individuals, suggesting that only negative implications have arose as a result of this theory and therefore it shouldn’t be used at all nowadays.