Historical approach

• Atavistic form= biological approach created by Lombroso that attributes criminal activity to the fact that offenders are genetic throwbacks or a primitive subspecies ill-suited to conforming to the rules of modern society. Such individuals are distinguishable by particular facial and cranial characteristics.
• Offenders were seen by Lombroso as lacking evolutionary development, their savage and untamed nature meant that they would find it impossible to adjust to the demands of civilised society and would inevitably turn to crime.
• Lombroso saw offending behaviour as a natural tendency, rooted in the genes of those who engage in it.
• Lombroso proposed that offending was innate and therefore an offender was not to blame for his actions.
• Lombroso argued the offender subtype could be identified by particular physiological ‘markers’ that were linked to particular types of offence.
• Physical markers included a sloping brow, strong jaw, facial asymmetry, dark skin, existence of extra toes, nipples or fingers.
• Lombroso went on to categorise particular types of offender in terms of their physical and facial characteristics. Murderers were described as having bloodshot eyes, curly hair and long ears. Sexual deviants had glinting eyes, swollen lips and projecting ears.
• Besides physical characteristics, Lombroso suggested there were other aspects if the born offender including insensitivity to pain, use of slang, tattoos and unemployment.
• Lombroso meticulously examined the facial and cranial features of hundreds of Italian convicts, both living and dead, and concluded that there was an ‘atavistic form’. Furthermore he concluded that these features were key indicators of criminality. Lombroso examined the skulls of 383 dead convicts and 3839 living ones, and concluded that 40% of criminal acts are committed by people with atavistic characteristics.
• A strength of Lombroso’s work is it changed the face of the study of crime. Lombroso is credited as shifting the emphasis in crime research away from a moralistic discourse (where offenders were judged as being wicked and weak-minded) towards a more scientific position (that of 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. Suggesting Lombroso made a major contribution to the science of criminology
• However, several critics, including DeLisi have 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 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.
• A limitation is evidence contradicts the link between atavism and crime. Goring, 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 cranial characteristic. This challenges the idea that offenders can be physically distinguished from the rest of population and are therefore unlikely to be a subspecies.
• Another limitation is that Lombroso’s methods of investigation were poorly controlled. Lombroso 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 the higher crime rates in certain groups of people (e.g. research supports links between poverty and poor educational outcomes and crime). This suggests Lombroso’s research does not meet modern scientific standards.