AO3

• Lombroso’s Legacy: Strength

  • ’Father of modern criminology’, he himself coined the term criminology (Hollin 1989)
  • Shifted crime away from the moralistic discourse (wicked and weak-minded) to a more scientific basis
  • Trying to define offender types, Lombroso’s work heralded the beginning of Profiling
  • Lombroso made a major contribution to the science of criminology
• Lombroso’s Legacy: Counterpoint

  • Matt DeLisi (2012) Racist undertones, many features if the A form (dark skin, curly hair) is more like to be found making people from African descent
  • Africans = more likely to commit crimes - fitted the 19th century eugenic attitude
  • Highly subjective, rather than objective, influenced by racial prejudices
• What did Charles Goring (1913) find (Contradictory evidence: Weakness)

  • Comparison of 3000 offenders and non-offenders
  • Concluded no evidence of offenders with a distinct group of offenders with an unusual set of characteristics
  • He did suggest many criminals have lower IQ
  • Challenges the idea that offenders can be physically distinguished from the rest of the population
• Poor Control: Weakness

  • Failed to control important variables within his research, he did not compare his sample with non-offenders (control)
  • Which could’ve controlled confounding variables that might’ve explained higher crime rates in groups of people
  • Research demonstrated links between crime and social conditions like poverty, and lack of education (Hay and Forest 2009) - why they’d be unemployed
  • Lombroso’s research does not meet modern scientific standards
• Nature or Nurture 


  • Raises the question whether criminals are born or made
  • Atavist form suggests that crime has a biological cause - genetically determined
  • However, may not mean it‘s the case = facial features may be because of poverty or poor diet rather than genes