AO3

• One strength of Lombroso’s work is it changed the face of the study of crime. Lombroso has been hailed as the father of modern criminology. He is also credited as shifting the emphasis in crime research away from a moralistic discourse towards a more scientific position
• Counter argument to Lombroso’s legacy being 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, basically suggesting that Africans were more likely to be offenders, a view that fitted 19th century eugenic attitudes
• There is evidence which contradicts the link between atavism and crime

  Goring compared 3000 offenders and 3000 non-offenders. He concluded that there was no evidence that offenders are a distinct group with unusual facial and cranial characteristics (though he did suggest that many people who commit crime have a lower than average intelligence).
• Lombroso’s methods of investigation were poorly controlled. He failed to control important variables within his research. Unlike Goring, he did not compare his offender sample with a non-offenders control group.
• Since Lombroso did not compare his offender sample with a non-offender control group, which could have led to the influence of an assortment of confounding variables that might have equally explained higher crime rates in certain groups of people. For example, research has demonstrated links between crime and social conditions such as poverty and poor educational outcomes. This would explain why offenders were more like to be unemployed, for example