Theory summary: criminals are physically different from non-criminals and facial characteristics determine whether or not someone is criminal
Strength: Lombroso was the first person to study crime scientifically.
Strength: Lombroso used objective measurements to gather evidence.
Strength: Lombroso showed the importance of examiningclinical and historical records of criminals.
Strength: Lombroso took some limited account of social and environmental factors.
Strength: Lombroso's theory helps us focus on how we might prevent furtheroffending by arguing that offenders weren’t freely choosing to commit crime.
Limitation: Research since Lombroso has failed to show a correlation between facial features and criminality.
Limitation: Lombroso failed to compare his findings with a control group of non-criminals which may have found that not everyone with these features committed crime.
Limitation: By describing criminals as ‘primitive savages’, Lombroso equates non-western societies with criminals, which is a form of racism.
Lombroso's research methods were innovative at the time, but they would be considered unscientific today as he did not control for confounding variables such as social class and occupation.