Lombroso

• 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 examining clinical 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 further offending 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.