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Lombroso and the ‘Born Criminal’
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Forensic Psychology – Criminality
In this course, Professor Francis Pakes (University of Portsmouth) explores key issues in criminal psychology. In the first lecture, we think about Lombroso and the notion of the ‘born criminal’. In the second lecture, we discuss genetic explanations for crime more broadly. In the third lecture, we examine cognitive explanations for crime, focusing in particular on moral reasoning. Next, we think about cognitive distortions as a cognitive explanation for crime. In the fifth lecture, we consider the criminal justice system, focusing on the aims of imprisonment. In the sixth and final lecture, we think about recidivism.
Lombroso and the ‘Born Criminal’
In this lecture, we think about the work of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, focusing in particular on: (i) his famous work L’uomo delinquente [Delinquent Man] (1878) in which he proposed that criminality was a genetic trait and that criminals could be recognised by a certain set of atavistic physiological characteristics; (ii) the origins of Lombroso’s theory of atavistic form in his work as a physician and consider its critical success in nineteenth-century Italy and beyond; (iii) the suggestion that, while Lombroso’s work was significant in advancing the popularity of criminology and promoting a scientific approach to understanding crime, it was also fundamentally flawed and marked by scientific racism, classism and misogyny.
Hello, My name is Francis Picks.
00:00:05I am a professor of criminology at the University of Portsmouth,
00:00:09and this causes called issues in Criminal Psychology.
00:00:12And let's start by talking about the born criminal.
00:00:17The concept furthered by Chase Ala. Bomba Rosa.
00:00:21Let's talk about Love, Brazil first.
00:00:25He's the most famous person
00:00:28in criminology and criminal psychology.
00:00:29He was born in Verona in the 19th century in 18 35
00:00:31and he became a professor of forensic medicine and hygiene in Turin in 18 78.
00:00:36And in 18 78 he wrote the book that made him famous.
00:00:41Lamo, Delinquent to
00:00:46Criminal Man
00:00:47is the book that made his name,
00:00:49and it has a lasting impact on criminology and criminal psychology.
00:00:51In that book, he furthered the famous notion
00:00:55that there is something like a born criminal
00:00:58relativistic man.
00:01:02Now, Rosa actually got the idea. While he did an autopsy,
00:01:04he was studying the remains of a criminal, a guy called Villella
00:01:08that he met when he was alive
00:01:12and whilst during the autopsy and looking at the skull of this person,
00:01:15the idea came to him
00:01:19The idea that this person was a born criminal.
00:01:21He was what he would call a degenerate,
00:01:24someone who was of a lower evolutionary stage,
00:01:27someone who possibly was more suited to living
00:01:31in the world and not equipped to live in
00:01:34polite society. As he saw it,
00:01:36it came to her in the flesh, and he hung on to the idea of the idea for many decades.
00:01:38The idea was that
00:01:44these born criminals are different
00:01:46from the rest of society.
00:01:48They are not a sophisticated and they lack the skills
00:01:51to be successful in society in a conventional way.
00:01:53They are genetically different.
00:01:56And the second part of Lambros revolutionary thought was
00:01:59that you could tell by looking at these people.
00:02:03They have different features.
00:02:07They look, they walk and they talk different from the rest of us.
00:02:08So among us,
00:02:12Lambros thought was we have these born criminals
00:02:14and the challenge is to identify them as early
00:02:17as we can.
00:02:19So how do you identify your born criminal?
00:02:21But Ambrosio came up with a list of features,
00:02:24and if you look up another list of features,
00:02:27it is very difficult not to smile and look at the inconsistencies between them.
00:02:30Sometimes he talks about very strength based type features like a strong jaw,
00:02:34big muscles.
00:02:41But he also talks about beady eyes
00:02:42and high cheekbones.
00:02:45He talks about tattoos.
00:02:47Tattoos were very important for ambrosia.
00:02:49But of course, nobody is born with tattoos. There is nothing genetic about tattoos,
00:02:51but Lambro so argued that having tattoos tells you two things.
00:02:56A high threshold for pain,
00:03:00which he associated with these. What he thought of as primitive people,
00:03:04the other is that many depictions of tattoos were rather immoral.
00:03:08So he also felt that they showed a lower moral status that these people would have.
00:03:12This idea of the born criminal really caught on
00:03:19in 19th century Italy and well beyond his book,
00:03:24was translated into many languages.
00:03:27Lambros well travelled a lot,
00:03:29and the idea that we have
00:03:31evolutionary throwback individuals among us was one that appealed.
00:03:34It chimed with how people understood Darwinism and evolution to work,
00:03:39even though we now know that it's flawed.
00:03:43Another thing that Lambros oh championed was a
00:03:47scientific approach to the study of crime.
00:03:50That's quite fundamental.
00:03:54So rather than
00:03:56in a way, philosophising about the nature of people,
00:03:58his point was that we should measure things.
00:04:01Lambros Oh measured skills and physical
00:04:04attributes in particularly of deceased criminals.
00:04:07Lumber also had the intriguing and to be frank by now absurd idea
00:04:11that a dead criminal
00:04:16is as informative to us
00:04:18as a live one
00:04:20and that measuring criminals is as good a way
00:04:21of understanding them
00:04:25as talking to them and understanding that point of view
00:04:26we now know. Many years later,
00:04:31deadline roses ideas were flawed.
00:04:33Any replication of his ideas has not been successful, and
00:04:35individuals like going in the U. K tried very hard
00:04:40to find similar features amongst British
00:04:43prisoners,
00:04:46and he was unable to do so.
00:04:47It just seems that while he preached scientific accuracy,
00:04:50the idea of the born criminal was so much launched in his mind
00:04:53and turned out to be so successful out there in the world
00:04:58that he perhaps lost the critical faculty
00:05:01to actually critically examine his own beliefs
00:05:04and assumptions. So while preaching science as the way forward,
00:05:07his actual practise of that very science
00:05:11was fundamentally flawed.
00:05:14Later in his career, he also wrote a book, Criminal Woman,
00:05:17La Donna Delinquent
00:05:22and even though he still favoured a scientific approach,
00:05:24if you read that book in his English translation
00:05:27and
00:05:31get a sense of the flavour of how he looked at criminal women,
00:05:32you would have to say sadly, now it is quite misogynistic.
00:05:36He describes criminal women and particularly prostitute, as devious,
00:05:39as deceitful as inherent female qualities.
00:05:42On top of that,
00:05:47we can no longer escape the fact that much
00:05:48of his reasoning was affected by notions of class
00:05:50notions of poverty and working classes,
00:05:55deprivation and also notions of race in
00:05:58his harsh physical descriptions of criminals.
00:06:02So Lamar also has been accused of scientific racism,
00:06:06which now
00:06:09is allegation that is impossible to refute.
00:06:11So what of Lambros Oh,
00:06:15some 150 years later,
00:06:16On the one hand,
00:06:19his approach that is at least aiming to be scientific has to the test of time.
00:06:20We now believe that there is an important scientific
00:06:26contribution to be made to the study of crime.
00:06:28The notion that perhaps genetics have something to do with
00:06:33the causation of crime also continues to be with it,
00:06:38but in a very different form.
00:06:41And finally, what liberals who achieved was making the study of crime popular,
00:06:45intriguing in the academic world and far, far beyond
00:06:51
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Pakes, F. (2019, October 22). Forensic Psychology – Criminality - Lombroso and the ‘Born Criminal’ [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/criminal-psychology/genetic-explanations-of-crime
MLA style
Pakes, F. "Forensic Psychology – Criminality – Lombroso and the ‘Born Criminal’." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 22 Oct 2019, https://massolit.io/courses/criminal-psychology/genetic-explanations-of-crime
Image Credits
• "Types of Italian delinquents" by Fondo Antiguo de la Biblioteca de la Universidad de Sevilla, licensed under CC BY 2.0