Positivism in Criminology

Advisory: the following text are for general points to ponder upon, students are advised to elaborate
their answers by referring more and more books. The sole purpose of this text is Clarity, NOT IN
ANY CASE THE TEXT MAY BE COPIED.

Ms. Sheetal Makhija, Assistant Professor Criminology

Paper 4- THEORIES OF CRIME

UNIT 2
Positivist School of Criminology (late 18th & 19th century)

By 19th century, certain French doctors were successful in

establishing that it was neither free-will nor his innate depravity
which actuated him to commit crime but the real cause of
criminality lay in anthropological features of the criminal.

Positivist School consist of several Italians whose approaches

agreed on the face that in the study of crime, the emphasis should
be on the scientific treatment of the criminal, not on the penalties to
be imposed after conviction

Basic idea of 19th century Positivism

During the late 19th century the scientific idea was beginning to
take hold in Europe.

After the work of the Charles Darwin it was believed that all human
activity could be verified by the scientific principle.

August Comte (1798-1857), founder of Sociology, he applied

scientific method to study society.

According to him People in primitive societies consider in-animate

objects as having life for e.g. sun as god, in later social stages
people hold a rational scientific view of the world, Comte called this
as final stage, and those who followed his writings are called
Positivist.

There are two main elements attached with the concept of

Positivism:-

1) A belief that human behaviour is a function of forces beyond a

persons control- some forces are social (wealth & class),
Political, historical (war & famine) other forces are more
personal and psychological such as an individual brain
structure and his/her biological make up or mental ability.
Each of this influences & shapes human behavior.
 2) Use of scientific method to conduct research Positivists relies
on the strict use of empirical methods to test hypothesis. That
is they believe in the factual, firsthand observation and
measurement of conditions and events. Hence there are two
kinds of Positivism Biological Positivism and social positivism.

Positivist School

Morphological Anthropological Biological Study of

theories theories theories twins and
Family tree

According to Stephens Schafer, their emergence (in the late 18 th century) symbolizes clearly
that the era of faith was over and the scientific age had begun

Morphological theory

Phrenology (brain section-Franz Gall 1791)

Physiognomy (Johan Lavater bearded women, un-bearded men etc

1775)

Phrenology is science of personality.

It is based on the idea that different behaviors were based on

the specific areas in the brain. E.g. if the destructiveness
area were over developed the person would be aggressive.
 Such larger areas of the skull would push out on the skull in
particular places causing slightly different skull shapes,
depending on the aggressiveness, amorousness and other
qualities of the individual.
Although Phrenology seems to be ridiculous to most of us now
but in its time it was just scientific as anything else. Prisons
for e.g. did phrenological analysis of inmates.
The basic idea behind this is if people behave differently, their
mind must work differently therefore, their physical make up
must also be different.
If the behavior is different extremely like violent, predatory
crime- the person may be so different in both mind and body
as to be less than fully human.

Morphological theories are primarily associated with the work of

Ernst Kretschmen and William H. Sheldon.

Kretschmen- professor of psychiatry, German University.

Proposed a relationship between body build and personality

type and created a detailed Biopsychological Constitutional
Typology
3 main Categories
a) Cycloids (also called Cyclothymes)
b) Schizoids (also called Schizothymes)
c) Displastics

Cycloids Personality

o Heavy, soft type of body

o Was said to fluctuate between normality/abnormality
o Lack of spontaneity and sophistication, thought to commit
mostly non-violent crime. (Property offences)
 Schizoids

o athletic/muscular bodies
o Could be thin & lean
o Were likely to commit violent types of offences.

Displastics

o Mixed group
o highly emotional
o often unable to control themselves
o were likely to commit sexual offences and crimes of passion.

Critic of Kretchmers work according to William H. Sheldon, he had

included too large an age range in his work therefore he choose to
limit his study to 200 boys between 15 to 21 ages at the Hayden
Goodwill Institute in Boston, his propounded Theory of Somatotype
(1940s). He called this as application of constitutional theory to
human behavioral problems.

Sheldon concluded 4 basic body types to characterize the entire

group
The Endomorph

Soft and round (whose digestive viscera are massive and

highly developed) i.e. a person with overweight and too large
stomach
Fatty or bulky body
Short narrowing limbs, small bones, soft and smooth skin,
and are usually of a mild temperament and comfortable
person.
 The Mesomorph

o Athletic, muscular the person with larger bones with

considerable muscular mass
o Heavy chest, large wrists and hands
o These persons are temperamentally somotonic, active,
dynamic, assertive and behave aggressively.

The Ectomorph

o Constitutionally lean and fragile with delicate body, small

face, sharp nose and fine hair
o Sensitive by temperament and avoid crowds.

The Balanced Types

o Average build neither overweight nor thin, nor muscular

Individual were ranked along each of the three dimensions using a

seven point scale.

For e.g. 1-1-7 score indicates a person exhibit few characteristic of

Endomorphology/mesomorphology but was predominately
Ectomorph.

Every person combination of 3 characteristics, what is important is

their proportion (Somatotype profile)
It varies from one person to another.

Personality-type of criminals, Earnest A. Hooton, anthropologists of

Harward University who published his book Crime And The Man
in 1939 after his intensive twelve years study. (after Lombroso)

Cesare Lombroso(1835-1909)

First attempt to understand the personality of offender in

physical terms was made by Lombroso of Italian School of
Criminology
He is even regarded as the originator of modern
criminology/Father of Modern Criminology
He was famous for his biological theory of crime. He
emphasized the biological causes of crime, he did not, as some
critics have argued, neglect the sociological causes.
He was educated in medicine and became specialist in
Psychiatry. He worked in military for sometime handling the
mentally afflicted soldiers but later he was associated with the
University of Turin.
His first published work was LUmo Delequente which meant
the criminal man. It was published in1876 and consist of 225
pages, 5th edition of it came out in 1897 with 1903 pages.
He was the first to employ scientific methods in explaining
behaviour and shifted focus from crime to criminal.

CESARE LOMBROSO (1835-1909),

He is referred as the leader of the positivist school, and has been called the
father of modern criminology. Lombroso rejected the classical doctrine of
free will; instead, he was influenced by the contemporary writings on
positivism of early sociologists. He was most famous for his biological
theory of crime
 He was born in Italy in 1835 and studied medicine and psychiatry there
(remember that at this time these were very ineffective and inexact
science).
In 1870, Lombroso had one of those aha! insights, when different notions
and observations suddenly come together to create an idea. By that year,
Darwins theory of human evolution had become of interest not only in
biology but in the social sciences as well, and no doubt Lombroso was
familiar with it.
At the same time, Lombroso was working with his medical knowledge of
anatomy in an attempt to differentiate physically between criminals and
the insane. One day, he was doing a postmortem examination of the skull
of a notorious criminal and noticed that not only was it different from a
normal skull but also the differences resembled those of Primitive men
and of inferior animals. In a flash, it all became clear: At the sight of that
skull, I seemed to see all at oncethe nature of the criminal, who
reproduces in civilized times characteristics not only of primitive savages,
but of still lower types as far back as the carnivore. Here was the basis for a
new theory. The criminal was an atavism; that is although he lived in the
present time, he was biologically and physiologically a throwback to an
earlier stage of evolution.
Lombrosos next step was to begin studying the heads of criminals in
search of other such atavisms or what he called born criminals. After much
research he concluded that they made up one-third of the criminal
population and could be distinguished by their facial features: thick skull
bones; protruding chin; low, sloping forehead; large ears; abundant and
curly hair; thin beard. In his later research, Lombroso even claimed that
specific types of criminals had different kinds of faces and bodies. For
example, Thieves have mobile hands and face; small frequently oblique
eyes. Rapists are of delicate structure and sometimes hunchbacked.
Among murderers, the nose, always large, is frequently aquiline or,
rather, hooked; the jaws are strong and so on Lombroso also included
in his description characteristics such as laziness, which we would think of
as social or psychological. The list continues with a mixture of physical,
 psychological, and social traits. Lombroso saw them all as part of the same
basic underlying pattern of atavism:
Lombroso reasoned as follows:-
(1) Criminals have these characteristics e.g., impulsiveness and tattoos); so
do savage peoples;
(2) Savage peoples are at a lower point in the evolutionary ladder;
(3) Therefore, criminals must also be evolutionary throwbacks. Criminals, at
least these atavistic ones, were essentially savages who through some
accident of nature happened to have been born in nineteenth-century
Europe.
At this point you may be asking, if Lombroso, with his ideas about criminal
ears and jaws, is the father of criminology, what can we expect of
subsequent generations of criminologists? But Lombrosos importance lay
not so much in the specifics of his theory of atavism. In fact, his ideas were
criticized as soon as they appeared, and by the time of his death in 1909
few people believed them. We now know the basic error in Lombrosos
theory: Humans in nineteenth-century Italy-criminals and noncriminal-were
biologically no more or less evolved than humans in other times and places
that Lombroso may have read about.

Ques.1. Write a short note on Lombroso idea about born criminals.

Ans.1. His ideas are as follows:-

o Lombroso adopted an objective and empirical approach to the study
of criminals through his anthropological experiments.
o After an intensive study of physical characteristics of his patients and
later on of criminals, he came to a definite conclusion that criminals
were physically inferior in the standard of growth and, therefore,
developed a tendency for inferior acts. He further generalized that
criminals are less sensitive to pain and therefore they have little
regard for the sufferings of others. Thus through his biological and
anthropological researches on criminal Lombroso justified the
involvement of Darwins theory of biological determinism in criminal
behavior.
o He classified criminals into three main categories:-
The Atavists or hereditary criminals. Lombroso also termed
them as born-criminals. In his opinion born-criminals were of a
distinct type who could not refrain from indulging in criminality
and environment had no relevance whatsoever to the crimes
committed by the Atavists. He, therefore, considered these
criminals as incorrigibles, i.e., beyond reformation. In his view,
the criminal reflected a reversion to an early and more
primitive being that was both mentally and physically inferior.
He resembled those of apes and had ape-like characteristics.
Lombrosos theory used physical characteristics as indictors of
criminality. He enumerated as many as sixteen physical
abnormalities of criminal some of which were peculiar size
and shape of head, eye, enlarged jaw and cheek bones, fleshy
lips, abnormal teeth, long or flat chin, retreating forehead,
dark skin, twisted nose and so on. Though he moderated his
theory of physical anomaly in later years but his emphasis
throughout his work was on human physical traits which also
included biology, psychology and environment. He revised his
theory of atavism in 1906 and held that only one-third of
criminals were born criminals and not all the criminals.
Finally, he agreed that his theory of atavism was ill-founded
and held that they were in fact occasional criminals.
Insane Criminals: - The second category of criminals according
to Lombroso consisted of insane criminals who resorted to
criminality on account of certain mental depravity or
disorder.
Criminoids: - The third category of criminals, according to his,
was those of Criminoids who were physical criminal type and
had a tendency to commit crime to overcome their inferiority
in order to meet the needs of survival.
o While analyzing causes of crime, Lombroso laid greater emphasis on the
biological nature of human behavior and thus indirectly drew attention of
criminologists to the impact of environment on crime-causation.
o It must, however, be stated that at a later stage Lombroso himself was
convinced about the futility of his theory of atavism and therefore
extended his theory of determinism to social as well as economic
situations of criminals. Thus he was positive in method and objective in
approach which subsequently paved way to formulation of multiple-
causation theory of crime by the sociologists.
o In the introduction to one of his school of having confined itself to the
study of the born criminal, thus teaching that the criminal is engaged for all
time to his destiny, and that humanity has no escape from his atavistic
ferocity. If this were true said Lombroso, his school could not be criticized
merely for discovering this truth. But, he added, the truth is that while the
old system of cruel punishment had nothing to propose for the prevention
of crime, my school has devised a new strategic method of proceeding
against crime, based upon a study of its an etiology and nature.
Importance
Although Lombroso emphasized the biological causes of crime, he did not,
as some critics have argued, neglect the sociological causes. Lombroso was
concerned about these critics, who came to what he considered a false
conclusion concerning his work. Lombroso described himself as a slave to
facts, and he should be recognized for his emphasis on the careful
measurement in securing data. Despite his conscientiousness, Lombroso
may be criticized for his failure to interpret the data in the light of his
theory. It was his belief that the data, even if they appeared unrelated at
the moment, would evolve subsequently into a theory of universal
applicability. His method was to draw conclusions primarily from analogy
and anecdote.
The reactions to Lombroso range from severe criticism to high praise. In an
early edition of his text, criminologist Edwin H. Sutherland asserted that
Lombroso and his school delayed for fifty years the work which was in
progress at the time of its origin and in addition made no lasting
 contribution of its own. In an edition published 19 years later (after
Sutherlands death), Donald R. Cresseys criticism was milder, stating only
that the Lombrosian school fell into disrepute.
Criminologist Marvin E. Wolfgang argued that the concern of critics that
Lombroso diverted attention from social to individual phenomena reveals
their basic misunderstanding of his work and its effect. Wolfgang
concluded. Lombroso served to redirect emphasis from the crime to the
criminal, not from social to individual factors.
Although Wolfgang acknowledged the serious methodological problems in
Lombrosos research, as evaluated by modern techniques and knowledge,
he strongly believed that Lombroso also manifested imaginative insight,
good intuitive judgment, intellectual honesty, awareness of some of his
limitation, attempts to use control groups and a desire to have his theories
tested impartially. Many researchers of today fare little better than this.
Donald Taft observed, The importance of Lombrosos work lies in the great
influence it had upon criminology and also upon penal practice. The
importance of Lombrosos work lies in its scientific methodology and his
rejection of free-will theory.

Critics
(1) Enrico Ferri subsequently challenged Lombrosos theory of atavism and
demonstrated that it was erroneous to think that criminals were incorrigibles. He
believed that just as non-criminals could commit crimes if placed in favorable
circumstances so also the criminals could refrain from criminality in healthy
surroundings.

(2) Goring, an English criminologist, who was one of the contemporaries of

Lombroso, also carried out his own researches on the psychology of criminals.
After a series of comparisons between the criminals and non-criminals he
concluded that there was nothing like physical-criminal type as suggested by
Lombroso. He attacked the idea that people were more or less criminogenic,
depending upon their physical characteristics. He opposed the view that
criminality could be inherited. Goring, however, agreed with Lombrosos statistical
and inductive method and supported the latters view that criminals were often
mentally depraved. He also commended Lombroso for his assertion that central
theme of penology was neither crime nor punishment, but the individual.

(3) Katherine S. Williams has illustrated the difference between the views held by
Lombroso and Goring by an example drawn from basket-ball. If we apple the
Lombrosian theory to basket-ball Players, the argument might be that they are
abnormal because they are tall, whereas Gorings argument would be that they
have been selected for that sport because of their tall stature.

(4) Prof. Sutherland observed that by shifting attention from crime as a social
Phenomenon to crime as an individual phenomenon, Lombroso delayed for fifty
years the work which was in progress at the time of its origin and in addition,
made no lasting contribution of its own. Be that as it may, it hardly needs to be
reiterated that contribution of Lombroso to the development of criminology is by
no means less significant.