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Various scholars have attempted to explain the causation of crime and criminal behavior. Each school of
criminology explains crime in its own manner and suggests punishment and measures to suit its ideology.
Each school represents the social attitude of people towards crime in a given time.
Naturalistic School
The proponents of this school argued that crime must be explained through the use of ideas and
interpretations of objects and events and their interrelation with the existing world. Thus, there is no place
for other worldly powers or spirits. No matter how unsatisfactory, the explanation must rest on what is
known or assumed to be true of the physical and material world. This approach is ancient as well as
modern.
Critical Criminology
This is a framework based on critical thinking, employing a variety of disciplines which include political
science, economics, sociology and philosophy. Its proponents are not preoccupied with the question of
whether mans behavior is free or determined. They are concerned with the process by which man creates
the social world in which he lives.
Critical criminologists would for example maintain that the phenomenon of crime is socially constructed
when a society defines certain actions and people as criminal. Any of a wide variety of people and actions
may, at one time or another, be the subject of these definitions.
Thus crimes and criminals are not independent phenomena that can be identified and studied objectively
by the social scientist. Crime and criminals exist only to the extent that they are defined as such by
society. The critical criminologist therefore studies the processes by which particular people and actions
become criminal at particular times and places.
Cesare Lombroso
He is referred to as the father of the Italian school of criminology. He was an Italian psychiatrist who was
a physician in the army. Lombroso turned attention from crime to criminals. During his period of service
in the army he was able to observe those army personnel who were trouble-makers. From his experience
he concluded that the criminals were a distinct anthropological type possessing definite physical
characteristics.
According to him, the criminal was a biological throw-back to an earlier evolutionary stage a man more
primitive and savage than his non-criminal counterparts. His theory was based on the view that the
physical characteristics of the criminal were an important causation for his criminal behavior. The theory
was largely based on degeneracy. This degeneracy was atavistic i.e. the criminal was inferior in his
development to normal man and resembled lower or ape-like animals. Lombroso was therefore, of the
view that criminals were born criminal.
He arrived at his conclusions, based on a study of 833 Italian criminals mainly drawn from the army.
From his research, he concluded that born criminals had the following characteristics:
1. They had a deviation in head size and shape;
2. Their faces were not symmetrical;
3. They would have excessive dimensions of the jaw and cheek bones;
4. They would have eye defects and peculiarity;
5. They had ears of unusual size very small or standing out from the head as do those of
chimpanzees;
6. the nose would be twisted and upturned. For thieves, the nose would be flat, beak-like for
murderers or with the tip rising like a peak;
7. The lips would be fleshy and swollen;
8. The dentition would be abnormal;
9. The chin would be receding or excessively long or excessively flat as in apes;
10. Abundance and variety of wrinkles;
11. Anomalies of the hair marked by characteristics of the hair of the opposite sex;
12. Defects of the thorax too many or too few ribs
13. Inversion of sex characteristics in the pelvic region;
14. Excessive length of the arm;
15. Too many or too few fingers or toes.
Of the 833 criminal people studied, 21 percent had one or more of such anomalies, 43% had five or more.
A person with five or more was described/classified as a criminal. As such Lombroso adopted an
objective and empirical approach to the study of criminals through his anthropological experiments.
In further research, he classified criminals as follows:
1. The Born Criminal
In his opinion, these were criminals who could not refrain from engaging in criminality. The
environment had no relevance whatsoever to the crimes committed by these offenders. He
therefore, considered these criminals to be beyond reformation;
2. Insane Criminals
The second category of criminals were insane criminals who resorted to criminality on account of
certain mental disorders or insanity.
3. Crimes of Passion
The third category are those who commit crime in a state of passion or due to inferiority complex;
4. Atavistic Criminals
The atavistic category are those who commit crime due to alcohol or when they get the
opportunity.
Charles Goring
He was an English criminologist who carried out research on the psychology of criminals. He 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 the centre point of
penology was neither crime nor punishment but the individual.
E.A. Hooton
He studied 17,000 individuals of whom 14,000 were criminals drawn from across 10 states of the United
States of America. His conclusions were quite similar to Lombrosos.
According to him crime is the result of the impact of the environment upon low grade human organisms.
It therefore follows that the elimination of crime can only be effected the expiation of the physically,
mentally and morally unfit or their complete segregation.
The study concluded that big tended to be murderers and robbers. Tall heavy men are killers and also
commit forgery and fraud. Undersized men are thieves and burglars; short heavy persons commit assault,
rape and other sex crimes. Men of mediocre physique have no specialty and commit several offences.
Conclusion
1. In 19 out of 33 measurements, there was a significant difference between criminals and civilians;
2. Criminals are inferior to civilians in nearly all their body characteristics;
3. Physical inferiority is significant as it is associated with mental inferiority;
4. Tattooing is more common among criminals than civilians;
5. Thin lips and compressed jaw angles are common in criminals;
6. The ear of the criminal tends to be rolled or small
7. Criminals have low sloping foreheads, thin necks and sloping shoulders.
He was criticized on the following grounds:
Most of the people he studied were recidivists i.e. they fell back to crime.
He ignored other important differences between criminals and civilians apart from physical
characteristics.
While he accepted that genetic make-up may influence behavior, he never actually clarified how this
genetic make-up would actually influence the criminal.
Modern positivism does not strictly adhere to Lombroso, Ferri, or Garafolos arguments. It however
emphasizes the application of scientific methods to the study of criminal behavior, the criminal
himself, his environment and other causative factors in an attempt to determine the causes of crime
and its elimination of reduction in society.
1. The processes which result in criminal behavior are fundamentally the same in form as the
processes which result in lawful behavior. Criminal behavior, just like lawful behavior is
learned. Thus a person who is not already trained in crime cannot invent criminal behavior
2. Criminal behavior is determined by a process of association with those who commit crime just as
lawful behavior is determined by association with those who are law abiding.
3. Differential association is the specific causal process in the development of criminal behavior. The
principles of the process of association are the same in the development of criminal and
lawful behavior but the techniques, training, motive etc in the two processes differ. This is
why Sutherland calls it differential association.
4. A person becomes delinquent because of an excess of definitions favorable to violation of law over
definitions unfavorable to violation of law.
5. The chance that a person will participate in systematic criminal behavior is determined roughly by
the frequency and consistency of his contacts with other persons of a criminal behavior.
6. Cultural conflict is the underlying cause of differential behavior. This is common in areas where
society is composed of people of different races, ethnic groups, habits and cultures.
7. Social disorganization is the basic cause of systematic criminal behavior.
Criticism
1. Sutherlands theory does not attempt to explain the origin of crime. It relies on an existing
criminal group that influences a normal person to engage in criminal activities.
2. The theory cannot apply uniformly to all kinds of offenders e.g. rural and urban based offenders,
white and blue-collar criminals. It cannot apply evenly to perpetrators of individual crimes e.g.
crimes of passion, occasional and incidental offenders or those pushed to criminal conduct by
factors outside their control e.g. Genetic make up, mental imbalance etc.
3. It has also been argued that contrary to Sutherlands theory, criminal or delinquent behavior is not
learned. It comes naturally. It is non-criminal behavior that is learned.
4. The theory fails to recognize that there may be an element of free will in human behavior and
leaves little if any room for the introduction of new knowledge i.e. it acts as a conclusive study,
yet it is generally accepted that there must be an element of the unknown.
5. The theory fails to recognize biological and psychological factors. It is argued that biological
differences in human personality also account for criminality in the individual.
Cyril Burt
A British scholar who using this multiple approach in a study (London: University of London Press, 1944,
at p 600), found 170 conditions, every one of which was considered as conducive to delinquency.
(Sutherland calls this the inevitable consequence of such crass empiricism.)
Crime is not assignable to one universal source but rather to a wide variety of reasons which is best
explained by a multiple causation approach.
Others have argued that the multiple causation or multiple factor theory is more illuminating and more in
accord with the variety of people involved in crime the variety in behavior and mentality of the people
concerned. The approach recognizes that behavior is conditioned by natural, biological, social cultural
and economic influences.
Criticism
Albert Cohen (Harvard, 1951)
1. There has been confusion of explanation by means of a single factor and explanation by a single
theory or system of theory applicable in all cases. A single theory does not explain crime in terms
of a single factor and is often concerned with a number of variables. A variable is a characteristic
or aspect such as velocity or income with respect to which something may vary. We make
statements of fact in terms of the values of these variables, e.g. The crime rate is high among
persons with incomes of less than $2,000. per year. The pertinent variable here is income and its
value is $2,000. but neither a statement of one fact (single factor) nor a series of such statements
(multiple factors) about crime is a theoretical explanation of crime. A theoretical explanation, a
single theory organizes and relates the variables; it is an abstract statement of how the known
variations in the values of one variable are related to known variations in the values of other
variables. A test the theory is how well it accounts for all the variations in the values of the
variables.
2. Factors are not only confused with causes but each factor is also assumed to contain within itself a
capacity to produced crime, a fixed amount of crime producing power. Thus one factor is not
always considered powerful enough to produce crime in individual cases several factors must
conspire to do so.
3. evil causes -evil fallacy this fallacy is that evil results (crime) must have evil precedents
(broken homes, psychopathic personality etc). so that when we explain crime or other social
problem we tend to merely catalog a series of sordid and ugly circumstances which any decent
citizen would deplore and attribute causal power to those circumstances. In criminology, this
fallacious procedure might stem from a desire to eradicate crime without changing other existing
conditions which we cherish and esteem; that is criminologists tend to identify with the existing
social order and seek causes of crime in factors which might be eliminated without changing
social conditions which they hold dear, or which may be safely deplored without hurting any ones
feelings.