Biological Theories

The First Biological Theories

Claims that there is a link between biology and crime were made in Europe as early as the 1700s as positivist theory. The chronologically ordered works of major contributors to the theory detail its progression.

In the 1760s in Germany, Johann Lavater reported a relationship between facial features and behavior. F. J. Gall, 4 decades later, studied phrenology; he believed skull shape determined criminality. Cesare Lombroso, the “father of modern criminology,” developed the notion that ailments and diseases contributed to mental and physical deficiencies that could result in violence. As his career progressed, he paid greater mind to environmental explanations, believing there were hereditary, social, economic, and cultural variables to criminality, but he never relinquished the notion of a born criminal type. One of his students, Enrico

Ferri, emphasized those latter elements, focusing on the interrelatedness of factors that contributed to crime. He presented five criminal types; their common thread was a lack of individual rationalization or choice. Similar to Ferri's work is Raffaele Garafalo's; both were representative of the times and of Mussolini's regime, based on ideas of racial purity, national strength, and authoritarian leadership. The publication of Garafalo's major works coincided with the height of the Darwinian era, when suggestions from biology, psychology, and the social sciences related how criminal law and penal practice could guarantee the survival of the fittest.

Overall, these biological theories were too simplistic; comparisons provided little support for such theories. The works mentioned previously were not advanced by statistical evidence. Distinctions made between criminals and noncriminals were speculative, a problem for biological theories that was not short lived. In 1913, Charles Goring's statistical computations regarding physical differences between criminals and noncriminals confirmed his hypothesis of criminals' physical inferiority but fell short of illuminating a physical criminal type. In 1930, G. J. Mohr and R. H. Gundlach associated some of those same body types with specific criminal behaviors; yet they did not demonstrate a relationship to any psychic elements. Earnest Hooten found criminals inferior to civilians in nearly all of their body measurements in 1939; however, his work had clear racial overtones and lacked a proper sample. In 1949, William Sheldon found that the factors that produce delinquency are inherited; his physical findings were supported one year later by Sheldon and Eleanor Gleuk. Despite the ability of the positivist theories to be tested based on their scientific modeling, replication in testing and in turn validity was scant. However, the influence of biological theories on policy was not.

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