Criminal and Forensic Psychology lecture 1 --> Early Biological Theories of Criminal Behaviour
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- Created on: 08-10-20 13:43
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- Early Biological Theories of Criminal Behaviour
- The Classical School
- Cesare Beccaria (1784), Jeremy Bentham (1786) , and John Howard (1777)
- Human beings have free will and are rational actors
- Human beings will engage in behaviours that are pleasurable and avoid behaviours that were painful (they therefore choose pain)
- Punishment should deter an individual from committing crime as the punishment results in pain that outweighs the ‘pleasure’ of the crime
- Not a focus on biology / individual factors
- Positivist School
- Lombroso, Lavater
- A growth in interest on the scientific methods lead to an increase in the application of it to human social behav
- Everything is determined - every behaviour, thought etc is determined by a past behaviour / exposure to something (no free will)
- Action taken towards to the criminal should cure, not punish
- Concerned with the root causes of crime
- Individual Positivism vs Sociological Positivism
- Physical Trait Theories
- Physiognomy -> one can determine an individ's character, behaviour or moral disposition by observing their physical attributes
- Giambattista della Porta (1535–1615) -> association between appearance and character ('man looks like a pig, man will behave like a pig')
- Phrenology -> Lavater, Cranioscopy -> Gall
- First advocated by Pythagoras (500 BC), taught in English unis but banned by H8 in 1531
- Physiognomy -> one can determine an individ's character, behaviour or moral disposition by observing their physical attributes
- Humorism
- Hippocrates (460 - 370 BCE) and Galen (129–201 AD)
- 4 humors were the cause of human behaviour
- (1) Sanguine (blood) -> courage and love
- (2) Choleric (yellow bile) -> anger and bad temper
- (3) Melancholic (black bile) -> depression, sadness, and irritability
- (4) Phlegmatic (phlegm) -> calmness and lack of excitability
- Hereditary and Evolution
- Darwin (1809-1882), Lombroso (1835-1909)
- Lombroso -> criminals were 'atavistic' / evolutionary throwbacks
- Study of prisoners found that 1/3 of them shared some physical features: strong jaw, big teeth, big nose, long arms etc
- Other 2/3 of criminals were 'criminaloids' -> minor offenders)
- Lead to the notion of 'born criminal'
- Goring and Hotten evidence for / against this
- Social Darwinism
- 'Improving' humanity through survival of the fittest
- Thought that the 'undesirables' would go extinct by themselves, therefore opposed gov intervention
- Many eugenicists advocated for 'active' intervention
- eg. measuring the noses of individuals to see if they were Jewish during Nazi Germany period
- 'Improving' humanity through survival of the fittest
- Galton and Eugenics
- 'Eugenic breeding' -> 'able' couples should breed to create 'more fit' individs
- Idea of reducing poverty, disease, egentic deformities, illnesses and crime
- Notion of forced sterilization until 1981 - more than 64k individs in 33 states were F.S
- Eugenic impacts on WW2 lost support for the cause
- The Classical School
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