Biological Explanations of offending behaviour: A historical Approach

Criminal Personality Types

Atavistic form - Lombroso wrote a book called 'the criminal man' in 1876 explaining his view that criminals posses the same characteristics as lower primates and could explain their criminal behaviours. He produced 4 editions of the book further explaining his views, his ideas came out when Dawin recently proposed the theory of evolution. Lombroso suggested that criminals were a thtrough back to an earlier species. 'Atavistic' meaning to revert to an ancestral type, which comes from the Latin 'Atavus'. Turvey (2011) indentified 18 different characteristic that make up the atavistic form. The basic assumption is that innate psychological make-up of the person causes them to become a criminal. Lombrosos linked different features to different crimes-as seen is the final edition of his books-

Empirical Evidence- Lombroso based his theory…