Biological and biosocial criminology

The predestined actor

  • Classical presentations of the ‘rational actor’ first emerged in the 1700s

    • Dominant until the mid 1800s

    • Association between opportunity and crime

    • Deterrence should be the focus of the CJS

  • During the 1800s scientific advancement and the process of bureaucratic civilisation revealed problems

    • Cime stats were published in france in 1827

    • Distribution of offences was not equal

    • Deterrence was minimal

  • Criminology’s ficus turned towards determinism and positivism

Positivism:

  • Application of the methodology of the naturla sciences

  • Knowledge is derived from observation nit speculation

  • Theory not philosophy

Determinism:

  • Biological, psychological and sociological

  • Opportunity and choice are not casual

    • Environmental conditions provoke or restrain they do not cause crime

    • Choice is mediated by ‘predestined’ characteristics

  • Offenders are distinct from non-offenders

  • Marks a shift from a philosophy to a social science

    • Theories rather then ideas

    • Empiricism

    • A focus on the actor rather than the act

  1. Determinism

  2. Differentiation

  3. Pathology

Key points

  • Positivists argue that criminology should focus on the scientific study of offenders and offender behaviour

  • Dominant form of criminology from the mid 19th century

  • Positivism is not a theory it is an epistemology

    • Offenders and non-offenders are different

    • This difference lies in factors beyond individual control

The foundations of Biological Positivism

  • Influenced by advancements in the natural sciewnces

    • Origin of species

    • Pathological offender

  • Emphasis placed explaining behaviour via biology and physiology

  • The most influential movement was the ‘Italian school’

    • Cesare Lombroso (1825-1909)

    • Enrico Ferri (1856-1929)

    • Raffaele Garofaio (1851-1934)

Physical typology Theories

  • Based on the hypothesis that offenders represent distinct substrata of the species

  • Manifest in degeneracy

  • First ‘scientific’ thesis expressed via Phrenology ad Physiognomy

  • Cesare Lombroso

    • The Criminal Man (1976)

    • The Female Offender (1895)

  • Offenders are physically different from law-abiding citizens

  • Atavism — evolutionary throwbacks

    • The Born Offender

    • The Underclass

  • First attempts to categorise offenders by their individual and demographic characteristics

  • Atavistic offenders

    • Epileptic

    • Imbecilic

    • Born

  • Occasional offenders

    • Criminaloids

    • Habitual criminals

  • FIrst systemativ testing by Charles Goring (1931)

    • Prison inmates with university undergraduates, soldiers, professors and hospital patients

    • No statistically significant differences between behaviour and 37 physical traits

    • Controlling for social class and age prisoners were shorter and thinner than members of the general population

    • Less intelligent

  • Rejected Lombroso’s conclusions whilst still maintaining that offenders represented distinct moral, physiological and mental types

  • Sheldons somatotypes (1949)

    • Endomorphs

    • Mesomorphs

    • Ectomorphs

  • Glueck and Glueck (1950)

    • The association between body type and personality type

Criminal Heredity Theories

  • Again beased around Darwinian processes

    • Goring (1913)

    • Goddard (1912)

    • Dugdale (1895)

  • ‘Social’ Darwinism

    • Correlations between the criminality of children and parents

    • Feeblemindedness

    • Moral degeneracy

Evaluating the foundations of biological positivism

  • Absolute determinism is deeply problematic

    • Lacks spuriousness

  • Remember the ‘tests’ for good theory

    • Many theories could not be falsified during the period

    • Widespread methodological inconsistency

    • Limited empirical testing

  • Policy implications impractical and morally incompatible with democratic criminal justice models

Key points

  • 19th century marked the birth of modern criminology

    • Shift towards a scientific approach (positivism)

    • Shift towards a ‘predestined’ approach (Determinism)

  • The ‘Italian school’ was the first major movement within criminology

    • Argued that crime was the product of defective biology

    • Defects are linked to evolutionary principles

    • Evidenced via physical or mental abnormality

  • Early theories are now entirely discredited

    • Atavism and feeblemindedness are dead concepts

  • Body type and hereditary explanations remained influential into the 20th century

    • Emergence of other forms of determinism and the connection between the science of Eugenics and the Holocaust end the dominance of biological determinism

Biosocial criminology

Biological sciences have made more progress in understanding crime over the last 10 years than social sciences have made in the last 50…Lombroso’s legacy is the miseducation of criminologists (Robinson, 2004 quoted in Wright et al., 2008 p. 325)

  1. Genetic influence (normal and abnormal)

  2. Biochemical explanations

  3. Neuropsychological

    • Each area contains an array of individual theoretical models

    • Biosocial criminology offers the widest theoretical

    • Adaptation of the predestined and determined actor

      • Nature and nurture not nature vs nurture

      • Risk factor paradigm

Genetic inlfuecnes

  • Exploring genetic influences does not necessitate a fundamentally deterministic approach

  • As crime is a social defined concept no modern theory attempts to link offending with genetic propensity

    • Genes may influence co-morbid factors associated with crime eg. alcoholism, mental illness

    • Genes may influence criminal risk factors eg. aggression, low self-control

  • Whilst genetic potential is fixed expression of this potential is influenced by the environment

    • “What is inherited is not a tendency to commit criminal acts as such, but rather a predisposition to develop certain aspects of personality, some of which may be linked to criminal behaviour” (Ainsworth, 2000 p. 72)

  • Various expressions of this thesis but all except that biological predisposition combined with shared and non-shared environments increases criminal propensity

  • Madnik (1977-2002) Biosocial theory is the most systematically tested of such models

    • Proposes that some genetic factors linked to offending are passed via genetic inheritance

    • Such factors do nor directly ‘cause’ offending but rather increase susceptibility to criminogenic environments

    • Based on low arousal within the autonomic nervous system

  • Comparison between concordance rates of monozygotic and dizygotic same-sex twins

    • Tests the concordance of behaviour

    • If no influence identical twins would be ni more concordant than fraternal twins

    • If identical twin behaviour is more concordant a possible genetic link is established

  • Concordance is offending is evident across empirical work

    • Meta-analysis suggests concordance is significant (cf. Raine, 1993)

  • Issues separating biological and sociological influences

  • Small number of studies have separated twin samples

    • Childhood conduct disorder (CD) and adult antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) heritability 41% for CD and 28% for ASPD

    • Likewise studies looking at attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have yielded similar results

  • Adoption studies provide another opportunity to test Mednick’s hypothesis

  • Children separated at birth from biological parents (BP) and reared by adoptive parents (AP)

    • Shared genetics with BP and shared environment with AP

    • Generally children’s offending more similar to BP

    • Again difficult to separate biological from environmental variable

Genetic mutation

  • Variation on genetic theory which focuses on pathological genetic development

    • Mutation in genes andor gene activators

  • Mutation of sex chromosome pairing

  • Abnormal complement

    • Female: XXX

    • Male: XXY; XYY; XXYY; XYYY

Biochemical influences

  • Has explored both pathological and normal functioning of biochemical processes

  • Wide area so study:

    1. Low arousal within the ANS

    2. Hormones

    3. Neurotransmitters

ANS

  • The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is the regulatory sector of the CNS

  • Responsible for controlling arousal

  • ANS responsiveness plays a role in the social learning of law-abiding behaviour

  • Low ANS rates may inhibit conditioning

Hormones

  • Hormones — Biochemical messengers in the body secreted into the bloodstream by endocrine organs through the body

  • Research has tended to focus on testosterone

  • Aggression keyed to violent and sexual offending

  • Impulsiveness keyed to substance use, non violent offending and antisocial behaviour

Neurotransmitters

  • Neurotransmitters — Chemicals that enable electrical transmission between neurones

  • Serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine have been related to offending

  • Significant relationship between high or low levels and offending

  • Focuses on the ability to inhibit aggression

  • Interestingly such work is increasing being applied to normal biological variation:

  • Activation of the hypothalamic-pituitart-gonadal axis

    • Increase in testosterone

  • Neurochemical change

    • Increase in excitatory neurotransmitters — dopamine

    • Decrease in inhibitory neurotransmitters — serotonin

- Biosocial criminology offers the widest theoretical coverage in
criminological theorisation
- Modern biosocial Criminology is an adaption of the ‘predestined’ and
determined’ actor
- Nature & Nurture
- ‘Soft’ Determinism
- No longer simply the pathological offender
- Looks at both normal and abnormal biology
- A new frontier for Criminology


New frontiers in biosocial criminology

Nuropsychology

  • Executive functions located in the frontal lobes

    • deficits on executive functions related to poor decision making and low self control

  • Research focused on the prenatal or postnatal trauma (Moffitt, 1993)

  • Raine (1993) correlation between trauma in week 1 and age of arrest

    • Only cases of environmental risk comorbidity

  • Structural and functional differences between ‘male’ and ‘female’ brains

    • Female brains have a larger and more active prefrontal cortex

    • Variation in risk and fear responses keyed to the amygdala (Hall et al., 2000)

  • Age related structural change

    • Risk taking as a neurobiological developmental stage (Steinberg, 2007)

    • Significant restructuring of the prefrontal cortex

Evolutionary Criminolgy

  • Seeking to explain behaviour with reference to human evolutionary history

    • Darwinian principals of natural selection and Genetics

    • Criminalised behaviour is an adaption to a hostile environment

  • Evolutionary mechanisms:

    • Parenting effort

    • Mating effort

  • Criminalised behavior includes adaption to a hostile environment (cf. Ellis & Walsh, 1997)

  • “To say that human behavior cannot be analyzed in evolutionary terms require the acceptance of a genuinely bizarre proposition, namely, that we alone amongst animal species have somehow managed to achieve independence from our evolutionary history” (Alcock, 2001 p. 223)

  • Disposition to commit sexual offences (Ellis and Walsh, 1997, 2008)

Nutrition

  • Longstanding recognition of links between
    diet and general health

    • New focus on behaviour and cognitive development

    • Diet and nutrition's role in antisocial conduct

  • Most research directed towards delinquency

    • Food allergies and additives

    • Vitamin and mineral deficiencies

    • Cumulative toxicity

  • The effect of nutrition on cognitive development has been studied for decades (cf. Brown & Pollitt, 1996)

    • link among cognitive deficits, brain functioning, and crime

  • Recent work has shown that nutrition can help prevent antisocial behaviour (Cf. Farrington & Welsh, 2007; Olds et al., 2007)