Response 5

Lombrosso is a famous criminal anthropologist that is regarded by many as the father of criminology. In general, his principal idea was that people are born criminals, he was absolutely convinced that it is n their nature to commit crimes. His views on studying crime may be defined as deterministic and probably that is why he "viewed criminals as being a more primitive form of human, influenced much by Charles Darwin's writings on evolution”. So, he believed that criminals having an innate predisposition to criminality are not of the same kind or not the same species as 'normal' people. According to him, they occupied an intermediate position between modern people and less developed ancient ancestors of Homo Sapiens. Lombrosso defined criminals as Homo Delinquents and estimated that they have certain characteristics that differ them from other normal people. He made serious researches concerning the problem of distinguishing criminals among other people and he finally worked out the main physical characteristics that could help a specialist to say if a person is an innate criminal or not, namely they are as follows: "a) size and shape of the head; b) enlarged cheekbones and jaw; c) fleshy protruding lips; d) abnormal teeth and dark skin". These characteristics were sufficient to him to distinguish a criminal among 'normal' people though a few other factors could be added to previous four such as an excessive use of tattooing, excessive idleness and a tendency to express the ideas pictorially. In spite the fact that Lombrosso collected quite a large amount of data based on his analysis of Italian prisoners and soldiers they are not sufficient enough to make the conclusion he made, that criminals are different from a non-criminal part of the population by their nature. To prove this insufficiency of data it would be enough to indicate that he didn't use a control group of 'normal' people that nowadays is an essential condition of objectiveness of final conclusions. Thus, it makes his conclusions quite questionable and uncertain. It is also worth noting that Lombrosso worked out the classification of criminals according to which all criminals were divided into four categories: born criminals, insane criminals, occasional criminals or criminaloids, and criminals of passion. Such categorization demonstrates that he admitted the possibility of occasional crimes that may be regarded as the possibility of environmental influence on the criminal but not innate but it is not exactly so because even though "through revision of his works he gave attention more and more to environmental explanations and most noteworthy is the attention he gave to social, cultural and economical variables in his explanation of crime, even though he always stated that they were less important than biological factors". Thus, it is obvious that to certain extent Lombrosso admitted the impact of environment on a personality of a criminal he still stood on his ground.

I think Lombrosso was not correct on the research he collected. There are a large amount of pieces missing in his studies. Most of his opinions were just ridiculous and did not make sense at all. Criminals do not have a cerain look, there are very different types of criminals and all criminals havetheir own look. Although it is a fact that people who are criminals like to express themselves with art and tattoos. People who express theirselves with tattoos are a sign that they have rebellion in them. Still, there are people like me for example that have a tattoo but are not criminals so that fact is true to an extent. Criminals are no different than a normal person except for the decisions they make as a person. Lombrosso says that a criminal is built different and can be picked out of a crowd which is a load of crap. Also Lombrosso didn't use a control group of any sort so none of his alleged assumptions could be confirmed.