4.1 Chapter Introduction
What do you think of when you see the terms biology and psychology in relation to crime? Do shows like CSI or Criminal Minds come to mind (figure 4.1)? Biology and forensics are important for criminal investigations and processing crime scenes, just like criminal profilers rely on psychological knowledge and training. However, to truly understand how these fields have contributed to our understanding of criminal behavior, we have to go back a lot further than 16 television seasons.
As philosophers and prominent thinkers began utilizing scientific study and considering factors beyond choice in behavior, biological and psychological theories of crime emerged. Early positivist criminologists looked at individual factors, including personality traits, genetics, disorders, and psychological development, to understand offending behavior. In full disclosure, it is critical to note that many of the theorists and theories discussed in this section have since been falsified or otherwise discredited. Once these theories were put to rigorous scientific examination, many did not hold up. However, they played an important role in the history of criminological thought, laying the foundation for later developments in the understanding of and response to crime.
In this chapter, we will explore how criminal behavior has been studied in the context of the brain, body, mind, and intelligence. We will first discuss some of the earliest attempts at uncovering biological and psychological reasons for crime and the impact of Charles Darwin’s work on the field of criminology. We will also look at 19th and 20th century research on biology and psychology’s influence on offending behavior, the social and political drivers behind this research and its biased outcomes, and the racist and problematic crime control policies that became popular as a result. Finally, we will explore the biological and psychological approaches that are still relevant, including a new look at the age-old debate of nature versus nurture.
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, students will be able to do the following:
- Locate the foundation of biological and psychological understandings of crime in terms of the race, gender, and societal status of the theorists.
- Critique the concepts of criminal behavior being predetermined by the brain, body, or mind.
- Analyze the broader context of what led to early biological and psychological theories being embraced at their time in history.
- Analyze the link between theory and policy, and the potentially harmful implications for people of color and marginalized populations.
- Explain the modern interpretation of biological and psychological influences on crime.
- Describe the arguments around nature versus nurture as they relate to criminal behavior.
Key Terms
- Atavism: Lombroso’s outdated theory that individuals who committed crime were a less evolved and more primitive species
- Born criminals: Lombroso’s term for people who chronically engaged in criminal offenses and had a collection of physical, psychological, and functional anomalies (see stigmata) and were unable to change their behavior because they were stuck in an earlier stage of evolution (see atavism)
- Craniometry: the outdated idea that brain and skull size could tell us about one’s intelligence, behavior, and personality
- Criminal personality theory: Eysenck’s theory used to explain the links between personality and crime
- Criminaloid: Lombroso’s term for people who were not life-long criminals and whose criminality could be explained by a variety of factors, such as disease or environment
- Eugenics: prejudiced beliefs and practices that aim to control the human gene pool by controlling reproduction and/or eliminating populations deemed inferior
- Intelligence quotient (IQ): intelligence as captured by tests; IQ tests are philosophically and contextually controversial, particularly due to their use in supporting the eugenics movement.
- Modeling: behavior that results from people observing and imitating others.
- Phrenology: outdated theory claiming that different areas of the skull corresponded to different personality, behavioral, or mental functions and that bumps on the skull could tell you about the corresponding traits
- Physiognomy: the outdated study of individuals’ facial features as a way of assessing character or criminality
- Psychoanalysis: Freud’s therapeutic application of psychological theories of the importance of the unconscious mind on behavior
- Scientific racism: an ideology that “appropriates the methods and legitimacy of science to argue for the superiority of white Europeans and the inferiority of non-white people whose social and economic status have been historically marginalized”
- Somatotyping: Sheldon’s theory that body type was hereditary and corresponded to differences in personality
- Stigmata: Lombroso’s term for any features that deviated from the norm, such as physical, psychological, or functional anomalies, and could indicate one’s atavism (see atavism)
Licenses and Attributions for Chapter Introduction
Open Content, Original
“Chapter Introduction” by Jessica René Peterson is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Open Content, Shared Previously
Figure 4.1. “Criminal Minds Logo” and “CSI Logo” are in the Public Domain.
legal term describing the violation of a criminal law
the study of crime and why it happens
a statement that proposes to describe and explain why facts or other social phenomenon are related to each other based on observed patterns