is more forensic than it is scientific and illustrates a dangerous habit of projecting our social frustrations upon some specific trail of our culture, which becomes a sort of "whipping boy" for our failure to control the whole gamut of social breakdown.[1]
One of the earliest of these monistic errors was that of Lombroso and his followers of the so-called Italian School of Criminology,[2] who asserted there was a born criminal type with certain "stigmata of degeneracy" which enabled the criminal to be distinguished from normal people. These included such characteristics as a cleft palate, a low retreating forehead, a peculiarly shaped head, nose, or jaw, large protruding ears, low sensitivity to pain, lack of beard in males, obtuseness of the senses, etc. These "criminal traits" were explained us due to a reversion to a hypothetical "savage" (atavism), or to physical and nervous deterioration, Accompanying the physical divergencies in some unexplained manner always went a predisposition to delinquency. Exponents of this theory in its extreme form have even claimed that different types of criminals exhibit different sets of physical anomalies.
More rigorous investigators shortly discredited this naive theory, One of these vas England's distinguished Charles Goring. He rejected Lombroso's conclusion because it was based upon an inadequate sample of the criminal population, chiefly the inmates of an institution for the criminally insane, As Von Hentig succinctly points out, only "minute sections of crime are found in court or in prison, a certain proportion in institutions for the criminally insane. Crime's most numerous and dangerous representatives are never seen by a judge, a warden, or a psychiatrist."[3] No valid conclusion concerning delinquents and criminals as a whole can be drawn from the small proportion of their number appearing in clinics or found in institutions.
Goring rejected Lombroso's theory further, and more importantly, because it ignored the possibility that the traits to which delinquent and criminal behavior were attributed might be as prevalent among law-abiding citizens. Goring was an exponent of the elementary scientific technique which insists on the use of a control group, a simple yet essential statistical maneuver designed to protect the scholar and the public against fallacious conclusions about human behavior. The use of the control group as applied to the study of the causation of delinquency simply means that the investigator must make sure the trait or condition to which he ascribes delinquency is not as prevalent among nondelinquents as among delinquents.
When Goring studied not merely the inmates of prisons, but a representative sampling of the unincarcerated population, he found "stigmata" to occur no more frequently among prisoners than among people at large.[4] Lombroso's theory was knocked into a cocked hat.
Students of delinquent and criminal behavior were slow, however, to heed the lesson implicit in the collapse of Lombroso's theory. Continuing to seek a simply monistic explanation of antisocial behavior, repeating Lambroso's errors of inadequate sampling and lack of control, they have attributed the bulk of delinquency to mental deficiency, to focal infections, to lesions of the nervous system, Lto psychopathic personality, to poverty, to broken homes, to one after another of the characteristics of the delinquent or his environment.
More rigorous sampling and control have forced the abandonment of these one-sided explanations. The assertion of Tredgold and Goddard,[5] for example, that mental deficiency is the major cause of antisocial behavior was based on institutional samples of the delinquent population, It should be reiterated that such samples are highly selective, since more intelligent criminals are less frequently found in institutions or other groups available for testing. Indeed adequately controlled studies, such as those of Carl Murchison,[6] E. A. Doll[7] and- ↑ Cf. Katherine Clifford, Common Sense About Comics, Parents Magazine, October 1948.
- ↑ Lombroso first stated his theory in a brochure in 1876 and this was expanded later into three volumes. See Cesare Lombroso, Crime: Its Causes and Remedies. Translated by H. P. Horton. Boston: Little, Brown, 1918.
- ↑ Hans Von Hentig, Crime; Causes and Conditions. New York: McGraw Hill, 1947.
- ↑ Charles Goring, the English Convict. London: Stationery Office, 1913.
- ↑ A. F. Tredgold, Mental Deficiency, New York: William Wood, 1914; and Henry H. Goddard, Feeblemindedness; Its Causes and Consequences. New York: Macmillan, 1914.
- ↑ American White Criminal Intelligence. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, August and November 1924.
- ↑ The Comparative Intelligence of Prisoners, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, August 1920.
