Crime and Essentialism

 Regarding something as having an innate existence or universal quality that cannot be altered or changed; a rejection of social factors as having an impact of the behavior of human beings and the access people have within a system.

 One of the earliest explanations of crime  Concerned with the size and shape of the skull  Popular from the mid 1700s to the mid 1800s

 Thought that three major regions of the brain govern three types of behavior and personality characteristics:  Intellectual  Moral  Lower-more prevalent in criminals  Because phrenologists could not directly measure the three brain regions, they reasoned that the size and shape of the skull corresponded to the brain’s size and shape

 Founder of the classical school of criminology  Founder of the positivist school

 Viewed criminals as “atavist” or throwbacks to an earlier stage of evolution  Criminals were evolutionary accidents who resembled primitive people more than modern people

 Evidence came from measurements of the bodies of men in Italian prisons that he compared to his measurements of the bodies of Italiam soldiers

 In his book The Female Offender (1895) he wrote that women were more likely than men to be atavists  Thought women had many traits in common with children in that their “moral sense is deficient”

 In 1939 published two books that reported the results of his measurement of 14k male prisoners and 3,200 control group subjects

 Determined that compared to his control group, prisoners tended to have low foreheads, crooked noses, narrow jaws, small ears, long necks and stooped shoulders  Labeled criminals “organically inferior” and “low grade human organisms”

 Hooton recommended that governments could reduce crime by sterilizing criminals or exiling them to reservations

 body structure as a predictor of criminality  Somatology-people’s body shapes affect their personalities and the crimes they commit  Endomorphs  Mesomorphs  ectomorph

*Genetic explanations *Diet and Nutrition *Neurochemical factors *Early Puberty *Pregnancy and Birth Complications