Criminal and Forensic Psychology lecture 1 --> Early Biological Theories of Criminal Behaviour

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  • Early Biological Theories of Criminal Behaviour
    • The Classical School
      • Cesare Beccaria (1784), Jeremy Bentham (1786) , and John Howard (1777)
      • Human beings have free will and are rational actors
      • Human beings will engage in behaviours that are pleasurable and avoid behaviours that were painful (they therefore choose pain)
      • Punishment should deter an individual from committing crime as the punishment results in pain that outweighs the ‘pleasure’ of the crime
      • Not a focus on biology / individual factors
    • Positivist School
      • Lombroso, Lavater
      • A growth in interest on the scientific methods lead to an increase in the application of it to human social behav
      • Everything is determined - every behaviour, thought etc is determined by a past behaviour / exposure to something (no free will)
      • Action taken towards to the criminal should cure, not punish
      • Concerned with the root causes of crime
      • Individual Positivism vs Sociological Positivism
    • Physical Trait Theories
      • Physiognomy -> one can determine an individ's character, behaviour or moral disposition by observing their physical attributes
        • Giambattista della Porta (1535–1615) -> association between appearance and character ('man looks like a pig, man will behave like a pig')
        • Phrenology -> Lavater, Cranioscopy -> Gall
      • First advocated by Pythagoras (500 BC), taught in English unis but banned by H8 in 1531
    • Humorism
      • Hippocrates (460 - 370 BCE) and Galen (129–201 AD)
      • 4 humors were the cause of human behaviour
        • (1) Sanguine (blood) -> courage and love
        • (2) Choleric (yellow bile) -> anger and bad temper
        • (3) Melancholic (black bile) -> depression, sadness, and irritability
        • (4) Phlegmatic (phlegm) -> calmness and lack of excitability
    • Hereditary and Evolution
      • Darwin (1809-1882), Lombroso (1835-1909)
      • Lombroso -> criminals were 'atavistic' / evolutionary throwbacks
      • Study of prisoners found that 1/3 of them shared some physical features: strong jaw, big teeth, big nose, long arms etc
      • Other 2/3 of criminals were 'criminaloids' -> minor offenders)
      • Lead to the notion of 'born criminal'
        • Goring and Hotten evidence for / against this
    • Social Darwinism
      • 'Improving' humanity through survival of the fittest
        • Thought that the 'undesirables' would go extinct by themselves, therefore opposed gov intervention
      • Many eugenicists advocated for 'active' intervention
        • eg. measuring the noses of individuals to see if they were Jewish during Nazi Germany period
    • Galton and Eugenics
      • 'Eugenic breeding' -> 'able' couples should breed to create 'more fit' individs
      • Idea of reducing poverty, disease, egentic deformities, illnesses and crime
      • Notion of forced sterilization until 1981 - more than 64k individs in 33 states were F.S
      • Eugenic impacts on WW2 lost support for the cause

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