Biological Explanations

Human behaviour was understood — or more correctly, misunderstood — during the nineteenth century as an expression of biological instincts. Along with other patterns of human behaviour, criminality was explained on biological grounds. Lombroso: early research

In 1876, Caesare Lombroso (1835-1909), an Italian physician who worked in prisons, developed s biological theory of criminality. Lombroso described criminals as having distinctive physical ;haracteristics - low foreheads, prominent jaws and cheekbones, protruding ears, hairiness, and unusually long arms - that resemble human beings' apelike ancestors. In other words, he viewec :riminals as evolutionary throwbacks to lower forms of life.

Because of their biologically based inadequacy, Lombroso reasoned, such individuals would think and act in a primitive manner likely to run afoul of society's laws. Although toward the end of his career Lombroso acknowledged that social factors play a part in criminality, his early claim that some people are literally-born criminals was widely influential in an era in which biological explanations of human behaviour were popular.

Lombroso's findings were based on seriously flawed research methods. He failed to see that the physical characteristics he found in prison and linked to criminality also existed in the population as a whole. Early in the twentieth century, the British psychiatrist Charles Buck-man Goring (1870-1919), who also worked in prisons, published the results of a comparison of thousands of convicts and noncriminals. There was a great deal of physical variation within both groups, but Goring's research showed there were no significant physical differences between the criminal and noncriminal categories of the kind suggested by Lombroso.

Deviance

The concept of deviance is defined as violation of cultural norms of a group or all of society. Since cultural norms affect such a wide range of human activities, the concept of deviance is correspondingly broad. The most obvious and familiar type of deviance is crime - the violation of cultural norms that have been formally enacted into criminal law. Criminal deviance is itself quite variable in content, from minor offenses such as traffic violations to serious crimes such as homicide and rape. Closely related to crime is juvenile delinquency -the violation of legal standards bv children or adolescents.

Deviance is not limited to crime, however. It includes many other types of nonconformity, from the mild to the extreme, such as left-handedness, boastfulness, and Mohawk hairstyles, as well as pacifism, homosexuality, and mental illness. Industrial societies contain a wide range of subcultures that display distinctive attitudes, appearance, and behaviour. Consequently, to those who conform to society's dominant cultural standards, artists, homeless people, and members of various ethnic minorities may seem deviant. In addition, the poor — whose lack of financial resources makes conforming to many conventional middleclass patterns of life difficulty - are also subject to definition as deviant. Physical traits, too, may be the basis of deviance, as members of racial minorities in America know well. Men with many highly visible tatoos on their body may be seen as deviant, as are women with any tatoo at all. Even being unusually tail or short, or grossly fat or exceedingly tnin, may be the basis of deviance Physical disabilities are yet another reason for being seen by others as deviant.

Deviance, therefore, is based on any dimension of difference that is considered to be significant am provokes a negative reaction that serves to make the deviant person an outsider. In addition to thi experience of social isolation, deviance is subject to social control, by which others attempt to brine deviant people back into line.