Some People are just Born Deviant. Discuss.

Authors Avatar

Stuart West (Ashford)        Sociology – Conformity& Deviance        11/05/2009

Some People are just Born Deviant.  Discuss.

When a new life is brought into the world, does the infant have to go through a deviant aptitude test to ascertain whether the child is going to act outside of the accepted social norms of that society?  Genetics are still some way from being able to allude to this, but perhaps one could envisage a future where this is realised, and becomes the accepted norm.   However do we really know whether a person is born with deviant aspects within them or is if a learnt behaviour?  

Cesare Lombroso (1876) whom was influenced by Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution popularised the theory of a born criminal through biological determinism, believing that an individual has physiognomic attributes or deformities which equate that person to having criminal behaviour in them.  By using a method called positivist science, he hoped to find out whether criminality was , then the born criminal could be distinguished by physical , such as, large jaw; low sloping forehead; high cheekbones; hawk-like nose; fleshy lips and insensitive to pain.  This was Lombroso’s attempted to introduce a scientific methodology, so a person can predict whether that individual is going to have criminal behaviour, and if so isolate that individual.  In Lombroso’s own words:

“At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal!”

(Carrabine, 2004, p36)

Years later, Charles Goring, an English physician who took an interest in Lombroso's theories, decided to examine more closely some of his conclusions. Goring studied thousands of prisoners in British jails.  He compared their physiological traits to members of a military unit, the Royal Engineers. Goring found no substantial differences between the two groups. He published the results in a book called The English Convict in 1913.  Goring proved that atavism had no scientific support and the data he gathered essentially discredited Lombroso's idea of a “born criminal” forever.

Join now!

Edwin H. Sutherland (1939) released a series of four explicit statements called Principles of Criminology.  He came up with nine theories to support his posit, he suggested that criminal behaviour was a learnt trait and not biological as Lombroso argued.  In summary, he believed that an individual’s associations are determined in a general context of social organization (for instance, family income as a factor of determining residence of family and in many cases, delinquency rate is largely related to the rental value of houses) and thus “differential group organization as an explanation of various crime rates is consistent with ...

This is a preview of the whole essay