Trends in the Development of Criminology in Britain

Abstract

AT THE BEGINNING of the twentieth century criminology ;\was at a crossroads. In so far as it was an accepted scientific £ Xdiscipline it owed much to Lombroso and his followers, who starting as anthropometrists, had begun to elaborate sociological and psychological theories of causation which took them far from measurement of bodily characteristics and comparisons with other races or animals. Lombrosianism was already becoming an elaborate complex of theorizing, partly based upon clinical observations; and, in numerous forms, was spreading rapidly over the continent of Europe. It was, however, an approach alien to English modes of thought. While Lombroso was elaborately proving the correctness of his original intuition regarding the atavistic nature of crime, and at the same time nibbling away at its base by adding new classes of offenders based on environmental classifications, Galton was noticing the consequences of the patterns of whorls and junctions upon people's fingers and suggesting their possible use for identification. The tradition of British criminology was founded upon the statistical techniques which Galton began to elaborate, and the long history of agitation for reform, rather than upon the biosocial theories of Havelock Ellisl and continental Lombrosianism. Of great importance to the social sciences were the development by Karl Pearson in the I890'S of the techniques of correlation and of chi-square2. They were, of course, invented primarily to further the cause of eugenics, and this has particular relevance to the nascent science of criminology, since the period was much dominated by discussion about the inheritance of various traits. Amongst these was criminality, or, to be more precise, 'the criminal diathesis' or tendency to criminality; and closely associated with it, feeblemindedness. Important in this connection are the various, now well-known family trees the Jukes in particular and the work of H. H. Goddard in America.