Criminal Anthropology Yesterday — Biosocial Criminology Today?

Abstract

The «biological» trend within contemporary foreign criminology has shown a clear tendency for the expansion of the range and spectrum of research in recent decades. First of all, this concerns the study of the features of neurophysiological processes in inmates of penitentiary institutions serving sentences for committing serious violent crimes. The results of such studies document the presence of significant structural and functional changes in the frontal lobes of the brain in these individuals (in comparison with those convicted for less serious crimes of non-violent nature and previously unconvicted persons). The article provides a brief overview of the history of studying the influence of these brain areas on human antisocial behavior. It shows that different aspects of this problem have been considered in the works of psychiatrists, pathologists and lawyers continuously since the 17th century. It assumed a distinctive form in the works of the representatives of criminal anthropology at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. During this period, a fairly complete theoretical picture of the involvement of the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex in the mechanism of human criminal activity emerged. However, the works of Lombroso and his followers, whose names today are associated with criminal anthropology, contributed not so much to the popularity of this theory as to the vulgarization its key theses and discreditation of the criminal anthropological trend as a whole. The biosocial trend, which is now being actively developed within the structure of criminological science in the West, sees its development prospects in the reasonable use of some fundamental points of criminal anthropology from the pre- and post-Lombrosoian periods of its development and their subsequent adaptation to the modern scientific and technological tools available in the neurosciences. This methodological scheme is manifested, in particular, in neurophysiological studies of criminals. Thus, today the representatives of the Russian science of penology are facing a dilemma: to continue ignoring the «biological» component of this sphere of scientific knowledge or to try and bring it back into their field of vision.