HookLombroso measured 383 dead convicts and invented the born criminal
In 1876 an Italian army doctor called Cesare Lombroso claimed he could spot a criminal by the shape of his skull. He measured 383 dead convicts and 3,839 living ones and announced that offenders were evolutionary throwbacks — atavistic — betrayed by strong jaws, high cheekbones and extra toes. It was pseudo-science with a body count: it seeded eugenics and racial profiling for decades. But Lombroso did one thing that mattered — he insisted that offending is a fact you can study rather than merely condemn, and forensic psychology has been arguing with him ever since.
The whole topic is four questions stacked on top of each other. What even counts as crime, and how do we count it? Who did it — the profiling question. Why do people offend — the explanations, biological and psychological. And what do we do with them afterwards — sentencing, treatment, justice. Examiners reward you for treating each as a live debate with evidence on both sides, not a list of names to recite. Every 16-marker on this option is secretly asking: does this explanation or intervention actually survive the evidence?
DataDefining and counting crime — the number nobody can trust
Crime has no fixed definition. It is whatever the law of a place and time says it is, which makes it culturally and historically relative: homosexuality was a crime in England until 1967 and still is in dozens of countries; smacking a child is lawful in England but banned in Scotland and Wales; rape within marriage was not a crime in England until 1991. If the behaviour itself will not sit still, measuring it is even harder.
Three methods, three sets of holes. Official statistics (police-recorded crime) miss the dark figure of crime — the offences never reported (embarrassment, distrust of police) or never recorded (a change in recording rules can swing the figures more than any change in behaviour). Victim surveys, such as the Crime Survey for England and Wales which asks tens of thousands of households about their experiences, capture crimes that never reached the police, but rely on memory and suffer from telescoping (misremembering when an event happened). Offender surveys ask people to self-report what they have done — useful for targeting known groups, but wide open to social desirability and to boasting. The examiner's favourite move is triangulation: no single figure is trustworthy, so criminologists read all three against each other.
MechanismOffender profiling — the American way and the British way
The top-down approach is the FBI method built in the 1970s from interviews with 36 sexual murderers, including some of America's most notorious. It sorts offenders into two pre-set types: organised (planned, controlled, targets a stranger, leaves little evidence — likely intelligent, socially and sexually competent) and disorganised (spontaneous, chaotic scene, little planning — likely lower intelligence, socially isolated). The profiler moves through four stages: data assimilation, crime-scene classification, crime reconstruction and profile generation. It works best on extreme, evidence-rich crimes such as murder, rape and arson.
The bottom-up approach is David Canter's British, data-driven alternative — no fixed types, just statistical inference from the evidence up. Its two engines are investigative psychology (interpersonal coherence, forensic awareness, and smallest-space analysis of offence patterns) and geographical profiling (Canter's circle theory, which distinguishes the marauder who offends around a home base from the commuter who travels out, using distance decay and crime mapping to estimate where the offender lives). Its showcase is the 'Railway Rapist' case: Canter's statistical profile of John Duffy predicted seventeen characteristics, thirteen of which proved accurate.
Apply it to a stem. Suppose a question describes a body left in daylight in a public park, no attempt to hide it, no weapon brought, a frenzied attack, and DNA left at the scene. Do not just label it — reason it. Top-down: the lack of planning, the improvised weapon and the failure to conceal the body all point to the disorganised type, so you would profile someone local, socially isolated and lower-functioning. Bottom-up: the crimes cluster in one neighbourhood with no travel pattern, which fits Canter's marauder, so geographical profiling would centre the search on a home base inside that cluster. Notice the exam skill — every claim in the profile is tied back to a specific detail in the stem. That is AO2 application, and it is where scenario marks are won or lost.
ModelThe biological case — from Lombroso's skulls to Raine's scans
Lombroso's atavistic form is where the biological story starts and where it is weakest: he concluded that 40% of criminal acts were committed by evolutionary throwbacks identifiable by physical markers, but he used no non-criminal control group and confounded 'criminality' with poverty and illness. It is a lesson in bad method as much as biology.
Modern biology is more careful. Genetic evidence comes from twin studies — Christiansen's Danish sample found concordance for offending of roughly 35% in identical twins against 13% in non-identical, implying heritability but nothing close to 100%. Candidate genes include MAOA (the so-called 'warrior gene', linked to violence in Brunner's study of a Dutch family whose men shared a rare deficiency) and, in Tiihonen's large Finnish sample, the MAOA and CDH13 genes were associated with extreme violent offending. Neural evidence includes Adrian Raine's PET-scan study of 41 people charged with murder who had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity: they showed reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex, the region governing impulse control and moral reasoning. Reduced empathy has also been linked to an under-active mirror-neuron system. The evaluation move examiners want: biology may confer vulnerability, but genes act through environments — a diathesis, not a destiny.
ModelThe psychological case — personality, thinking, learning and the unconscious
Four explanations, four different bets on what makes an offender. Eysenck's criminal personality proposes that offenders score high on extraversion (an under-aroused nervous system that craves stimulation), high on neuroticism (unstable, over-reactive) and high on psychoticism (cold, aggressive), measured on his EPQ. Because high-E, high-N people condition poorly, they never properly learn society's rules through childhood punishment. Cognitive explanations point to level-of-moral-reasoning (offenders often reason at Kohlberg's pre-conventional level — avoiding punishment rather than upholding principle) and to cognitive distortions such as hostile attribution bias (reading neutral faces as threatening) and minimalisation (downplaying the harm done). Differential association is Sutherland's sociological claim that offending is learned like anything else — through exposure to pro-crime attitudes and techniques; when favourable definitions of law-breaking outnumber unfavourable ones, offending follows. Psychodynamic explanations blame an inadequate superego — weak, deviant or over-harsh — and trace it, via Bowlby's maternal deprivation, to the affectionless psychopathy he saw in his 44 juvenile thieves. Together they show why 'offending' is never one thing: the essay skill is choosing two explanations and pitting their evidence against each other.
Here is a Level-4 evaluation paragraph on Eysenck, annotated so you can see the machinery. 'A limitation of Eysenck's theory is that the criminal personality may not be a single, stable entity' — that is the POINT, stated as a critical claim, not a fact about the theory. 'Moffitt distinguished offending that is confined to adolescence from a smaller group of life-course-persistent offenders, and personality alone cannot explain why most young offenders simply stop' — that is the EVIDENCE, a named counter-finding. 'This matters because Eysenck predicts a fixed type carried through life, so the theory struggles with the most common pattern of all — desistance' — that is the EXPLAIN step, spelling out why the evidence damages the theory rather than leaving the reader to guess. 'Taken with its reliance on a self-report questionnaire that invites socially desirable answers, the personality account looks better as one risk factor than as a complete explanation' — that is the LINK, tying the point into an overall line of argument. Point, evidence, explain, link, running to a conclusion: reproduce that shape three or four times and you are in the top band.
CaseDealing with offenders — and whether any of it works
Custodial sentencing is justified on four aims — deterrence, incapacitation, retribution and rehabilitation — but its psychological effects cut the other way: depression, self-harm, institutionalisation and 'prisonisation' (absorbing the inmate code) can leave people less able to function outside, which is one reason roughly half of released adults in England and Wales reoffend within a year, and the rate is higher still for young offenders. Behaviour modification applies Skinner's operant conditioning through token economies: desirable behaviour earns tokens exchangeable for privileges (Hobbs and Holt found gains in young offenders), but the effect rarely survives release because the reinforcement schedule does not follow the person out of the gate. Anger management is a cognitive-behavioural programme, following Novaco's three stages — cognitive preparation, skill acquisition and application practice — that treats offending as a failure of self-control; Keen and colleagues reported improved self-awareness in young offenders, though short-term change need not mean lower reoffending. Restorative justice flips the focus onto the survivor: a supervised meeting in which the offender hears the impact of what they did and takes active responsibility. Meta-analyses by Sherman and Strang found modest but real reductions in reoffending — evidence that accountability may rehabilitate where punishment alone does not.
VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for
TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks
ExamWhat examiners want
Forensic sits on Paper 3, so the big money is the 16-mark essay marked as 6 AO1 (description) and 10 AO3 (evaluation), or as 6 AO1 + 4 AO2 + 6 AO3 when the question carries a scenario. The single most common way to lose a grade here is to over-describe and under-evaluate: examiner reports repeat every year that candidates write a full page of accurate AO1 and then bolt on three thin, unexplained criticisms. Aim for the opposite balance — a tight, accurate description, then evaluation that does the work.
Make every AO3 paragraph a full point → evidence → explain → link unit, and make the 'explain' step carry the marks: state why a finding weakens or supports the theory rather than just naming it. Do not chase 'counterpoints' for their own sake — a counterpoint that you cannot elaborate is worth less than one criticism you develop properly. Above all, run a line of argument: signpost early where you are heading ('the biological account is best read as one risk factor among several'), and close by cashing it out. That coherent thread is precisely what separates Level 4 (13–16) from Level 3.
If the question includes a stem — a described offender or crime scene — you must apply to it explicitly (AO2): quote the detail, then draw the inference, exactly as in the profiling worked example. A generic answer that ignores the scenario is capped below full marks however good the theory.