After Lombroso

Dr. Earnest Albert Hooton believes that human behavior, though it may be influenced by environment, has a fundamental basis in organic constitution, that is, in hereditary endowment. An affable and brilliant scientist who heads Harvard's world-famed Department of Anthropology, Dr. Hooton points out that a chimpanzee and a man behave differently not because their environments are different but because they are born with different anatomical equipment.

The behavior of criminals differs radically and conspicuously from that of law-abiding people; therefore Hooton boldly set out in 1926 to get anthropological data on criminals. His trained field workers spent three years collecting it, and another nine years were spent at Harvard analyzing it. Now Anthropologist Hooton is ready to release his findings. The Harvard University Press is to publish a huge technical monograph in three volumes for scientists. For laymen, many-sided Dr. Hooton last week published a shorter and simpler book, Crime and the Man* which put the salient facts of his investigation in lighter form.

The lightest element in Crime and the Man are the 24 charts which Dr. Hooton himself drew to illustrate his text. An amateur sketcher with a humorous line that many a cartoonist might envy, he calls his illustrations "nasty little human figures" (see opposite page).

Inferiority. But Anthropologist Hooton's basic finding is no spoofing. He says that a number of anthropological features mark off criminals in the mass from the general population, and different classes of criminals from one another. These features do not occur uniformly enough for individual diagnosis of a criminal type; but simply by occurring more frequently in the large groups of which they are characteristic, they serve, when statistically analyzed, to set aside these groups as anthropologically distinct.

For example, Hooton found nine features characteristic of robbers--such things as attached ear lobes, heavy beards, diffused pigment in the iris. In a group of 414 robbers, six had none of these characteristics at all, no robber had all nine, and only one had as many as seven. But more than half had two or three of the features, which was a significantly higher incidence than in other criminal classes or in law-abiding people.

Some of his conclusions: the whole class of criminals in general is marked off from the civilian population by organic inferiority. "Old American" criminals (native-born whites of native parentage) tend to be smaller and lighter, to have shorter and broader faces, narrower jaws, more sloping shoulders, longer and thinner necks. To the trained anthropologist the dimensions and contours of their heads and faces are sometimes suggestive of retarded development, sometimes of the retention of primitive features, and often of conservatism which may be described as evolutionary rigidity or a failure to conform to modern trends of physical change." Whether the less handsomely endowed criminal takes to anti-social behavior as a compensation for his physical shortcomings, Dr. Hooton does not venture a guess.

In evaluating differences among criminals, Dr. Hooton also took account of racial type. Hooton is as well aware as anybody that "pure races" do not exist, but that did not blind him to the fact that racial differences among human beings do exist. He set up nine arbitrary racial types on the basis of discernible features--for example, "Pure Nordic" (long heads, ash-blond or golden hair, blue eyes), "Mediterranean" (long heads, dark eyes, dark or red-brown hair), "Dinaric" (round heads, mixed pigmentation, narrow noses). He then found that certain of these types seem addicted to certain crimes, uninterested in others. The "Pure Nordic" criminals go in heavily for forgery and fraud, but rank lowest in sex offenses (led by the Dinarics) and in robbery (led by the Alpines).

Hooton's trained field workers also took certain social data from their subjects (such as marital state, education, occupation) and some of these are charted in Crime and the Man. In one of his special group studies he found that 44.8% of his criminals were married. In studying racial and national groups he found that Negroes, contrary to the folklore of lynch mobs, commit rape less frequently than "Old American" whites, white immigrants or children of white immigrants. Favorite offense of Negro criminals is burglary.

Old Stuff, New Stuff. Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909) was a great Italian pioneer in criminal anthropology, who assembled a mass of data to show that wrongdoers fall into an "atavistic" and "degenerate" class distinct from other men. His statistical methods were so crude and biased, however, that they were easily knocked down by opponents who were as biased as he but better statisticians.

Lombroso had the right idea, according to Hooton, but he made the mistake of looking for a specific criminal type. Hooton feels that his own researches reveal a multiplicity of criminal types--or rather, a constellation of features which occur more frequently in criminals than in noncriminals, and more often in certain criminal classes than in others.

Hooton's co-workers made their observations on a total of 17,680 individuals in ten far-flung States, and the data was sorted, tabulated and analyzed with the help of "the most nearly perfect and efficient mechanical apparatus hitherto devised." Says Author Hooton: ". . . . I have every confidence that many will squall and that right loudly. I await these squallings with equanimity."

*Harvard University Press ($3.75)

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