SOCB50H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Social Constructionism, Cesare Lombroso, Class Discrimination
Document Summary
Feminist and critical race theory are informed by conflict theory. These groups have power over controlling what is considered a legal crime and what isn"t. Have control over apprehending criminals, charging them, prosecuting them, convicting them, punishing them. Early positivist theory: deviance can only be explained by biology: something biologically different about criminals (i. e. in psychopathology) Lombroso took pictures of people in prisons, mental hospitals, etc: his interest was in why females were not committing as much crime as males, looked at facial features that the people in the pictures had in common. These were physical traits and evidence that showed that there is something biologically different about these females i. e. different nose shape, stare in their eyes, etc. The look in her eyes, she"s clearly crazy. The notion here was that crime for men was normal and a normal part of patterned male behaviour. That there was something biological about women that.
