The Return of Lombroso? Ethical Aspects of (Visions of) Preventive Forensic Screening

Munthe, Christian; Radovic, Susanna

The fact that the specific T may remain uncertain, while the conditions b and c may nevertheless be met points towards a final approach to the new Lombrosian vision, which stays neutral on the choice between competing causal models of crime, while retaining a broad criminological focus. 9 In this case, the T is limited to mapping epidemiological linkage between crime and detectable behavioural, biological or social factors, focusing on particularly burdened populations. Epidemiological studies using large samples have shown that a comparatively small group of individuals commit a large proportion of all violent crimes and that individuals in this group have exhibited disinhibitory behaviour early in life (Moffit and Caspi, 2001; Moffitt et al., 2002; Farrington et al., 2013) . In a recent large Swedish longitudinal study (Falk et al., 2014) comprising 2,393,765 individuals, epidemiological analysis of data from multiple registers was used to isolate a very small portion of individuals responsible for a very large portion of persistent violent criminality, and these individuals were then typed in terms of various conditions and analysed further in comparisons to controls. The authors conclude: