Word: crime
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...students that nurture, not nature, is responsible for criminal behavior. Now, however, two prominent Harvard professors, James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein, argue that Lombroso was on the right track: no one is born a criminal, but many are born with "constitutional factors" that predispose them to serious crime. "There is mounting evidence," the professors write in their new book Crime and Human Nature (Simon & Schuster; $22.95), "that on the average, offenders differ from nonoffenders in physique, intelligence and personality...
Though fair-minded and often generous to its intellectual opponents, the book is obviously an effort to discredit the reigning view that crime is largely, or entirely, the by-product of poverty, racism, broken families and other social disturbances. By focusing narrowly on environmental conditions that help breed crime, the authors write, criminologists overlook traits that many offenders seem to share. Criminals tend to be young males who are muscular rather than thin, and who have lower-than-average IQs and impulsive, "now"-oriented personalities, which make planning or even thinking about the future difficult. While these factors...
Wilson is a professor of government and author of Thinking About Crime (1975). Herrnstein, a psychologist, has been a controversial figure since his 1971 article in the Atlantic stressing the role of genetic factors in producing differences in IQ scores. The two professors have jointly taught a course on crime at Harvard since 1977. Says Wilson: "There is overwhelming evidence first that crime runs in families and second that early childhood precursors of crime seem clear." One study of adoptions in Denmark from 1924 to 1947 found that chronically criminal biological parents were three times as likely to produce...
None of the seven was charged with actually committing a crime...
...single ridge splits into two. A thin beam of light scans each print and records the location of up to 100 minutiae. The computer then converts these data into numbers that can be stored on magnetic disks and retrieved for comparison with prints taken from the scene of a crime...