My Take: Criminal Profiling a Hundred Years Ago to Today

Profiling criminals based on physical features is not something new. A hundred years ago, a man by the name of Lombroso constructed a profile of the "atavist", or the born criminal. Today, countless innocent Arabs are halted at checkpoints for anti-terrorist security measures. The article The False Promise of Profiling Terrorists discusses why racial profiling today won't work. This article, on the other hand, looks back at criminal profiling a hundred years ago-in a way the precursor of racial profiling today-and point why it didn't work.

Physical attributes are so often disturbingly taken to correlate to a person's criminal tendencies. From the earliest times, as evidenced in Homer's Iliad, the bad guys always seem to have been cursed with disfigurement and "misshapen heads". Before the belated philosopher Socrates was put to death on grounds of heresy and corruption of youth, a physiognomist determined his face to belie a brutal countenance. In the Middle Ages, annals about demonic possession warned of the presence of warts or moles signifying the physical entry point of the demon. It is not surprising then that even in children's books today, criminals are often portrayed as deformed imps with a crooked lilt, hooked nose and unusually arched brows.

The Face of Crime

Scientifically, this theory was pioneered by the 19th century physician Cesare Lombroso in his book The Criminal Man, after conducting autopsies of criminals and studying the physical features of inmates and soldiers. He proposed the presence of certain physical stigmata and anomalies indicative of an atavist-a born criminal-including peculiar reptile-like palates or cleft palates, eye defects, facial asymmetry, protruding lips, unusually long arms, and deviation in head size, to name a few. In thieves, he noted that noses were twisted, flattened or upturned, while in murderers, they were peculiarly sharp and beak-like, protruding from swollen nostrils. Though his work was discredited by many criminologists thereafter who argued that the environment and circumstances were more likely to influence a criminal mind, Lombroso's early theories have had a lasting impact on the modern mindset.

Later on, Earnest Hooton would also come up with a similar theory banking on the physical inferiority of criminals to non-criminals based on the analysis of physical measurements of the former. This was preempted by a keen anthropological interest in studying various body types and how they related to a person's traits. By measuring the physical characteristics of some 13,873 criminals and comparing them to that of 3,203 non-criminals, Hooton stratified his findings to elucidate certain precepts that governed criminal behavior. Relating to physical appearance, he found that generally, felons had thinner facial and body hair that was more often straight and reddish-brown in color. Blue-gray and mixed eye colors were more widespread than blue or dark-hued eyes. Ears were prone to have a slightly rolled helix, with "low sloping foreheads, high nasal bridges and thin lips with compressed jaws".

Hooton went on further to explore the stereotypical appearance of certain kinds of offenders. He concluded that arsonists, for one, were wont to have ash blonde hair and those who commit crimes of assault have an unnaturally olive-tanned skin color. First degree murderers have straight hair, while second degree murderers have unusually golden hair and broad nasal bridges. Aside from this, Hooton maintains other classifications of criminals based on physical appearance, including body type. He later on concludes that "Criminals as a group represent an aggregate of sociologically and biologically inferior individuals." Much to his dismay, however, his work did not garner much acclaim and credibility among criminologists. It was argued to have had strong racist leanings and there was never any direct evidence that criminal behavior was biologically inherited.

Interestingly, while the adherents of Lombroso's theory have significantly dwindled through time, a fascinating study was published in 1978 where plastic surgeons performed corrective procedures on over 100 physically unattractive inmates, repairing unsightly disfigurements, skewed features and scars from needle incisions or tattoos. Their behavior was tracked for a year after release and compared to that of another 100 unattractive inmates who were also released but did not receive any plastic surgery. Surprisingly, those who underwent surgery and had better physical appearances were less likely to revert to their old habits of crime. Was physical appearance the determining factor for the reformed behavior of these ex-inmates? This study seems to tell us so, but human behavior is so complex, that the scientific community is hesitant to pin down one definitive variable responsible for determining it.

Profiling Terrorists

While most theories directly relating facial and physical features to criminal behavior have been gunned down, their remnants pose as great a threat to our notions of social liberty today. Living in an age embroiled with the bitter memories-and looming prospects-of terrorist attacks, racial profiling has of late become an invisible shackle. Case in point: a brazen walk through the public square may inadvertently garner disproportionate numbers of rude stares, all depending on skin color. While racial profiling used to simply refer to the phenomenon of traffic police pulling over more African Americans than whites on the skewed premise that they were more likely to commit crime, it has taken on a whole new meaning today. While many are tempted to call this form of "rational discrimination" a no-nonsense approach to the demands of reality at hand, singling out nearly every Arab at security checkpoints borders on the ridiculously impractical, asking them to disembark from planes on the insistence of uncomfortable passengers-despite having cleared airport security-is outright racism. Terrorism, it seems, is not just the only threat to our security that reality forces us to deal with. Ironically, racial profiling has already done its job of stripping a good number of us of the freedom that our governments valiantly claim to be protecting.

Even if many terrorists are Arabs, most Arabs are not terrorists. Racial profiling of terrorists reinforces the tendencies of people to use logic to make sense of observations and ultimately make screwed up classifications of the terrorist portfolio. Many people today would ridicule Lombroso's classification of criminals and his physical construction of the "ideal" criminal. But is not that just exactly what we're doing today in the name of the war against terror?

A century ago, people have shown that criminal profiling based on physical attributes does not work. It was a rational proposal that, based on the rules of logic, should've worked. But it didn't. Today, a hundred years later, human beings are as rational enough to watch all the acts and threats of terrorism unfold around him to come up with the same conclusion. It seems that we have again yet to learn that racial profiling simply doesn't work. It's the biggest irony that in our bid for security and democracy, the steps we're taking work to thin out our sense of security and go against the very principles of democracy. Crime knows no borders.