Google, Phil Donahue, and the Born Criminal

University of Minnesota Sociologist & Criminologist Christopher Uggen recently blogged about using short video clips to augment lectures. One resource mentioned in that post is Google Video. This is the new service offered by Google serving up video streams of varying lengths on all sorts of things.

Since I'm teaching today about the foundations of positivist criminology and its linkages to Eugenics, I thought I'd see what a search for "Born Criminal" would turn up in the google search engine.

I think either the Google folks need to tweak their algorithm, or there's more to Phil Donahue than meets the eye! .

In the "speaking too soon" department....

I've been reading some of Ceasare Lombroso's translated writings in preparation for my Criminology course this semester. Lombroso is considered the founder of the Italian school of Criminal Anthropology, a program emphasizing crime's biological and hereditary sources.

Though early in his career, he advanced a theory of atavism, he moderated on this view later in his life. In 1899, he published Crime, It's Causes and Remedies, which was translated by H.P. Horton and reprinted in English by Little, Brown, and Company in 1918. In this book, Lombroso tried to synthesize everything he knew about crime. The first chapter is devoted to climatology effects on crime (e.g., extreme heat or cold).

Lombroso argued that extreme cold temperatures mitigate against violence and aggression. I found the following passage some what amusing (having the benefit of more than a century of hindsight.

This explains why, not only despotic Russia, but also the liberal Scandinavian countries, have rarely experienced revolutions (Lombroso 1899 [1918], pg 3).

Well, one out of two ain't bad.