Charles Buckman Goring

Charles Buckman Goring

Born 1870
Died 5 May 1919 (aged 49)
Manchester, England
Nationality British
Education University of London, B.Sc. M.D.
Occupation Criminologist
Notable work The English Convict: a statistical study
Awards Weldon Memorial Prize (1914)
 Charles Buckman Goring
• He was educated at the University of London, receiving his B.Sc. in 1895
and his M.D. in 1903. In 1893, he was awarded the John Stuart Mill
Studentship in Philosophy of Mind and Logic, and four years later was
elected a Fellow of University College.
• He worked in numerous English jails as a medical officer from 1902 until his
death in 1919.
• His scientific imagination, reasoning, and superb prose earned him the
respect of all who knew him. According to a statement made by Goring's
coworker Karl Pearson, "The creative mind has the potentiality of a poet,
artist, and scientist within its grasp. Goring's friends were never quite sure in
which category to place him.
Charles Buckman Goring
• Goring's crowning achievement was The English Convict: a statistical study, one of the most
comprehensive criminological works of its time.
• Its goal, as suggested by Cesare Lombroso, was to determine whether there were any notable
physical or mental abnormalities among the criminal classes that distinguished them from
ordinary persons. It was originally published in 1913.
• Goring gathered and analyzed information pertaining to 96 features of each of the more than
3,000 English prisoners under the sponsorship of the British government with the help of other
prison medical officers, other prison medical officers, Karl Pearson, and his team at the
Biometrics Laboratory.
• In the end, he came to the conclusion that "the physical and mental structure of both criminal
and law-abiding citizens, of the same age, stature, class, and intellect, are identical.
• There is no such thing as an anthropological criminal type.
Charles Buckman Goring
• He did, however, claim that it is a "indisputable fact that there is a physical,
mental, and moral type of normal person who tends to be convicted of
crime: that is, our evidence conclusively shows that, on average, the
criminal of English prisons is markedly differentiated by defective
physique - as measured by stature and body weight, by defective mental
capacity.“
• Goring continued to make the case that one of the three methods for
reducing crime was to "control the reproduction of those degrees of
constitutional traits — feeblemindedness, inebriation, epilepsy, social
instinct, etc.
• hehe