What physiognomy says about criminals is insignificant compared to what it tells us about our own psychology. It is strange how we do associate particular physical traits with mental ones, especially when it leads us to make moral assumptions about their behaviour.
It'd be interesting to analyse prison populations today and see to what extent the inmates conform to type, though again, that wouldn't prove much about any inherent disposition to commit crime or the idea that the body degenerates in response to moral degeneracy. To an extent the second idea is true, because particular social conditions that are more likely to 'produce' criminals also produce particular physical characteristics; someone could have a stocky figure because they'd eaten poorly, but this would have been caused by their social environment rather than their morals, despite the figure being produced by a factor that also influences as their morals.
Hope this makes sense without sounding horribly offensive? What a study today would tell us would be about the inherent bias in our psychology that probably influences the outcomes of trials, which would be interesting. Obv it's pretty impossible to isolate cause & effect. I don't know much about psychology really...
But yeah, the resemblance between those pictures is uncanny.
Ooh I didn't see your reply until just now. I don't think there is a "criminal type" which is why this kind of study is doomed from the word go. The thing about phenotyping is it doesn't seem to have much to do with psychology especially with small stuff like the shape of someone's nose or hair colour - in a broad sense, you could probably draw some vague conclusions about asome aspects of a person 's psyche if they were born with no legs, for instance, but even then you might draw the wrong conclusions. People can always surprise you.
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