Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet

Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet (1796-1874) was a mathematician and scientist. His broad
approach enabled him to gain a greater understanding of the world and its people. His
criminal analysis was based on his studies of human development, and he was noted for his
meticulous attention to detail. Quetelet used his understanding of physics and mathematics to
research and characterize crime and abnormal conduct in quest of rational explanations.
Quetelet used statistics, mathematics, and geography to investigate moral statistics, a
precursor of sociology. His studies encompassed a wide range of disciplines. He established
or co-founded various national and international statistical organizations and scientific
journals, and he led the first series of international statistical conferences.

Other scholars of the time argued that these ideas could not be reconciled with the idea of
​freedom of choice. First, it was claimed that Quetelet, not Lombroso, was responsible for
rescuing criminology from metaphysics and elevating it to the level of science, and the
tradition established by Quetelet had provided for it. Lombroso's contemporary uses both
standards and evidence to criticize and refute the brutal ideas of inborn crime. Second, it is
argued that Quetelet and Guerry were the creators, or at least, early pioneers, of the
ecological school of thought in crime. The first claim that led to Quetelet's intervention in
criminology was simply the pre-Lombrosian period. The latter claim seems to have had the
effect that Quetelet's reputation depended on the success of the environmental movement that
flourished in Chicago in the 1930s, and in which Guerry - not Quetelet - is generally
considered is the predecessor. As a result, these statements tend to display invisible, or
preferably derived, Quetelet's specific analysis of crime.

From Malthus's treatise on population, Quetelet learned how to apply algebra and geometry
to demographic tables. After returning to Belgium from Paris in 1824, Quetelet worked on
several projects. His first statistical work relied on Belgian birth and death records to
calculate insurance rates. He contributed to Dutch population policy and made proposals for a
national census and the collection of crime statistics in Belgium.

His most influential book was Sur l'homme et le développement de ses facultés, or Essai de
physical sociale, published in 1835. He has gathered data on a wide variety of such variables.
With André-Michel Guéry, he co-founded the Cartographic School and the Positivist Crime
School, and he applied the statistical methods effectively.
His studies revealed a strong link between age, gender, and criminality. Climate, poverty,
education, and consumption of alcohol were among the other influences he found, and his
research on the development of criminal tendencies was published.

Some of his books are :

● 1831. The Propensity to Crime.

● 1834. 1835. Sur l'homme et le développement de ses facultés, ou Essai de
physique sociale. 2 volumes.
● 1838. De l'influence des saisons sur la mortalité aux différens âges dans la
Belgique.
● 1839. Catalogue des principales apparitions d'étoiles filantes.
● 1842. A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties.
● 1843. Sur l'emploi de la boussole dans les mines.
● 1848. Du système social et des lois qui le régissent.
● 1848. Sur la statistique morale et les principes qui doivent en former la base.

The constancy of Crime:

In addition to the consistency in the annual number of accused and convicted as well as the
ratios of accused to convicted, inhabitants, and crimes against persons and property, Quetelet
notes consistency in the number of accused who failed to appear in tribunals, the number of
convictions in various types of tribunals, and the number of convicts sentenced to death,
confinement, or forced labor for a term. As a result, he concludes that we go from year to
year with the bleak prospect of seeing the same sins repeated in the same order and leading to
the same punishments in the same proportions. We can estimate how many people will
commit crimes almost as accurately as we can estimate how many births and deaths might
occur.
Average Man:

The way Quetelet applied the normative crime distribution heralded a fundamental change in
his criminology, resulting in his binary opposition between the statistical mean and the
"abnormal" deviation. Although he found that "every individual has a tendency to break the
law," it was also clear to him that the average man's propensity to commit crime rarely
translates into criminal behavior. Accordingly, Quetelet caters to the inclination of
moderately inclined individuals with his claims to respect for the law, psychological and
medical health, as well as moderate morality. Quetelet's interpretation of Aristotle's difference
in virtue convinced him that the common man often chooses the middle path between the two
extremes of deficiency and excess.

Thus, an average man occupies a place among all individuals that Quetelet considers similar
to the center of gravity of the matter. This is done in preparation for the application of social
mechanics to important phenomena of moral statistics, such as suicide, marriage, and crime.

Criminal Propensities:

The apparent regularity of crime rates in Compte led Quetelet to believe that, regardless of
the uniqueness of human activity, criminal behaviour follows the same principles as
inanimate movement. From 1826 to 1829, the disproportionate and persistent presence of
some categories in Comte shows that young males, the indigent, the illiterate, the
unemployed, and those engaged in unskilled labor outnumbered others. This knowledge
appears to have enabled Quetelet to contradict widely held beliefs about what motivates
criminal behaviour.

Some of the poorest regions, such as Cruz and Luxembourg, have the lowest crime rates,
according to Quetelet. Both areas have the highest rates of illiteracy. The devastating effects
of economic inequity are even more severe than poverty itself. Furthermore, contrary to many
who believe that the advancement of knowledge has reduced criminal urges, Quetelet
maintains that people with better "intellectual standing" are more likely to commit
comparable serious crimes such as rape and murder. On the other hand, Quetelet cited others
who have concluded that public education is potentially harmful to society, noting that the
highly educated do not disproportionately commit crimes.

As a result, rather than education itself, it was the kind of education and the presence or lack
of "moral education" that determined criminal tendencies. According to Compte's statistics,
age and gender were the two traits most strongly associated with Quetelet's criminal
tendencies. He calculated crimes by the age of the offender and divided the crimes by
population into each age group. The results show criminal trends at different ages. This
tendency is weaker at both ends of life, producing neither strength nor passion in childhood
("the two most powerful instruments of its crime"), and its strength in old age is "dictated by
reason." One limiting aspect is that crime rates peak between the ages of 21 and 25. The
immaturity of the body enables only crimes like obscenity and rape, to which victims have
little resistance, In contrast, the age of sober remorse allows for more organized crimes like
stealing on public roads, poisoned murders, and acts of insurrection. Seeking, and finally
obtaining, a minority of senior criminals' share of intrinsic authority, evil treachery to "stand
up to the adversary behind the scenes" through forgeries and child abuse.

Quetelet emphasised, however, that the findings do not mean that men and women commit
different degrees of crime. In an attempt to explain the disparity in crime rates between men
and women in France, he proposed that committing crimes needed will, opportunity, and the
ability to act.

Causes of Crime:

1. Accidental causes such as war, starvation, and natural disasters.

2. Multiple causes, such as free will and individuality, climate and seasons.
3. Age, gender, occupation, and religion.
This third causal category has a fixed probability and acts continuously with the same
intensity and direction. Quetelet found evidence of the dominance of this third category of
causes in the persistence of crime rates. Quetelet's incorporation of criminal behavior into a
formal causal structure was a significant advance on the ad hoc, eclectic ideas of his
contemporaries. Even more crucially, within this formal structure, he shifts his analysis to
another level, allowing him to assert that, because crime is an unavoidable characteristic of
social organization, crime was generated by society, France, or the nation itself. Quetelet's
intuition that society causes crime represented an important theoretical break with the basic
realism of public opinion, classical jurisprudence, and the criminal code, and was opposed to
the idea that criminals choose evil themselves.

CRITICISM:

Modern statisticians have advanced three significant arguments against Quetelet's notion that
statistical measures of various physical characteristics may be used to produce an "average"
archetypal human being.

As Cournot cannot generate a right-angled triangle in general from the average lengths of the
three sides of several right-angled triangles, and the typical human being cannot either, based
on many people's average body dimensions.

Bertillon asserted that the average person, composed of all human natures, is a fiction of
Bertillon's imagination rather than a scientific actuality. Theoretical foundations Quetelet's
typical man represented the pinnacle of mediocrity, a tremendous distance from the ideal of
human perfection.

Joseph Bertrand added to the critique by claiming that Quetelet defined "man" irrespective of
any specific man in mind. He maintained that because the average man must be average in all
aspects, his facial features must express conflicting averages such as beauty and ugliness at
the same time.

We must add a fourth objection to Quetelet's idea of the average human from Emile
Durkheim's Suicide to these three. Descriptions of social norms, no matter how accurate and
exhaustive, do not explain them. Durkheim thus reminds us that Quetelet's average person
was established as the arithmetic mean of attributes shared to varying degrees by all people of
a particular type.
Some important concerns in criminal law and the statistical movement were addressed by
Quetelet's criminology. Quetelet's social mechanics of crime arose almost directly from the
apparent failure of French prison methods and the expansion of the statistical movement into
empirical social studies. Much of Quetelet's criminology was built around this combination,
which provided much of the essential content.

The New Criminology mentions Quetelet briefly, but mainly in the dubious claim that
Quetelet and his colleague A. M. Guerry were primarily responsible for the move in penology
from free will to determinism. It is unlikely that later theorists have ever read Quetelet,
especially since his work on criminology and his influence on social statistics is rarely
recognized in the field of criminology or jurisprudence. criminal law.
 REFERENCES:

Beirne, P., 1986. A note on quetelet and the development of criminological statistics. Journal
of Criminal Justice, 14(5), pp.459-462.

Beirne, P., 1987. Adolphe Quetelet and the Origins of Positivist Criminology. American
Journal of Sociology, 92(5), pp.1140-1169.

Criminal Justice. 2022. Biological Theories of Crime (Criminology Theories) IResearchNet.

[online] Available at:
<https://criminal-justice.iresearchnet.com/criminology/theories/biological-theories-of-crime/
8/> [Accessed 9 September 2022].

Breen, C., 2014. Quetelet, Adolphe. The Encyclopedia of Theoretical Criminology, pp.1-4.

Quetelet, A., 1984. Adolphe Quetelet's Research on the propensity for crime at different ages.
Cincinnati, Ohio: Anderson Pub. Co.

Sylvester, S., 1982. Adolphe Quetelet: At the Beginning. HeinOnline,