Scott Townsend Publishers, 1996
Crime as Destiny: A Study of Criminal Twins (1931) by Johannes Lange is a pioneering—and now controversial—work in criminology that examines whether criminal behavior is primarily inherited or shaped by environment. Using one of the earliest systematic twin studies, Lange sought to address the longstanding debate between nature and nurture in explaining crime.
The book's central method is a comparison of identical (monozygotic) and fraternal (dizygotic) twins. Lange analyzed pairs of twins in which at least one sibling had a criminal record and looked for similarities in behavior between the twins. He argued that identical twins showed a much higher degree of similarity in criminal conduct than fraternal twins, leading him to conclude that hereditary factors played a major role in criminal tendencies. Much of the book consists of detailed case studies.
Rather than relying solely on statistics, Lange presents biographies of individual twins, describing their family backgrounds, personalities, offenses, and life histories. These cases are intended to demonstrate that even when twins experienced somewhat different environments, inherited traits appeared to exert a powerful influence on behavior.
Today, the book is remembered as an important milestone in behavioral genetics and criminology, but many of its conclusions are viewed with caution. Modern researchers generally reject the idea that criminality is predetermined by heredity alone and emphasize the complex interaction of genetics, upbringing, social conditions, education, and individual choice. Historians also note that Lange's work emerged during a period when eugenic theories were influential in Europe, and some of the book's assumptions later became associated with views that are now widely shunned.
Crime as Destiny is a landmark early criminological study in which Johannes Lange used twin research to argue for a strong hereditary component in criminal behavior, making the book influential in the history of behavioral science while also linking it to the broader—and troubling—history of eugenic thought. About the Author
Johannes Lange (1891–1938) was a German psychiatrist and student of Emil Kraepelin. He specialized in psychiatric genetics and criminology and became known for applying twin studies to questions of heredity and behavior. His research was influential in early twentieth-century debates over genetics, mental illness, and criminality, though many of his conclusions have since been revised or rejected by modern scholarship.