The Multiple Factor Approach

In one line

The multiple factor approach holds that crime has no single cause, and that any offence is the product of a combination of factors which differs from case to case.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the multiple factor theory of crime rejects the search for a single universal cause and holds that criminal behaviour results from the interaction of a plurality of factors, biological, psychological, social and economic, whose combination varies from offender to offender, so that no one factor is either necessary or sufficient.

What it says

Three propositions, and they should be stated separately because the criticism attacks them separately.

One: no single cause exists. Neither heredity, nor poverty, nor a broken home, nor mental disorder, nor bad company explains crime as a whole. Each is present in some cases and absent in others, and each is present in enormous numbers of people who never offend.

Two: any offence is produced by a combination. In the individual case a number of factors have operated together, and the offence is the resultant. The same offence in two people may rest on wholly different combinations.

Three: the combination varies. There is no fixed set. What criminology can do is identify the factors that recur and estimate their weight, not produce a formula.

Where it came from

Its ancestry is in the Positive School. Ferri's division of causes into anthropological, physical and social factors, described in the chapter on Ferri and Garofalo, is the multiple factor approach in embryo, and Lombroso himself moved a long way towards it in his later editions.

Its method is the case study. William Healy, the psychiatrist who examined juveniles at the Chicago juvenile court, published The Individual Delinquent in 1915 after studying a thousand cases and concluded that in each case a number of factors had operated and that no general causal law could be extracted. His method, examining the individual thoroughly rather than counting a population, is what the approach rests on.

Cyril Burt studied young offenders in London and reported that a large number of conditions were associated with delinquency, of which he identified around one hundred and seventy, with several operating in every case.

Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck carried out the largest work in the tradition, matching five hundred delinquent boys with five hundred non-delinquent boys of the same age, intelligence, ethnic origin and neighbourhood, and comparing them across physical, psychological and social measures. The matched control design is what makes their work valuable and it is what Lombroso lacked.

Its practical attraction

It fits what a practitioner sees. Any probation officer, magistrate or prison officer who reads a hundred case files will recognise the description at once: each file is different, and each contains several things that went wrong.