Jacob Riis: Nurture Not Nature

Jacob Riis took a different approach to identifying the criminal than did his predecessors or contemporaries of the late 1800s. He was “a newspaper reporter for the New York Tribune, and later, the Sun” (Phillips 25). Rather than looking to the individual for the basis of his criminality, Riis decided that an individual was simply the product of his environment. He did not believe that a criminal was born a criminal and that it was more common in certain gene pools. Instead, he believed that social circumstances were to blame and thus shaped the individual. In order to support this theory and convince the mass public, he began to compile photographs of the conditions that fostered crime. In the following picture found in Police Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence, convinced that the environment was responsible for producing criminals, Jacob Riis presents the conditions in which immigrants to New York City lived (Phillips 77):

Bandit's Roost, 39 1/2 Mulberry Street (1890)

In this photograph, the bodies are not the main focus. Instead, it is the location of these bodies that catches the eye of the audience. The careful lighting and the natural positioning of the bodies give this picture authenticity and give the audience the sense that maybe the idea of the criminal is not necessarily just based on biological anatomy or constrained to a certain "lower" race. If anyone was forced to live in the same environment, they would be privy to a similar fate. Below is another picture of the horrible conditions in which some grew up. Riis argued that their motives for committing crime must have a basis in their squalid environment:

Bandit's Roost, One of Four Pedlars Who Slept in the Cellar of 11 Ludlow Street Rear

Riis decided to promote his theory through photographs because "he found that words alone were not powerful enough to evoke the conditions he saw" (Phillips 26). Thus, the photograph proves yet again to be an invaluable tool to show the truth, even though it remains completely subjective to the whims of the photographer. What is interesting is that he did not just take pictures of actual criminals. He took pictures of single mothers, alley ways, and cramped living conditions. By simply taking a mug shot, the photographer removes the criminal from his background and because Riis felt that environment played such a large role in determining criminality, he decided to photograph the environment rather than just the individual. The majority of the photographs were taken in the neighborhoods of immigrant and minority populations in New York City, those populations that were deemed prone to commit crime by authors such as Cesare Lombroso and police inspectors like Thomas Byrnes due to their inferior biology. Riis wrote many books about his findings, the most famous of which was How the Other Half Lives. To see more of Riis' photographs, click here.

The Nature vs. Nurture debate is once again at odds and still exists when it comes to the basis of criminality. In present day, is there more of an emphasis on the biology or the environment of the criminal? What is the impact of that emphasis? How does photography today view criminality?