Gets under the skin: Elaborating on and expanding the “social” in biosocial criminology

This article focuses on the biosocial perspective in criminology. Its purpose is to highlight public health approaches on biosocial interactions that can be drawn from to develop more theorization on the social environment and to provide new possibilities in studying how socio-environmental macro–micro characteristics interact with neurobiology in developing antisocial, violent, and criminal behaviors. Extant biosocial research in criminology examines and understands the social environment as characteristics proximal to the individual, more so than those that are distal. Examples of proximal level characteristics are family, education, or individual socioeconomic status and examples of distal level ones are income inequality and institutional racial discrimination. Although the field of criminology traces the history of the biosocial perspective to Cesare Lombroso, the concept of “biosocial” and its onto-epistemological approach is also linked to that of public health. In relinking criminological biosocial research to public health, this article highlights how trends within the latter may have shaped the former; and in relinking, the article also provides “ways of seeing” the role of distal level social factors in biosocial interactions from three public health theoretical frameworks and constructs: Nancy Krieger’s embodiment from ecosocial theory; Merrill Singer’s syndemics ; and Johan Galtung’s structural violence .