Sukuna and the myth of being «born for evil»: what criminology says about the born criminal

Ryomen Sukuna is, most likely, the cleanest villain in «Jujutsu Kaisen». Not in the moral sense —he is the very opposite— but in the narrative one: he drags along no trauma to explain him, he seeks no redemption, he has no broken childhood the plot shows us to soften our hearts. The King of Curses is cruel out of selfishness, full stop. The work, which ended in 2024 and swept across half the world, hands us the pure monster. And that purity, so satisfying on screen, is exactly what criminology has spent a century and a half trying to dismantle in real life.

Because the idea of being «born for evil» is old, powerful and false. Before we dive in, this house's guiding line: to explain is not to excuse… but «he was born bad» does not explain anything either, it just ends the conversation. Saying someone is a factory-made monster spares us the uncomfortable task of looking at the causes. Sukuna is the perfect alibi for that shortcut, and that is why he is the best case for talking about the born criminal and about why science buried it.

// The theoryLombroso and the seductive lie of atavism

In 1876, the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso published «L'uomo delinquente» and lit up modern criminology with a magnetic idea: the born criminal existed. For Lombroso, the offender was an atavism, an evolutionary throwback, a savage born by mistake into civilization. And —this is the chilling part— he believed you could recognize him by his face: a prominent jaw, a sloping forehead, large ears, asymmetries. Crime, he held, was written on the body.

The theory was a success precisely because it was comfortable. It turned a thorny social problem into a matter of visible biology: if the criminal can be recognized at a glance, there is no need to ask about poverty, exclusion or choice. It was, moreover, a perfect story for fiction. The villain with the «evil face» is born here. Sukuna, with his markings and his inhuman presence, is a direct aesthetic descendant of that fantasy: evil made visible.

It has to be said without mincing words: atavism was not just a scientific error, it was a dangerous one. It served to justify racism, eugenics and the idea that certain peoples or classes were biologically destined for crime. When you believe crime is inherited and visible, the next step is to treat whole groups of people as factory defects. That is why dismantling it is not an academic whim: it is a vaccine against one of the most expensive lies ever told about human beings.

// The refutationGoring measured the faces, and found no monster

Science did what fiction never does: check it. In 1913, the English physician Charles Goring published «The English Convict», a statistical study of thousands of prisoners compared with the non-incarcerated population. He measured skulls, features, proportions. And he found no physical «criminal type»: the traits Lombroso painted as marks of crime were spread everywhere, inside and outside prison. The born criminal, as an anatomical category, simply did not exist.

It was a devastating blow, though the ghost was slow to die. What Goring buried was not the idea that biology matters —it does, and we will come back to that— but the idea that a criminal destiny is written on the face, sealed from the cradle. That deterministic, physiognomic version is pseudoscience. And yet it survives, in disguise, every time someone looks at a mugshot and feels that «you can already tell».

The important detail is that Goring did not win with a more eloquent opinion, but with data. That is the line separating criminology from carnival physiognomy: counting, comparing, putting the hunch to the test. Sukuna never goes through that filter because he does not need to; he is a character, and a character only needs to come across as menacing. The problem begins when we carry the logic of the script —«you can see the evil in his face»— into a courtroom, a police station or an everyday prejudice.

// What we do knowfrom the criminal face to biosocial factors

Does this mean biology plays no part? No. Serious neurocriminology, that of Adrian Raine in «The Anatomy of Violence», shows that certain biological factors —deficits in the prefrontal cortex, alterations in the fear response, perinatal complications— are associated with a higher risk of violent behavior. But the key word is interaction: those factors act with the environment, not in its place. A high-risk brain in a protective environment often leads to no crime at all. Risk is not destiny.

A nuance fiction erases is worth adding: most people with those risk factors never commit a serious crime. The studies work with probabilities across populations, not with prophecies about individuals. The same biological profile can end up as a meticulous neurosurgeon or as a predator, and what often tips the balance is biography: attachment, opportunities, limits, decisions. Determinism sells because it is simple; the evidence is more boring and more honest: almost everything depends on almost everything.

The same holds for psychopathy. Robert Hare, in «Without Conscience», described the psychopath by his lack of empathy and remorse, his superficial charm, his cold instrumentality. It is the label that comes closest to Sukuna and to villains like Hannibal Lecter or Hisoka. But psychopathy is not a synonym for «born criminal»: it is a profile of traits, with a partly biological basis and a development modulated by the environment, and most of those who score high are not serial killers. Fiction fuses the two things; science separates them carefully.

That is why Sukuna, so enjoyable on screen, is a terrible model of real crime. A villain without a cause works in a manga because his function is to be obstacle and spectacle, not explanation. But crime in the world always has a biography: a before, an environment, a series of doors that opened or closed. Refusing to look at that before out of narrative comfort does not make us tougher on evil; it makes us blinder to how it is produced.

Here comes the big question, that of free will. If there are factors that push, is there any room left to choose? Criminology's honest answer is neither total determinism nor absolute freedom: it is that behavior emerges from an interaction, and that responsibility still stands. Villains like Kefka or Frieza are fascinating precisely because they seem like evil in its pure state; but they are fantasies. In the real world, harm almost always has a chain of causes and a decision at the end of the chain.