Lombroso, Cesare

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LOMBROSO, CESARE

LOMBROSO, CESARE (1835–1909), Italian criminologist.

Often called the "father of criminology," Cesare Lombroso was a pioneer in establishing criminology as a social science. Born into a Jewish family of Verona, Italy, he studied medicine and psychiatry at universities in Italy and Austria. While volunteering as a military doctor in the new Italian army (1859–1863) he began to collect data on the physical and psychological characteristics of recruits. He subsequently transferred his methodology, based on measurement of the body and clinical interviews, to the insane and then to criminals. During his long career as a professor at the University of Turin he founded the discipline of criminal anthropology, which traced the causes of crime to abnormal physical and psychological characteristics in offenders. He thus challenged the reigning orthodoxy in legal thought that attributed criminal behavior to free will, arguing instead for the important role of biological determinism in lawbreaking.

Lombroso is best known for his concept of the "born criminal," an atavistic throwback on the evolutionary scale who can be identified by physical and psychological "anomalies." Using a social Darwinist framework, Lombroso likened these anomalies in criminals to typical traits of "savage" man, animals, and even plants. Physical anomalies included small heads, low foreheads, jug ears, and large jaws; abnormal psychological traits included vindictiveness, vanity, lack of probity, and, in the case of women, lack of modesty and of maternal feelings. Despite his emphasis on innate and hereditary causes of crime, Lombroso did not ignore the importance of social factors like poverty, illiteracy, and overcrowded housing that could lead to "occasional" criminality. The humanitarian streak in his work led him to join the Italian Socialist Party, where he found a following among those who compared his materialistic explanations of crime favorably to Karl Marx's economic determinism.

Lombroso went beyond theory to enumerate practical policies to protect society from crime. Contrary to the "classical school" of penology, which traced its philosophy back to Cesare Beccaria's famous Enlightenment tract On Crimes and Punishments (Dei delitti e delle pene; 1765), criminal anthropology argued that degrees of punishment should correlate with the dangerousness of offenders rather than the severity of their crimes. From this perspective, born criminals, whose atavistic constitution denied any possibility of reform, deserved perpetual separation from society in special prisons for incorrigibles or, in the case of the most violent recidivists, capital punishment. Lombroso discouraged incarceration for occasional criminals because prisons tended to corrupt rather than reeducate their inmates and instead recommended probation or suspended sentences. Believing that only criminal anthropologists could accurately identify and classify criminals, Lombroso sought to place his disciples in key positions within the police, courts, and prisons.

Lombroso expounded his criminological theory in a series of books, including his classic companion works Criminal Man (L'uomo delinquente; five editions from 1876 to 1897) and Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman (La donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale; coauthored with Guglielmo Ferrero, 1893). Founding editor of the journal Archivio di antropologia criminale, psichiatria e medicina legale (Archives of criminal anthropology, psychiatry, and legal medicine), he gained national and international fame as the leader, along with Enrico Ferri and Raffaele Garofalo, of the "Italian" or "positivist" school of criminology. While the Italian school dominated debates at the first international Congress of Criminal Anthropology held in Rome (1885), Lombroso's ideas soon came under attack for emphasizing atavism at the expense of other biological determinants of crime and for underestimating the role of "social milieu" in shaping human behavior. In response to his critics Lombroso expanded his theory of the etiology of crime to include "moral insanity," degeneracy, epilepsy, and a host of sociological factors while never abandoning his primary allegiance to atavism.

After many years of neglect, the theories of Lombroso have elicited a revival of scholarship since the 1990s. These studies have been concentrated in three areas. First, Italian historians have been reevaluating Lombroso's importance to the intellectual and institutional history of his own nation. Once considered marginal and simplistic, criminal anthropology is now being recognized as consonant with many mainstream scientific and legal developments of its day. Second, international scholars are reevaluating Lombroso's influence in shaping late-nineteenth-century criminology in Europe and the Americas. Even in nations like France, where individual criminologists conducted highly public feuds with Lombroso, theories of crime were permeated with biological and deterministic rhetoric. Finally, historians of gender and racism have had to come to terms with Lombroso's voluminous data purporting to prove the inferiority of women to men and establish a hierarchy of races. Research remains to be done on his contributions to the development of sexology, the study of prison culture, and the establishment of criminological museums.