The ‘father of modern criminology’1, the description given to Cesare Lombroso, has gained a considerable amount of attention during the end of the 19th century. Those before his time, such as Beccaria, Quetelet, Darwin, Compte and Haeckel and their theories, statistical analysis and triumphs all shaped Lombroso’s criminological perspective and laid the foundation for him to become influential worldwide. 2 Lombroso’s theory relating to the ‘born criminal’ is based on the now-outmoded idea of atavism; criminality is determined by psychological traits3and criminals can be classified by these.
4 The general theory proposed, and postulated, by Lombroso suggested that criminals could be distinguished from non-criminals by multiple physical anomalies. 5 However, Lombroso’s theories were based on a collective selection of science learned from the above named theorists6 but his theory relating to physical abnormalities and criminal behaviour has since been scientifically discredited. Initially the classical school of thought prevailed until the 19th century when criminologists began to move towards a more scientific view of human behaviour; the positivist school of thought.
It is important to clarify here that the Positivist and Classicist theories of crime are extremely different with regard to their views as to what creates criminal behaviour but they share certain similarities; both are of Italian origin and agree that crime is caused as a result of human nature and they also suggest that criminals should be removed from society. However, the positivist theory believes criminals are born and not made while the classicist theory rebukes the former theory and believes in rehabilitation and deterrence.
The young Italian Cesare Bonesana, Marchese di Beccaria, the father of classical criminology, defined a process of thought targeting the criminal justice system’s adjudication of criminals and this became known as the “classical school”. 7 Beccaria’s essay On Crimes and Punishments8 focused on the causes of crime, deemed by some as a choice of free will9, and addressed the need for an improvement in criminal justice policies.
His argument in relation to the causes of crime was deemed to be too deterministic to “those who held spiritualistic explanations of crime” and his reasoning that behaviour was predictable and could be controlled by punishments that were public, prompt, proportionate, and minimal with criminal justice policies that adhered to the above would deter others from committing crime. 10 All modern criminal justice systems in the world today
assume the classical position; individuals are free agents who deserve punishment when they transgress the law. Cesare Lombroso and the pathological perspective can be traced back to the 19th Century following a history of demonic and classical perspectives. 11 Positivism was first evident in the field of biology and then later in criminology. Positivist philosophy dates back to the 16th Century and is based on the presumption that human life can be explained through science.
However, Lombroso’s theory of atavism was heavily influenced by his medical background and is said to have been influenced by any, such as Darwin’s Origin of Species, Jean Baptists della Porte12 and Johann Casper Lavater. 13 Between 1859 and 1863 when he was serving as an army physician, Lombroso developed an interest in biological explanations for criminal behaviour. During this period he developed the idea that diseases somehow contributed to the development of mental and physical deficiencies “which may result in violence and homicide”.
14 After extensive post-mortem examinations and anthropometric studies of normal individuals, criminals and the insane, Lombroso was convinced that the ‘born criminal’, or reo nato as described by Ferri, was capable of being anatomically identified with features such as a sloping forehead, asymmetry of the face, unusually sized ears, excessively long arms along with other ‘physical stigmata’.
Together with the above physical descriptions Lombroso also maintained that criminals were less responsive to touch and pain; possessed acute sight; impulsiveness, vindictiveness and cruelty and lacked a moral sense combined with other manifestations including, for example, the excessive use of tattooing. 15 He firmly believed that criminals were born. Lombroso studied several hundred criminals and found traits of stigmata which he concluded showed atavism. The results of these tests resulted in Lombroso to conclude that it was in fact possible to be born a criminal and thus his theory was supported, and therefore accurate.
Lombroso began to publish his research on the idea that biology, more specifically brain pathologies, was a means to understanding and explaining criminal behaviour in a series of papers that first appeared in 1861. In 1876 he produced the start of his best-known work, L’Uomo Delinquente or The Criminal Man, and it contained not only a biological perspective but also an evolutionary one. This work was so popular that it grew from 200 hundred pages in its first edition to over three thousand in its fifth.
16 Lombroso altered each edition of The Criminal Man to include environmental explanations but he never abandoned the idea of the existence of a born criminal type. Through the research he conducted Lombroso classified criminals under four different categories: born criminals (those with atavistic characteristics); insane criminals (idiots, paranoiacs and imbeciles, including alcoholics); occasional criminals or criminaloids (crimes explained primarily by opportunity but they possess innate traits that predispose them to criminality); criminals of passion (commit crimes due to love, honour, anger).
17 In contrast, the classical school was not interested in the study of criminals but focused instead on law making and the legal process18 and accentuated the legal definition of crime instead of attempting to define what constituted criminal behaviour. It should be noted that Lombroso was not the first individual to connect biological explanations to criminal behaviour. The Swiss scholar Johann Kaspar Lavater, in the 1760’s, claimed that there existed a relationship between an individual’s facial features and their behaviour.
Later an eminent European anatomist, Franz Joseph Gall, expanded on this idea through phrenology, which believes the shape of an individual’s head could explain their personal characteristics. Despite this Lombroso contributed to criminology in many significant ways, for example, the attention he gave to a multiple-factor explanation of crime that included heredity, cultural, social and economical variables.
19 He is also accredited with moving the study of crime towards “a scientific study of the criminal and the conditions under which he commits crime”20 Enrico Ferri continued Lombroso’s legacy of positivism and when aged just 21 years he published his first major work The Theory of Imputability and the Denial of Free Will. 21 This work was an attack on the argument of free will and, unlike Lombroso, Ferri gave more emphasis to the interrelatedness of political, social and economic factors that contribute to crime22 and was not so concerned with the nature of criminal behaviour but more with social preservations.
In the first four edition of Sociologia Criminale Ferri listed only five categories of criminal: the born or instinctive criminal who was identified by Lombroso as atavist; the insane criminal who was identified as mentally ill; the passion criminal; the occasional criminal and the habitual criminal. In the fifth edition of Sociologia Criminale the involuntary criminal was added, described by Ferri as “becoming more and more numerous in our mechanical age in the vertiginous speed of modern life”.
23 In 1927 Lombroso’s most prominent supporter, the Harvard Anthropologist Earnest Hooton, aimed to validate Lombroso’s theory that criminality marked the offender’s body in some way and therefore criminals are in fact physically inferior to non-criminals in some manner. It is important to state the Hooton was not in agreement with all aspects of Lombroso’s theory and questioned the methodology employed by him. However, Hooton felt strongly about Charles B. Goring’s challenge of Lombroso’s theory and stated Goring was “...
frankly and violently prejudiced against Lombroso and all of his theories”24 but aimed to prove Lombroso’s theory, that deviant behaviour was due to “low-grade mentality”. 25 During his studies Hooton diverged from the basic principles of the “born criminal” and instead grounded his theory on eugenics which is a concept in criminology where hereditary degenerates were capable of being controlled though welfare reform or lack of support, sterilisation and euthanasia. However, at that time Hooton was among the minority of scientists in America who considered biological criminality a legitimate approach to the study of criminals.
26 Lombroso’s influence was more concentrated in Italy and, as a result, his theory took on more fervour here; a contrast with the paradigm shift occurring in America. One example could be found in Germany where crimino-biologists were studying typologies called leptosomes, which are characterised by narrow shoulders, thin limbs, under-developed musculatures, and the athletic types defined as the opposite of leptosomes, display characteristics such as being friendly and social with small and round body types. 27 These Crimino-Biological Schools succeeded Lombroso’s school at that time in Germany.
It is apparent from the fact that, in addition to the above, some South American countries28 have established Anthropological Societies based, to an extent, on Lombroso’s theories29 and the compassion displayed by Lombroso for the advancement of his theories has spread worldwide to compel others to advance the breadth of criminological research. Despite his overzealous imagination combined with his failure to prove his own theories and his lack of sound scientific methodology, Lombroso has to be recognised for making hugely significant contributions to the study of criminology.
Marvin Wolfgang stated that “In the history of criminology probably no name has been eulogised or attacked so much as that of Cesare Lombroso”. 30 An explanation for criticisms of his work was may be due to the above mentioned failures and shortcomings; his use of primitive methodology, as he employed the simple use of statistics and limited data; his failed to establish a general theory and so the interpretation of its meaning was somewhat difficult31 and the criminals employed in his studies suffered from some form of mental illness and so this data is unreliable.
Lombroso’s theory ignited scientific research in the field of hereditary exploration, psychology, forensic pathology and endocrinology simply based on the principle that it is the criminal we should study and consider and not the crime. 32 The legacy of Lombroso’s theory of the “born criminal” survives in current criminological theory and considerable research has been conducted with regard to hereditary and biological characteristics to identify the causes of crime within a criminal.
The study relating to hereditary or gene-based evolutionary theories, which cannot be considered as mainstream criminology, have withstood the test of time over the last 120 years. Lombroso’s concepts are apparent in the turn of the century biological studies and include genes associated with behavioural traits, delinquency associated with body types, IQ and tattooing status. The most prominent perspective associated with Lombroso’s thought is the concept of hereditary criminal.
In the essay Gene-Based Evolutionary Theories in Criminology Lee Ellis and Anthony Walsh state that “all modern theories share only a faint resemblance to the first evolutionary theory in criminology proposed over a century ago by Lombroso... he knew nothing of the concept of genetics. ” In more recent times the American-Polish psychologist, William Herbert Sheldon, founded the concept of somatotyping and advanced his theory, closely related to Lombroso’s, that criminal behaviour is linked to a person’s physical form.
33Sheldon was of the opinion that people could be classified under three different body types which each correspond to different personality traits: endomorphic who tend to be sociable and relaxed; ectomorphic who are introverted and restrained and mesomorphic who tend to be aggressive and adventurous. Under the system developed by Sheldon a somatotype three digit number must be established to determine what group an individual belongs to. Once a score is produced for the individual then a personality type for that individual can be determined.
However, this method raised some issues. Sheldon’s model and the results obtained were based on male body types alone and he classified people not only by body type but also by the temperament associated with each body type and with these guidelines he concluded. Both Sheldon and Lombroso were of the opinion, according to their research and findings, that any correlations imply causalities which are viewed as being false as there are many contributing factors that could influence such physical traits or characteristics.
However, in 1956 Sheldon’s work on criminal behaviour was supported by Glueck and Glueck who found that 60% of their sample of delinquents were mesomorphs while only 31% were in their non-delinquent sample. One of Lombroso’s earliest critics was Gabriel Tarde, argued that Lombroso’s theories were in fact contradictory on two principle points. Firstly, women with criminal stigmata should have a proportional crime rate to males but they were in fact significantly lower.
Tarde’s second issue was if stigmata determined a propensity for crime then it should follow in theory that if one examined advocates, judges, labourers features then you could find “born” advocates, judges, labourers but this is not the case. 34 After his death, Lombroso was heavily criticised by Charles Goring. Goring attacked both Lombroso’s theory and methodology in his book The English Convict.
Goring criticised Lombroso’s rather ‘unscientific use of statistical calculation and research methods’ and specifically questioned his employment of ill-defined measurements, unwarranted deductions and inadequate control of groups. Goring stated “since this belief of Lombroso’s was arrived at, not by methods of disinterested investigation, but, rather by a leap of the imagination... Lombrosian doctrine, judges by the standards of science, is fundamentally unsound”.
35 In conclusion, Cesare Lombroso’s achievement is not specifically within the context of his own theories, but opening up avenues of research to discover the causes of crime within the individual. No modern theory is singularly descendent from the Lombrosian theory; however, his ingenuity helped spark new criminological thought that has lasted for over a century. The advent of modern technology and continued growth in scientific knowledge has helped to advance those theories Lombroso developed but for which he did not have scientific reference to prove.
