LOMBROSO, CESARE (1835–1909)

The Italian criminologist and psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso was born into a Jewish family in Verona in 1835 and studied medicine at the universities of Pavia, Padua and Vienna. While in Vienna he began to develop his life-long interest in the connections between psychology and anatomy, an area of research that was attracting growing academic attention in the 1850s in Europe thanks largely to the work of French doctors such as B.A.Morel and Paul Broca. While Lombroso was not directly influenced by their studies, his own early research made use of similar conceptual suppositions and experimental techniques. One of his first projects involved an investigation of the links between cretinism and diet in Lombardy, in which he demonstrated through careful empirical research that the degenerative disease pellagra was caused not just by vitamin deficiency but also by poisoning arising from maize rotting while in storage.

Between 1859 and 1863 Lombroso was attached to the Piedmontese army as a surgeon and served in southern Italy. His first-hand experience here of brigandage—at that time a major problem threatening the new Italian kingdom—confirmed him in his belief that mental abnormalities and crime needed to be studied in relation to the physical and

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biological characteristics of individual criminals rather than in the abstract. This view received further reinforcement during a spell as director of a lunatic asylum in Pavia, where he was able to continue his experimental work on the biological abnormalities accompanying ‘alienation’. Lombroso’s first studies of insanity and crime, Genius and Madness (1863) and An Experimental and Anthropological Treatise on Delinquent Man (1872), attracted little interest, but the 1876 edition of Delinquent Man, which appeared at a time of intense debate about the nature of Italy’s social problems, especially those in the south of the country, proved astonishingly successful. It went through many subsequent editions and was widely translated.

At the heart of Lombroso’s view of crime lay a rejection of the whole classical tradition of criminal law, with its notions of free will, morality and individual responsibility. Deviancy, he argued, was not an abstraction but rather a social and human reality brought about by a range of factors, which might vary in relation to each offender and which needed to be approached and studied scientifically. He accepted that social environment, climate, diet and occupation could all contribute to criminal behaviour, but

he insisted that the principal determinant was an inherited proclivity. The criminal, like the madman, was the product of biological degeneracy, and the task of the criminologist was to examine and catalogue the external manifestations of degeneracy in order to arrive at a general typology of criminals. This would then be used as the basis for a radical reappraisal of current procedures for punishment and rehabilitation.

Lombroso’s views were heavily influenced by contemporary evolutionary theories. The physical peculiarities of criminals—their cranial dimensions, jaw and ear shapes, facial asymmetries, density of body hair (not to mention their penchant for tattoos, slang, alcohol and sexual promiscuity)—were relics, or what he called ‘stigmata’, from man’s primitive past. ‘Criminals are neither lunatics nor are they normal beings; they are abnormal beings who bear certain physical attributes of our ancestors, of monkey and carnivores…they are atavistic beings.’ However, he was careful to eschew excessive determinism and argued that not all criminals were equally the product of biological degeneracy. He maintained a sharp distinction between casual criminals, who might be drawn into offending as a result of environmental or social pressures, and who might thus

be successfully rehabilitated, and ‘born’ criminals, who were wholly incorrigible and against whom society needed to protect itself.

Lombroso was a strong critic of contemporary penal and police practices in Italy, and argued that since crime was specific to the criminal, the state needed to be more rigorously scientific and targeted in its approach to the problems of deviancy. He called for prison reform, and urged the segregation of casual from habitual offenders in order to avoid the former being vitiated by the latter; and he wanted the penal law to be in general more progressive in its handling of socially determined forms of crime, and more severe in its treatment of ‘born’ criminals. However, the influence of Lombroso and his increasingly wide circle of followers (among whom was the brilliant and flamboyant young socialist Enrico Ferri) on policy-makers was limited, and the new Italian Penal Code of 1889 failed to incorporate any of their principles. This greatly angered Lombroso. During the 1890s he briefly gave his support to the Socialist Party, and in 1896 he stood as a socialist candidate for the city council of Turin.

From 1876 Lombroso held chairs in Forensic Medicine and Hygiene, Psychiatry and Criminal Anthropology at the University of Turin. Besides new and expanded editions of

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Delinquent Man, and other works on aspects of crime and its causes, he ventured into the field of political criminality in 1894 with a study of anarchism. In this he suggested that anarchists were physically and mentally abnormal—though in different ways to habitual criminals—and that their behaviour might stem from a form of delirium brought about by excessive idealism. No less indicative of the limits of his ‘scientific’ approach was his study of female delinquency (Delinquent Woman, 1893), in which he argued that the natural form of biological degeneracy in women was prostitution, not crime (‘primitive woman was impure rather than criminal’), and that prostitutes posed a particularly insidious threat to the social order in as much as they embodied the antitheses of ‘normal’ female qualities such as chastity, loyalty and graciousness.

Lombroso’s work was widely translated and proved highly influential among criminologists and jurists in Europe and parts of South America. He died in Turin in 1909.

LOMBROSO, CESARE (1835–1909)