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Cesare Lombroso and the origins of criminology:
Rethinking criminological tradition^1
Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) is widely recognized as one of the first people to bring scientific methods to bear on the study of crime. A physician, psychiatrist, and prolific author, Lombroso is best known as the founder of criminal anthropology, the study of the body, mind, and habits of the “born” criminal. Lombroso's theory of the atavistic offender dominated criminological discussions in Europe, North and South America, and parts of Asia from the 1880s into the early twentieth century. But critics attacked his theory even during his lifetime, and by the time he died, criminologists outside Italy had moved on to other explanations of crime^2. Today, criminology textbooks continue to acknowledge Lombroso as the “father” of the field, but they tend to be vague as to the nature of his contribution, and in U.S. courses on criminology, Lombroso and his work are sometimes ridiculed. The time is ripe to reassess Lombroso’s work and significance to the field. While I have no intention of defending Lombroso as a researcher, I have spent the last decade immersed in the originals of his books, which has led me to conclude that what we thought we knew about Lombroso differs in important respects from what he actually said. And because our view of his work has been unavoidably narrow and distorted, we have also reached some inaccurate conclusions about the nature of his contribution to criminology.
In what follows, first I summarize the view of Lombroso that has appeared over time in American criminology textbooks. Then I identify sources of this view, which was based on mistranslations and partial translations of Lombroso’s work. Once misconceptions were established, they were passed through the academic generations, repeated without correction because correction was virtually impossible, given the inaccessibility of the originals. I next explain how new research and fresh translations are making possible a more complete view of Lombroso and, in conclusion, I predict ways in which the new resources are likely to change American ideas about Lombroso’s contribution to criminology.
The Traditional View of Lombroso
Using U.S. criminology textbooks published between 1939 and 2004^3 , I extracted a summary view of Lombroso. In this view, Lombroso formulated a biological explanation according to which criminals (or at least the worst of them) are doomed by their physical makeup to break the law. The main cause of this condition is atavism, a reversion to savagery. Criminals are throwbacks to a primitive stage in human evolution. A few textbooks mention another Lombrosian cause of crime, bad heredity, but without explaining how it relates to atavism. In addition, several mention in passing Lombroso’s etiological interest in epilepsy and insanity, although again without explaining how Lombroso connected these conditions to other causes. Most of the authors refer to the stigmata of crime, the physical anomalies with which Lombroso expected the bodies of born criminals to be marked; and to
(^1) Prepared for Stuart Henry and Mark Lanier, The Essential Criminology Reader (Westview/Basic Books, 2005). My thanks to Mary Gibson of John Jay College of Criminal Justice for her help with this article. (^2) Italian criminologists, reluctant to repudiate their famous countryman, continued to build on his work well into the 20 th^ century (Gibson, 2002). (^3) In order of publication, I reviewed these texts: Sutherland 1939, Barnes and Teeters 1943, von Hentig 1948/
1979, Vedder, Koenig, and Clark 1953, Barnes and Teeters 1959, Vold and Bernard 1979, Reid 1988, Jeffrey 1990, Seigel 1995, Beirne and Messerschmidt 2000, Barkan 2001, and Lanier and Henry 2004.
their credit, most of the textbook authors resist going into a lot of detail on the stigmata - the silliest and most vulnerable aspect of Lombroso’s work. Several of the recent textbooks, perhaps sensitized by the current interest in women and crime, mention that Lombroso studied female as well as male offenders, although they are not always clear about what he said in this regard. According to one (Barkan 2001), Lombroso emphasized the female offender’s passivity; according to another (Seigel 1995), he emphasized her masculinity. In addition, some of the books refer to problems with Lombroso’s research. Vedder, Koenig, and Clark (1953) claim that Lombroso failed to use control groups, Jeffrey (1990) that he failed to use statistics. Vold and Bernard hold that he used control groups and statistics, while Jeffrey reports a secondhand rumor that Lombroso sometimes used control groups. Only Sutherland, Vold/ Bernard, and Lanier and Henry, among the authors whose work I examined in detail, observe that Lombroso modified his theories over time. The textbooks link Lombroso’s significance to “positivism,” though few explain the nature of that link or positivism’s significance. One text seems to equate positivism with biological theories of crime per se, while another two imply that it has something to do with debates over determinism and free will. Only three of the works (Vold/ Bernard, Beirne and Messerschmidt, and Lanier and Henry) locate the positivist endeavor in the historical perspective of efforts to apply principles of scientific investigation to an entirely new area of study, that of crime. This summary of the traditional view, while it washes out some of the strengths of the better textbook coverage, reveals a deep uncertainty among authors of American criminological textbooks as to the substance of Lombroso’s criminology and its significance.
Sources of the Traditional View
The traditional view is understandably vague and halting: it was based on inadequate sources. Even though Lombroso’s L’uomo delinquente or Criminal Man is widely acknowledged as a foundational text in the field, it has been available to English-only readers solely through two incomplete editions, both published in 1911. The first is a volume titled Lombroso’s Criminal^ Man ,^ produced^ shortly^ after^ his^ death^ by^ his^ daughter^ and translated by an unidentified party. This edition was reprinted in 1972 by Patterson Smith, but it is now out of print. Most of it seems to have been authored by Gina Lombroso-Ferrero herself, not her father. For example, one passage reads: “It was these anomalies that first drew my father’s attention to the close relationship between the criminal and the savage, and made him suspect that criminal tendencies are of atavistic origin” (Lombroso-Ferrero, 1911/1972: 5). Clearly, these are the daughter’s words, not the father’s. There is no way to tell, from the book itself, how accurately or completely Gina Lombroso-Ferrero presented her father’s ideas. The second English-language source is Crime: Its Causes and Remedies , a translation by Henry P. Horton, now also out of print. In his “Translator’s Note,” Horton writes that he worked from a French edition of 1899, supplementing it with a German edition of 1902. He can only speculate on the relationship of these sources to the Italian originals and has no idea how the textual extract he has translated relates to Lombroso’s L’uomo delinquente as a whole.^4 Unless one compares these two English-language volumes with the Italian originals, one cannot possibly determine their relationship to Lombroso’s own thought. Lombroso took L’uomo delinquente through five editions, the first a one-volume study published in 1876,
(^4) As Horton guessed, Crime: Its Causes and Remedies was based on the third volume of the fifth edition of L’uomo
delinquente.
European intellectuals of the late nineteenth-century. We reproduce Lombroso’s own notes, enabling readers to identify his specific sources; we also reproduce many of his illustrations, including the bawdy tattoos. These new translations should help correct misconceptions about Lombroso’s work. Let me indicate just a small part of their potential by mentioning ways in which they contradict the traditional view of Lombroso.
Revisionist Views
Lombroso anticipated one of the most influential criminological ideas of recent decades, the distinction between life-course persistent and adolescence-limited offenders (Moffitt et al. 2001), according to which some criminals continue to break the law for most of their lives while others desist after their teenage years. Lombroso’s born criminal is equivalent to the life-course persistent offender, someone who continues violating the law into old age. Lombroso was not unique in formulating this concept of the lifelong recidivist, which also turns up in the work of several other late 19th-century criminologists; but he was the first to explore it in depth and make it the basis for a galvanizing popular image of the criminal. His typology, ranging from the biologically doomed born criminal through the salvageable criminaloid to idealistic and essentially innocent political criminal, incorporates the idea of criminality as a continuum, a concept closely related to Moffitt’s distinction between the biologically- handicapped lifecourse persistent offender and the more adaptable adolescence-limited offfender. Lombroso also anticipated one of the most controversial theories in recent criminology: that of evolutionary criminology (e.g., Ellis and Walsh 1997), according to which personality structures conducive to crime are holdovers from an evolutionary period when rape and pillage contributed directly to male reproductive fitness. Regardless of one’s opinion of evolutionary criminology, one can see a very similar notion in Lombroso’s idea of the criminal as atavism, a throwback to an earlier evolutionary stage when savage behaviors were more useful and social and personal controls had not yet developed. In this respect, then, Lombroso stole a march upon one of the major strands in current biological explanations of crime. Lombroso further anticipated genetic explanations of crime. Although he died before the concept of genes became familiar, Lombroso’s theory of degeneration, or an inherited tendency to devolve and become socially problematic, broadly resembles today’s genetic theories. These theories argue that heredity interacts with environment to produce individuals with various potentials for offending. This is similar to what Lombroso said when he analyzed the ways in which social, hereditary, and environmental factors interact to produce criminals and crime. Thus although some aspects of Lombroso’s work are indeed outmoded today, others arguably offer examples of prematurity in scientific discovery (Hook 2002). The new translations enable us to determine what Lombroso meant by “positivism.” He called for the collection of “facts”- data about crime and criminals that could be verified and, ideally, quantified – and insisted on inductive reasoning from these facts, even though he often fell short of that goal himself. To follow him through the five editions of Criminal Man is to see him constantly searching for new data, adding cross-national comparisons, refining and elaborating his ideas. He identified fresh data sources, found and invented measuring tools to collect better information, and devised novel methods for displaying his data. Moreover, the new editions show Lombroso struggling to figure out how to apply his positivist principles, as when in studying female criminality, for instance, he tries to construct a control group of normal women. (The first English translation left that part out.) The overall lesson of the new editions is that, notwithstanding his many scientific
shortcomings, Lombroso was in fact central in and crucial to the development of the positivist tradition that remains fundamental to scientific criminology. While he had predecessors, he was indeed the “father” of scientific methods in criminology. I would go so far as to suggest that Lombroso was the only figure in the history of criminology who might qualify for having produced one of those seismic scientific reorientations that the historian Thomas Kuhn (1970) labeled paradigm shifts. Before Lombroso, the study of crime fell into the domain of metaphysicians, moralists, and penologists; Lombroso turned it into a biosocial science. In retrospect we can see that Lombroso often worked along major intellectual fault lines, in contested areas where various trends in social thought collided. The tensions in his work - between feminism and antifeminism, liberalism and conservatism, protofascism and socialism, humanism and positivism – are as instructive as his attempted resolutions. In any case, Lombroso had one of the most fertile minds in 19th-century Europe and produced a body of work seldom equaled for its variety, richness, and influence. Subsequently mocked and forgotten, Lombroso is today being rediscovered. We are on the verge of better understandings that will, I think, help us better understand the origins of criminology itself.
Nicole Rafter, College of Criminal Justice, Northeastern University
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