Cesare Lombroso

Cesare Lombroso

Dorothy Isaac

University of Mount Olive

CRJ 475 Theories of Crime and Delinquency

Mr. Mark Ketchum

November 12, 2014

Cesare Lombroso

Cesare Lombroso was one of the Italian university professors that is widely recognized as the father of criminology. This paper will consider the work of Lombroso especially in” the criminal man” and the various findings from his experiments. This paper will also consider the life history of Lombroso and how it helped shape his theories plus the contribution that his work has had to modern day criminology.

He was born on the 6th of November 1835 in the city of Verona to a Jewish family. He studied archeology, Literature and linguistics from the University of Padua in Vienna. He later changed his career plan and became a surgeon in the army in 1859. By the end of 1866, he had been appointed as a visiting lecturer in Pavia and by 1871, he took charge of insane asylum that was a Pesaro. In 1878, he became a professor of hygiene and forensic medicine at Turin. It was in that same year that he wrote “Luomo delinqente”. He later was made a psychiatry professor in 1896 and a professor of criminal anthropology in 1906 while working in the same university(Gibson, 2002).

The theory that Lombroso suggested was one that uses multiple physical characteristics in the process of distinguishing non-criminals from criminals.  His early work and education in the field of archeology had given him a preview of the different features that people that had died due to criminal activities presented with. His postulation was one that was based on the belief that criminal behavior was an equivalent of human regression to a more primitive and subhuman man, the primitive man was characterized by the same physical features that had characterized the early forms of human evolution as seen in apes and other lower primates. This theory was then an advocate of the preservation of the early man in savages that had appeared in modern times. The conclusion was that the behaviors that these ” throwbacks” biologically that had been preserved from the early man would not be in line with the new rules of the modern and civilized world (Lombroso, 2006).

As Lombroso carried out his anthropometric examinations and postmortem examination, he became more convinced that people who were born criminals had specific characteristics anatomically like sloping forehead, face asymmetry, unusual sized ears, prognathism, cranium asymmetry, excessive arm length, and other physical features. He also held the opinion that people who were criminals had a high threshold of pain as their sense of pain and touch was reduced and that their sight sense was more acute than the normal non-criminal man. He also held that the criminal man  did not have a sense of remorse and tended towards vanity vindictiveness, impulsiveness and cruelty among other varied manifestations like excess tattooing (Kushner, 2013).

Besides describing the category of people that were considered born criminals, Lombroso also described another category of criminals. He called them criminaloids. These were considered as occasional criminals, moral imbeciles, passion criminals or criminal epileptics. Lombroso recognized that the organic factors had a diminished role especially in habitual offenders and noted that there was a need to have a balance between the factors that were predisposing man to criminal tendency like genetics and organic factors and the factors that were acting as precipitators of the criminal tendency like the environment. Poverty and opportunity to commit crime (Mannheim, 1972).

Though the work of Lombroso has been widely disputed and disregarded in the modern pursuits of criminology, he is widely acknowledged as the father of criminology. The reason for such a recognition can be found in the methodology that Lombroso employed in his work. His research methods were descriptive and clinical with accuracy and precision on the dimensions that he was studying in the human anatomy relations to criminology. Although he was not famous for his statistical comparison approaches with other findings, he was famous for making criminology a science with a specific scope in sociology. His contribution in the modern pursuits of criminology can also be seen through such criminology theories as adolescent-limited offenders and life-course persistence in criminology. These widely used ideas borrow from the same basic idea of born as criminals, existing as criminaloids and continuing as criminals. His typology was basically that of criminals having a continuum in their criminal activity, a concept that he deeply pursued and one that is still in use today even though he is not acknowledged as the founder of the concept (Gatti & Verde, 2012).