Cesare Lombroso was an Italian university professor and criminologist, born in Nov. 6, 1835, in Verona, who became worldwide renowned for his studies and theories in the field of character ology, or the relation between mental and physical characteristics. Lombroso tried to relate certain physical characteristics, such as jaw size, to criminal psychopathology, or the innate tendency of individuals toward sociopathy and criminal behavior. As such, Lombroso’s approach is a direct descendant of phrenology, created by the German physician Franz Joseph Gall in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and closely related to other fields of character ology, such as craniology and physiognomy. His theory has been discredited, but Lombroso had the merit of bringing up the importance of the scientific studies of the criminal mind, a field which became known as criminal anthropology.
Lombroso studied at the universities of Padua, Vienna, and Paris, and was later (1862-1876) a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pavia and of forensic medicine and hygiene (1876), psychiatry (1896) and criminal anthropology (1906) at the University of Turin. He was also the director of a mental asylum in Pesaro, Italy. Lombroso’s main idea was partly inspired by the evolutionary and genetic al studies at the end of the nineteenth century, and proposed that certain criminals had physical evidence of an ‘atavistic’ (reappearance of characteristics which were present only in distant ascendants) or hereditary sort, reminiscent of earlier, more primitive stages of human evolution. These anomalies, named as stigmata by Lombroso, could be expressed in terms of abnormal forms or dimensions of the skull and jaw, as symmetries in the face, etc, but also of other parts of the body. These associations were later shown to be highly inconsistent or plainly inexistent, and theories based on the environmental causation of criminality became dominant. Despite the unscientific nature of his theories, Lombroso was highly influential in Europe (and also in Brazil) among criminologists and jurists.
The Essay on Criminal Justice theory of crime
There is no single cause of crime, it is rooted in a diversity of casual factors and takes a variety of forms, depending on the situation in which it occurs. Nonetheless, some theories of human behavior help us understand why certain people engage in acts that society defines as criminal or deviant, while others do not. A theory is a kind of model. Theories posit relationships, often of a casual ...
Among his books are L’Uomo Delinquente (1876; ‘The Criminal Man’) and Le Crime, Causes et Rem ” eyes (1899; Crime, Its Causes and Remedies).
O’Connor, P. 1997. The Wik decision: Judicial activism or conventional ruling? Agenda 4 (2): 217-223.
