A brief sketch of Lombroso's findings--

Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909)

The history of primitive societies and early medieval period reveals that human thinking in those days was predominated by religious mysticism and all human relations were regulated through myths, superstitions and religious tenants prevailing in a particular society. This is other words, meant that little attention was devoted to the motive, environment and psychology of the offender in the causation of crime. Moreover, in absence of any definite principle for the guidance of those who were concerned with the criminal justice administration, punishments were often haphazard, arbitrary and irrational. This situation prevailed until the end of the seventeenth century. Thereafter, with the change in human thinking and evolution of modern society, certain social reformers took up the cause of criminals and devoted their attention to analysis of crime causation. This finally led to the emergence of criminology as a branch of knowledge through the development of different schools of criminology.

--Prof. N.V.Paranjape (Criminology and Penology)

Criminology and Penology is one of the four subjects that I am studying this semester. I got over with my Cream in Pen (as I like to call it) midterms on June, 27. Among the many vast chapters that my Professor had assigned the class to read for the exam, I found Chapter III: The Schools of Criminology, exceptionally interesting. For this reason, even while I was cramming my head with the various theories of criminology on examination eve, I made a mental note to summarize a portion of it in my BLOG, to share with some of my young non-law friends.

There are six broad schools of criminology, namely:
1. Pre-classical School of Criminology
2. The Classical School
3. Neo-classical School
4. Positive School
5. Clinical School of Criminology
6. Sociological School of Criminology

Out of these six schools, I thought the fourth i.e. the Positive School, to be out of the ordinary, because it established that the real cause of criminality lay in the anthropological features of the criminal, as against the concepts of ‘free will’ and ‘innate depravity’ that the other schools emphasize on.

In simpler words, Positive School of Criminology shed light on the biological explanation of crime causation.

The one man who the experts suggest and I (with whatever critical thinking skills I have mastered over the years) agree is the main exponent of this school is Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909), also regarded as the originator of modern criminology.

The first attempts to understand the personality of offenders in physical terms was made by Lombroso of the Italian School of criminological thought.

He brought about a shift in criminology from a legalistic preoccupation in crime to a scientific study of the criminals. He compared the anthropological measurements and developed the concept of Atavism. Thus, to realize Lombroso’s theory we have to understand the term Atavism.

Briefly, Atavists are those persons who are not fully evolved. Lombroso considered these people ‘throwbacks’ to earlier forms of man or primate.

Basing on the concept of Atavism, Lombroso’s general theory suggested the following:
1. Criminals are distinguished from non-criminals by a multiple physical anomalies.
2. Criminals exhibit a higher percentage of physical and mental anomalies than non-criminals.
3. These anomalies were termed as stigmata.
4. Criminals are in effect biological throwback to a more primitive stage of human evolution.
5. Criminals represent a reversion of primitive or subhuman type of man characterized by physical features reminiscent of apes, lower primates and early man.
6. The behavior of these biological ‘throwbacks’ will inevitably be contrary to the rules and expectations of modern civilized society.

Furthermore, some of the stigmata that were supposed to reflect Atavistic type of man who became criminal according to Lombroso’s studies are as follows:
1. sloping forehead
2. ears of unusual size
3. asymmetry of face
4. large and excessive dimensions of the jaw and cheek bones
5. defective eyes
6. twisted nose
7. fleshy and swollen lips
8. abnormal dentition
9. scant beard
10. anomalies of the hair
11. excessive length of the arm
12. supernumerary fingers and toes
13. abnormal and inconsistent sex organ
14. defect of the thorax
15. asymmetry of the cranium
16. abnormal head

Before drawing a concluding line to this skeleton of a summary of Lombroso’s theory consisted in the Positive School of Criminology, it has to be added that Lombroso maintained criminals had –
1. less sensibility to pain and touch
2. more acute sight
3. a lack of moral sense, including an absence of remorse
4. more vanity, impulsiveness, and cruelty
5. and other manifestations such as a special criminal argot and the excessive use of tattooing.

Now to end this brief biological explanation of crime causation, I would like to say that if nothing else was understood, I hope at least this much has been that it isn’t all imagination that writers and movie directors shape their gruesome looking antagonists from. Every imagination has reality or Lombroso’s theory as in this case, at its base.