Criminal Man - Softcover

Lombroso, Cesare

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822337231 ISBN 13: 9780822337232

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2006

Synopsis

Cesare Lombroso is widely considered the founder of criminology. His theory of the “born” criminal dominated European and American thinking about the causes of criminal behavior during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. This volume offers English-language readers the first critical, scholarly translation of Lombroso’s Criminal Man, one of the most famous criminological treatises ever written. The text laid the groundwork for subsequent biological theories of crime, including contemporary genetic explanations.

Originally published in 1876, Criminal Man went through five editions during Lombroso’s lifetime. In each edition Lombroso expanded on his ideas about innate criminality and refined his method for categorizing criminal behavior. In this new translation, Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter bring together for the first time excerpts from all five editions in order to represent the development of Lombroso’s thought and his positivistic approach to understanding criminal behavior.

In Criminal Man, Lombroso used modern Darwinian evolutionary theories to “prove” the inferiority of criminals to “honest” people, of women to men, and of blacks to whites, thereby reinforcing the prevailing politics of sexual and racial hierarchy. He was particularly interested in the physical attributes of criminals—the size of their skulls, the shape of their noses—but he also studied the criminals’ various forms of self-expression, such as letters, graffiti, drawings, and tattoos. This volume includes more than forty of Lombroso’s illustrations of the criminal body along with several photographs of his personal collection. Designed to be useful for scholars and to introduce students to Lombroso’s thought, the volume also includes an extensive introduction, notes, appendices, a glossary, and an index.

About this title

About the Author

Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), an internationally famous Italian physician and criminologist, wrote extensively about jurisprudence and the causes of crime. He produced more than thirty books during his lifetime.

Mary Gibson is Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her books include Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminality. Nicole Hahn Rafter is Senior Research Fellow at Northeastern University. Her books include Creating Born Criminals. Rafter and Gibson translated Lombroso’s Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman, also published by Duke University Press.

From the Back Cover

"Cesare Lombroso's "Criminal Man" has long been a classic of criminology. Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter, in offering this finely annotated translation and showing the progression of Lombroso's thought through five editions of the book, have made a great contribution to a broader understanding of this towering, yet often misrepresented, figure and his classic text. With its lucid introduction by Gibson and Rafter, and many original illustrations, this book will be a precious resource for the history of criminology and for European intellectual and social history more generally."--David I. Kertzer, author of "Prisoner of the Vatican: The Popes' Secret Plot to Capture Rome from the New Italian State"

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Criminal Man

By Cesare Lombroso

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2006 Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3723-2

Contents

LIST OF TABLES...............................................................................xiiiLIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS........................................................................xvACKNOWLEDGMENTS..............................................................................xviiEDITORS' INTRODUCTION........................................................................1EDITORS' FOREWORD............................................................................39AUTHOR'S PREFACE.............................................................................431 Criminal Craniums (Sixty-six Skulls).......................................................452 Anthropometry and Physiognomy of 832 Criminals.............................................503 Tattoos....................................................................................584 Emotions of Criminals......................................................................635 Criminals and Religion.....................................................................706 Intelligence and Education of Criminals....................................................727 Jargon.....................................................................................778 Criminal Literature........................................................................799 Insanity and Crime.........................................................................8110 Organized Crime...........................................................................8511 Atavism and Punishment....................................................................91EDITORS' FOREWORD............................................................................97AUTHOR'S PREFACE.............................................................................9912 Suicide among Criminals...................................................................10113 Criminals of Passion......................................................................10514 Recidivism, Morality, and Remorse.........................................................10815 Handwriting of Criminals..................................................................11116 Etiology of Crime: Weather and Race.......................................................11417 Etiology of Crime: Civilization, Alcohol, and Heredity....................................12018 Etiology of Crime: Age, Sex, Moral Education, Genitals, and Imitation.....................12719 Prevention of Crime.......................................................................13520 Penal Policy..............................................................................141APPENDIX 1 Giovanni Cavagli.................................................................149APPENDIX 2 A Medical Examination of Parricide and Insanity...................................154EDITORS' FOREWORD............................................................................161author's preface.............................................................................16321 Crime and Inferior Organisms..............................................................16722 Crime and Prostitution among Savages......................................................17523 Origins of Punishment.....................................................................18324 Moral Insanity and Crime among Children...................................................18825 Anomalies of the Brain and Internal Organs................................................19826 Photographs of Born Criminals.............................................................20227 Sensitivity and Blushing in Criminals.....................................................20628 Moral Insanity and Born Criminality.......................................................21229 Summary of Edition 3......................................................................221editors' foreword............................................................................227author's preface.............................................................................22930 Metabolism, Menstruation, and Fertility...................................................23731 Criminal Communication....................................................................23932 Art and Industry among Criminals..........................................................24433 The Epileptic Criminal....................................................................24734 Epileptics and Born Criminals.............................................................25335 Physiology and Etiology of Epilepsy.......................................................26036 The Insane Criminal.......................................................................26737 Biology and Psychology of Insane Criminals................................................27138 The Alcoholic Criminal....................................................................27739 The Hysterical Criminal...................................................................28140 The Mattoid...............................................................................28441 The Occasional Criminal...................................................................288EDITORS' FOREWORD............................................................................29942 Criminal Craniums (689 Skulls)............................................................30143 Anthropometry and Physiognomy of 6,608 Criminals..........................................30644 Political Criminals.......................................................................31345 Etiology of Crime: Urban Density, Alcoholism, Wealth, and Religion........................31646 Etiology of Crime: Heredity, Sex, and Politics............................................32547 Prevention of Crime.......................................................................33148 Synthesis and Penal Applications..........................................................338APPENDIX 1 Comparison of the Five Italian Editions...........................................357APPENDIX 2 Illustrations in the Five Italian Editions........................................364NOTES........................................................................................371GLOSSARY.....................................................................................401REFERENCES...................................................................................411INDEX........................................................................................417

Chapter One

Criminal Craniums (Sixty-six Skulls)

I thought it best to begin this study of criminal man with an anatomical table to facilitate a thorough examination of criminal craniums, amounting to a total of sixty-six skulls. Of these

-16 were provided by Calori, from his superb Anatomical Museum in Bologna;

-8 were provided by Mantegazza, from the Anthropological Museum of Florence;

-5 were provided by Zoja, from the Anatomical Museum of Pavia;

-6 came from the Anthropological Museum of the Academy of Medicine at Turin;

-18 came from Dr. Roggero's valuable private collection at the town prison of Alessandria;

-12 were collected by me and form part of my Anthropological-Psychiatric Museum;

-1 was donated by my esteemed friend, Dr. Golgi.

As shown in table 1, measurement of cranial circumference found very few criminal skulls that were particularly large (one of 580 mm [millimeters], two of 560 mm, one of 550 mm, two of 540 mm) or even normal in size (eight of 530 mm, thirteen of 520 mm), but a high incidence of craniums that were microcefalic or abnormally small: thirty-nine out of sixty-five. More precisely, there were nineteen at 510 mm, twelve at 500 mm, and eight at 490 mm.

The cranial sutures or joins in the bones of the skull were normal in only seventeen cases. In five cases, they were still open at the age of seventy-five or eighty. This was true of men like Villella, Pietrotto, and Soldati, who were famous for committing crimes into old age and repeatedly eluding capture. A few of the skulls with open sutures had a large cranial capacity, but others had a small one accompanied by many monkeylike anomalies. The cranial sutures were completely closed in thirty-eight cases-so thoroughly in seven of these that they had become invisible.

In another study of fifty-six criminal craniums, I found that thirteen had one of the most serious of all anomalies, a median occipital fossetta or indentation at the base of the skull. A brigand from Calabria, Villella, had a median occipital fossetta of extraordinary dimensions, 34 mm long, 23 mm wide, and 11 mm deep. He also exhibited atrophy of the lateral occipital openings, absence of the occipital crest, and two boney parallel projections that gave the occipital opening a trapezoidal shape that ended in a small triangular protrusion near the occipital aperture. From these features, comparative anatomy and human embryology can induce that we are dealing with a fairly small cerebellum. Such a brain suggests not the sublimity of the primate, but the lower level of the rodent or lemur, or the brain of a human fetus of three or four months.

If we compare criminals with the insane, we find the former exhibit a similar or perhaps greater number of cranial abnormalities. This is not surprising, given that most of the insane are not born so, but become mad, while criminals are born with evil inclinations. At the moment I will not go into all the reasons for these cranial abnormalities in criminals, but I cannot avoid pointing out how closely they correspond to characteristics observed in normal skulls of the colored and inferior races.

Criminals have the following rates of abnormality: 61 percent exhibit fusion of the cranial bones; 92 percent, prognathism or an ape-like forward thrust of the lower face; 63 percent, overdevelopment of the sinuses; 27 percent, cranial thickness; 9 percent, an open medio-frontal suture; 20 percent, a large jawbone; 25 percent, a receding forehead; 74 percent, wide or overdeveloped cheekbones; 45 percent, overly large wisdom teeth; 59 percent, small cranial capacity, among which 10 percent show true microcephaly; and 14 percent, too many wormian bones. These features recall the black American and Mongol races and, above all, prehistoric man much more than the white races.

These abnormalities are almost always found in large clusters in individual criminals like Villella. Is it possible that individuals with such an enormous variety of cranial anomalies can have the same level of intelligence and sense of responsibility as men with perfectly normal skulls? Note, moreover, that the cranial variations discussed here represent only the most obvious lesions of the brain, that is, alterations of volume and form.

Chapter Two

Anthropometry and Physiognomy of 832 Criminals

To many, my attempt to conclude anything at all about the cranial dimensions of the criminal man from a few measurements of cadavers will seem futile and rash. Fortunately, however, I have been able to compare these measurements with those taken from 832 live specimens of criminals, thanks to the help of colleagues who are prison directors and prison physicians.

In terms of height, criminals reproduce their regional types. In Italy, they are very tall in the Veneto (1.69 meters), fairly tall in Umbria and Lombardy (1.66 m), less tall in Emilia, Calabria, and Piedmont (1.63 m), slightly shorter in Naples, Sicily, and the Marches (1.62 m), and shortest of all in Sardinia (1.59 m). Compared with healthy men in the army, criminals appear to be taller than the average Italian, especially in the Veneto, Umbria, Lombardy, Sicily, and Calabria. In the Marches, Naples, and Piedmont, criminals are the same height as healthy men.

These findings, however, are skewed by the preponderance of robbers and murderers in my sample, and thus they conflict with the conclusions of Thomson and Wilson. Robbers and murderers are taller than rapists, forgers, and especially thieves. As for weight, we can compare the findings on 1,331 soldiers, studied by me and Dr. Franchini, with the average for criminals from each region. In the Veneto, healthy men weighed an average of 68 kilograms, while criminals weighed 62.5 kg. But in most other regions, most notably Naples, Sicily, and Piedmont, criminals' average weight exceeded that of healthy men. There are many erroneous ideas in circulation about the physiognomy, or facial expressions, of criminals. Novelists turn them into frightening-looking men with beards that go right up to their eyes, penetrating ferocious gazes, and hawklike noses. More serious observers, such as Casper, err on the other extreme, finding no differences between criminals and normal men. Both are wrong. It is certainly true that there are criminals with notably large cranial capacity and beautifully formed skulls, just as there are those with perfectly regular physiognomy, particularly among adroit swindlers and gang leaders. Lavater and Polli wrote about a murderer whose face resembled one of the angels painted by Guido (Saggio di Fisiognomia, 1837). But criminals whose handsome features make a strong impression can be misleading precisely because they contradict our expectations. They are usually individuals of uncommon intelligence, a trait associated with gracefulness of form.

When, on the other hand, one ignores those rare individuals who form the oligarchy of the criminal world to study the entire spectrum of these wretches, as I have done in various prisons, one has to conclude that while offenders may not look fierce, there is nearly always something strange about their appearance. It can even be said that each type of crime is committed by men with particular physiognomic characteristics, such as lack of a beard or an abundance of hair; this may explain why the overall appearance is neither delicate nor pleasant.

In general, thieves are notable for their expressive faces and manual dexterity, small wandering eyes that are often oblique in form, thick and close eyebrows, distorted or squashed noses, thin beards and hair, and sloping foreheads. Like rapists, they often have jug ears. Rapists, however, nearly always have sparkling eyes, delicate features, and swollen lips and eyelids. Most of them are frail; some are hunchbacked. Pederasts are often distinguished by a feminine elegance of the hair and feminine clothing, which they insist on wearing even under their prison uniforms.

Habitual murderers have a cold, glassy stare and eyes that are sometimes bloodshot and filmy; the nose is often hawklike and always large; the jaw is strong, the cheekbones broad; and their hair is dark, abundant, and crisply textured. Their beards are scanty, their canine teeth very developed, and their lips thin. Often their faces contract, exposing the teeth. Among nearly all arsonists, I have observed a softness of skin, an almost childlike appearance, and an abundance of thick straight hair that is almost feminine. One extremely curious example from Pesaro, known as "the woman," was truly feminine in appearance and behavior.

Nearly all criminals have jug ears, thick hair, thin beards, pronounced sinuses, protruding chins, and broad cheekbones. Dumollard, a rapist and murderer, had a deformed upper lip and very thick black hair. The rapist Mingrat had a low forehead, jug ears, and an enormous square jaw. Archaeologists have established that the cruelest of the Caesars-Commodius, Nero, and Tiberius-had jug ears and swollen temples.

But anthropology needs numbers, not isolated, generic descriptions, especially for use in forensic medicine. Thus I will provide statistics on 390 criminals from the regions of Emilia, the Marches, and southern Italy. Table 2 compares the hair color of these 390 criminals with that of 868 Italian soldiers from the same regions and 90 insane from Pavia. These figures show that hair color of criminals replicates typical regional characteristics, but only up to a certain point.

Jug ears are found on 28 percent of criminals, but the proportion varies by region: 47 percent of Sicilian criminals have jug ears, as do 33 percent from Piedmont, 11 percent from Naples, 33 percent from the Romagna, 9 percent from Sardinia, and 36 percent from Lombardy. Nine percent of all criminals have very long ears, although that proportion rises to 10 percent in Lombardy and the Romagna and 18 percent in Sicily and Piedmont.

It is difficult to determine the muscular force of criminals even with the best dynamometers because the subjects are completely out of condition after long periods of detention and inertia. The problem is often compounded by the malignant spirit that characterizes prisoners' whole existence. They pretend to be weaker than they really are and do not put much effort into pushing the dynamometer. In this regard, it is noteworthy that, as I was able to verify in the penitentiary of Ancona, prisoners are more energetic when they work continuously than in institutions that permit them to be idle. Rapists, brigands, and arsonists are the strongest and thieves and forgers the weakest, based on measurements of traction. Murderers and pickpockets differ in strength only by a slight fraction.

Criminal Women

At this point little can be said about female criminals because I have been allowed to examine only twenty-one of them and did so with much less ease than in the case of men. But this does not pose a complete obstacle because, first, I do not have enough information on normal women to make a comparison with criminal women; and, second, Parent-Duchatelet offers us numerous and reliable statistics on prostitutes, a class of women almost identical to criminal women in moral terms. In addition, the esteemed Dr. Soresina has provided me with measurements on fifty-four prostitutes who were patients in the Milan lock hospital for venereal disease.

The average cranial capacity of the twenty-one female criminals in my sample was 1,442 cc, slightly less than that of twenty insane women without dementia (1,468 cc), and above that of nineteen idiots with dementia (1,393 cc).

Table 3 presents these differences more clearly. Female criminals, and especially prostitutes, have oversized heads, but these are found only in a fraction of insane women. The rate of microcephaly, or a cranial circumference of forty-eight centimeters, among prostitutes is four times greater among the insane, who in turn have a rate double that of criminal women.

The only conclusion about the physiognomy of criminal women that I can draw from my sample is that female criminals tend to be masculine. (Among prostitutes even the voice often seems virile.) The only exception was a poisoner. Two out of twenty-one criminal women closely resembled the insane with their protruding and asymmetrical ears. Where criminal women differ most markedly from the insane is in the rich luxuriance of their hair. Not a single woman in my sample was bald, and only one showed precociously graying hair. Thomson, too, has noted rich manes of hair among female criminals.

Summing up in a few words that which scientific exigencies oblige me to express with arid numbers, I conclude:

-The criminal is taller than the normal individual and even more so than the insane, with a broader chest, darker hair and (with the exception of Venetians) greater weight. -In head volume, the criminal presents a series of submicrocephalic craniums, double the number for normal men, but fewer than in the case of the insane. -Criminals, especially forgers, also exceed the insane in large-volume heads. But the average head size of criminals never reaches the size of healthy men. -The cephalic index, or shape of the criminal skull, varies with ethnicity but tends to be brachycephalic, or short-headed, particularly among robbers. Criminal skulls present frequent asymmetry, although less often than among the insane. -Compared to the insane, criminals have more traumatic lesions of the head and oblique eyes. But they less frequently display degeneration of the temple arteries, abnormalities of the ear, thin beards, tics, virility of appearance (if they are female), dilated pupils, and, still less often, graying hair and baldness. -Criminals and the insane show equal rates of prognathism, unequally sized pupils, distorted noses, and receding foreheads. -Measured on the dynamometer, criminals reveal greater weakness than normal men, though they are not as weak as the insane. -More often than in the healthy population, criminals have brown or dark eyes and thick black hair. Such hair is most frequently found among robbers. -Hunchbacks are extremely rare among murderers but are more common among rapists, forgers, and arsonists. -Arsonists, and even more so thieves, tend to have gray irises; members of both groups are always shorter, lighter, weaker, and smaller in cranial capacity than pickpockets, who are in turn shorter, lighter, and weaker than murderers.

Among criminal women, one thing that can be said with certainty is that, like their male counterparts, they are taller than the insane. Yet they are shorter, and, perhaps with the exception of prostitutes, lighter than healthy women. All three female groups are identical in their average cranial circumference. Prostitutes show both a greater than average number of large heads and more microcephaly. In prostitutes, extremely small heads are four times more common than among the mad, and the rates among the mad are twice as high as those of the criminal. Prostitutes have dark, thick hair, and in Lombardy, but not in France, they frequently have dark irises. Female criminals are weaker than the insane and more often masculine looking.

Prognathism, thick and crisp hair, thin beards, dark skin, pointed skulls, oblique eyes, small craniums, overdeveloped jaws, receding foreheads, large ears, similarity between the sexes, muscular weakness-all these characteristics confirm the findings from autopsies to demonstrate that European criminals bear a strong racial resemblance to Australian aborigines and Mongols.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822337231
• ISBN 13: 9780822337232
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448