Rethinking criminological
tradition:
Cesare Lombroso and the origins of Criminology
Abstract:
This paper compares some of the
traditional, mythic views of Lombroso's work, as
reflected in American criminology textbooks, with the substance of Lombroso's actual work, as revealed in new translations.
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
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 several years 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 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 2001,[i] 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 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
text, 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 and Vold/ Bernard, among the authors whose work I examined in
detail, noted 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 two texts (Vold/
Bernard and Beirne and Messerschmidt)
put 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 American authors 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 compendium, titled Lombroso’s Criminal Man, put together
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. An undeterminable amount of its text was
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
speculates (incorrectly) on the relationship of these sources to the Italian
originals and apparently has no idea how the textual extract he has translated
relates to Lombroso’s L’uomo delinquente as a whole.
Unless one compares
these two English-language volumes with the Italian originals, one cannot
possibly determine their relationship to Lombroso’s
own thought. He took L’uomo delinquente through
five editions, the first a one-volume study published in 1876, the last a 4-
volume work published in 1896-97. Are
the English-language sources based on the first edition? the fifth? on Gina Lombroso-Ferrero’s
’s vision of a text she wished her father had written? How did Lombroso’s
ideas evolve over time? Does our
traditional view of Lombroso derive from the first
edition, the last, both, or all five?
Similar issues are
raised by Lombroso’s other major criminological work,
La donna delinquente, co-authored with Guglielmo
Ferrero and published in Italian in 1893. This was translated into English in 1895 as The Female Offender and frequently
reprinted thereafter, though it too is now out of print. The translation fails to mention that it
covers only two of the original’s four major sections. It also does not acknowledge that it has
excised half of the original text, leaving out nearly all the material on
“normal” women (the control group) and prostitutes. Nor does it mention that it switches the
order of some chapters and bowdlerizes the original by cutting most references to female breasts and genitals and
excising discussions of lesbianism and sexual deviance. Not only did the anonymous translator impose
Victorian prudery on this book (a real shame, as the study made one of the
earliest contributions to the field of sexology); he or she rendered the
original into literal but frequently incomprehensible English from which it is
difficult to extract criminological concepts.
In this case, too, then, it is impossible to test the traditional view
of Lombroso against his text. The traditional view may be true or it may be
false; one cannot tell.
New Resources
New resources are
beginning to overcome the traditional inadequacy of our Lombroso
materials. One consists of new studies
in Italian: Over the past several decades, there has been an outpouring of
books and articles on Lombroso, including studies of
his life and work (Bulferetti 1975, Villa 1985), his
daughters’ lives (Dolza 1990), his museum (Colombo
2000, Portigliato Barbos
1993), and his work on a particular criminal case (Guarnieri
1993). The new studies include a
slightly fictionalized biography (Guarnieri 2000) ; a
study of Lombroso’s impact on Italian criminal
justice practices under fascism (Gibson 2002); and, most recently, an
intellectual history of Lombroso and criminal
anthropology (Frigessi 2003). The French and Germans, too, have started to
reexamine their involvement in criminal anthropology (Mucchelli
1994, Gadebusch Bondio
1995), and early in 2004, Cambridge University Press will publish Criminals and Their Scientists (Becker
and Wetzell 2004), a collection of original essays
examining Lombroso’s influence on various fields and
in various countries. Results of this
international explosion of Lombroso scholarship will
eventually filter through to English-only readers, improving knowledge of Lombroso’s socio-cultural circumstances, his sources, and
his own research.
Another new source of
material is fresh translations. Mary
Gibson, an Italian historian at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and I are
preparing new Lombroso translations for Duke
University Press. The first, which we have retitled
Criminal Woman (a more accurate
rendering of La donna
delinquente than The Female Offender), will appear in early 2004; our Criminal Man will follow in 2005. Because one of our primary concerns is to
make the texts accessible, and because accessible books must be both readable
and affordable, we have condensed so as to give a full view of Lombroso’s originals while omitting repetitions and
unnecessary examples. The new Criminal Man will include passages from
all five of Lombroso’s own editions so that
English-only readers can, for the first time, follow the development of his
ideas over time. In addition, we have
restored the smutty parts to Criminal
Woman. Our extensive annotations and
introductions are designed to clarify difficult passages, locate Lombroso in historical context, and show how his thought
related to that of other major 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
dirty pictures.
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
One of the most
influential criminological ideas of recent decades is the distinction between
life-course persistent and adolescence-limited offenders (Moffitt et al.
2001). The life- course persistent
offender is equivalent to Lombroso’s born criminal,
someone who is likely to continue offending over the lifecourse. 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 to popularize it. While Lombroso does
not talk about adolescence-limited offenders, his typology, ranging from born
criminals through criminaloids to idealistic
political criminals, incorporates the idea of criminality as a continuum, a
concept endorsed by 20th-century criminologists such as Hans Eysenck and related to the notion of the AL-limited
offender.
Lombroso
also anticipated one of the most controversial theories in recent criminology:
that of evolutionary criminology, 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 anticipated one of the major strands in current
biological explanations of crime.
Lombroso
also anticipated genetic explanations of crime.
Even though he was not familiar with the concept of genes, his 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
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 see 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 positivst tradition that remains fundamental to scientific
criminology. Although 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 Thomas
Kuhn’s (1970) paradigm shifts.
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 the resolutions. In any case, Lombroso
had one of the most fertile minds in 19th-century
References for 2003 ASC
paper
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_____ 1959. New Horizons in
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By Nicole Rafter n.rafter@neu.edu
Paper prepared for annual meeting of ASC, Nov. 2003,
[i] In order of publication, I reviewed these texts:
Sutherland 1939, Barnes and Teeters 1943, von Hentig
1948/ 1979, Vedder, Koenig, and