Date Added
SEP 2002

There have been theories for centuries that certain individuals were 'born' to be criminals, though it was not until impetus was provided by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution (published as The Origin of Species on the Basis of Natural Selection in 1859) that anthropology as a science achieved popularity and was taken into the service of criminologists to help explain bewildering conduct of habitual criminals.


Pioneers in the field were Lauvergne, the prison surgeon at Toulon, who made plaster casts of his patients heads' to demonstrate 'degenerate' features of the skull: and the psychologist Morel, who believed fervently in the 'spirit' of the habitual criminal. However, the acknowledged father of anthropometric criminology is Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso was born in Verona in 1836, and after studying at Padua, Vienna and Paris began his medical career as an army doctor, later being appointed Medical Superintendent of an asylum in Pesaro. Lombroso's studies had convinced him that a study of the criminal was more rewarding than a study of crime, and in this he laid the foundation of modern criminology.

It also predisposed him to relate criminal behaviour to a distinct criminal 'type' (or more accurately, 'types') which could be identified by anthropometric measurements. In 1876, Lombroso published his great study L'Uomo Delinquente (Criminal Man). In it he claimed that on the basis of a study of almost 7,000 criminals he had found that they 'reproduce in their persons the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals'. By this Lombroso did not mean simply that a criminal behaved metaphorically like an animal, but that aspects of his very physique were close to the savage - which he took to be, among others, large jaws, high cheekbones, square ears of large dimensions and long arms.


So convinced were they that the key to identifying the criminal lay in his physiognomy, that Cesare Lombroso and his adherents devised a whole range of bizarre measuring instruments the more easily to prove the theories.


Anfossi invented the 'craniograph' which traced the profile of the cranium on to a piece of card; and Landolt devised the 'campimeter', an apparatus for testing Lombroso's contention that criminals suffered a restricted field of vision - a small was swung from side to side in front of the subjects eyes and his gaze as they followed it monitored.

Stature & Features


To sum up in a few words the results of a study on 6,304 living criminals, Lombroso found that the delinquent when a minor has a higher stature, and when an adult a lower stature than normal, and darker hair... Swindlers, Bandits and Assassins are apt to have a head of exaggerated size. Congenital criminals present frequent cranial and facial asymmetry; this is especially the case with Ravishers and Thieves, and yet less to them than the insane, although they exhibit more traumatic lesions of the head, and greater obliquity of the eyes. They less frequently have atheroma of the temporal arterius, abnormal position of the eyes, scantness of the beard, nystagmus, facial and cranial asymmetry, and mydriasis [excessive dilatation of the eye pupils], and less frequently still, premature greyness or baldness; they have in about equal proportions with the insane, prognathism, inequality of the pupils, crookedness of the nose, and a retreating forehead; the face is apt to be longer than that of lunatics or of the sane, the cheek bones and jaw are more prominent; the eyes are a dark brown, the hair is thick and dark, particularly in highwaymen. Humped backs, which are rare in murderers, are more frequent among ravishers, forgers and incendiaries; the latter, and thieves to an even greater extent, often have a grey iris, and in stature, weight and muscular force are inferior to highwaymen and murderers.


There are certain differential points in the various classes of criminals:


Assassins
prominent jaws
widely separated check bones
thick dark hair
scanty beard
pallid face


Assailants
brachycephaly [a short broad head]
long hands
narrow foreheads are rare


Ravishers
short hands
medium-sized brains
narrow foreheads
predominance of light hair
abnormalities of genital organs and of the nose


Highwaymen
anomalies of cranial measurement
thick hair
scanty beards are rare


Incendiaries 
long extremities
small atypical heads
weigh less than normal 


Swindlers
large jaws
prominent cheek bones
heavy weight
pail, paretic faces


Pickpockets
long hands
high stature
black hair
scanty beards


With the wisdom of hindsight it is clear that many of the theories of Lombroso and his followers were well off track - sometimes to the point of fatuity. But the greater danger of these theories of 'criminal man' was that they militated against any attempt at social reform or rehabilitation of the offender - after all, he was born a criminal.


However, it would be both unfair and inaccurate to treat the contribution of Cesare Lombroso himself so dismissively. He was a man of great scientific integrity, continually revising his ideas to take account of new information from others working in his new field of criminology. Towards the end of his professional life, when he was appointed successively Professor of Medical Jurisprudence and Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Turin, he had begun to take account of suggestions made by his disciples of the environmental and social contributions to criminality.

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