Extracts from Cesare Lombroso
Lombroso 1876
L'uomo delinquente studiato in rapporto alla
antropologia, alla medecina legale, ed alle discipline carcerarie
[The criminal man studied in connection with anthropology, forensic
medicine, and prison discipline].
Translated into English by Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter.
Lombroso 1893/1895 The Female Offender by Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, with an introduction by W. Douglas Morrison, Her Majesty's Prison, Wandsworth. Illustrated. New York. D. Appleton and Company. 1895
Lombroso 1876/1911 Criminal Man, According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso Briefly summarised by his daughter, Gina Lombroso Ferrero, with an introduction by Cesare Lombroso. New York and London. 1911
Lombroso, C.
1876 L'uomo delinquente studiato in rapporto alla
antropologia, alla medecina legale, ed alle discipline carcerarie
[The criminal man studied in connection with anthropology, forensic
medicine, and prison discipline].
Extracts from the English
translation by Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter
1876/2006 p.43
Author's Preface
... Those who have had direct contact with offenders... know that they are
different from other people, with weak or diseased minds that can rarely be
healed. Psychiatrists in many cases find it impossible to neatly
distinguish between madness and crime. And yet legislators, believing
exceptions to free will to be rare, ignore the advice of psychiatrists and
prison officials. They do not understand that most criminals really do lack
free will....
It seems to me important... to determine whether the criminal man belongs
to the same category as the healthy man or the insane individual or in an
entirely separate category. To do this and decide whether there is a force
in nature that causes crime, we must... proceed... to the direct physical
and psychological study of the criminal, comparing the results with the
information on the healthy and the insane.
The outcome of such inquiries is presented in this work.
1876/2006 p.45
1: Criminal Craniums (Sixty-six Skulls)
1876/2006 p.48
... 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.
cranial abnormalities in criminals... closely... correspond to
characteristics observed in normal skulls of the coloured and inferior
races.
...
1876/2006 p.49
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 abnormalities can have the same level of intelligence
and sense of responsibility as men with perfectly normal skulls?
1876/2006 p.50
1876/2006 p.53
Nearly all criminals have jug ears, thick hair, thin beards, pronounced
sinuses, protruding chins, and broad cheekbones.
But anthropology needs numbers, not isolated, generic descriptions,
especially for use in forensic medicine. This I will provide statistics on
390 criminals from the regions of Emila, the Marches, and southern
Italy....
Jug ear are found on 28% percent of criminals, but the proportion varies by
region: 47% of Sicilian criminals have jug ears, as do 33% from Piedmont,
11% percent from Naples, 33% from the Romagna, 9% from Sardinia, and 36%
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.
2: Anthropometry and Physiognomy of 832 Criminals
1876/2006 p.58
3: Tattos
1876/2006 p.63
4: Emotions of Criminals
1876/2006 p.67
Everyone agrees that the few violent women far exceed men in their ferocity
and cruely... Thus
Shakespeare depicts
Lady Macbeth as more cruel and cold than her
male accomplice.
...
After the delights of taking revenge and satisfying his vanity, the
criminal finds no greater pleasure than those offered by drinking and
gambling. However, the passion for alcohol is very complex, being both a
cause and an effect of crime.
1876/2006 p.70
5: Criminals and Religion
1876/2006 p.72
6: Intelligence and Education of Criminals
1876/2006 p.77
7: Jargon
1876/2006 p.79
8: Criminal Literature
1876/2006 p.81
9: Insanity and Crime
1876/2006 p.85
If there is a line between crime and madness, it is a subtle division that
is often not perceived until it is too late, after justice has been handed
down, or when there is no remedy for the harm. In some cases there is no
dividing line at all, since the distinction between crime and [p.87]
madness is something constructed not by nature but by society. This is why
we must establish criminal insane asylums; they are the only solution to
the eternal conflict between justice and public security.
1876/2006 p.85
10: Organised Crime
1876/2006 p.91
11: Atavism and Punishment
The Female Offender by Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo
Ferrero, with an introduction by W. Douglas Morrison, Her Majesty's Prison,
Wandsworth. Illustrated. New York. D. Appleton and Company. 1895
CRIMINAL FEMALE LUNATICS
At Broadmoor the greatest number of lunatics are to be found among the
homicides and wounders (103 in 141); next comes incest, 19; parricides 6,
and burglary 3.
The greater number of female lunatics are married women, while the greater
number of male lunatics are single (see " L'Uomo Delinquente," vol. ii.) ;
and this fact confirms the observations made on healthy criminals in all
countries.
The lunatic asylums for females receive more inmates in summer (25) than in
winter (21), while the figures for spring and autumn are respectively 1 1-
14. The statistics of male criminals are about the same.
Criminal Man, According to the Classification of Cesare
Lombroso
Briefly summarised by his daughter, Gina Lombroso Ferrero, with an
introduction by Cesare Lombroso. New York and London. 1911
CONTENTS
Introduction by Cesar Lombroso
The first idea came to me in
1864, when, as an army doctor, I beguiled my ample leisure with
a series of studies on the Italian soldier. From the very beginning I was
struck by a characteristic that distinguished the honest soldier from his
vicious comrade : the extent to which the latter was tattooed and the
indecency of the designs that covered his body. This idea, however, bore no
fruit.
The second inspiration came to me when on one occasion, amid the
laughter of my colleagues, I sought to base the study of psychiatry on
experimental methods. When in
'66, fresh from the atmosphere of clinical
experiment, I had begun to study psychiatry [p. xiii], I realised how
inadequate were the methods
hitherto held in esteem, and how necessary it was,
in studying the insane, to make the patient, not the
disease, the object of attention. In homage to these
ideas, I applied to the clinical examination of cases
of mental alienation the study of the skull, with
measurements and weights, by means of the esthesiometer
and craniometer. Reassured by the result of
these first steps, I sought to apply this method to
the study of criminals-that is, to the differentiation
of criminals and lunatics, following the example of a
few investigators, such as Thomson and Wilson;
but as at that time I had neither criminals nor
moral imbeciles available for observation (a remarkable
circumstance since I was to make the
criminal my starting-point), and as I was skeptical
as to the existence of those "moral lunatics" so
much insisted on by both French and English
authors, whose demonstrations, however, showed a
lamentable lack of precision, I was anxious to apply
the experimental method to the study of the diversity,
rather than the analogy, between lunatics,
criminals, and normal individuals. Like him, however,
whose lantern lights the road for others, while
he himself stumbles in the darkness, this method
proved useless for determining the differences between
criminals and lunatics, but served instead to
[p. xiv ]
indicate a new method for the study of penal jurisprudence,
a matter to which I had never given serious
thought. I began dimly to realise that the a priori
studies on crime in the abstract, hitherto pursued
by jurists, especially in Italy, with singular acumen,
should be superseded by the direct analytical study
of the criminal, compared with normal individuals
and the insane.
I, therefore, began to study criminals in the Italian
prisons, and, amongst others, I made the acquaintance
of the famous brigand Vilella. This man
possesssed such extraordinary agility, that he had
been known to scale steep mountain heights bearing
a sheep on his shoulders. His cynical effrontery
was such that he openly boasted of his crimes. On
his death one cold grey November morning, I was
deputed to make the post-mortem, and on laying open
the skull I found on the occipital part, exactly on the
spot where a spine is found in the normal skull, a
distinct depression which I named median occipital
fossa, because of its situation precisely in the middle
of the occiput as in inferior animals, especially
rodents. This depression, as in the case of animals,
was correlated with the hypertrophy of the vermis,
known in birds as the middle cerebellum.
PART I.- THE CRIMINAL WORLD
1.3 The Born Criminal
1.2 The Born Criminal and his Relation to Moral Insanity and Epilepsy
p.69...
The connection between epilepsy and crime is one of derivation rather than
identity. Epilepsy represents the genus of which criminality and moral
insanity are the species.
The born criminal is an epileptic, inasmuch as he possesses the anatomical,
skeletal, physiognomical, psychological, and moral characteristics peculiar
to the recognised form of epilepsy, and sometimes also its motorial
phenomena, although at rare intervals. More frequently he exhibits its
substitutes (vertigo, twitching, sialorrhea, emotional attacks). But the
criminal epileptic possesses other characteristics [p.70] peculiar to
himself; in particular, that desire of evil for its own sake, which is
unknown to ordinary epileptics. In view of this fact this form of epilepsy
must be considered apart from the purely nervous anomaly, both in the
clinical diagnosis and the methods of cure and social prophylaxis.
1.3 The Insane Criminal
p.74
General Forms of Criminal Lunacy
Epileptic born criminals and the morally insane may be classed as lunatics
under certain aspects, but only by the scientific observer and professional
psychologist. Outside these two forms, there is an important series of
offenders, who are not criminals from birth, but become such at a given
moment of their lives, in consequence of an alteration of the brain, which
completely upsets their moral nature and makes them unable to discriminate
between right and wrong. They are really insane; that is, entirely without
responsibility for their actions.
Nearly every class of mental derangement contributes a special form of
crime.
p.87...
Epilepsy
We have spoken of this disease in another chapter and have shown that the
born criminal is in reality an epileptic, in whom the malady, instead of
manifesting itself suddenly in strange muscular contortions or terrible
spasms, develops slowly in continual brain irritation, which causes the
individual thus affected to reproduce the ferocious egotism natural to
primitive savages, irresistibly bent on harming others.
But besides these epileptics, who are morally insane from their birth and
pass their lives in prisons and lunatic asylums, without any one being able
to mark the exact boundary between their perversity and their
irresponsibility; besides these individuals, whom society has a right, nay
a moral obligation, to remove from its midst because they are ever a source
of danger there are those who are afflicted with other forms of epilepsy;-
forms in which irritation is manifested in seizures exactly similar to the
typical [p.88] convulsive fit, which they resemble also with regard to
variation in intensity and duration. Generally speaking, they are likewise
accompanied by complete loss of memory and consciousness, but in some cases
there may be partial or complete consciousness, and yet the sufferer is not
responsible for his actions. This variety of epilepsy, termed by Samt
psychic epilepsy (epilepsy with psychic seizures), manifests itself at long
intervals, sometimes onlyonce, but more frequently twice or thrice in the
course of a lifetime, and during the attack the personality of the
individual undergoes a complete change.
1.4 Criminaloids
PART II.- CRIME, ITS ORIGIN, CAUSE, AND CURE
2.1 Origin and Causes of Crime
2.2 The Prevention of Crime
2.3 Methods for the Cure and Repression of Crime
PART 3.- CHARACTERS AND TYPES OF CRIMINALS
3.1 Examination of Criminals
Classical and modern schools of penal jurisprudence-
Physical anomalies of the born criminal - Senses and functions - Psychology
- Intellectual " manifestations - The criminal in proverbial sayings.
Identity of born criminals and the morally insane - Analogy
of physical and psychic characters, origin and develop-
ment - Epilepsy - Multiformity of disease - Equivalence
of certain forms to criminality - Physical and psychic
characters - Cases of moral insanity with latent epileptic
phenomena.
General forms of criminal insanity, imbecility, melancholia,
general paralysis, dementia, monomania - Physical and
psychic characters of the mentally deranged - Special
forms of criminal insanity - Inebriate lunatics from in-
ebriation - Physical and psychic characters - Specific
crimes - Epileptic lunatics - Manifestations - Hysterical
lunatics - Physical and functional characters - Psychology.
Psychology - Tardy adoption of criminal career - Repentance - Confession -
Moral sense and affections - Habitual criminals - Juridical criminals -
Criminals of passion.
Atavistic origin of crime - Criminality in children - Pathological origin
of crime - Direct and indirect heredity - Illnesses, intoxications, and
traumatism - Alcoholism - Social causes of crime - Education and
environment - Atmospheric and climatic influences - Density of population -
Imitation - Immigration - Prison life - Economic conditions - Sex - Age.
Preventive institutions for children and young people -
Homes for orphans and destitute children - Colonies for unruly youths -
Institutions for assisting adults - Salvation Army.
Juvenile offenders - Children's Courts - Institutions for
female offenders - Minor offenders, criminals of passion,
political offenders, and criminaloids - Probation system
and indeterminate sentence - Reformatories - Peniten-
tiaries - Institutes for habitual criminals - Penal colonies -
Institutions for born criminals and the morally insane -
Asylums for insane criminals - Capital punishment -
Symbiosis.
Antecedents and psychology - Methods of testing intelli-
gence and emotions - Alorbid phenomena - Speech, me-
mor3% and handwriting - Clothing - Physical examination
- Tests of sensibility and senses - Excretions - Table of
anthropological examination of criminals and the insane.
1876 (2006 translation)