Anthropological criminology
Encyclopedia
Anthropological criminology (sometimes referred to as criminal anthropology
, literally a combination of the study of the human
species and the study of criminals) is a field of offender profiling
, based on perceived links between the nature of a crime
and the personality or physical appearance of the offender. Although similar to physiognomy
and phrenology
, the term criminal anthropology is generally reserved for the works of the Italian school of criminology
of the late 19th century (Cesare Lombroso
, Enrico Ferri
, Raffaele Garofalo
). Lombroso thought that criminals were born with inferior physiological differences which were detectable. He popularized the notion of "born criminal" and thought that criminality was an atavism
or hereditary disposition. His central idea was to locate crime completely within the individual and utterly divorce it from the surrounding social conditions and structures. A founder of the Positivist school
of criminology, Lombroso hereby opposed social positivism developed by the Chicago school
and environmental criminology
.
(1741–1801) was one of the first to suggest a link between facial figures and crime . Victor Hugo
referred to his work in Les Misérables
, about what he would have said about Thénardier
's face. Franz Joseph Gall
then developed in 1810 his work on craniology, in which he alleged that crime was one of the behaviors organically controlled by a specific area of the brain. The philosopher Jacob Fries (1773–1843) also suggested a link between crime and physical appearance when he published a criminal anthropology handbook in 1820.
, whose most famous member was Cesare Lombroso
. The Italian criminologists rejected the Classical school
of criminology (Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham
) who had developed a "rational choice theory
" before the letter. They considered that crime was attributed to a specific nature
, and that essential
type of criminals could be found.
Lombroso divided for instance Northern Italian and Southern Italians in two different "races," and claimed that "Southern Italians were more crime-prone and lazy because they were unlucky enough to have less Aryan
blood than their northern countrymen ." Enrico Ferri
, a student of Lombroso, considered Black people
to be of an "inferior race
" and more prone to crime than others.
(1853–1914) created a mugshot identification system for criminals prior to the invention of fingerprinting. Hans Gross
(1847–1915), leading worker in the field of criminology
was also involved in the development of the theory.
(1809–1882). However, the influences came mainly from misconceptions of Darwin's theory of evolution, specifically that some species were morally superior to others. This idea was in fact spawned by Social Darwinism
, but nevertheless formed a critical part of anthropological criminology.
The work of Cesare Lombroso was continued by Social Darwinists in the United States
between 1881 and 1911.
Lombroso outlined 14 physiognomic characteristics which he and his followers believed to be common in all criminals: unusually short or tall height ; small head, but large face ; fleshy lips, but thin upper lip ; protuberances (bumps) on head, in back of head and around ear ; wrinkles on forehead and face ; large sinus cavities or bumpy face ; tattoos on body ; receding hairline ; bumps on head, particularly above left ear ; large incisors ; bushy eyebrows, tending to meet across nose ; large eye sockets, but deep-set eyes ; beaked or flat nose ; strong jaw line ; small and sloping forehead ; small or weak chin ; thin neck ; sloping shoulders, but large chest ; large, protruding ears ; long arms ; high cheek bones ; pointy or snubbed fingers or toes.
Lombroso published several works regarding his work, L'Uomo Delinquente, L'Homme Criminel (The Criminal Man), The Female Offender (original titled Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman) and Criminal Man, According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso.
as the idea of a physiological flaw in the human race was often associated with plans to remove such flaws. This was found particularly in America, with the American Eugenics Movement between 1907 and 1939, and the Anti-miscegenation laws
, and also in Germany during the Third Reich where 250,000 mentally disabled Germans were killed.
Criminal anthropology, and the closely related study of Physiognomy, have also found their way into studies of social psychology
and forensic psychology
. Studies into the nature of twins
also combines aspects of criminal anthropology, as some studies reveal that identical twins share a likelihood of criminal activities more so than non-identical twins. Lombroso's theories are also found in studies of Galvanic skin response
and XYY chromosome syndrome
.
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
, literally a combination of the study of the human
Human
Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...
species and the study of criminals) is a field of offender profiling
Offender profiling
Offender profiling, also known as criminal profiling, is a behavioral and investigative tool that is intended to help investigators to profile unknown criminal subjects or offenders. Offender profiling is also known as criminal profiling, criminal personality profiling, criminological profiling,...
, based on perceived links between the nature of a crime
Crime
Crime is the breach of rules or laws for which some governing authority can ultimately prescribe a conviction...
and the personality or physical appearance of the offender. Although similar to physiognomy
Physiognomy
Physiognomy is the assessment of a person's character or personality from their outer appearance, especially the face...
and phrenology
Phrenology
Phrenology is a pseudoscience primarily focused on measurements of the human skull, based on the concept that the brain is the organ of the mind, and that certain brain areas have localized, specific functions or modules...
, the term criminal anthropology is generally reserved for the works of the Italian school of criminology
Italian school of criminology
The Italian school of criminology was founded at the end of the 19th century by Cesare Lombroso and two of his Italian disciples, Enrico Ferri and Raffaele Garofalo .- Lombroso's conception of the "atavistic born criminal" :...
of the late 19th century (Cesare Lombroso
Cesare Lombroso
Cesare Lombroso, born Ezechia Marco Lombroso was an Italian criminologist and founder of the Italian School of Positivist Criminology. Lombroso rejected the established Classical School, which held that crime was a characteristic trait of human nature...
, Enrico Ferri
Enrico Ferri
Enrico Ferri was an Italian criminologist, socialist, and student of Cesare Lombroso. However, whereas Lombroso researched the physiological factors that motivated criminals, Ferri investigated social and economic factors. Ferri was the author of Criminal Sociology in 1884 and the editor for...
, Raffaele Garofalo
Raffaele Garofalo
Raffaele Garofalo was an Italian jurist and a student of Cesare Lombroso, often regard as the father of criminology. He rejected the doctrine of free will and supported the position that crime can be understood only if it is studied by scientific methods...
). Lombroso thought that criminals were born with inferior physiological differences which were detectable. He popularized the notion of "born criminal" and thought that criminality was an atavism
Atavism
Atavism is the tendency to revert to ancestral type. In biology, an atavism is an evolutionary throwback, such as traits reappearing which had disappeared generations before. Atavisms can occur in several ways...
or hereditary disposition. His central idea was to locate crime completely within the individual and utterly divorce it from the surrounding social conditions and structures. A founder of the Positivist school
Positivist school
In criminology, the Positivist School has attempted to find scientific objectivity for the measurement and quantification of criminal behavior. As the scientific method became the major paradigm in the search for all knowledge, the Classical School's social philosophy was replaced by the quest for...
of criminology, Lombroso hereby opposed social positivism developed by the Chicago school
Chicago school (sociology)
In sociology and later criminology, the Chicago School was the first major body of works emerging during the 1920s and 1930s specialising in urban sociology, and the research into the urban environment by combining theory and ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago, now applied elsewhere...
and environmental criminology
Environmental criminology
Environmental criminology focuses on criminal patterns within particular built environments and analyzes the impacts of these external variables on people's cognitive behavior...
.
History
The physiognomist Johann Kaspar LavaterJohann Kaspar Lavater
Johann Kaspar Lavater was a Swiss poet and physiognomist.-Early life:Lavater was born at Zürich, and educated at the Gymnasium there, where J. J. Bodmer and J. J...
(1741–1801) was one of the first to suggest a link between facial figures and crime . Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
referred to his work in Les Misérables
Les Misérables
Les Misérables , translated variously from the French as The Miserable Ones, The Wretched, The Poor Ones, The Wretched Poor, or The Victims), is an 1862 French novel by author Victor Hugo and is widely considered one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century...
, about what he would have said about Thénardier
Thénardiers
The Thénardiers, commonly known as Thénardier and Madame Thénardier , are two of the primary villains in Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables and the stage musical of the same name...
's face. Franz Joseph Gall
Franz Joseph Gall
Franz Joseph Gall was a neuroanatomist, physiologist, and pioneer in the study of the localization of mental functions in the brain.- Life :...
then developed in 1810 his work on craniology, in which he alleged that crime was one of the behaviors organically controlled by a specific area of the brain. The philosopher Jacob Fries (1773–1843) also suggested a link between crime and physical appearance when he published a criminal anthropology handbook in 1820.
The Italian school
However, criminal anthropology per se refers to the Italian school of criminologyItalian school of criminology
The Italian school of criminology was founded at the end of the 19th century by Cesare Lombroso and two of his Italian disciples, Enrico Ferri and Raffaele Garofalo .- Lombroso's conception of the "atavistic born criminal" :...
, whose most famous member was Cesare Lombroso
Cesare Lombroso
Cesare Lombroso, born Ezechia Marco Lombroso was an Italian criminologist and founder of the Italian School of Positivist Criminology. Lombroso rejected the established Classical School, which held that crime was a characteristic trait of human nature...
. The Italian criminologists rejected the Classical school
Classical school
The Classical School in criminology is usually a reference to the 18th-century work during the Enlightenment by the utilitarian and social contract philosophers Jeremy Bentham and Cesare Beccaria. Their interests lay in the system of criminal justice and penology and, indirectly through the...
of criminology (Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham was an English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism...
) who had developed a "rational choice theory
Rational choice theory
Rational choice theory, also known as choice theory or rational action theory, is a framework for understanding and often formally modeling social and economic behavior. It is the main theoretical paradigm in the currently-dominant school of microeconomics...
" before the letter. They considered that crime was attributed to a specific nature
Nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...
, and that essential
Essential
Essential or essentials can refer to:*An essential property, which defines an entity as being a particular type of entity. See also essentialism, the philosophical view that an entity must have certain characteristics in order to belong to a certain defined group, and its counterpart,...
type of criminals could be found.
Lombroso divided for instance Northern Italian and Southern Italians in two different "races," and claimed that "Southern Italians were more crime-prone and lazy because they were unlucky enough to have less Aryan
Aryan
Aryan is an English language loanword derived from Sanskrit ārya and denoting variously*In scholarly usage:**Indo-Iranian languages *in dated usage:**the Indo-European languages more generally and their speakers...
blood than their northern countrymen ." Enrico Ferri
Enrico Ferri
Enrico Ferri was an Italian criminologist, socialist, and student of Cesare Lombroso. However, whereas Lombroso researched the physiological factors that motivated criminals, Ferri investigated social and economic factors. Ferri was the author of Criminal Sociology in 1884 and the editor for...
, a student of Lombroso, considered Black people
Black people
The term black people is used in systems of racial classification for humans of a dark skinned phenotype, relative to other racial groups.Different societies apply different criteria regarding who is classified as "black", and often social variables such as class, socio-economic status also plays a...
to be of an "inferior race
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
" and more prone to crime than others.
Mugshot and fingerprinting
On the other hand, Alphonse BertillonAlphonse Bertillon
Alphonse Bertillon was a French police officer and biometrics researcher who created anthropometry, an identification system based on physical measurements. Anthropometry was the first scientific system used by police to identify criminals. Before that time, criminals could only be identified...
(1853–1914) created a mugshot identification system for criminals prior to the invention of fingerprinting. Hans Gross
Hans Gross
Hans Gustav Adolf Gross was an Austrian criminal jurist and an examining magistrate. He is believed to be the creator of the field of criminalistics; he taught as a professor at the Chernivtsi University, Prague University and the University of Graz, and established the Institute of Criminology in...
(1847–1915), leading worker in the field of criminology
Criminology
Criminology is the scientific study of the nature, extent, causes, and control of criminal behavior in both the individual and in society...
was also involved in the development of the theory.
Social Darwinism
The theory of anthropological criminology was influenced heavily by the ideas of Charles DarwinCharles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
(1809–1882). However, the influences came mainly from misconceptions of Darwin's theory of evolution, specifically that some species were morally superior to others. This idea was in fact spawned by Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism is a term commonly used for theories of society that emerged in England and the United States in the 1870s, seeking to apply the principles of Darwinian evolution to sociology and politics...
, but nevertheless formed a critical part of anthropological criminology.
The work of Cesare Lombroso was continued by Social Darwinists in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
between 1881 and 1911.
The theory
In the 19th century, Cesare Lombroso and his followers performed autopsies on criminals and declared that they had discovered similarities between the physiologies of the bodies and those of "primitive humans", monkeys and apes. Most of these similarities involved receding foreheads, height, head shape and size, and based on these Lombroso postulated the theory of the ‘born criminal'. Lombroso also declared that the female offender was worse than the male, as they had strong masculine characteristics.Lombroso outlined 14 physiognomic characteristics which he and his followers believed to be common in all criminals: unusually short or tall height ; small head, but large face ; fleshy lips, but thin upper lip ; protuberances (bumps) on head, in back of head and around ear ; wrinkles on forehead and face ; large sinus cavities or bumpy face ; tattoos on body ; receding hairline ; bumps on head, particularly above left ear ; large incisors ; bushy eyebrows, tending to meet across nose ; large eye sockets, but deep-set eyes ; beaked or flat nose ; strong jaw line ; small and sloping forehead ; small or weak chin ; thin neck ; sloping shoulders, but large chest ; large, protruding ears ; long arms ; high cheek bones ; pointy or snubbed fingers or toes.
Lombroso published several works regarding his work, L'Uomo Delinquente, L'Homme Criminel (The Criminal Man), The Female Offender (original titled Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman) and Criminal Man, According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso.
Rejection
During Lombroso's life, British scientist Charles Goring 1870–1919 was also working in the same area, and concluded that there was no noticeable physiological differences between law abiding people and those who committed crimes. Maurice Parmelee, seen as the founder of modern criminology in America, also began to reject the theory of anthropological criminology in 1911, which led to its eventual withdrawal from the field of accepted criminology research.Modern times
Despite general rejection of Lombroso's theories, anthropological criminology still finds a place of sort in modern criminal profiling. Historically (particularly in the 1930s) criminal anthropology had been associated somewhat with eugenicsEugenics
Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...
as the idea of a physiological flaw in the human race was often associated with plans to remove such flaws. This was found particularly in America, with the American Eugenics Movement between 1907 and 1939, and the Anti-miscegenation laws
Anti-miscegenation laws
Anti-miscegenation laws, also known as miscegenation laws, were laws that enforced racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by criminalizing interracial marriage and sometimes also sex between members of different races...
, and also in Germany during the Third Reich where 250,000 mentally disabled Germans were killed.
Criminal anthropology, and the closely related study of Physiognomy, have also found their way into studies of social psychology
Social psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...
and forensic psychology
Forensic psychology
Forensic psychology is the intersection between psychology and the criminal justice system. It involves understanding criminal law in the relevant jurisdictions in order to be able to interact appropriately with judges, attorneys and other legal professionals...
. Studies into the nature of twins
TWINS
Two Wide-Angle Imaging Neutral-Atom Spectrometers are a pair of NASA instruments aboard two United States National Reconnaissance Office satellites in Molniya orbits. TWINS was designed to provide stereo images of the Earth's ring current. The first instrument, TWINS-1, was launched aboard USA-184...
also combines aspects of criminal anthropology, as some studies reveal that identical twins share a likelihood of criminal activities more so than non-identical twins. Lombroso's theories are also found in studies of Galvanic skin response
Galvanic skin response
Skin conductance, also known as galvanic skin response , electrodermal response , psychogalvanic reflex , skin conductance response or skin conductance level , is a method of measuring the electrical conductance of the skin, which varies with its moisture level...
and XYY chromosome syndrome
XYY syndrome
XYY syndrome is an aneuploidy of the sex chromosomes in which a human male receives an extra Y-chromosome, giving a total of 47 chromosomes instead of the more usual 46. This produces a 47,XYY karyotype...
.
See also
- Biosocial criminologyBiosocial criminologyBiosocial criminology is a subfield of criminology and sociology. While many sociologists and criminologists focus on the role of environmental effects as primarily responsible for causing crime, the influence of biology on crime is also often studied...
- PathognomyPathognomyPathognomy is the study of passions and emotions. It refers to the expression of emotions indicated by the voice, gestures and facial expression. While physiognomy is used to predict the overall, long-term character of an individual, pathognomy is used to ascertain clues about one's current character...
- Personology
- PhrenologyPhrenologyPhrenology is a pseudoscience primarily focused on measurements of the human skull, based on the concept that the brain is the organ of the mind, and that certain brain areas have localized, specific functions or modules...
- PhysiognomyPhysiognomyPhysiognomy is the assessment of a person's character or personality from their outer appearance, especially the face...
- CriminologyCriminologyCriminology is the scientific study of the nature, extent, causes, and control of criminal behavior in both the individual and in society...
- Criminal psychologyCriminal psychologyCriminal psychology is the study of the wills, thoughts, intentions and reactions of criminals. It is related to the field of criminal anthropology. The study goes deeply into what makes someone commit crime, but also the reactions after the crime, on the run or in court...
- Scientific racismScientific racismScientific racism is the use of scientific techniques and hypotheses to sanction the belief in racial superiority or racism.This is not the same as using scientific findings and the scientific method to investigate differences among the humans and argue that there are races...