Criminal Man, According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso

by Gina Lombroso

I, therefore, began to study criminals in the Italian prisons, and, amongst others, I made the acquaintance of the famous brigand Vilella. This man possessed 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.

This was not merely an idea, but a revelation. At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek-bones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle-shaped or sessile ears found in criminals, savages, and apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its blood.

I was further encouraged in this bold hypothesis by the results of my studies on Verzeni, a criminal convicted of sadism and rape, who showed the cannibalistic instincts of primitive anthropophagists and the ferocity of beasts of prey.

The various parts of the extremely complex problem of criminality were, however, not all solved hereby. The final key was given by another case, that of Misdea, a young soldier of about twenty-one, unintelligent but not vicious. Although subject to epileptic fits, he had served for some years in the army when suddenly, for some trivial cause, he attacked and killed eight of his superior officers and comrades. His horrible work accomplished, he fell into a deep slumber, which lasted twelve hours and on awaking appeared to have no recollection of what had happened. Misdea, while representing the most ferocious type of animal, manifested, in addition, all the phenomena of epilepsy, which appeared to be hereditary in all the members of his family. It flashed across my mind that many criminal characteristics not attributable to atavism, such as facial asymmetry, cerebral sclerosis, impulsiveness, instantaneousness, the periodicity of criminal acts, the desire of evil for evil's sake, were morbid characteristics common to epilepsy, mingled with others due to atavism.

Thus were traced the first clinical outlines of my work which had hitherto been entirely anthropological. The clinical outlines confirmed the anthropological contours, and vice versâ; for the greatest criminals showed themselves to be epileptics, and, on the other hand, epileptics manifested the same anomalies as criminals. Finally, it was shown that epilepsy frequently reproduced atavistic characteristics, including even those common to lower animals.

That synthesis which mighty geniuses have often succeeded in creating by one inspiration (but at the risk of errors, for a genius is only human and in many cases more fallacious than his fellow-men) was deduced by me gradually from various sources—the study of the normal individual, the lunatic, the criminal, the savage, and finally the child. Thus, by reducing the penal problem to its simplest expression, its solution was rendered easier, just as the study of embryology has in a great measure solved the apparently strange and mysterious riddle of teratology.

But these attempts would have been sterile, had not a solid phalanx of jurists, Russian, German, Hungarian, Italian, and American, fertilised the germ by correcting hasty and one-sided conclusions, suggesting opportune reforms and applications, and, most important of all, applying my ideas on the offender to his individual and social prophylaxis and cure.

Enrico Ferri was the first to perceive that the congenital epileptoid criminal did not form a single species, and that if this class was irretrievably doomed to perdition, crime in others was only a brief spell of insanity, determined by circumstances, passion, or illness. He established new types—the occasional criminal and the criminal by passion,—and transformed the basis of the penal code by asking if it were more just to make laws obey facts instead of altering facts to suit the laws, solely in order to avoid troubling the placidity of those who refused to consider this new element in the scientific field. Therefore, putting aside those abstract formulæ for which high talents have panted in vain, like the thirsty traveller at the sight of the desert mirage, the advocates of the Modern School came to the conclusion that sentences should show a decrease in infamy and ferocity proportionate to the increase in length and social safety. In lieu of infamy they substituted a longer period of segregation, and for cases in which alienists were unable to decide between criminality and insanity, they advocated an intermediate institution, in which merciful treatment and social security were alike considered. They also emphasised the importance of certain measures which hitherto had been universally regarded as a pure abstraction or an unattainable desideratum—measures for the prevention of crime by tracing it to its source, divorce laws to diminish adultery, legislation of an anti-alcoholistic tendency to prevent crimes of violence, associations for destitute children, and co-operative associations to check the tendency to theft. Above all, they insisted on those regulations—unfortunately fallen into disuse—which indemnify the victim at the expense of the aggressor, in order that society, having suffered once for the crime, should not be obliged to suffer pecuniarily for the detention of the offender, solely in homage to a theoretical principle that no one believes in, according to which prison is a kind of baptismal font in whose waters sin of all kinds is washed away.

Thus the edifice of criminal anthropology, circumscribed at first, gradually extended its walls and embraced special studies on homicide, political crime, crimes connected with the banking world, crimes by women, etc.

But the first stone had been scarcely laid when from all quarters of Europe arose those calumnies and misrepresentations which always follow in the train of audacious innovations. We were accused of wishing to proclaim the impunity of crime, of demanding the release of all criminals, of refusing to take into account climatic and racial influences and of asserting that the criminal is a slave eternally chained to his instincts; whereas the Modern School, on the contrary, gave a powerful impetus to the labors of statisticians and sociologists on these very matters. This is clearly shown in the third volume of Criminal Man, which contains a summary of the ideas of modern criminologists and my own.