Tag Archives: beginings of criminology

Request against Cesare Lombroso

It interested to me that now a days a lot of people from Italy (Milan) do not like Cesare Lombroso’s studies or theories about criminology.  These people requested to the Mayor and Town Concillors to remove the name of Cesare Lombroso to a street that the town name to commemorate him. They describe Dr. Lombroso’s work as very controversial and worthless . They find his thesis of “the born or atavistic uncultured offender” very lame and offensive. This thesis is base on how a criminal is like by his physical features. These criminals were born not made and their features differentiate from “a normal society men”.  He performed autopsies on alleged criminals by measuring their skulls and  bodies to conclude how is the physical body of a born criminal. He pretty much  (in my opinion) based racism in the way that he was basing this theories just with lower class people (immigrants). He would compared the skulls  and facial features of these criminals to animals such as, rats, apes. He describes as follows; “….. 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…enormous jaws, high cheekbones …. found in criminals, savages, and apes, insensibility to pain…”(P240)  this is how he  described people who didn’t look like him. He also describe them as pure evil, people without any remorse, lazy, excessive tattooing, etc. He describes ‘Slang’ as ‘a peculiar jargon used by criminals among themselves” (P 242). Quite interesting on how nowadays we don’t measure the skulls and bodies but we still denigrate and point to alleged criminals  because of the way they dress, speak, their culture or race.  I guess certain thing will NEVER change.

Check out this site also…. http://www.significancemagazine.org/details/webexclusive/1378229/Testing-Lombrosos-theory.html

Maria Leon