Chapter 9

SUMMARY OF CHIEF FORMS OF CRIMINALITY TO AID IN DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN CRIMINALS AND LUNATICS AND IN DETECTING SIMULATIONS OF INSANITY 258 A few cases showing the practical application of criminal anthropology.

APPENDIX

WORKS OF CESARE LOMBROSO (BRIEFLY SUMMARISED)

_I._ THE MAN OF GENIUS 283

_II._ CRIMINAL MAN 288

_III._ THE FEMALE OFFENDER. (In Collaboration with Guglielmo Ferrero.) 291

_IV._ POLITICAL CRIME. (In Collaboration with Rodolfo Laschi.) 294

_V._ TOO SOON: A Criticism of the New Italian Penal Code 298

_VI._ PRISON PALIMPSESTS: Studies in Prison Inscriptions 300

_VII._ ANCIENT AND MODERN CRIMES 302

_VIII._ DIAGNOSTIC METHODS OF LEGAL PSYCHIATRY 303

_IX._ ANARCHISTS 305

_X._ LECTURES ON LEGAL MEDICINE 307

_XI._ RECENT DISCOVERIES IN PSYCHIATRY AND CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF THESE SCIENCES 309

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE CHIEF WORKS OF CESARE LOMBROSO 310

INDEX 315

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

Fig. 1. FOSSETTE OCCIPITAL 6

Fig. 2. SKULL FORMATION 11

Fig. 3. SKULL FORMATION 11

Fig. 4. HEAD OF CRIMINAL 16

Fig. 5. HEAD OF CRIMINAL 16

Fig. 6. LAYERS OF THE FRONTAL REGION 23

Fig. 7. FIGURES MADE IN PRISON. MURDER OF A SLEEPING VICTIM 32

Fig. 8. CRUCIFIX POIGNARD 32

Fig. 9. WATER-JUGS 42

Fig. 10. DRAWINGS IN SCRIPT. DISCOVERED BY DE BLASIO 44

Fig. 11. ALPHABET. DISCOVERED BY DE BLASIO 45

Fig. 12. BOY MORALLY INSANE 56

Fig. 13. BOY MORALLY INSANE 56

Fig. 14. AN EPILEPTIC BOY 60

Fig. 15. FERNANDO. EPILEPTIC 60

Fig. 16. ITALIAN CRIMINAL. A CASE OF ALCOHOLISM 82

Fig. 17. SIGNATURES OF CRIMINALS 163

Fig. 18. CRIMINAL GIRL 114

Fig. 19. THE BRIGAND SALOMONE 114

Fig. 20. BRIGAND GASPARONE 166

Fig. 21. BRIGAND CASERIO 120

Fig. 22. TERRA-COTTA BOWLS. DESIGNED BY A CRIMINAL 134

Fig. 23. ART PRODUCTION FROM PRISON 136

Fig. 24. A COMBAT BETWEEN BRIGANDS AND GENDARMES. DESIGNED BY A CRIMINAL 136

Fig. 25. A VOLUMETRIC GLOVE 224

Fig. 26. HEAD OF A CRIMINAL. EPILEPTIC 224

Fig. 27. ANTON OTTO KRAUSER. APACHE 236

Fig. 28. A CRIMINAL'S EAR 224

Fig. 29. ANTHROPOMETER 237

Fig. 30. CRANIOGRAPH ANFOSSI 238

Fig. 31. PELVIMETER 239

Fig. 32. DIAGRAM OF SKULL 241

Fig. 33. DIAGRAM OF SKULL 241

Fig. 34. ESTHESIOMETER 245

Fig. 35. ALGOMETER 248

Fig. 36. CAMPIMETER OF LANDOLT (MODIFIED) 248

Fig. 37. DIAGRAM SHOWING NORMAL VISION 250

Fig. 38. DYNAMOMETER 253

Fig. 39. HEAD OF AN ITALIAN CRIMINAL 254

INTRODUCTION

BY CESARE LOMBROSO

[Professor Lombroso was able before his death to give his personal attention to the volume prepared by his daughter and collaborator, Gina Lombroso Ferrero (wife of the distinguished historian), in which is presented a summary of the conclusions reached in the great treatise by Lombroso on the causes of criminality and the treatment of criminals. The preparation of the introduction to this volume was the last literary work which the distinguished author found it possible to complete during his final illness.]

It will, perhaps, be of interest to American readers of this book, in which the ideas of the Modern Penal School, set forth in my work, _Criminal Man_, have been so pithily summed up by my daughter, to learn how the first outlines of this science arose in my mind and gradually took shape in a definite work--how, that is, combated by some, the object of almost fanatical adherence on the part of others, especially in America, where tradition has little hold, the Modern Penal School came into being.

On consulting my memory and the documents relating to my studies on this subject, I find that its two fundamental ideas--that, for instance, which claims as an essential point the study not of crime in the abstract, but of the criminal himself, in order adequately to deal with the evil effects of his wrong-doing, and that which classifies the congenital criminal as an anomaly, partly pathological and partly atavistic, a revival of the primitive savage--did not suggest themselves to me instantaneously under the spell of a single deep impression, but were the offspring of a series of impressions. The slow and almost unconscious association of these first vague ideas resulted in a new system which, influenced by its origin, has preserved in all its subsequent developments the traces of doubt and indecision, the marks of the travail which attended its birth.

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, 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 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 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.

One nation, however--America,--gave a warm and sympathetic reception to the ideas of the Modern School which they speedily put into practice, with the brilliant results shown by the Reformatory at Elmira, the Probation System, Juvenile Courts, and the George Junior Republic. They also initiated the practice, now in general use, of anthropological co-operation in every criminal trial of importance.

For this reason, and in view of the fact that America does not possess a complete translation of my works--_The Criminal, Male and Female_, and _Political Crime_ (translation and distribution being alike difficult on account of the length of these volumes)--I welcome with pleasure this summary, in which the principal points are explained with precision and loving care by my daughter Gina, who has worked with me from childhood, has seen the edifice of my science rise stone upon stone, and has shared in my anxieties, insults, and triumphs; without whose help I might, perhaps, never have witnessed the completion of that edifice, nor the application of its fundamental principles.