Lombroso and the Positive School

Two problems, one intellectual and one institutional.

The intellectual problem was differentiation. Traditional accounts of crime, Christian and otherwise, had plenty of secular and materialist explanations lying about — falling in with bad company, laxity, temptation, drink, idleness, poverty, avarice. What they lacked was a developed sense of differential etiology: an account of why some succumbed and others resisted. Where the older accounts reached that question the explanation trailed off into the unknowable — fate, providence, or the will of God. When a science of criminology emerged in the late nineteenth century, one of its central concerns was to take that question of differentiation and subject it to empirical inquiry.

The institutional problem was that the classical penal programme had visibly failed to reduce crime, as the French statistics of 1827 onwards showed, while simultaneously suggesting that factors outside the criminal justice system were at work.

Criminals are a naturally occurring kind of person, and can therefore be the object of a natural science of their own.

Lombroso proposed that criminals were biological throwbacks to an earlier evolutionary stage — people more primitive and less highly evolved than their non-criminal counterparts. He used the term atavistic: the criminal reproduces the physical and psychical characteristics of remote ancestors; he is a savage born into the modern world. This let him explain why acts were outlawed at all: human beings were simply reproducing acts customary in the evolutionary past, as vendetta killings among uncivilised Italians had been labelled customary duties rather than crimes.

The idea of evolution was itself recent, Darwin's On the Origin of Species having appeared in 1859; and even the idea that some individuals might be reversions to an earlier evolutionary stage had been suggested by Darwin, who wrote that with mankind some of the worst dispositions may perhaps be reversions to a savage state from which we are not removed by many generations.

Lombroso later distinguished three major classes of criminals:

1. Born criminals — atavistic reversions to a lower or more primitive evolutionary form, thought to constitute about one third of offenders.
2. Insane criminals — idiots, imbeciles, paranoiacs, sufferers from melancholia, and those afflicted with general paralysis, dementia, alcoholism, epilepsy or hysteria.
3. Criminaloids — a large general class without special physical characteristics or recognisable mental disorders, but whose mental and emotional make-up is such that in certain circumstances they indulge in vicious and criminal behaviour. Lombroso conceded that well over one half of all criminals were criminaloids, so they were neither born criminals nor insane in the sense he used those terms.

The single most important point about the school is often the one omitted. The real basis of the positive school is not atavism but the search for the causes of criminal behaviour, based on the conception of multiple factor causation, in which some factors may be biological, others psychological and still others social. Lombroso's own thinking moved that way. In the first edition of 1876 he required 252 pages to explain evolutionary atavism; twenty years later, in the fifth edition, he needed over 1,900 pages to include everything that appeared related to crime causation — climate, rainfall, the price of grain, sex and marriage customs, criminal laws, banking practices, national tariff policies, the structure of government, and the state of religious belief. His last book, Crime, Its Causes and Remedies, published in 1911, two years after his death, includes discussions of many factors, of which by far the largest number are environmental rather than biological.

Lombroso's science grew, somewhat accidentally, out of an anthropological concern to study humanity and its natural varieties, using anthropometry and craniometry to measure the physical features of human subjects, influenced by the physical anthropology of Paul Broca and a Darwinian concern with species and their evolution. He studied Italian army recruits and asylum and prison inmates.

• The tattoo study, which failed: working as an army doctor he was struck by the tattoos on some soldiers and not others, and hoped to distinguish the honest comrades from the vicious. He found no relation.
• The Villela skull, his major break: performing a post-mortem on Guiseppe Villela, imprisoned for theft, he noticed what he classified as a depression in the middle of the occipital part of the skull. Historians have tended to discount the significance of this story, in part because of several exaggerations and inconsistencies pertaining to the incident.
• The toe measurement: he measured the space between the first and second toes of criminals and non-criminals and reported that, when relaxed, the interdigital space of criminals was 3 mm greater.
• Other measurements: length of arms, abnormal teeth, and the amount of body hair.
• Writing style: he argued that criminals, though capable of writing words, resorted to pictography, expressing their thoughts in images.
• The young girls experiment: girls he classified as inexpert in the world of good and evil were shown images of criminals and non-criminals and, more often than not, correctly identified the criminals on facial characteristics alone.

The scientific claim carried a programme of practical action quite at odds with the legal principles that had underpinned criminal justice.

• The notion of the offender's free will was attacked as a metaphysical abstraction, as was the concept of legal responsibility.
• Uniformity of sentencing was viewed as a failure to differentiate between types of offender.
• Proportionate, retrospective punishment was rejected in favour of a flexible system of penal sanctions adapted to the reformability or dangerousness of the specific individual.
• Criminal justice was to cease being a punitive, reactive system and become a scientifically informed apparatus for the prevention, treatment and elimination of criminality, run by criminological experts, concerned to maximise social defence, individual reform and measures of security rather than to uphold some outdated legalistic conception of justice.

Two things made that attractive to late nineteenth-century governments. The regulatory advantage was the rejection of formal egalitarianism: criminology offered to differentiate between constitutional and accidental criminality, marking out the criminal class scientifically rather than moralistically, and offered a system of control that need not wait for an offence to occur or be limited by any principle of proportionality. The legitimating advantage was that this more interventionist system could also claim to be more humane, its rationale being individual and social welfare rather than the infliction of retributive punishment.

• Goring's statistics. Charles Goring, a prison medical doctor, conducted a statistical study to test the accuracy of the theory, and concluded that there were in fact no distinct physical abnormalities differentiating criminals from non-criminals.
• Anthropology moved on. It abandoned the conception of uniform, linear evolution with humans as the most highly evolved animal, whereupon the notion of the atavistic criminal as a less evolved person became quite meaningless.
• Psychiatry moved on. The relationship between crime and epilepsy, or between crime and insanity, was shown to be far more complex than Lombroso assumed.
• It was not even new. When Lombroso discovered the criminal type he was extending a line of research already well established, and restating in a more vivid form an observation already made by psychiatrists such as Maudsley and prison doctors such as J. Bruce Thomson. What was novel was the significance he gave it — the idea of a distinctive science of the criminal, treating the criminal as a fact of nature rather than a social or legal product.
• Practical resistance. Legislators refused to replace a system of penalties with measures of social defence, and jurors, lacking the vocabulary, became fed up by an excess of subtle scientific analyses and could not follow the witness.
• Sex, race and class bias, most visible in his account of women. He held that the most advanced forms of human are white males and the most primitive are non-white females; the traits he called atavistic in women — large hands, low voice pitch, moles, short stature, darker skin, dark hair, fatness — are more prevalent in some populations than others, and all his tests were carried out in Italy where such characteristics were most marked in Sicily, whose people were generally poorer, so social conditions rather than physical appearance may explain their criminality.
• The internal contradiction. If all females are less advanced than males, female crime should exceed male crime; the recorded female rate was and is lower. He escaped this only by asserting that prostitution was the female substitute for crime and that women had a smaller cerebral cortex.

Two answers, and both are worth stating.

The first is cultural: the popularity of the work is probably explicable by the extent to which the conception of the criminal type chimed with deep-rooted cultural prejudices and offered scientific respectability to middle-class perceptions of criminal classes forming in the growing cities.

The second is institutional, and it is Foucault's: the disciplinary, reformative practices of the penitentiary prison acted as a practical surface of emergence for the individualizing, differentiating discourse of criminology. What Lombroso invented was a science of individual differences; but the data and social arrangements necessary to produce it, and the practical context in which such knowledge would be useful, were already inscribed in the architecture and regimes of the disciplinary prison, where inmates were arranged in individual cells and subjected to constant individual surveillance for long periods. As Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise put it in 1924, penitentiary science develops gradually into the science of the discovery of the causes of crime — the science of criminology.

- On the schools question, give the three classes of criminals and the atavism thesis, then immediately give the correction: the real basis of the school is multiple-factor causation, and Lombroso's own editions prove it. - On whether criminology is a science, Lombroso is the best example of the discipline's characteristic weakness and its characteristic strength: a theory whose factual claims were false, but which was testable and was in fact tested and refuted by Goring. Non-scientific explanations of crime, such as spiritual explanations, cannot be tested at all. - On the relation between the schools, resist the temptation to present them as simple opposites. Positivist criminologists can include the certainty and severity of punishment among the factors influencing behaviour, and, as Gottfredson and Hirschi put it, no deterministic explanation of crime can reasonably exclude the variables of the classical model on deterministic grounds. - On penology, the positive programme is the ancestor of the indeterminate sentence, of individualized treatment, of the pre-sentence report and of preventive detention — and therefore of every modern argument about how far the state may act on prediction rather than on proof. </content>