Lombroso and the Born Criminal

What Lombroso proposed should be done

Because the born criminal offends by constitution, punishment cannot deter him, so the response must be protective rather than retributive. Lombroso favoured measures proportioned to the offender rather than to the offence: treatment for the reformable, indefinite detention for the incorrigible, and, in his later work, transportation and in extreme cases capital punishment for the irredeemably dangerous.

He also drew a conclusion that is easily overlooked and that is genuinely humane in its context: if the offender is not morally responsible, then the savagery of nineteenth-century punishment is pointless, and he argued for the abolition of much of it.

The criticism

Method. Lombroso compared prisoners and soldiers, but his procedures were loose, his categories shifted, and above all he had no adequate control group. Many of the features he called stigmata were common in the poor populations from which prisoners were drawn, and reflected malnutrition, injury and untreated illness rather than heredity.

Goring's refutation. Charles Goring, an English prison doctor, measured some three thousand English convicts against control groups including university students and soldiers, and published The English Convict in 1913. He found no physical criminal type. The differences Lombroso reported did not survive proper comparison. This is the decisive empirical answer and every good script names it.

Circularity. The stigmata were derived from a population defined as criminal by conviction, and then offered as the cause of criminality. The reasoning goes round in a circle.

Confusion of correlation with cause. Even where a physical difference existed, nothing showed which way the causation ran.

And the consequences. A theory that some people are born criminal invites the identification and detention of a class of people before they offend. It fed the eugenics movement, and in India the same logic underlay the criminal tribes legislation, under which whole communities were notified as criminal by birth. That legislation was repealed in 1952, and the communities it stigmatised are still living with its effects. Say this in an answer; it is the point at which the topic ceases to be a historical curiosity.

Why he still matters

He made criminology empirical. Whatever the quality of his measurements, he measured. He is called the father of modern criminology because he moved the subject from armchair speculation to the examination of actual offenders.

He shifted the object of study from the act to the actor, which every school since has accepted.

He generated a research programme. Goring's refutation is itself part of Lombroso's legacy, because a claim that can be refuted is a scientific claim, and the chapter on whether criminology is a science makes this point at length.

And his multi-factor turn was real. By the later editions and in the work he wrote with his son-in-law Ferrero, Lombroso had added climate, education, economic conditions, alcohol and prison contamination to his account. He ended much closer to the multiple factor position of Module II than he began.

A worked example

Suppose Lombroso's method were applied today in a Maharashtra prison. The researcher measures two hundred convicted prisoners and finds that a high proportion are undersized, have poor dentition, bear scars, and are illiterate.

Would that show a criminal type? No, and the reason is Goring's. Measure two hundred men of the same age drawn from the same districts and the same economic stratum who have never been convicted, and the same features will appear in similar proportions. What the prison sample records is poverty, malnutrition, manual labour and lack of medical care, all of which also predict who gets arrested, who cannot obtain bail and who cannot afford counsel.

And the circularity. The sample is defined as criminal because these men were convicted. Conviction depends on the operation of the filters described in the chapter on the dark figure, and those filters select for exactly the characteristics the researcher has measured. The finding is a description of the filter presented as a discovery about human beings.

One line captures it. Lombroso studied the prison and thought he was studying crime.

Quick revision

• Cesare Lombroso, L'Uomo Delinquente, 1876. Called the father of modern criminology.
• Atavism: the born criminal is an evolutionary throwback, identifiable by physical stigmata such as skull abnormalities, receding forehead, prominent jaw, large ears, facial asymmetry, long arms, excessive hair and insensitivity to pain, with tattooing and criminal argot as further markers.
• Classification: born criminals, insane criminals, criminaloids, criminals by passion, and habitual criminals. Criminaloids are the largest group, which is a substantial concession.
• Consequence: punishment cannot deter the born criminal, so measures should fit the offender, and much existing punishment is pointless cruelty.
• Criticism: no adequate control group; Charles Goring's The English Convict, 1913, found no physical criminal type; the reasoning is circular; correlation was taken for cause; and the theory fed eugenics and, in India, the criminal tribes legislation repealed in 1952.
• Legacy: an empirical method, the shift from act to actor, a falsifiable research programme, and a late move towards multiple factors.

Test yourself

1. State Lombroso's theory and name his five classes of offender. That the serious criminal is an atavistic being, a reversion to a primitive evolutionary type, recognisable by physical stigmata, who offends by constitution rather than choice. His classes are born criminals, insane criminals, criminaloids who offend under the influence of circumstance and who form the largest group, criminals by passion, and habitual criminals made by environment and association.

2. How was the theory disproved? By Charles Goring in The English Convict, 1913. He measured about three thousand English convicts against properly constituted control groups, including soldiers and university students, and found no physical criminal type: the differences Lombroso had reported did not survive comparison with a control. The features Lombroso called stigmata were markers of poverty, malnutrition and injury common in the populations from which prisoners were drawn.

3. Why is the theory more than a historical curiosity for an Indian student? Because the proposition that some people are criminal by birth licenses their identification and control before any offence. In India that logic produced the criminal tribes legislation, under which whole communities were notified as criminal by birth and subjected to registration and restriction; it was repealed in 1952 and the stigma it created has outlived it by generations.