ANALYSE THE IDEOLOGY BEHIND

LOMBROSIAN
THEORY OF CRIME CAUSATION- CRITICALLY
EXAMINE ITS RELEVANCE IN MODERN TIMES.

Sebi S
Govt. Law College,
Ernakulam.
 POSITIVIST SCHOOL
 The positivist school of criminology emerged in the 19th century as a
contrasting idea to the classical theory of crime.
 The classical school of criminology posited that individuals commit
crimes because of their selfish desires and that crime is a product of
free will.
 The Positivist School was founded by Cesare Lombroso and led by two
others: Enrico Ferri and Raffaele Garofalo. As the main exponents of
this school were the Italian Criminologists, this school is called the
Italian school of criminology.
 In criminology, it has attempted to find scientific objectivity for the
measurement and quantification of criminal behaviour.
 Under this school, method was developed by observing the
characteristics of criminals to observe what may be the root cause of
their behaviour or actions.
 The advocates of this school completely discarded the theories of
omnipotence of spirit and free will on the ground that they were
hypothetical and irrational. Alternatively, they attributed criminality to
anthropological, physical and social environment.
 CESARE LOMBROSO
6 NOVEMBER 1835 – 19 OCTOBER 1909

 Cesare Lambroso was an

Italian criminologist,
phrenologist, physician and
the founder of the Italian
School of Positivist
Criminology.
 Lombroso believed that
criminals have hereditary
incentives, which are
transmitted from generation
to generation in a genetic
way and therefore believe in
the existence of “criminal
genes”.
LOMBROSIAN THEORY OF
DEVIANCE

 Cesare Lambroso was the first criminologist who made an attempt

to understand the personality of offenders in physical terms.
 Lombroso employed scientific methods in explaining criminal
behaviour and shifted the emphasis from crime to criminal.
 Lombroso developed the ‘Theory of Deviance’ and according to
this theory, a person’s bodily constitution indicates whether or
not an individual is a born criminal or not.
 In developing this theory, Lambroso observed the physical
characteristics of Italian prisoners and compared them to those
of Italian soldiers.
 Lombroso also maintained that criminals had less sensitivity to
pain and touch; more acute sight; a lack of moral sense, including
an absence of remorse; more vanity, impulsiveness, vindictiveness,
and cruelty and also other manifestations.
Lombrosian theory of deviance
 Lombroso was among the first to consider criminality, in
men and women, as a phenomenon worthy of scientific
study.
 He recognized the diminished role of organic factors in
many habitual offenders and referred to the delicate
balance between predisposing factors (organic, genetic)
and precipitating factors such as one’s environment,
opportunity or poverty.
 Lombroso's research methods were clinical and
descriptive, with precise details of skull dimensions and
other measurements. He did not engage in rigorous
statistical comparisons of criminals and non-criminals.
 Although he gave some recognition in his later years to
psychological and sociological factors in the etiology of
crime, he remained convinced of and identified with,
criminal anthropometry.
CLASSIFICATION OF CRIMINALS
Lombroso classified criminals in to three categories:
 The atavist or hereditary criminals

 Insane criminals

 Criminoids

 The atavist or hereditary criminals

Lombroso termed them as born-criminals.

According to him, born-criminals were of a distinct type who could
not refrain from indulging in criminality and environment had no
relevance whatsoever to the crimes committed by the Atavists.
Lombroso considered these criminals as incorrigibles, i.e., beyond
reformation.
He enumerated as many as sixteen physical abnormalities of a
criminal some of which were peculiar size and shape of head, eye,
enlarged jaw and cheek bones, fleshy lips, abnormal teeth, long or
flat chin, retreating forehead, dark skin, twisted nose and so on.
Theory of Atavism
 The word ‘Atavistic’ comes from the Latin word
“avatus”, which means ‘ancestor’ in Latin.
 In his view, criminals reflect a reversion to an early
and more primitive being that was both mentally and
physically inferior.
 Lombroso’s theory used physical characteristics as
indicators of criminality and suggest that criminals
are distinguished from non criminals by multiple
physical anomalies.
 Lombroso moderated his theory of physical anomaly in
later years but his emphasis throughout his work was
on human physical traits which also included biology,
psychology and environment.
Theory of Atavism

 In ’The Criminal Man’, first published in 1876, he suggested that

there was distinct biological class of people that were prone to
criminality.
 The ‘atavistic’ characteristics, he argued, denoted the fact that the
offenders were at a more primitive stage of evolution than non-
offenders and they were called “genetic throwbacks” . This implies
that criminality is inherited and that it can be identified by physical
defects.
 The theory was that criminals were physically different from normal
persons and possessed a few physical characteristics of inferior
animal world.
 This made them, according to Lombroso, wilder, untamed and unable
to fit in the 1870’s society and therefore they would inevitably turn
to crime.
 The Theory of Atavism was revised in 1906 and held that only one-
third of criminals were born criminals and not all the criminals.
 Finally, he conceded that his theory of atavism was ill-founded and
held that there were in fact occasional criminals.
 Insane Criminals: 
The second category of criminals according to Lombroso
consisted of insane criminals who resorted to
criminality on account of certain mental depravity or
disorder.
 Criminoids: 

The third category of criminals was those of criminoids

who were physical criminal type and had a tendency to
commit crime in order to overcome their inferiority in
order to meet the needs of survival.
 Besides describing the term "born criminal,” Lombroso
also described "criminaloids", or occasional criminals,
criminals by passion, moral imbeciles, and
criminal epileptics.
LOMBROSIAN VIEW REGARDING
FEMALE CRIMINALITY
 Lombroso used his theory of atavism to explain women's
criminal offending.
 Lombroso viewed female criminals as having an excess of
male characteristics. He argued that, biologically, criminal
females more closely resembled males than females.
 According to this theory, Lombroso outlines a comparative
analysis of "normal women" as opposed to "criminal women"
such as "the prostitute.“ However, Lombroso's "obdurate
beliefs" about women presented an "intractable problem"
for this theory:
"Because he was convinced that women are inferior to men
Lombroso was unable to argue, based on his theory of the
born criminal, that women's lesser involvement in crime
reflected their comparatively lower levels of atavism."
 LOMBROSO AND DARWIN’S THEORY
OF EVOLUTION
 Lombroso was heavily influenced by a misunderstood Darwin: criminals
were “throwbacks” in the phylogenetic tree to early phases of
evolution.
 If a criminal man is an ancestral form of human being, obviously his
anthropological features and physiological reactions would be
different from those of the “normal nineteenth century man”. For this
reason Lombroso quickly applied anthropometry to the criminal man
and woman.
   Lombroso argued that criminals were not to blame for their criminal
activities as their behaviour was determined by their physiology. From
this anatomical observation, Lombroso also quickly extended the
theory of deviance as a form of evolutionary blockage to insanity.
 Lombroso considered insanity a milder form of regression in the
evolutionary tree, less dramatic than criminality, and genius a sort of
mental mosaic in which the evolution of positive qualities was mixed
with degeneration of some somatic organs.
CHARACTERISTICS OF CRIMINALS

 Cesare Lombroso
concluded that the
criminals were physically
different. The physical
characteristics that he
used to identify criminals
included:
 An asymmetry of the face
or head.
 Large monkey-like ears.

 Large lips.

 Long arms.
CHARACTERISTICS OF CRIMINALS
A twisted nose.
 Excessive cheekbones.

 Excessive wrinkles on the skin.

 Large jaw.

 Large chin.

 Lombroso declared that Males

with five or more of these
characteristics could be
marked as born criminals.
 Females, on the other hand,
only needed as few as three of
these characteristics to be
born criminals.
 CRITICAL VIEW REGARDING LOMBROSIAN THEORY

ENRICO FERRI
Enrico Ferri challenged Lombroso’s theory of atavism and demonstrated that it
was erroneous to think that criminals were incorrigible.
He believed that just as non-criminals could commit crimes if placed in
conducive circumstances as also the criminals could refrain from criminality in
healthy and crime –free surroundings. According to him, crime is the
synthetic product of three main factors:
 Physical or geographical;

 Anthropological; and

 Psychological or social.

Ferri emphasized that criminal behaviour is an outcome of a variety of factors

having their combined effect on the individual. According to him social
change, which is inevitable in a dynamic society, results in disharmony,
conflict and cultural variations.
As a result of this, social disorganization takes place and a traditional pattern
of social control mechanism totally breaks down. In the wake of such rapid
social changes, the incidence of crime is bound to increase tremendously. The
heterogeneity of social conditions destroys the congenial social relationship,
creating a social vacuum which proves to be a fertile ground for criminality.
GABRIEL DE TARDE
 Gabriel de Tarde, the eminent French criminologist
and social psychologist, criticized Lombroso’s theory
of criminal behaviour, and offered a social
explanation of crime.
 Tarde asserted that criminal behaviour is the result
of a learning process, therefore, any speculation
regarding direct relationship between physical
appearance and criminal propensities of criminals
would mean overlooking the real cause of criminality.
 Tarde further denounced the proposition of
phrenologists who tried to establish a correlation
between the skull, the brain and the social behaviour
of a person.
GORING
Goring carried out research on the psychology of criminals.
After a series of comparisons between the criminals and
non-criminals, he concluded that there was nothing like
‘physical criminal type as suggested by Lombroso.
SUTHERLAND
Prof. Sutherland observed that by shifting the attention
from crime as a social phenomenon to crime as an
individual phenomenon, Lombroso delayed for fifty years
the work which was in progress at the time of its origin
and in addition, made no lasting contribution of his own.
LINDESMITH AND LEVIN
Lindesmith and Levin even alleged that Lombroso’s faulty
assumption’s were responsible for hindering the growth
of the scientific criminology for few more decades.
 RELEVANCE OF LOMBROSIAN
THEORY IN PRESENT CONTEXT
The greatest contribution is the development of criminal
science, which lies in the fact that the attention of
criminologists was drawn for the first time towards the
individual, that is, the personality of criminal rather than
his act (crime) or punishment.
 This paved the way for the modern penologists to
formulate a criminal policy embodying the principle of
individualization as a method and reformation. Thus
introduced the methodology and logic of natural science
in the field of criminology.
 While analyzing causes of crime, Lombroso laid greater
emphasis on the biological nature of human behaviour and
thus indirectly drew attention of criminologists to the
impact of environment on crime causation.
The individualization of punishment, which all humanitarian
and scientific thinkers now agreed upon, is something which
Lombroso's work, more perhaps than that of any other
man, has helped to bring about and amounts to one of the
greatest contribution to criminology.
The emphasis was shifted from penology to criminology and
the objects of punishment were radically changed in as
much as retributory methods were abandoned. Criminals
were now to be treated rather than punished.
Protection of society from criminals was to be the primary
object which could be achieved by utilizing reformatory
methods for different classes of criminals in varying
degrees.
It is in this context that Lombrosian theory is said to have
given birth to modern sociological or clinical school which
regards criminal as a by-product of his conditions and
experience of life.
One thing Lombroso's work has definitely accomplished, and
which will remain forever a monument to his name is that the
criminal man must be studied and not simply crime in the
abstract; that the criminal must be treated as an individual
and not his act alone considered.
At a later stage Lombroso himself was convinced about the
futility of his theory of atavism and therefore extended his
theory of determinism to social as well as economic situations
of criminals. Thus he was positive in method and objective in
approach which subsequently paved way to formulation of
multiple-causation theory of crime by the propounders of
sociological school of criminology
 Lombroso accepted that there could be extenuating
circumstances under which an individual might be forced to
commit crime. Therefore, besides looking to the crime strictly
from the legal standpoint, the judicial authorities should not
lose sight of the circumstantial conditions of the accused
while determining his guilt and awarding punishment.
 CONCLUSION
 Even though the modern positivism in criminology has
developed its own systemic views in which it is told that
there is little scope for Lombroso’s Atavism and is quite
described as ‘Lombrosian Myth’ in Criminology, we
cannot fully close our eyes regarding the contribution of
Lombroso to the development of the science of
criminology.
 It can be rightly commented that the sociologists
emphasise on the external factors, psychologists on the
internal factors, while Lombroso held that both had a
common denominator– the ‘individual’.
 The ‘individualistic’ approach in crime and criminology is
the foundation on which the present pillars and
structures of criminology is built.
THANK YOU