Lombroso

Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) was an Italian physician, criminologist, and a pioneering figure in the positivist school of criminology. He is often regarded as the founder of scientific approaches to crime, arguing that criminal behavior could be studied through biological and anthropological means rather than purely moral or legal explanations.

Lombroso proposed that criminality is partly inherited and that there are measurable physical traits associated with criminal tendencies. He introduced the concept of atavism, the idea that some individuals are evolutionary throwbacks with primitive features that predispose them to crime. In his influential work The Criminal Man (L'uomo delinquente, 1876), he described bodily anomalies or stigmata—such as certain facial features, cranial variations, and other physiological markers—that he claimed distinguished criminals from non-criminals. He conducted empirical studies of convicts in Italy and argued that anatomy, physiology, and psychology together could predict criminal behavior. He also studied female offenders and expansion of criminal anthropology beyond male crime.

Impact and reception: Lombroso’s ideas helped establish criminology as a scientific discipline and influenced later reformers and scholars in the fields of penology and criminal anthropology. However, his conclusions were contested on methodological grounds, and his emphasis on biology came under heavy criticism for racial and gender bias and for overgeneralizing from biased samples. Modern criminology largely rejects the notion of criminality determined by simple physical traits, instead recognizing a complex interplay of biological, psychological, social, and environmental factors. Lombroso spent much of his career in Turin, where he helped found the Museo di Antropologia Criminale (Museum of Criminal Anthropology).