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.
