Italian School of Criminology - Lombroso's Conception of The "atavistic Born Criminal"

Lombroso's Conception of The "atavistic Born Criminal"

The central idea of Lombroso's work came to him as he autopsied the body of a notorious Italian criminal named Giuseppe Villela. As he contemplated Villela's skull, he noted that certain characteristics of it (specifically, a depression on the occiput that he named the median occipital fossa) reminded him of the skulls of "inferior races" and "the lower types of apes, rodents, and birds". The term Lombroso used to describe the appearance of organisms resembling ancestral (prehuman) forms of life is atavism. Born criminals were thus viewed by Lombroso in his earliest writings as a form of human sub-species (in his later writings he came to view them less as evolutionary throwbacks and more in terms of arrested development and degeneracy). Lombroso believed that atavism could be identified by a number of measurable physical stigmata, which included protruding jaw, drooping eyes, large ears, twisted and flattish nose, long arms relative to the lower limbs, sloping shoulders, and a coccyx that resembled "the stump of a tail." The concept of atavism was glaringly wrong, but like so many others of his time, Lombroso sought to understand behavioral phenomena with reference to the principles of evolution as they were understood at the time. If humankind was just at one end of the continuum of animal life, it made sense to many people that criminals — who acted "beastly" and who lacked reasoned conscience — were biologically inferior beings. Thus understood, atavism became a popular concept, used for instance by the novelist Emile Zola in the Rougon-Macquart.