The Mismeasure of Man

by Stephen Jay Gould

  As an intriguing sidelight, unknown to most people today, the supposed link between degeneracy and racial ranking left us at least one legacy—the designation of “Mongolian idiocy” or, more blandly, “mongolism” for the chromosomal disorder now generally called “Down’s syndrome.” Dr. John Langdon Haydon Down, an English patrician, identified the syndrome in a paper entitled “Observations on an ethnic classification of idiots” (Down, 1866).

  Down argued that many congenital “idiots” (a quasi-technical term in his day, not just an epithet) exhibited anatomical features, absent in their parents but present as defining features of lower races. He found idiots of the “Ethiopian variety”—“white negroes, although of European descent” (1866, p. 260)—others of the Malay type, and “analogues of the people who with shortened foreheads, prominent cheeks, deep-set eyes, and slightly apish nose, originally inhabited the American continent” (p. 260). Others approached “the great Mongolian family.” “A very large number of congenital idiots are typical Mongols” (p. 260). He then proceeded to describe, accurately, the features of Down’s syndrome in a boy under his charge—a few accidental similarities with Orientals (“obliquely placed” eyes and slightly yellowish skin), and a much larger number of dissimilar features (brown and sparse hair, thick lips, wrinkled forehead, etc.). Nonetheless, he concluded (1866, p. 261): “The boy’s aspect is such that it is difficult to realize that he is the child of Europeans, but so frequently are these characters presented, that there can be no doubt that these ethnic features are the result of degeneration.” Down even used his ethnic insight to explain the behavior of afflicted children: “they excell at imitation”—the trait most frequently cited as typically Mongolian in conventional racist classifications of Down’s time.

  Down depicted himself as a racial liberal. Had he not proven human unity by showing that the characters of lower races could appear in degenerates of the higher (1866, p. 262)? In fact, he had merely done for pathology what Lombroso was soon to accomplish for criminality—to affirm the conventional racist ranks by marking undesirable whites as biological representatives of lower groups. Lombroso spoke of atavisms that “liken the European criminal to the Australian and Mongolian type” (1887, p. 254). Yet Down’s designation persisted to our day and is only now fading from use. Sir Peter Medawar told me that in the late 1970s, he and some Asian colleagues persuaded the London Times to drop “mongolism” in favor of “Down’s syndrome.” The good doctor will still be honored.

  The influence of criminal anthropology

  Dallemagne, a prominent French opponent of Lombroso, paid homage to his influence in 1896:

  His thoughts revolutionized our opinions, provoked a salutary feeling everywhere, and a happy emulation in research of all kinds. For 20 years, his thoughts fed discussions; the Italian master was the order of the day in all debates; his thoughts appeared as events. There was an extraordinary animation everywhere.

  Dallemagne was recording facts, not just playing diplomat. Criminal anthropology was not just an academician’s debate, however lively. It was the subject of discussion in legal and penal circles for years. It provoked numerous “reforms” and was, until World War I, the subject of an international conference held every four years for judges, jurists, and government officials as well as for scientists.

  Beyond its specific impact, Lombrosian criminal anthropology had its primary influence in bolstering the basic argument of biological determinism about the roles of actors and their surroundings: actors follow their inborn nature. To understand crime, study the criminal, not his rearing, not his education, not the current predicament that might have inspired his theft or pillage. “Criminal anthropology studies the delinquent in his natural place—that is to say, in the field of biology and pathology” (Lombroso’s disciple Sergi, quoted in Zimmern, 1898, p. 744). As a conservative political argument, it can’t be beat: evil, or stupid, or poor, or disenfranchised, or degenerate, people are what they are as a result of their birth. Social institutions reflect nature. Blame (and study) the victim, not his environment.

  The Italian army, for example, had been bothered by several cases of misdeismo, or, as we would say, fragging. The soldier Misdea (Fig. 4.5), who gave the phenomenon its Italian name, had murdered his commanding officer. Lombroso examined him and proclaimed him “a nervous epileptic …, very affected by a vicious heredity” (in Ferri, 1911). Lombroso recommended that epileptics be screened from the army and this, according to Ferri, eliminated misdeismo. (I wonder if the Italian army got through WW II without a single incident of fragging by nonepileptics.) In any case, no one seemed disposed to consider the rights and conditions of recruits.

  The most dubious potential consequence of Lombroso’s theory was neither realized in law nor proposed by Lombroso’s supporters: prescreening and isolation of people bearing stigmata before they had committed any offense—though Ferri (1897, p. 251) did label as “substantially just” Plato’s defense of a family’s banishment after members of three successive generations had been executed for criminal offenses. Lombroso did, however, advocate prescreening of children so that teachers might prepare themselves and know what to expect from pupils with stigmata.

  Anthropological examination, by pointing out the criminal type, the precocious development of the body, the lack of symmetry, the smallness of the head, and the exaggerated size of the face explains the scholastic and disciplinary shortcomings of children thus marked and permits them to be separated in time from their better-endowed companions and directed towards careers more suited to their temperament (1911, pp. 438–439).

  4.5 Four “born criminals,” including the infamous Misdea, who murdered his commanding officer.

  We do know that Lombroso’s stigmata became important criteria for judgment in many criminal trials. Again we cannot know how many men were condemned unjustly because they were extensively tattooed, failed to blush, or had unusually large jaws and arms. E. Ferri, Lombroso’s chief lieutenant, wrote (1897, pp. 166–167):

  A study of the anthropological factors of crime provides the guardians and administrators of the law with new and more certain methods in the detection of the guilty. Tattooing, anthropometry, physiognomy, physical and mental conditions, records of sensibility, reflex activity, vaso-motor reactions, the range of sight, the data of criminal statistics … will frequently suffice to give police agents and examining magistrates a scientific guidance in their inquiries, which now depend entirely on their individual acuteness and mental sagacity. And when we remember the enormous number of crimes and offenses which are not punished, for lack or inadequacy of evidence, and the frequency of trials which are based solely on circumstantial hints, it is easy to see the practical utility of the primary connection between criminal sociology and penal procedure.

  Lombroso detailed some of his experiences as an expert witness. Called upon to help decide which of two stepsons had killed a woman, Lombroso declared (1911, p. 436) that one “was, in fact, the most perfect type of the born criminal: enormous jaws, frontal sinuses, and zygomata, thin upper lip, huge incisors, unusually large head (1620 cc) [a mark of genius in other contexts, but not here], tactile obtuseness with sensorial manicinism. He was convicted.”

  In another case, based on evidence that even he could not depict as better than highly vague and circumstantial, Lombroso argued for the conviction of a certain Fazio, accused of robbing and murdering a rich farmer. One girl testified that she had seen Fazio sleeping near the murdered man; the next morning he hid as the gendarmes approached. No other evidence of his guilt was offered:

  Upon examination I found that this man had outstanding ears, great maxillaries and cheek bones, lemurine appendix, division of the frontal bone, premature wrinkles, sinister look, nose twisted to the right—in short, a physiognomy approaching the criminal type; pupils very slightly mobile … a large picture of a woman tattooed upon his breast, with the words, “Remembrance of Celina Laura” (his wife), and on his arm the picture of a girl. He had an
epileptic aunt and an insane cousin, and investigation showed that he was a gambler and an idler. In every way, then, biology furnished in this case indications which, joined with the other evidence, would have been enough to convict him in a country less tender toward criminals. Notwithstanding this he was acquitted (1911, p. 437).

  You win some, you lose some. (Ironically, it was the conservative rather than the liberal nature of jurisprudence that limited Lombroso’s influence. Most judges and lawyers simply couldn’t bear the idea of quantitative science intruding into their ancient domain. They didn’t know that Lombrosian criminal anthropology was a pseudo-science, but rejected it as an unwarranted transgression of a study fully legitimate in its own domain. Lombroso’s French critics, with their emphasis on the social causes of crime, also helped to halt the Lombrosian tide—for they, Manouvrier and Topinard in particular, could parry numbers with him.)

  In discussing capital punishment, Lombroso and his disciples emphasized their conviction that born criminals transgress by nature. “Atavism shows us the inefficacy of punishment for born criminals and why it is that they inevitably have periodic relapses into crime” (Lombroso, 1911, p. 369). “Theoretical ethics passes over these diseased brains, as oil does over marble, without penetrating it” (Lombroso, 1895, p. 58).

  Ferri stated in 1897 that, in opposition to many other schools of thought, criminal anthropologists of Lombrosian persuasion were unanimous in declaring the death penalty legitimate (1897, pp. 238–240). Lombroso wrote (1911, p. 447): “There exists, it is true, a group of criminals, born for evil, against whom all social cures break as against a rock—a fact which compels us to eliminate them completely, even by death.” His friend the philosopher Hippolyte Taine wrote even more dramatically:

  You have shown us fierce and lubricious orang-utans with human faces. It is evident that as such they cannot act otherwise. If they ravish, steal, and kill, it is by virtue of their own nature and their past, but there is all the more reason for destroying them when it has been proved that they will always remain orang-utans (quoted favorably in Lombroso, 1911, p. 428).

  Ferri himself invoked Darwinian theory as a cosmic justification for capital punishment (1897, pp. 239–240):

  It seems to me that the death penalty is prescribed by nature, and operates at every moment in the life of the universe. The universal law of evolution shows us also that vital progress of every kind is due to continual selection, by the death of the least fit in the struggle for life. Now this selection, in humanity as with the lower animals, may be natural or artificial. It would therefore be in agreement with natural laws that human society should make an artificial selection, by the elimination of anti-social and incongruous individuals.

  Nonetheless, Lombroso and his colleagues generally favored means other than death for ridding society of its born criminals. Early isolation in bucolic surroundings might mitigate the innate tendency and lead to a useful life under close and continual supervision. In other cases of incorrigible criminality, transportation and exile to penal colonies provided a more humanitarian solution than capital punishment—but banishment must be permanent and irrevocable. Ferri, noting the small size of Italy’s colonial empire, advocated “internal deportation,” perhaps to lands not tilled because of endemic malaria: “If the dispersion of this malaria demands a human hecatomb, it would evidently be better to sacrifice criminals than honest husbandmen” (1897, p. 249). In the end, he recommended deportation to the African colony of Eritrea.

  The Lombrosian criminal anthropologists were not petty sadists, proto-fascists, or even conservative political ideologues. They tended toward liberal, even socialist, politics and saw themselves as scientifically enlightened modernists. They hoped to use modern science as a cleansing broom to sweep away from jurisprudence the outdated philosophical baggage of free will and unmitigated moral responsibility. They called themselves the “positive” school of criminology, not because they were so certain (though they were), but in reference to the philosophical meaning of empirical and objective rather than speculative.

  The “classical” school, Lombroso’s chief opponents, had corn-batted the capriciousness of previous penal practice by arguing that punishment must be apportioned strictly to the nature of the crime and that all individuals must be fully responsible for their actions (no mitigating circumstances). Lombroso invoked biology to argue that punishments must fit the criminal, not, as Gilbert’s Mikado would have it, the crime. A normal man might murder in a moment of jealous rage. What purpose would execution or a life in prison serve? He needs no reform, for his nature is good; society needs no protection from him, for he will not transgress again. A born criminal might be in the dock for some petty crime. What good will a short sentence serve: since he cannot be rehabilitated, a short sentence only reduces the time to his next, perhaps more serious, offense.

  The positive school campaigned hardest and most successfully for a set of reforms, until recently regarded as enlightened or “liberal,” and all involving the principle of indeterminate sentencing. For the most part they won, and few people realize that our modern apparatus of parole, early release, and indeterminate sentencing stems in part from Lombroso’s campaign for differential treatment of born and occasional criminals. The main goal of criminal anthropology, wrote Ferri in 1911, is to “make the personality of the criminal the primary object and principle of the rules of penal justice, in place of the objective gravity of the crime” (p. 52).

  Penal sanctions must be adapted … to the personality of the criminal.… The logical consequence of this conclusion is the indeterminate sentence which has been, and is, combatted as a juridical heresy by classical and metaphysical criminologists.… Prefixed penalties are absurd as a means of social defense. It is as if a doctor at the hospital wanted to attach to each disease the length of a stay in his establishment (Ferri, 1911, p. 251).

  The original Lombrosians advocated harsh treatment for “born criminals.” This misapplication of anthropometry and evolutionary theory is all the more tragic because Lombroso’s biological model was so utterly invalid and because it shifted so much attention from the social basis of crime to fallacious ideas about the innate propensity of criminals. But the positivists, invoking Lombroso’s enlarged model and finally even extending the genesis of crime to upbringing as well as biology, had enormous impact in their campaign for indeterminate sentencing and the concept of mitigating circumstances. Since their beliefs are, for the most part, our practices, we have tended to view them as humane and progressive. Lombroso’s daughter, carrying on the good work, singled out the United States for praise. We had escaped the hegemony of classical criminology and shown our usual receptiveness for innovation. Many states had adopted the positivist program in establishing good reformatories, probation systems, indeterminate sentencing, and liberal pardon laws (Lombroso-Ferrero, 1911).

  Yet even as the positivists praised America and themselves, their work contains the seeds of doubt that have led many modern reformers to question the humane nature of Lombroso’s indeterminate sentences and to advocate a return to the fixed penalties of classical criminology. Maurice Parmelee, America’s leading positivist, decried as too harsh a New York State law of 1915 that prescribed an indeterminate sentence of up to three years for such infractions as disorderly conduct, disorderly housekeeping, intoxication, and vagrancy (Parmelee, 1918). Lombroso’s daughter praised the complete dossier of moods and deeds kept by volunteer women who guided the fortunes of juvenile offenders in several states. They will “permit judges, if the child commits an offense, to distinguish between a born criminal and a habitual criminal. However, the child will not know of the existence of this dossier, and this will permit him the most complete freedom to develop” Lombroso-Ferrero, 1911, p. 124). She also admitted the burdensome element of harassment and humiliation included in several systems of probation, particularly in Massachusetts, where indefinite parole might continue for life: “In the Central Probation Bureau of Boston, I have rea
d many letters from proteges who asked to be returned to their prisons, rather than continue the humiliation of their protector always on their backs (or “in their bundles,” as she said literally in French—Lombroso-Ferrero, (1911, p. 135).

  For the Lombrosians, indeterminate sentencing embodied both good biology and maximal protection for the state: “Punishment ought not to be the visitation of a crime by a retribution, but rather a defense of society adapted to the danger personified by the criminal” (Ferri, 1897, p. 208). Dangerous people receive longer sentences, and their subsequent lives are monitored more strictly. And so the system of indeterminate penalties—Lombroso’s legacy—exerts a general and powerful element of control over every aspect of a prisoner’s life: his dossier expands and controls his fate; he is watched in prison and his acts are judged with the carrot of early release before him. It is also used in Lombroso’s original sense to sequester the dangerous. For Lombroso, this meant the born criminal with his apish stigmata. Today, it often means the defiant, the poor, and the black. George Jackson, author of Soledad Brother, died under Lombroso’s legacy, trying to escape after eleven years (eight and a half in solitary) of an indeterminate one-year-to-life sentence for stealing seventy dollars from a gas station.

  Coda

  Tolstoy’s frustration with the Lombrosians lay in their invocation of science to avoid the deeper question that called for social transformation as one potential resolution. Science, he realized, often acted as the firm ally of existing institutions. His protagonist Prince Nekhlyudov, trying to fathom a system that falsely condemned a woman he once wronged, studies the learned works of criminal anthropology and finds no answer: