The explosion of international interest in criminal man left a considerable quantity of ideological debris in its wake.110 At the 1889 Second International Criminal Anthropology Congress in Paris, French criminologists attacked Lombrosoian doctrine for its determinism, proposing instead to account for criminality with the concept of the “social milieu.”111 Gabriel Tarde and Paul Topinard voiced their opposition, as did Alexandre Lacassagne, who proposed a sociological explanation of crime.112 Other challenges to the “Italian School” focused on the reality of cranial anomalies, the statistical data, and the lack of criminality in women.113 The adoption of the Italian approach, Lacassagne had argued at the First Congress, would mean that jurists and legislators could “do nothing but cross their arms, or construct prisons in which to gather these misshapen creatures.”114 As the debates descended into disorganization and ad hominem attacks, the Italians voted en masse not to attend the Brussels congress. Criminal anthropology’s detractors either took a sociological approach—the socialist Turati asserting that “bourgeois Society is the biggest criminal”—or they downgraded the importance of biology by pointing to the existence of habitual or occasional criminals. Colajanni, the author of Criminal Sociology, made the compelling criticism that Lombroso and his followers had failed to find a single trait that was exclusive to delinquents. The Catholic Church, a firm opponent of criminal anthropology, resolutely defended the concept of free will, rehearsing the argument that crime was a function of immorality.115 Charles Féré, the author of Degeneration and Criminality (1895), blamed the genesis of crime on morality and inferior physiology. Charles Goring, a student of Karl Pearson’s biometric statistical school, similarly conflated the physical, the mental, and the moral in his description of the criminal.116
French anthropology—a powerful influence by the final quarter of the nineteenth century—was more open to ethnographic and cultural interpretations of human action. Police officer and creator of the “Bertiollage” system of anthropometrics, Alphonse Bertillon refused to accept the notion of born criminal, arguing that attempts at rehabilitation would be useless.117 One of Lombroso’s most influential opponents, the sociologist Gabriel Tarde, disputed the theory’s atavistic underpinnings, offering instead a psychosociological explanation of crime.118 Tarde’s social imitation theory proposed that criminal customs and habits were transformed into personological traits over time.119 Hostile to the Italians’ perceived fatalism, the French thought that heredity and social milieu were bound up in constant reciprocal exchange.120 The “social milieu is the broth of criminality,” Lacassagne wrote, “the microbe is the criminal.”121 Medical doctors maintained their influence within the French legal system. Even though they sought legal recognition for the limited mental responsibilities of the criminally insane, they attempted to avoid alienating jurists with excessive claims for institutional reform as the Italians had done.122 Because the French critique was consistent with the concerns of the legal community, a split between the new ideas and the classical doctrines was avoided.123
Lombrosoian criminal anthropology spread like a virus across Europe. It was well established in Spain by the start of the twentieth century. Félix de Aramburu, the vice-rector of the University of Oviedo, had given the first public exposition of Lombroso’s theories in 1886. Two years later Alvarez Taladriz and Rafael Salillas at the University of Alava founded the Revista de Antropología Criminal y Ciencias Médico-Legales, a monthly periodical in imitation of Lombroso’s journal. As the country’s foremost representative and promoter of criminal anthropology, Salillas came to be known as Spain’s “little Lombroso.”124 The penologist Pedro Dorado Montero and the lawyer and self-taught criminologist Bernaldo de Quirós y Pérez became the leading Spanish writers on the subject. The latter’s New Theories of Criminality of 1898 gave prominent place to the innovators of the Italian school. By the early years of the twentieth century, the Italian positivist approach to crime had significantly permeated Spanish universities, the police and prisons, the Institute of Social Reform, parliament, and the government. As in Italy, criminal anthropology’s mixture of radical and conservative tenets appealed to both ends of the political spectrum.125
From the 1890s into the early years of the twentieth century, both Italy and Spain were experiencing attacks from anarchist terrorists. Whereas in Italy criminal anthropology was a sufficiently influential doctrine to be used to placate and contain terrorism, this wasn’t the case in Spain. In his 1894 book on anarchists, Lombroso had attempted to demonstrate that assassins and bombers “were epileptic, insane, the victims of congenital disease of various sorts, degenerate, hysterical, and often suicidal.”126 He reframed their politically motivated acts as the “deeds of the mentally unbalanced, juvenile delinquents, and common criminals.” Thanks to “a virtual alliance” between the government and the Italian positivist school, criminal anthropology was able to obviate further dissent by individualizing and medicalizing political agitation.127 The result was a reconceptualization of the meaning of violence and a refusal to create political martyrs who might foment further protest. The Spanish government’s reliance on the classical notion of the rational and responsible individual law breaker led to a disastrous handling of two anarchist incidents in the first decade of the twentieth century.128 In 1906, after a needlessly politicized trial for attempted regicide, the anarchist educator Francisco Ferrer was inadvertently turned into a heroic martyr by the authorities. Three years later, he was made a scapegoat for being the ringleader of a riot in which one hundred people were killed by army reservists. Whereas criminal anthropology might have pathologized Ferrer and weakened his influence, instead he “became another Giordano Bruno or Galileo, an enlightened thinker who seemed to be the innocent victim of the reactionary policies of a Spanish government dominated by clerics—the sacrificial offering of a new Spanish Inquisition.”129
The German medical community showed a considerable interest in criminological questions from the 1880s. German doctors had long enjoyed a standing contact with the criminal justice system as forensic psychiatrists in the courts and as prison physicians in the correctional system. As a result, the medical profession felt compelled to respond to Lombroso’s biological theory of crime.130 By the 1870s it was standard procedure to call a medical doctor to the court if a defendant’s mental condition was in question. Ten years later it was known that there was a greater incidence of mental illness among prison inmates compared to the general population, although it was difficult to distinguish those who became ill after conviction from those who were so beforehand. Whereas pre-Lombrosian psychiatry was concerned with the offender as an exceptional phenomenon, the exploration of a general link between insanity and crime became the norm after Lombroso.
The German reception of Lombroso’s ideas took hold in the mid-1890s with expositions by Robert Sommer, Abraham Baer, Paul Näcke, Julius Koch, Hans Kurella, and Eugen Bleuler. Sommer accepted the notion of “endogenous criminal constitutions” but doubted the concept of “a type in the anatomical sense.” Although they also denied the notion of the born criminal, Baer and Näcke proposed that an unfavorable social environment would trigger criminality among a degenerate subpopulation. Koch drew attention to “moral debility,” a key factor in “cases in which immanent pathological characteristics of the individual turn a person into a criminal.”131 From the mid-1890s to the outbreak of the First World War, the most influential defense of the concept of the born criminal was in Emil Kraepelin’s Psychiatrie, a textbook that was in its eighth edition by 1915. Kraepelin had first introduced Lombroso’s work to the medical profession in his favorable review of L’uomo delinquente. Although he accepted that different types of criminal had differing somatic constitutions, Kraepelin rejected Lombroso’s atavism hypothesis and considered the concept of stigmata unnecessary. Degeneration theory became highly influential in German psychiatry, partly because it could be used to explain virtually any mental illness through its positing of generational decline, and also
because it was sufficiently flexible to accommodate both hereditarian and environmental aetiologies as well as explaining minor or borderline psychiatric conditions.132 Kraepelin, Bleuler, and Koch’s approach stripped the notion of the born criminal of its anthropological characteristics and redefined the concept in purely psychiatric terms. Gustav Aschaffenburg and Paul Näcke took a more complex view of the interaction of heredity and environment, arguing that many criminals suffered from general mental abnormalities that made them more likely to succumb to a life of crime. This approach subsequently came to dominate German criminology.133
In 1898 the Austrian judge Hans Gross founded the Archiv für Kriminal-Anthropologie und Kriminalistik. As the title of the journal suggested, the intention was to combine the study of scientific crime detection and the handling of scientific evidence. Gross had studied physics, psychology, medicine, and general science, as well as microscopy and photography.134 Every criminal case was a scientific problem to which the examining judge must apply the best scientific and technical aids available. Gross rejected Lombroso’s theory of the born criminal, maintaining instead that criminals functioned according to normal psychological mechanisms, knowledge of which was a crucial part of the investigating officer’s armory. A Criminalistic Institute was established at the University of Graz in 1912, and Gross’ Manual for the Examining Justice went through seven editions before 1915.
In continental Europe during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, criminology assembled itself around the concept of the “born criminal.” A “relic of a vanished race,”135 the born criminal was an anomaly, a prehistoric savage “living amidst the very flower of European civilization.”136 The notion of the born criminal was a rich and heterogeneous tapestry of concepts that weaved empirical data with the wisdom of folklore and tied the utopian dream of a crime-free state to an imaginative use of scientific technique. The new science resulted from transformations in an array of enterprises ranging from statistics, prison reform, and psychiatry.137 A variety of administrative elements also found their way into the discipline, including charitable and social work, the management of workhouses and slum housing, inquiries about the causes and extent of inebriety, and investigations into the employment and treatment of children. Although all ended up as ingredients in the modern criminological mixture, at the time “they were discrete forms of knowledge, undertaken for a variety of different purposes, and forming elements within a variety of different discourses,” none of which corresponded exactly with the criminological project that eventually formed.138 Only when a form of inquiry emerged that centered on the criminal could these various enterprises be drawn together under the umbrella of a specialist discipline.139
In the early nineteenth century the practical skills of magistrates and police detectives was of crucial importance in detecting the false appearances of disguised professional criminals, but toward the end of the century science came to organize knowledge around the criminal. While the earlier regime had been intimate and personal, and dominated by the immediacy of hands and eyes, the latter was abstract and theoretical, and governed by the distancing effects of physiological instruments and statistical tables. Although the miscreant was initially conceptualized as a fallen man, a victim of his own lusts and lack of personal discipline, he was, nevertheless, thought to be capable of moral action. This was not the case for criminal man, who was considered an irredeemably degenerate being, one incapable of functioning adequately in the modern world.
A discourse of otherness par excellence, the new science of criminology spoke of such types as prehistoric humans and contemporary primitives, promiscuous women and delinquent children, epileptics, and the morally insane. Despite their differences, all these species of human beings were believed to share a genealogy with that archetypal but abject figure—a “distinct category of social perception and analysis”140—the born criminal, homo criminalis. The notion of the category dominated all discussions of criminality until after the turn of the century. But the belief in criminal man prevented the emergence of other biological approaches to criminality. Although the technology that would eventually make up the lie detector became available to criminology in the 1880s, the instrument’s invention would have to wait until criminology had abandoned its first organizing concept of criminal man.
CHAPTER 2
“A vast plain under a flaming sky”
The Emergence of Criminology
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.
—Cesare Lombroso (1906)
Between the publication of Cesare Lombroso’s Criminal Man in 1876 and Charles Goring’s The English Convict in 1913, criminology emerged as a viable empirical endeavor. The period was a time of political strife across Europe, conducive to birth of an enterprise devoted to explaining and controlling deviance and dissent.1 Like earlier phrenological and degenerationist discourses, also associated with political messages, criminal anthropology was compatible with socialism, fascism, and liberalism, not to mention racism, sexism, and imperialism.2 Criminal anthropology blossomed together with a European-wide effort by progressive jurists and penal authorities to revise and update criminal codes that had been held since the late eighteenth century.3 Most of the existing statutes did not recognize limited degrees of mental responsibility, and few prison systems distinguished between habitual and insane criminals. Despite its formal egalitarianism, by the 1850s, criminal justice was perceived, in Britain at least, as being particularistic, discretionary, and embodied in personal relations.4 Criticism of the old system as a “lottery of justice” went hand-in-hand with appeals to base a new system on scientific (and, therefore, supposedly impartial) knowledge of the criminal.
A new human science, it has been suggested, does not emerge as a consequence of the accumulation and refinement of data and theory—these are science’s ambitions once established—but rather as a function of widely held social anxieties.5 A fledgling discipline obtains support if it addresses a moral panic or solves a social problem. Breaking with the Enlightenment principle that everyone should be treated equally, criminology promised to identify the sources of social danger by scientifically differentiating between intrinsic and extrinsic criminality.6 Criminology constructed homo criminalis as the problem, offering itself as the solution. Constructed “at the crossroads of moral philosophy and everyday social policy,”7 criminology was an empirical-political hybrid.8 As with the medical, phrenological, and statistical sciences from which it emerged, criminology’s scientific object was considered preeminently governable. Previously thought to be chaotic and unruly, criminological subjects were to be transformed into “calculable, disciplinable objects.”9
The focus here is on power. The political dimensions of criminological discourse led to the functioning of the complex enterprise of criminology with relative coherence and stability. The discipline’s language, including its argumentative and rhetorical strategies, as well as an interpretation of the role that “Lombroso” played within the discourse, were fundamental. Criminology endowed its texts and the image of its founding father with tremendous charismatic authority. Like the flywheel in a complex machine, charismatic authority ensured the smooth running of the criminological apparatus; indeed, this field has consistently invested in the charisma of its pioneers. The lie detector could not have been created without it.
In 1859, on the outbreak of the Italian wars of unification, Cesare Lombroso volunteered as a doctor in the army. He was particularly struck by his fellow soldiers’ tattoos, wondering if they could distinguish “the honest soldier from his vicious comrade.”10 Between 1863 and 1872, he was a director of insane asylums. By 1876, when he was appointed to the University of Turin, he had already published on
pellagra, cretinism, genius and insanity, brain pathology, and criminality. Italy was at this time in the throes of a debate about the definition of the nation state. According to some estimates, less than one percent of Italians spoke the national language, and seventy-five percent of the population was illiterate.11 Lombroso’s social evolutionary model of deviance articulated widespread social anxieties, proffered a new language of social representation, and created “a blueprint for disciplining groups that resisted integration into the new national culture.”12 His theory promised to unify Italy’s disparate cultures, languages, customs, and economies by delineating “a biological hierarchy that guaranteed power and control to white European adult men.”13 “Only we White people have reached the most perfect symmetry of bodily form,” he wrote in 1871, the year of unification: “Only we have created true nationalism.”14 If the criminal could be understood scientifically, Lombroso argued, then he and other threats to the social order could be excluded politically.15
“One would have to be blind ten times over,” Lombroso lamented in 1894, not to realize that “we are the second most backward amongst the peoples of Europe with regard to morality, wealth, education, industrial activity, agriculture, [and] justice.” He added scornfully, Italy held “the first place when it comes to uncultivated, malarial land, endemic illness … crime and the weight of taxes.”16 Although the contemporary moral panic over crime seems not to have been underpinned by any statistical evidence of rising crime rates, there was, nevertheless, a widespread popular belief that crime was on the increase. Above all, Lombroso’s ambition was to assist his nation’s march toward modernity by defending the state against dangerous individuals, both from within and beyond the state’s borders. Despite extensive emigration, this was a period of demographic and economic pressures in Italy.17 Although the notion of an atavistic throwback found an enthusiastic audience in this climate, Lombroso’s characterization of the Italian peasantry as savages was less a discovery as “a virtual reflex of the governing castes of the North when they ventured into the rural hinterlands.”18
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