Who is Cesare Lombroso ? What is Cesare Lombroso known for ?
Cesare Lombroso was the founder of the criminology as we know it today. Lombroso, who was also the pioneer of the Italian Positivist Criminology School, was more heatedly discussed in the middle of the twentieth century rather than the period when he expressed his views.
Lombroso’s “scientific” ideas were clustered in the book “The Criminal Man” (L’Homme Criminel) published in 1876. In the study, a robot picture of those involved in crime and those who could commit crimes at any time was drawn and profiled.
Lombroso was a thoroughly eclectic scientist; Combining disciplines such as psychiatry, Social Darwinism and physiognomy, he put forward a “theory” claiming to expose possible criminals by attempting to analyze the character from the physical characteristics of the criminal. The “theory” was based on the fact that the “guilty-born” person transferred this trait to the next generations and physical symptoms gave him away.
“Those with physical disorders are prone to commit crimes,” said Lombroso. In fact, according to him, the perpetrators or potential criminals were immediately recognizable from his mindset!
Defending that the organism is the most important data in detecting the criminal, Lombroso said that the structural features (atavism) from distant relatives transmitted the tendency to commit crime from generation to generation as well as various mental diseases. His followers formed the “Lombroso School” by adopting these views. Ekol representatives also developed a “remediation” method for the elimination of physical disorders, such as those advocating closure in the “treatment” of mentally ill patients.