Lombroso Cesare is a famous forensic scientist, psychiatrist and sociologist. He is the founder of the Italian school of criminal anthropology. This article will describe his biography.
Lombroso Cesare was born in Verona in 1836.The boy’s family was quite wealthy, as it owned a lot of land. In his youth, Cesare studied Chinese and Semitic languages. But he could not make a calm career. Imprisonment in a fortress on charges of conspiracy, material deprivation, participation in the war aroused in the young man an interest in psychiatry. Cesare published the first articles on this topic at the age of 19, while studying at the Faculty of Medicine (University in Pavia). In them, the future psychiatrist told about the problem of cretinism. The young man independently mastered such difficult subjects as social hygiene and ethnolinguistics. In 1862 he was awarded the title of professor of medicine, and later - criminal anthropology and legal psychiatry. Lombroso also headed the clinic of mental illness. The decisive role in its intellectual formation was played by the philosophy of positivism. Its main postulate is the approval of the priority of scientific knowledge, which was obtained experimentally.
Cesare Lombroso is the founderanthropological direction in criminal law and criminology. The main features of this trend are that it is necessary to introduce the method of natural science into criminology - observation and experience. And the identity of the offender must become a center for learning.
They were carried out by a scientist in the 60snineteenth century. Cesare worked as a doctor at the time, and also participated in a campaign to eradicate banditry in southern Italy. The statistical material collected by the professor was a huge contribution to the development of criminal anthropology and social hygiene. The scientist analyzed the empirical data and concluded that poor socio-economic living conditions in the south of Italy contributed to the birth of people of a mentally and anatomically abnormal type in this area. In other words, these are ordinary criminal personalities. This anomaly Cesare revealed through psychiatric and anthropometric examination. On the basis of this, a prognostic assessment of the dynamics of the development of crime was made. With his conceptual approach, the scientist contested the position of official criminology, which placed responsibility only on the person who violated the law.
Lombroso the very first of the researchers appliedanthropometric method using craniograph. With this device, Cesare measured the sizes of the parts of the head and face of the suspects. The results were published by him in the work "Anthropometry 400 offenders", which was released in 1872.
The scientist formulated it in 1876.It was then that his work "Criminal Man" was released. Cesare believes that the offenders do not become, namely, are born. That is, according to Lambroso, a crime is as natural a phenomenon as death or birth. The professor came to this conclusion, comparing the results of studies of pathological psychology, physiology and anatomy of criminals with their anthropometric data. In his opinion, the offender is a degenerate, lagging behind in its development from the evolution of a normal person. Such an individual cannot control his own behavior, and the best way out is to get rid of him, depriving him of life or freedom.
There is also a classification of offendersformulated by Cesare Lombroso. Types of criminals, in his opinion, are: swindlers, rapists, thieves and murderers. Each of them has innate features of atavistic nature, which indicate the presence of a criminal inclination and a lag in development. The professor identified stigmata (physical characteristics) and mental traits, the presence of which will help to identify a person endowed with criminal tendencies from birth. Cesare considered the main signs of the offender to be a frowning glance, large jaws, a low forehead, a wrinkled nose, etc. Their presence makes it possible to identify the criminal before he committed the atrocity. In this regard, the scientist demanded that sociologists, anthropologists and doctors be brought to judges, and the question of guilt should be replaced by the question of social harm.
By the way, at the moment anthropometricmeasurements are carried out in almost all countries of the world. And this is typical not only for the special services and the army. For example, knowledge of anthropometry is necessary in the construction of civil things and objects, as well as to study the labor market (labor force).
Scientific views of cesare lombroso were prettyradical and did not take into account the social factors of crime. Therefore, the theory of the scientist was subjected to sharp criticism. Cesare even had to soften his own position. In his later works, he counted only 40% of offenders as innate anthropological type. Also, the scientist recognized the importance of non-hereditary - sociological and psychopathological - causes of crime. Based on this, his theory can be called biosociological.
Perhaps this is the most famous work of Cesare Lombroso."Genius and insanity" was written by him in 1895. In this book, the professor put forward one main thesis. It sounds like this: “Genius is an abnormal activity of the brain, bordering on epileptoid psychosis.” Cesare wrote that in physiological terms, the similarity of geniuses with the obsessed is simply amazing. They can be traced the same reaction to atmospheric phenomena, and heredity and race affect their birth the same. Many geniuses had insanity. These included: Schopenhauer, Rousseau, Newton, Swift, Cardano, Tasso, Schumann, Comte, Ampere and a number of artists and entertainers. In an annex to his book, Lombroso described the anomalies of the skulls of geniuses and gave examples of the literary works of crazy authors.
Its most valuable part of the heritage isresearch Cesare left it for this discipline. The essay "Anarchists" and "Political Revolution and Crime" - these are two works written by him on this topic. These works are still popular in the homeland of the scientist. The phenomenon of political crime was common in Italy in the 19th and 20th centuries in the form of anarchist terrorism. The professor investigated him from the point of view of considering the identity of the criminal, who was sacrificially devoted to the utopian ideal of social justice. The scientist explained the nature of such behavior by the devaluation of the highest goals of public justice, corruption of politicians and the crisis of democracy in the Italian parliament.
Another famous work of Cesare Lombroso is “Love for the Insane”. She reveals the manifestation of this feeling in mentally ill people.
Cesare Lombroso, whose books are known throughoutworld, became one of the first to use in the forensic science achievements of physiology. In 1880, the scientist began to measure the pulse and pressure of the suspects during the interrogation procedure. Thus, he could easily determine whether a potential criminal is lying or not. A device for measuring pressure and pulse called ...
In 1895, Lombroso Cesare publishedresults obtained after the use of laboratory instruments during interrogation. In one of these studies, the professor used a “plethysmograph”. The experiment went like this: a murder suspect was asked to do a number of mathematical calculations in his mind. In this case, the device connected to it recorded the pulse. Then, a potential criminal was shown several photographs of wounded children (among them there was a picture of the murdered girl). In the first case, his pulse jumped, and in the second he was close to normal. From this, Cesare concluded that the suspect was innocent. And the results of the investigation confirmed his case. It was probably the first case of using a lie detector recorded in the literature that led to an acquittal. And he said that the control of the physiological reactions of a person can not only reveal the information hidden by him, but also establish innocence.
The scientist died in Turin in 1909.
The criminological ideas of the professor were widelyknown in our country. They are presented in a series of lifetime and posthumous editions of Cesare Lombroso: “Woman-criminal and prostitute”, “Anti-Semitism”, “Anarchists”, etc. In 1897, the scientist came to the congress of Russian doctors, who gave the Italian an enthusiastic reception. In his memoirs, Cesare reflected that period of his biography. He condemned the social order of Russia for police brutality (“suppression of character, conscience, thoughts of a person”) and authoritarianism.
Этот термин был широко распространён в советский period and designated the anthropological direction of the school of criminal law. Particularly criticized the teachings of Cesare about the born criminal. Soviet lawyers believed that this approach is contrary to the principle of legality, and also has a reactionary and anti-people orientation, as it condemns the revolutionary actions of the exploited people. Such a biased ideologized approach rejected many of the merits of the professor in the study of the root causes of protest and extremist types of social struggle.
Несмотря на ошибочность и справедливую критику Some of the postulates of his own theory, Lombroso Cesare - one of the most prominent scientists of the nineteenth century. He was a pioneer in introducing objective methods into legal science. And his works gave a significant impetus to the development of legal psychology and criminology.
