Criminal Anthropology: What Studies and Main Exponents

The criminal anthropology It is a branch of anthropology whose purpose is to scientifically investigate crime. It deals with the study of its origin and causes, and tries to determine what level of responsibility both society and the person committing the crime have.

In this sense, the remedies, the causes of the crime and also the effect of the punishment on it are considered, considering it as a means of reform and prevention. Given its nature and the scope of the work it develops, it can be affirmed that criminal anthropology is composed of three parts or fields: general, special and practical.

The Italian doctor Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) is considered the precursor of criminal anthropology; he founded the positivist school of criminology. In addition, there are two other precursors of this school: Enrico Ferri and Rafael Garófalo.

The other school of criminal anthropology is the French, which derives from a dissidence of the Italian school. This admits the importance of the physiology and anatomy of the criminal, but denies its precedent. Instead, give greater preponderance in criminal behavior to the sociological and psychological aspects.

What study?

Criminal anthropology studies the physical and mental characteristics of criminals, as well as social and environmental factors that could influence their criminal behavior.

Research in criminal anthropology focuses on two fundamental factors: criminal acts properly and the human being as a whole.

It studies the personality and behavior of the criminal, as well as that of criminal organizations, based on their morphological and physical-psychic features. In this way, try to discover common patterns.

In the face of a criminal act, it tries to objectively discover what led an individual to commit a crime or to commit a crime.

It uses other scientific disciplines and fields of knowledge such as psychology, criminal law and genetics, among others. The criminal anthropology comprehensively studies the delinquent and his criminal behavior in the social environment where he develops.

In the first half of the nineteenth century the research lines of criminal anthropology were oriented towards two disciplines or pseudosciences called phrenology and physiognomics. Both studied and tried to explain the personality and criminal human behavior based on elements of racial and physiognomic order.

However, these theories were refuted and dismissed as absolute truths to explain criminal behavior.

Interest in criminal anthropology

For the study of criminal behavior, criminology provides the scientific elements that throws the fact; that is, everything that surrounds a crime scene, how it happened, the material authors, and other related data.

From these elements the criminal anthropology draws a line of investigation to explain that fact, from the biological and ethological point of view. Study all the characteristics of the offender to interpret their criminal behavior.

This science is not interested in establishing value judgments about criminal behavior, because it deals with unraveling the crime from the reality or perspective of the criminal; that is to say, it tries to elucidate what it was that led the delinquent to commit a certain criminal behavior, be it with antecedents or not.

Main exponents

The positive Italian school of criminal anthropology had among its most outstanding exponents Cesare Lombroso, Enrico Ferri and Rafael Garófalo.

Cesare Lombroso

He was an Italian doctor born in Verona, Piedmont (1835), with concerns about the study of human behavior. At the age of 20 he wanted to show that intelligence was alien to women.

He studied Medicine at the University of Pavia, but eventually graduated as a medical surgeon at the University of Vienna. His doctoral thesis was titled Study on cretinism in Lombardy '

In the year 1871, while observing the skull of a criminal named Villella, he determined several anomalies in this one. From that moment he considered that criminal behavior is influenced by certain cranial deformities and that these deformities have similarities with some animal species.

The idea of ​​Lombroso was not to establish a genetic-criminal theory but rather to find a criterion or differential pattern between the offender and a mental patient. However, with this discovery -which changed his life- he began his studies on criminal anthropology, as he baptized it.

Being director of an asylum between 1871 and 1872, he studied the differences between criminals and demented people. He published his Memories of criminal asylums , where he established that the criminal is really a patient with very precise cranial malformations.

Asylums for criminals

Lombroso believed that the mentally ill should not be in prisons but in institutes aimed exclusively at them. For him, the criminals should not be in prisons either, but they should be interned in insane asylums for criminals.

On April 15, 1876, he published the Experimental anthropological treatise of the delinquent man . This date will be formally considered as the formal birth of criminology as a science.

In 1878 he opened the free course of Psychiatry and Criminal Anthropology. Such was the success that the university students left their studies to register and attend the course. The other two exponents of criminal anthropology, Enrico Ferri and Rafael Garófalo, became his students in 1879.

In this same year the Positive School was officially born, whose ideas are exposed through the Archivio di psichiatria e anthropologia criminale .

Lombroso believed that there was a"criminal type", as a result of hereditary and degenerative factors rather than the environment. His ideas were rejected at first but then applied successfully in the treatment of criminal madness.

Enrico Ferri

Ferri was also Italian. In 1882 he published his book he titled Socialism and criminality . Previously, in his thesis, he tried to demonstrate that free will is nothing more than a fiction; for that reason, moral responsibility had to be replaced by social responsibility.

He directed the Scuola di Applicazione Guirídico-Criminale, which offered a course on criminality divided into four modules: the delinquent, the crime, the sanctions and the procedure.

He devoted his efforts to ensuring that the Italian legislation had a positivist criminal code. For this, in 1921 he presented a bill made by a commission he chaired.

However, due to the political situation, it could not be approved until 1930, when he had already died.

Rafael Garófalo

Garófalo was also part of the Positive School, where he published several writings that would serve as a sociological support and legal guidance to the new school. In these he established concepts such as danger and special and general prevention.

His most important work was the book Criminology . Other of his most outstanding works were Recent studies on the penalty Y Positive criterion of the penalty .

The author was concerned about the practical application of criminological theory at the legislative and judicial level. It established that the penalties would be applied according to the classification of the offender and not the crime committed.

Garófalo opposed the absolute determinism of his colleagues, with whom he had notable philosophical differences; He was a supporter of the death penalty.

References

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2. Criminal Anthropology. Viewed scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu
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5. Criminal Anthropology in Its Relation to Criminal Jurisprudence. jstor.org
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9. Main Exponents of Criminology. Consulted by psicocrimiuanl.blogspot.com
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