CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY: WHAT IT STUDIES AND MAIN EXPONENTS - SCIENCE - 2024

The criminal anthropology is a branch of anthropology whose purpose is to scientifically investigate the crime. It deals with studying 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 examined, 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; 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 one, which stems from a dissent from the Italian school. It admits the importance of the physiology and anatomy of the criminal, but denies its preceding character. Instead, give greater preponderance in criminal conduct to sociological and psychological aspects.

What does criminal anthropology study?

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

Research in criminal anthropology focuses on two fundamental factors: the criminal facts themselves 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.

Faced with a criminal act, try to objectively discover what led an individual to commit a crime or commit a crime.

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

In the first half of the 19th century the lines of investigation 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 of criminal anthropology

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

Based on these elements, criminal anthropology draws a line of research to explain this fact, from the biological and ethological point of view. Study all the characteristics of the offender to interpret his criminal behavior.

This science is not interested in establishing value judgments about criminal behavior, since it deals with unraveling the crime from the reality or perspective of the criminal; In other words, it tries to elucidate what it was that led the offender to engage in a certain criminal conduct, be it with a criminal record or not.

Main exponents

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

Cesare Lombroso

He was an Italian doctor born in Verona, Piedmont (1835), with concerns for 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 surgeon at the University of Vienna. His doctoral thesis was entitled Study on Cretinism in Lombardy '.

In 1871, while observing the skull of a criminal named Villella, he determined several anomalies in it. From that moment on, he considered that criminal behavior is influenced by certain cranial deformities and that these deformities present similarities to some animal species.

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

Being the director of a madhouse between 1871 and 1872, he studied the differences between criminals and insane people. He published his Memoirs on criminal asylums, where he established that the criminal is actually a patient with very precise cranial malformations.

Asylum for criminals

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

On April 15, 1876, he published the experimental anthropological treatise on 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 university students dropped out of their studies to enroll 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 antropologia criminale.

Lombroso believed that a “criminal type” existed, as a result of hereditary and degenerative factors rather than the environment. His ideas were rejected at first but later applied successfully in the treatment of criminal insanity.

Enrico Ferri

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

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

He dedicated his efforts to ensuring that Italian legislation had a positivist criminal code. For this, in 1921 he presented a bill made by a commission that 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 various writings that would serve as sociological support and legal guidance for 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 Penalty and Positive Criterion of Penalty.

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