Criminal Anthropology

CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY. - It is that branch of anthropology which, with the same naturalistic methods of that science, studies the delinquent man in all his somatic and psychic characteristics (the term "anthropology" being a synthesis of all human aspects), and, on the basis of these, together with physical and social environmental influences, aims to explain the genesis of individual criminal acts, with the intent of arriving at a general interpretation of criminality. In this definition we can encompass, in its present evolved form, this discipline. It assumes as a fundamental principle that crime is always, in every case, the product of two orders of factors: endogenous or intrinsic, inherent in the personality of the agent, and exogenous or extrinsic, inherent in the physical and social environments; whereby crime is conceived as an action both bound to the personality of the one who commits it and connected with the influences exercised upon him by the external factors of the physical world and of associated life. Criminal a. therefore has its bases in various disciplines, from which it draws, cooperating toward a single result: biology, pathology, psychology, psychopathology, sociology, statistics, raciology, ethnology, demography, mesology; which, however, cannot merge into a whole except within the orbit of criminal law.

Criminal a. has subsequently passed through various phases. Born as a positive science, it upheld the anthropological determinism of crime, in contrast with the self-determinist principle of the classical juridical school, founded on the doctrine of free will and of the moral imputability of man (Carrara, Pessina, etc.); evolving later with the progress of research, it abandoned its original extreme positions, attenuating certain of its primitive unilateral affirmations and taking into account the advanced sociological studies and especially those of psychology, which today occupies a place of the first order in this young discipline.

This evolutionary process currently leads criminal a. to study: a) crime (v.) in its exterior materiality, since, by the intimate nexus linking personalities to their actions, these reveal the psychic facts that led their authors to commit them; b) the delinquent (v.) in all his psychic personality (in the affective, volitional, intellectual spheres) and in the interior process of the development of the crime, from ideation to preparation and execution; c) the strictly biological personality of the offender in his normal, abnormal, degenerative, pathological characteristics, whether hereditary or acquired. Depending on the authors, greater value is attributed and prevalence given now to one and now to another of these studies.

The origin of criminal a. (so named by its founder Cesare Lombroso) goes back to the middle of the last century, connecting directly to the concepts of the French psychiatrist Morel, who in 1857 enunciated the doctrine - influenced by his religious convictions regarding the "fall" of man - of "degeneration," which he conceived as a deviation from a primeval perfect human type. Associated with Morel are two other French alienists of his same time: Moreau de Tours, to whom is owed the theory of the relations between genius and hereditary neurosis (1859), and Despine, who illuminated the psychology of the abnormal and criminal man (1868). Morel's thesis was inverted by Magnan, for whom the degenerate represented the imperfect man of the remote past, reappearing in his atavistic characters of inferiority. Lombroso, drawing not a few ideas from the aforementioned and especially from Magnan, from Darwin, from Lubbock, from Haeckel, in short from the entire evolutionist current, then held in great honor, presented at first (1876) his now so well-known "criminal type" or, as Ferri called him, "born delinquent": a variety of the human species, a savage, a primitive, one retarded in stages of prehuman life, the product of atavistic heredity (atavism), with pronounced regressive traits denounced by an imposing symptomatic picture rich in structural, functional and psychic anomalies, deeming in him the somatic and the psychic aspects inseparable. He then modified his original conception of the "primitiveness" of the criminal, considering him as a degenerate of a more or less strictly pathological nature; then, in the wake of Prichard, as a moral insane person; finally he affirmed criminality to be a variety of epilepsy (epileptic equivalent), in which convulsions are replaced by violent and irresistible impulses to commit crime. Thus, from the median occipital fossa of the brigand Villella one arrived straight at the heart of moral freedom and freedom of the will. At times a savage, at times a child, at other times a sick man, but always "acting criminally, in any condition, precisely by organic necessity" (M. Carrara), the Lombrosian "born delinquent," the object of merciless criticism even among the positivists themselves, has remained, one might say, a pseudoscientific creature because it is not even supported by the rule of large numbers.

In 1877 the jurist Garofalo, an adherent of the Lombrosian school, placed beside the juridical crime a natural crime, giving crime a definition not juridical but sociological; but what matters most is that he enunciated, in its fundamental nucleus, what was later the doctrine and the goal, and above all the great merit, of the positive school: special or individual prevention as a function of criminal repression in addition to general prevention, as well as the prevalence of the former, in case of conflict, over the latter; moreover, the dangerousness of the offender as criterion and measure of criminal repression.

Organically fusing Garofalo's doctrine with the teachings of Lombroso, Enrico Ferri, a jurist, grafted criminal sociology onto this trunk, applying the Comtian and Spencerian system to the study of criminality, and affirming that crime is the resultant of individual conditions reacting to a given physical (cosmic-telluric) and social environment. For Ferri, "innate delinquency" is nothing other than "a personal physio-psychic predisposition to crime, which may not reach criminal acts if contained by favorable circumstances in the environment"; whence the non-admission of the fatal inevitability of crime from purely organic causes and the recognition of the high value of prevention. A denier himself of human freedom, Ferri shifted the center of responsibility from moral guilt to legal responsibility; having thus abolished the principle of guilt and retribution, he replaced it with that of dangerousness and social defense.

The social element, introduced by Ferri, was affirmed by Colajanni, a sociologist, as the exclusive factor of crime (sociological determinism), placing the accent on economic determinism.

The field shifts toward criminal psychology through the work of Niceforo, with his theory of "latent criminality" (1902), for which crime is nothing other than the re-emergence of the lower self (seat of atavistic, primitive psychic formations, charged with the deep egoistic, aggressive, antisocial instincts, inherent in every man), to the surface of the higher self (seat of evolved sentiments). These concepts are taken up by Patrizi, Lombroso's successor to his chair, who, repudiating Lombrosian theories, goes back to a psychological explanation of criminality with the doctrine of the "psychological monogenesis of crime," which considers as the fundamental criminogenic nucleus the predominance of the brute and egoistic instincts nested in the paleopsychism, of ancient and solid structure, over the ethical sentiments of the neopsychism, of recent and weak structure.

Also to be noted is the contribution that so-called "depth psychology," whether on Freudian or Adlerian principles, can bring to the study of some type of delinquent or some particular case of criminality. According to Freud's psychoanalysis (v.), crime, in neurotic criminals — who may be said to form the proper object of all psychoanalytic criminology — would be determined by a feeling of guilt driving the subject to commit crimes for the purpose of being punished; according to Adler's individual psychology, the subject would commit crimes in order to free himself from conflicts determined by an inferiority complex; but neither of these doctrines can give us, as they would wish, a general theory of criminality.

The anthropological conception of crime has found new vigor (whence the name "neo-Lombrosianism") in recent times, in constitutionalist theories (De Giovanni, Viola), according to which individual temperaments are placed in relation to a particular organic constitution with its characteristic reactions to exogenous stimuli, and especially in present-day human biotypology (Pende), which interprets and evaluates the individual type in a unitary correlational investigation of all the elements — somatic and psychic — that constitute it; following in the footsteps of this synthetic approach, Di Tullio, rejecting pathologism, made reference to the constitution both for the explanation of criminality and for a criterion of classification of delinquents, describing the "delinquential constitution," which can be found to a greater or lesser degree in all offenders, with the exception of purely occasional ones. In this approach, as already in that of Ferri, the motive of "necessitation to crime" does not dominate, but rather that of "predisposition," and psychological and especially psychopathological factors are also taken into account.

Also to be remembered is the doctrine (which we might call biopsychological-constitutionalist) of Kretschmer, which takes as its principle the correlation between body and psyche, distinguishing various types of bodily constitution to which particular psychic characteristics generally correspond; this doctrine has been applied by some of his pupils (Viernstein, Michel, Rohden, Bohmer, Riedl) to the study of criminals.

Following an uninterrupted thread that leads from the names of Despine, with his fundamental work (1868), of Kraft-Ebing, of Kraus, of Sommer, of Gross to those of Patrizi and De Sanctis, today criminal anthropology is clearly orienting itself, in the view of some authors (Niceforo, Grispigni, Flesch), toward a fundamentally psychological approach. This can be summarized in the following principle: psychic factors are the primary, immediate cause of the criminal resolution; the other factors influence it indirectly. Since crime consists, in the final analysis, in a psychic activity (which may be normal, abnormal, or pathological), it follows that the preeminent part of criminal anthropology must be the psychological one, always taking due account of the influence of the organic constitution. As Gemelli states, "the progress of psychology leads to the demonstration that the criminal act must be considered both in the environmental conditions in which it developed and was carried out and as a manifestation of the individual who committed it; who therefore must be studied in his organic and psychic constitution, in his tendencies and aptitudes, in his psychic differentiation as it manifests itself in character, which may present itself as an extreme variation of common types, and therefore still normal, or else fall within the pathological field."
CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN CATHOLIC CRITICISM AND IN ITS PRESENT PRACTICAL VALUE. — What has been said is enough to explain the lively opposition constantly shown by Catholics against the extremist Lombrosian brand of a. c.: bound to pure materialism (biological determinism), it denies human freedom, strips all meaning from the terms merit and demerit, reward and punishment; which constitutes grounds for rejecting its premises and conclusions. The same can be said of theories stamped with an absolutist sociologism, in which the principle of exogenous determinism of crime (sociological determinism) dominates. The same cannot be said, however, of a. c. as it presents itself in its present phase (and precisely for this reason there has been talk of a "new a. c."), even though it has not yet received its definitive systematization, many are the questions that remain unanswered, and not a few the assumptions still to be regarded as working hypotheses. And all this is due in large part to the fact that each of the cultivators of this discipline (biologists, sociologists, jurists, psychologists) has availed himself of the resources of his own field, and on the ground of his own specialty, so that in this complex field of study paths have been trodden, and are still trodden, now similar, now different, now diametrically opposed. Today, still, too many cultivators of this science look almost exclusively to organic factors, and especially to morbid ones, to discern in them the basic etiogenetic elements in the dynamics of crime, and they therefore want only biologists to have the monopoly of a. c. For too many, still, the agitur tyrannically replaces the agit; and although many work to renew a. c. by stripping it of its dominant naturalism, their minds are still so impregnated with it that, even unconsciously, or at least implicitly, they follow positivistic conceptions of the purest materialism, even while affirming the contrary. It is not enough to observe that a criminal has a particular constitution or a particular illness in order to affirm that his crime stands in a causal relationship with them: there are no biological or pathological stigmata of crime; for which reason one must beware of falling into the error of mistaking causal correlations for causal correlations.

But beyond these remarks it is dutiful to acknowledge the great services rendered by a. c. in the field of penal and penitentiary disciplines. Its chief merit has been, since its first phase, that of stimulating the study of the criminal, causing the investigation of those charged with the grave task of defining crime, tracing its motives, and measuring its sanctions to converge on the agent rather than on the action objectively considered. Note should also be taken of the impulse it gave to the work of social reclamation and, in general, to all initiatives tending toward the prophylaxis and therapy of crime, especially in the sector of education and re-education. A. c. has exercised on the penal laws of various countries, and first of all Italian ones, an indisputably advantageous influence. For centuries the delinquent man was ignored or rather tacitly assumed or neglected: the whole of penal law gravitated, and in many cases still gravitates, between two poles: crime and punishment. Whatever its errors of method and program, one cannot honestly deny a. c. the merit of having called to the attention of scholars and legislators the necessity of studying the homo delinquens. Thanks to the antagonism between the two fundamental orientations, proper respectively to the classical and the positive school of penal law, other more tempered, intermediate ones arose; among which the third school (also called that of legal positivism) established itself, and the Italian penal code of 1889 (Zanardelli) drew its principles from it. A compromise between the third school and the positive school (and not, as is often inaccurately stated, between the positive and the classical school), indeed, an attempt at overcoming the two contending orientations since it captures vital parts of both, is the penal code of 1930 (Rocco), which represents a notable evolution of penal law.

This code in force, while not accepting the postulates of the positive school insofar as they depart from the fundamental principle of the freedom of human actions, and instead engraving the voluntaristic principle in arts. 42 and 85 (that is, that of imputability as the basis of criminal responsibility), takes into consideration the personality of the offender in the provisions concerning his psychic conditions (arts. 88 and 89), in the system of circumstances (arts. 59-70), in the evaluation of motives for crime (arts. 61 and 62), in the evaluation of the capacity to commit crime for the purposes of punishment (art. 133) and finally and above all in the institution of administrative measures of security (arts. 202-208), suggested by a wisely preventive mentality, since the ultimate aim of this new institution consists in the defense of the community from socially dangerous individuals.

Passing to comparisons with canon law, one must well note the precursor spirit and practical sense of the Church which already at the Council of Trent (sess. XIII, de ref., cap. 1) admonished ordinaries to wish rather to prevent than to repress the infractions of subjects; and in liber V of the CIC, it contemplates the remedia poenalia placed alongside ecclesiastical penalties (cann. 2306-11), and with profound scientific insight it warns (cann. 2218, § 1) that in order to observe an equitable proportion between the penalty and the crime one must consider not only obiectum et gravitas legis, but also age, instruction, education, sex, social condition, state of mind of the offender, having acted under the impulse of passion or out of grave fear: all those elements, in short, capable of forming an exact judgment on the personality of the offender and on the motives that drove him to act.

Gislero Fiesch