CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY. — It is that branch of anthropology which, using the same naturalistic methods as that science, studies the criminal man in all his somatic and psychic characteristics (the term “anthropology” being a synthesis of all human aspects), and, on the basis of these characteristics, together with the 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 current evolved aspect, this discipline, which assumes as its fundamental principle that the offense is always, in every case, the product of two orders of factors: the endogenous or intrinsic ones, inherent to the personality of the agent, and the exogenous or extrinsic ones, inherent to the physical and social environments; whereby the crime is conceived as an action both linked to the personality of the one who commits it and connected with the influences that the external factors of the physical world and of social life exert upon him. Criminal anthropology thus has its foundations in various disciplines from which it draws, all cooperating toward a single result: biology, pathology, psychology, psychopathology, sociology, statistics, racial studies, ethology, demography, and mesology; yet these cannot be fused into a whole except within the orbit of penal law.
Criminal anthropology subsequently passed through various phases. Born as a positive science, it upheld the anthropological determinism of crime, in contrast to the self-determining principle of the classical juridical school, founded on the doctrine of free will and moral imputability of man (Carrara, Pessina, etc.); evolving thereafter with the progress of research, it abandoned its original extreme positions, attenuating some of its primitive unilateral assertions and taking into account the advanced sociological studies and especially of psychology, which today occupies a primary place in this young discipline.
This evolutionary process now leads criminal anthropology to study: a) the crime (v.) in its external materiality, since, due to the intimate connection linking personalities to their actions, these reveal the psychic facts that led their authors to commit them; b) the criminal (v.) in all his psychic personality (in the affective, volitional, and intellectual spheres) and in the inner process of the development of the crime, from its conception to its preparation and execution; c) the strictly biological personality of the offender in its normal, abnormal, degenerative, and pathological characteristics, whether congenital or acquired. According to different authors, greater value is attributed and precedence given now to one and now to the other of these studies.
The origin of criminal anthropology (so named by its founder Cesare Lombroso) dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, directly connecting to the concepts of the French psychiatrist Morel, who in 1857 enunciated the doctrine—on which his religious convictions about the “fall” of man exerted an influence—of “degeneration,” conceived by him as a deviation from a perfect primordial human type. Associated with Morel are two other French alienists of the same period: Moreau de Tours, to whom we owe the theory of the relationship 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 traits of inferiority. Lombroso, drawing not a few ideas from the aforementioned thinkers and especially from Magnan, Darwin, Lubbock, Haeckel, in short from the entire evolutionist current then in great vogue, initially presented (1876) his now so well-known “criminal type” or, as Ferri called it, the “born criminal”: a variety of the human species, a savage, a primitive, a throwback to prehuman stages of life, produced by atavistic heredity (atavism), with marked regressive traits revealed by an imposing symptomatological picture rich in structural, functional, and psychic anomalies, deeming in it inseparable the somatic aspect from the psychic one. He then modified his original conception of the “primitiveness” of the criminal, considering him as a degenerate of more or less strictly pathological nature; then, following Prichard, as a moral madman; and finally affirmed that criminality is a variety of epilepsy (epileptic equivalent), in which convulsions are replaced by violent and irresistible impulses to commit crime. Thus, from the median occipital depression of the brigand Villella, one arrived straight at the heart of moral freedom and the freedom of the will. At times a savage, at times a child, at other times a sick man, but always “a criminal agent, in any condition, precisely because of organic necessity” (M. Carrara), the Lombrosian “born criminal,” the object of merciless criticism even among positivists themselves, has remained, one might say, a pseudoscientific construct, unsupported even by the rule of large numbers.
In 1877 the jurist Garofalo, adhering to the Lombrosian school, posited alongside juridical crime a natural crime, giving a definition of crime that was not juridical but sociological; but what is most significant is that he enunciated, in its fundamental core, what would later become 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, and the prevalence of the former over the latter in case of conflict; moreover, the dangerousness of the offender as the criterion and measure of criminal repression.
By organically fusing Garofalo’s doctrine with Lombroso’s teachings, Enrico Ferri, a jurist, grafted criminal sociology onto this framework, applying to the study of criminality the Comtean and Spencerian system, and affirming that crime is the resultant of individual conditions reacting to a given physical (cosmic-terrestrial) and social environment. For Ferri, “innate delinquency” is nothing other than “a personal physiopsychic predisposition to crime, which may not lead to criminal acts if contained by favorable circumstances in the environment”; hence the non-admission of the fatal inevitability of crime due to purely organic causes and the recognition of the high value of prevention. Also a denier of human freedom, Ferri shifted the center of responsibility from moral guilt to legal responsibility; thus abolishing the principle of guilt and retribution, he substituted 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), emphasizing economic determinism.
The field shifted toward criminal psychology through the work of Niceforo, with his theory of “latent criminality” (1902), according to which crime is nothing other than the refinement of the inferior ego (seat of active, primitive psychic formations, charged with deep selfish, aggressive, antisocial instincts inherent in every man), at the surface of the superior ego (seat of evolved sentiments). These concepts were taken up by Patrizzi, Lombroso’s successor to his chair, who, repudiating Lombrosian theories, reverted 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 base and selfish instincts nestled in the paleopsyché, of ancient and solid structure, over the ethical sentiments of the neopsyché, of recent and weak structure.
It should also be noted that the so-called "depth psychology," whether adhering to Freudian principles or not, can contribute to the study of certain types of delinquents or specific cases of criminality. According to Freud's psychoanalysis (v.), crime in neurotic criminals — who may be said to constitute the proper subject of all psychoanalytic criminology — would be determined by a compelling sense of guilt that drives the individual to offend in order to be punished; according to Adler's individual psychology, the subject would offend to free themselves from conflicts arising from a sense of inferiority. However, neither of these doctrines can, as they claim, provide a general theory of criminality.
The anthropological conception of crime has recently found new vigor — hence the name "neo-Lombrosianism" — in the constitutionalist theories (De Giovanni, Viola), which relate individual temperaments to a particular organic constitution with specific reactions to exogenous stimuli, and especially in contemporary human biotypology (Pende), which interprets and evaluates the individual type through a unified correlational investigation of all elements — somatic and psychic — that constitute II. Following this synthetic approach, Di Tullio, rejecting pathologism, has referred to constitution both for explaining criminality and for classifying delinquents, describing the "delinquent constitution," which can be observed to a greater or lesser degree in all criminals, except for pure occasional offenders. In this approach, as in Ferri's, the motive is not "necessity to commit crime" but rather "predisposition," and psychological factors, particularly psychopathological ones, are also considered.
Also noteworthy is the doctrine — which we might call _biopsychological-constitutional_ — of Kretschmer, which assumes as its principle the correlation between body and mind, distinguishing various types of bodily constitution to which particular psychic characteristics generally correspond; this has been applied by some of his students (Viernstein, Michel, Rohden, Bohmer, Riedl) to the study of criminals.
Following an unbroken thread that leads from the names of Despine, with his fundamental work (1868), through Kraft-Ebing, Kraus, Sommer, Gross, to those of Patrizi and De Sanctis, today the a. c. is clearly moving, among some authors (Niceforo, Grispigni, Flesch), toward a fundamentally psychological approach. This can be summarized in the principle that psychic factors are the primary, immediate cause of criminal resolution; other factors influence it indirectly. Since the crime, in the final analysis, consists in a psychic activity (which may be normal, abnormal, or pathological), it follows that the preeminent part of the a. c. must be psychological, always taking due account of the influence of organic constitution. As Gemelli affirms, "the progress of psychology leads to demonstrating 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; hence, the individual must be studied in their organic and psychic constitution, in their tendencies and aptitudes, in their psychic differentiation as manifested in character, which may present itself as an extreme variation of common types and thus still be normal, or fall within the pathological sphere."
THE A. C. IN CATHOLIC CRITIQUE AND ITS PRESENT PRACTICAL VALUE. — What has been said suffices to explain the lively opposition constantly manifested by Catholics against the a. c. of an extreme Lombrosian stamp: bound to pure materialism (biological determinism), it denies human freedom, stripping the terms of merit and demerit, reward and punishment of all meaning, which provides grounds for rejecting its premises and conclusions. The same can be said of theories imbued with absolutist sociologism, in which the principle of exogenous determinism of crime (sociological determinism) prevails. This cannot, however, be said of the a. c. as it presents itself in its current phase (and this is precisely why the term "new a. c." has been used), even if it has not yet reached its definitive systematization, with many questions remaining unanswered and numerous assumptions still to be considered working hypotheses. This is largely due to the fact that each scholar in this discipline (biologists, sociologists, jurists, psychologists) has employed the resources of their own field and from the standpoint of their specialty, so that in this complex field of study, paths have been pursued that are now similar, now different, now diametrically opposed. Even today, too many scholars of this science look almost exclusively to organic factors, and particularly morbid ones, to find the basic etiogenetic elements in the dynamics of crime, and thus maintain that only biologists have the monopoly of the a. c. For too many, the _agitur_ tyrannically replaces the _agit_; and although many work to renew the a. c. by stripping it of its dominant naturalism, their minds are still so imbued with it that, even unconsciously or at least implicitly, they follow positivistic conceptions of the purest materialism, even while affirming the opposite. It is not enough to observe that a delinquent has a particular constitution or a particular disease to assert that their crime is causally related to them: there are no biological or pathological stigmata of crime; hence, one must beware of falling into the error of mistaking casual correlations for causal ones.
Yet beyond these criticisms, it must be acknowledged that the a. c. has rendered great services in the fields of penal and penitentiary disciplines. From its earliest phase, its laudable concern has been not to neglect the study of the delinquent, directing investigation toward the agent rather than the objectively considered action, for those tasked with defining crime, tracing its causes, and measuring sanctions. Also noteworthy is the impetus it has given to social reform efforts and, in general, to all initiatives aimed at prophylaxis and therapy of crime, particularly in the areas of education and re-education. The a. c. has exerted an undeniable and beneficial influence on the penal laws of various countries, and first and foremost of Italy. For centuries, the delinquent was ignored or rather taken for granted or neglected: all criminal law revolved, and in many cases still revolves, around two poles: the crime and the punishment. Whatever its methodological and programmatic errors may be, it cannot honestly be denied that the a. c. has merit in drawing the attention of scholars and legislators to the necessity of studying the _homo delinquens_. Thanks to the antagonism between the two fundamental schools — the classical and the positive schools of criminal law — other more temperate, intermediate schools emerged; among these, the third school (also called legal positivism) gained prominence, principles of which inspired the Italian penal code of 1889 (Zanardelli). A compromise between the third school and the positive school (and not, as is often insisted, the positive third school, the positive school, and the classical school), transcending the two opposing schools by incorporating vital elements from each, is the penal code of 1930 (Rocco), which represents a notable evolution in criminal law.
This current code, while not adopting the postulates of the positive school insofar as they depart from the fundamental principle of the freedom of human actions, and instead enshrining the voluntarist principle in articles 42 and 85 (i.e., that of imputability as the basis of criminal responsibility), takes into consideration the personality of the offender in the provisions concerning his mental conditions (articles 88 and 89), in the system of circumstances (articles 59-70), in the evaluation of motives for committing crimes (articles 61 and 62), in the assessment of the capacity to commit crimes for the purposes of punishment (article 133), and finally and above all in the institution of administrative security measures (articles 202-208), suggested by a wisely preventive mindset, allowing the latter half of this new institution to serve in the defense of society against socially dangerous individuals.
Turning to comparisons with canon law, one must well note the pioneering spirit and practical sense of the Church, which as early as the Council of Trent (session XIII, de ref., chap. 1) admonished ordinaries to prefer prevention to repression of the infractions of their subjects; and in Book V of the Code of Canon Law, it contemplates the *remedia poenaria* placed alongside ecclesiastical penalties (canons 2306-2311), and with profound scientific insight warns (canons 2218, §1) that to observe an equitable proportion between the penalty and the crime, one must consider not only the objective gravity of the law but also the age, education, upbringing, sex, social condition, mental state of the offender, and whether he acted under the impulse of passion or grave fear: in short, all those elements capable of forming an exact judgment on the personality of the offender and the motives that drove him to act.