CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY. – This is that branch of anthropology which, using the same naturalistic methods as that science, studies the delinquent man in all his somatic and psychic characteristics (since the term “anthropology” synthesizes all human aspects) and, on the basis of these, together with the physical and social environmental influences, seeks to explain the genesis of individual criminal acts, with the aim of arriving at a general interpretation of criminality. In this definition we may encompass this discipline in its present, developed form. It takes as its fundamental principle that the offense is always, in every case, the product of two orders of factors: endogenous or intrinsic factors, pertaining to the agent’s personality, and exogenous or extrinsic factors, pertaining to the physical and social environments; hence crime is conceived as an action both linked to the personality of the person who commits it and connected with the influences exerted upon him by the external factors of the physical world and of social life. 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, the study of races, ethnology, demography, mesology; these, however, can be fused into a whole only within the orbit of criminal law.
Criminal anthropology subsequently passed through various phases. Born as a positive science, it upheld the anthropological determinism of crime, in opposition to the autodeterminist principle of the classical legal school, founded on the doctrine of free will and the moral imputability of man (Carrara, Pessina, etc.); later evolving with the progress of research, it abandoned its original extreme positions, mitigating some of its primitive unilateral assertions and taking account of the advances in sociological studies, and especially of psychology, which today occupies a foremost place in this young discipline.
Its evolutionary process currently leads criminal anthropology to study: a) crime (v.) in its external materiality, since, through the intimate connection linking personalities to their actions, the latter reveal the psychic facts that led their authors to commit them; b) delinquent (v.) in his entire psychic personality (in the affective, volitional, and intellectual spheres) and in the internal 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 hereditary or acquired. Depending on the author, greater value is attributed and precedence given now to one and now to another of these fields of study.
The origin of criminal anthropology (so named by its founder Cesare Lombroso) dates back to the middle of the last century, being directly connected with the ideas of the French psychiatrist Morel, who in 1857 enunciated the doctrine—upon which his religious convictions concerning the “Fall” of man had exerted an influence—of “degeneration,” conceived by him as a deviation from an original perfect human type. Alongside Morel, two other French alienists of his time must be mentioned: Moreau de Tours, to whom we owe the theory of the relations between genius and hereditary neurosis (1859), and Despine, who illuminated the psychology of abnormal and criminal man (1868). Morel’s thesis was reversed by Magnan, for whom the degenerate represented the imperfect man of the remote past, reappearing in his atavistic characteristics of inferiority. Lombroso, drawing not a few ideas from those already mentioned, especially from Magnan, Darwin, Lubbock, and Haeckel—in short, from the entire evolutionist current, then held in high esteem—initially presented (1876) his now very well-known “criminal type,” or, as Ferri called it, the “born delinquent”: a variety of the human species, a savage, a primitive, a man held back at stages of prehuman life, produced by atavistic heredity (atavism), with marked regressive traits revealed by an imposing symptomatological picture rich in structural, functional, and psychic anomalies, since he regarded the somatic and psychic aspects as inseparable in II. He later modified his original conception of the criminal’s “primitivity,” considering him a degenerate of a more or less strictly pathological nature; then, following Prichard, a moral madman; finally, he asserted that criminality was 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 directly at the heart of moral freedom and freedom of the will. Sometimes a savage, sometimes a child, at other times a sick man, but always “acting criminally, in any condition, precisely by organic necessity” (M. Carrara), Lombroso’s “born delinquent,” the object of merciless criticism even among the positivists themselves, has remained, one may say, a pseudoscientific creature, since it was not even supported by the rule of large numbers.
In 1877 the jurist Garofalo, an adherent of the Lombrosian school, placed alongside the juridical crime a natural crime, giving crime a definition that was not juridical but sociological; but what matters most is that he enunciated, in its fundamental nucleus, what would later become the doctrine, 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, together with the precedence of the former, in the event of conflict, over the latter; furthermore, the dangerousness of the offender as the criterion and measure of criminal repression.
Organically combining Garofalo’s doctrine with Lombroso’s teaching, Enrico Ferri, a jurist, grafted criminal sociology onto this trunk, applying the Comtian and Spencerian system to the study of criminality, and asserting 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 physiopsychic predisposition to crime, which may not lead to criminal acts if restrained by favorable circumstances in the environment”; hence the rejection of the fatal inevitability of crime from 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; 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 asserted by Colajanni, a sociologist, as the exclusive factor in crime (sociological determinism), with emphasis on 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 resurfacing of the lower self (the seat of atavistic and primitive psychic formations, charged with the profound egoistic, aggressive, and antisocial instincts inherent in every man) on the surface of the higher self (the seat of evolved sentiments). These concepts were taken up by Patrizi, Lombroso’s successor in his chair, who, repudiating Lombrosian theories, returned to a psychological explanation of criminality with the doctrine of the “psychological monogenesis of crime,” which regards as the fundamental criminogenic nucleus the ascendancy of the brute and egoistic instincts harbored in the paleopsyche, of ancient and solid structure, over the ethical sentiments of the neopsyche, of recent and weak structure.
It is also worth noting the contribution that the so-called “depth psychology,” whether based on Freudian or Adlerian principles, can make to the study of certain types of delinquent or particular cases of criminality. According to Freud’psychoanalysis (v.), the crime of neurotic criminals—which may be said to constitute the proper object of all psychoanalytic criminology—would be determined by a sense of guilt impelling the subject to commit a crime in order to be punished; according to Adler’s individual psychology, the subject would commit a crime in order to free himself from conflicts determined by an inferiority complex; but neither of these doctrines can provide us, as they claim to do, with a general theory of criminality.
The anthropological conception of crime has found new vitality (hence the name “neo-Lombrosianism”) in recent times in constitutionalist theories (De Giovanni, Viola), according to which individual temperaments are related to a particular organic constitution characterized by 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 the elements—somatic and psychic—that constitute it; following this synthetic approach, Di Tullio, rejecting pathologism, has referred to constitution both for the explanation of criminality and as a criterion for classifying delinquents, describing the “delinquent constitution,” found to a greater or lesser degree in all offenders except purely occasional ones. In this approach, as earlier in that of Ferri, the notion of “necessitation to crime” does not predominate, but rather that of “predisposition,” and psychological and, more particularly, psychopathological factors are also taken into consideration.
Also to be recalled is the doctrine (which might be called 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 was applied by some of his pupils (Viernstein, Michel, Rohden, Bohmer, Riedl) to the study of criminals.
Following an unbroken line extending from the names of Despine, with his fundamental work (1868), Kraft-Ebing, Kraus, Sommer, and Gross, to those of Patrizi and De Sanctis, a. c. is today clearly tending, among certain authors (Niceforo, Grispigni, Flesch), toward a fundamentally psychological approach. This may be summarized in the following principle: psychic factors are the primary, immediate cause of the criminal resolution; other factors influence it indirectly. Since, therefore, the crime ultimately consists in a psychic activity (which may be normal, abnormal, or pathological), it follows that the predominant part of a. c. must be psychological, while always giving due consideration to the influence of 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; that individual must therefore be studied in his organic and psychic constitution, in his tendencies and aptitudes, in his psychic differentiation as manifested in character, which may present itself as an extreme variation of common types, and therefore still be normal, or may instead fall within the pathological field.”
CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN CATHOLIC CRITICISM AND ITS PRESENT PRACTICAL VALUE. — What has been said suffices to explain the strong and consistent opposition manifested by Catholics against the extreme Lombrosian brand of criminal anthropology: bound to sheer materialism (biological determinism), it denies human freedom, stripping all meaning from the terms merit and demerit, reward and punishment; this constitutes grounds for rejecting its premises and conclusions. The same can be said of theories imprinted with an absolutist sociologism, in which the principle of exogenous determinism of crime (sociological determinism) dominates. However, the same cannot be said of criminal anthropology as it presents itself in its current phase (and precisely for this reason we have spoken of a "new criminal anthropology"), even if it has not yet achieved its definitive systematization, many questions remain unanswered, and not a few propositions are still to be considered working hypotheses. All this is largely due to the fact that each of the cultivators of this discipline (biologists, sociologists, jurists, psychologists) has drawn on the resources of their own field and within the terrain of their own specialty, so that in this complex field of study, paths have been and are being pursued that are at times analogous, at times different, at times diametrically opposed. Even today, too many cultivators of this science look almost exclusively to organic factors, and especially morbid ones, to discern the basic etiogenetic elements in the dynamics of crime, and thus claim that only biologists should hold the monopoly of criminal anthropology. For too many, the agitur tyrannically replaces the agit; and while many work to renew criminal anthropology by stripping it of its dominant naturalism, their minds remain so impregnated with it that, even unconsciously or at least implicitly, they follow the most unadulterated materialistic positivist conceptions, despite affirming the contrary. It is not enough to observe that a criminal has a particular constitution or a particular illness to assert that his crime is in a causal relationship with them: there are no biological or pathological stigmata of crime; thus, one must beware of mistaking causal correlations for causal correlations.
Beyond these criticisms, it is only right to recognize the great services rendered by criminal anthropology in the field of penal and penitentiary disciplines. Its primary merit, from its earliest phase, has been to stimulate the study of the criminal, focusing investigation on the agent rather than on the action objectively considered, for those entrusted with the grave task of defining crime, tracing its motives, and measuring its sanctions. It must also be noted the impetus it has given to social reform and, in general, to all initiatives aimed at the prophylaxis and therapy of crime, especially in the sectors of education and re-education. Criminal anthropology has exerted an undeniably advantageous influence on the penal laws of various countries, and first and foremost those of Italy. For centuries, the criminal was ignored or rather taken for granted or neglected: all criminal law revolved, and in many cases still revolves, between two poles: crime and punishment. Whatever its methodological and programmatic errors, one cannot honestly deny criminal anthropology the merit of having drawn the attention of scholars and legislators to the necessity of studying homo delinquens. Thanks to the antagonism between the two fundamental orientations, respectively proper to the classical and positive schools of criminal law, other more temperate, intermediate ones emerged; among these, the third school (also called juridical positivism) asserted itself, whose principles inspired the Italian penal code of 1889 (Zanardelli). A compromise between the third school and the positive school (and not, as is often inaccurately stated, between the positive and classical schools), indeed, an attempt to overcome the two opposing orientations by capturing the vital elements of both, is the penal code of 1930 (Rocco), which represents a notable evolution of criminal law.
This current code, while not embracing the postulates of the positive school insofar as they depart from the fundamental principle of the freedom of human actions, and instead enshrining the voluntaristic principle in articles 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 regarding his psychic conditions (articles 88 and 89), in the system of circumstances (articles 59-70), in the evaluation of motives for committing crime (articles 61 and 62), in the assessment of the capacity to commit crime 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 mentality, the ultimate aim of this new institution being the defense of society from socially dangerous individuals.
Turning to comparisons with canon law, one must rightly highlight the precursory spirit and practical sense of the Church, which already in the Council of Trent (sess. XIII, de ref., cap. 1) admonished ordinaries to prefer preventing rather than repressing the infractions of their subjects; and in Book V of the CIC, it contemplates remedia poenalia placed alongside ecclesiastical penalties (cann. 2306-11), and with profound scientific intuition warns (can. 2218, § 1) that to observe a fair proportion between punishment and crime, one must consider not only obiectum et gravitas legis, but also the age, education, upbringing, sex, social condition, mental state of the offender, whether he acted under the impulse of passion or grave fear: all those elements, in short, capable of forming an exact judgment on the personality of the offender and the motives that drove him to act.
BIBL.:
Per la critica cattolica: A. Gemelli, La lotta contro il delitto, Milano 1920; id., La personalità del delinquente nei suoi fondamenti biologici e psicologici, Milano 1946; G. Ballerini, La scuola positiva di diritto penale, Roma 1921; F. Carnelutti, Teoria generale del reato, Roma 1933; per l'a. c. in genere: C. Lombroso, L'uomo delinquente, Torino 1876; E. Ferri, Sociologia criminale, Torino 1892; R. Garofalo, Criminologia, Torino 1885; per la legislazione: P. Del Giudice, Storia del diritto penale italiano, Milano 1896; A. Rocco, Relazione sul progetto del codice penale, Roma 1929; per il diritto canonico: P. Gasparri, Codicis Iuris Canonici Fontes, Romae 1926-39.
A. Gemelli