The criminal anthropology It is the discipline that studies the relationship between criminal activities and anthropological factors. Originally, this branch of anthropology focused solely on the physical characteristics of individuals who committed crimes, following the belief that there were aspects of the physical that only criminals had..
The Italian Cesare Lombroso is considered the creator of criminal anthropology. This criminologist and doctor studied in the 19th century the physical characteristics of criminals, reaching the conclusion that they had a different physiology than ordinary and innocent people.
Lombroso and the rest of the first students of this theory were influenced by social Darwinism and the positivist school. However, these theories that only took into account the study of physical features were rejected by new research.
In a more contemporary era, criminal anthropology has introduced into its object of study aspects such as the psychology of the subject, the influence of the environment and the personal circumstances of criminals. Likewise, in recent decades, investigations have been conducted on the possible influence of genetics on criminals, without finding conclusive evidence..
Already at the end of the 16th century and at the beginning of the 17th century theories appeared about a morphological origin of criminal behavior in human beings..
Scientists Franz Gall and Johann Spurzheim developed the craniological and phrenological theories that proposed that criminals had skulls with different shapes and sizes from those of the rest of the population.
In the mid-nineteenth century these ideas evolved into criminal anthropology. The founder of this discipline was the Italian Cesare Lombroso, who published his ideas in the work The delinquent man (1875).
In 1870, Cesare Lombroso dissected the skull of a famous criminal in Italy. In his analysis he found several anomalies, which led him to carry out a more complete study on the physical characteristics of criminals and those affected by serious mental illnesses..
The Italian published his results in his work Medical-psychological fragments, an antecedent of what would be his most famous work, The Delinquent Man. In both, he affirmed that there was a type of person whom he called a "born criminal" and that he could be recognized by his physical characteristics.
Criminal anthropology is a branch of anthropology whose object of study is the physical, mental and morphological features of criminals. With the data collected, an attempt is made to know the behavior and personality of the individuals or organizations that commit crimes.
Criminal anthropology uses the same methodology as general anthropology when analyzing the human being. Among other aspects, you must analyze anatomy and physiology, psychology or demography, always taking into account criminal activity.
In its origins, this discipline was strongly influenced by the idea that there was a less developed type of person who was responsible for the crimes. These born criminals could be recognized by the physical differences they presented compared to non-criminal individuals.
In the context of the time, the first half of the 19th century, it was common for race to also be taken into account when defining the physical and psychological traits of the born criminal..
Later, starting in the 1930s, criminal anthropology was associated with concepts such as eugenics, which sought to eliminate the physiological defects of human beings to improve the species.
Over time, several studies disproved the idea of the existence of physical differences that explain criminal behavior. From that moment on, this discipline began to include aspects such as psychology, the social environment or economic factors in its analysis..
The final objective of this discipline is to try to find common patterns that explain the criminal act, that is, to know the cause for which crimes are committed.
Criminal anthropology, as with all branches of anthropology, uses other disciplines to obtain its results. Psychology, genetics or criminal law are essential.
One of the disciplines that most collaborates with criminal anthropology is forensic anthropology, which aims to study human remains to discover the causes of death, the origin, sex or ethnicity of the person or the time of death..
This discipline is a sub-branch of physical anthropology and is dedicated to studying the measurements of a human being. In the field of criminology, investigators measure each part of the human body to obtain data that can be useful to discover those responsible for the crime, as well as for the trial.
In contemporary criminal anthropology it is essential to use psychology, a discipline that is responsible for analyzing the mental and emotional state of the offender. Psychology is responsible, for example, for determining if you suffer from any type of disorder that is related to the crime committed.
The father of criminal anthropology, the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso, believed that in 1871 he found a relationship between madness and crime.
In 1876 he published a work in which he explained his theory: Experimental anthropological treatise on the delinquent man. This work is considered as the one that established criminology as a science.
Lombroso was influenced by Charles Darwin's theories on evolution. According to his theory of the born criminal, criminals belong to a less evolved human subspecies. Among the physical characteristics that would distinguish them from the rest of the individuals were the large jaws and pronounced frontal sinuses, among other physical features..
The work carried out by Lombroso was intended to be able to identify criminals before they committed a crime. To do this, you had to look at physical features such as those mentioned, as well as others such as lower cranial capacity, scarcity of hair or greater agility..
Lombroso also included among the characteristics of what he called a "born criminal" aspects such as laziness, lack of moral sensitivity, the non-existence of remorse or the taste for sexual pleasures..
Enrico Ferri was an Italian sociologist and criminologist who claimed that moral responsibility should not be considered when analyzing a crime. For this author, free will did not exist, so only social responsibility should be taken into account.
Unlike Lombroso, Ferri did not focus on the physical features of criminals. According to his theories, psychological characteristics, such as lack of moral sensitivity and remorse, were more important.
Likewise, he affirmed that it was important to study aspects such as writing, literature and art as responsible for the creation of a criminal personality.
With his idea of the lack of individual responsibility, he tried to get the Italian government to change its penal code, although he did not succeed..
The American psychologist William Herbert Sheldon stood out within this discipline by creating the theory of somatypes.
This theory linked each type of body to a form of behavior, intelligence, the role of the individual in society and his propensity to commit crimes. According to their studies, which have been refuted, most criminals have a mesomorphic body, that is, broad shoulders and broad muscles..
This American anthropologist from Harvard Earnest University conducted a detailed study in 1939 in which he compared more than 10,000 inmates in his country's prisons with about 3,000 non-criminal people.
Hooton claimed to have found "biological inferiority" in criminals. The anthropologist discarded the idea that there was a unique physical type for criminals, but he did maintain that some groups had peculiar physical features. In conclusion, he pointed out that the crime had its origin in a mixture of social and biological forces..
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