In 1871, while performing an autopsy on a notorious bank robber, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso saw something unusual. It was a small hollow at the base of the skull, under which lay an enlarged section of the spinal cord. The feature was rare in Europeans, but he had seen it in lower apes and certain ‘inferior races’ of South America. Eureka. ‘At the sight of that skull,’ he later wrote, he understood the biological nature of the criminal – ‘an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity’.
So was born the theory of ‘the criminal man’, the idea that certain people are biological criminals. According to Lombroso, these people represented an evolutionary throwback who, by a quirk of biology, had inherited the brain structure of their primitive forbearers. They exhibited poor impulse control, brutality and selfishness, lack of empathy, and had no sense of higher morality. ‘Theoretical ethics passes over these diseased brains as oil does over marble, without penetrating it,’ he wrote. They bore outward signs of this condition as well, including a low brow, big jaw and long arms, like apes. At trials, Lombroso could identify a guilty person simply by observing his physical features.
[For more of this story, written by Douglas Starr, go to https://aeon.co/essays/linking...e-an-act-of-eugenics]
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