"I would not wait for them to commit crime": Cesare Lombroso's criminal anthropology in Croatia

Croatia is a Central European and Mediterranean country with a long maritime border with Italy. Throughout history, it was not only goods but also knowledge and medical practices that were exchanged over its borders. Following archival sources, individual informal networks, professional publications, daily newspapers, and public lectures, we aimed to present main channels by which Croatian intellectuals embraced Lombroso's criminal anthropology at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. We illuminated the fact that the adoption of Cesare Lombroso's concepts stimulated the joint engagement and communication of medical and legal realms in Croatia. Our analysis exposed the traces of Lombroso's ideas within the reform of the penal code, thus influencing forensic psychiatric practice. We showed how those ideas were translated into policy, politically exploited, and pitched into discussions employing rhetorical techniques, which led to the stigmatization of certain groups of people, particularly patients suffering from epilepsy. Our results also showed that, contrary to other countries that formed Austria-Hungary, the discussions about Lombroso's criminology waned in Croatia after the First World War. We believe that our results can close the gap on this topic, adding the evidence about the spread and influence of Lombroso's concepts within Austria-Hungary in the analyzed period.

"Social malaise... demonic agitation:" anarchism according to the criminology of the French physician Alexandre Lacassagne

This article analyzes the way anarchism and its followers were understood in L'assassinat du président Carnot, by the French physician Alexandre Lacassagne. A few months before the book was published, in June 1894, the president of France, Sadi Carnot, had been killed by the Italian anarchist Sante Geronimo Caserio. Lacassagne was called upon to perform the autopsy of Carnot's body and a psychiatric examination of Caserio. The results of these two analyses were published in the aforementioned book. He made his observations on the anarchist in the broader context of criminological debates pursued in the late nineteenth century, which were not restricted solely to the authors of Italian criminology.

Analysis of the crime scene model using three objects from the collection of the Hans Gross Museum of Criminology of the University of Graz

As part of the collection in the Hans Gross Museum of Criminology in Graz there are still three crime scene reliefs; two of which were made by Hans Gross himself. The practical purpose of these criminal landscape models is something one could speculate about, but such models may have been useful in two fields: in the criminal lab and in the courtroom. To see the reliefs in a scientific experimental context as well as under the aspects of artwork and topography is as essential as emphasizing their genuine military character.

[Psychiatry and criminology in Criminal Justice: Jury Trial Courts and Appellate Courts in the Federal District of Rio de Janeiro, during the 1930s]

As part of a research study on the 1930s and 1940s medical-criminological debate in Brazil, this research paper analyzes some of the uses and criticisms of arguments of a psychiatric and criminological nature, among certain jurists who carried out important work in the city of Rio de Janeiro during the 1930s. In this context, these magistrates, tended to have significant psychiatric and criminological knowledge, in spite of all the heterogeneity, plurality and differences in perspectives that existed among them. We selected two principal areas to conduct an analysis of the activities of these jurists: the Appellate Court of the Federal District of Rio de Janeiro and Jury Trial Courts.

[Archaeology and criminology--Strengths and weaknesses of interdisciplinary cooperation]

Interdisciplinary cooperation of archaeology and criminology is often focussed on the scientific methods applied in both fields of knowledge. In combination with the humanistic methods traditionally used in archaeology, the finding of facts can be enormously increased and the subsequent hermeneutic deduction of human behaviour in the past can take place on a more solid basis. Thus, interdisciplinary cooperation offers direct and indirect advantages. But it can also cause epistemological problems, if the weaknesses and limits of one method are to be corrected by applying methods used in other disciplines. This may result in the application of methods unsuitable for the problem to be investigated so that, in a way, the methodological and epistemological weaknesses of two disciplines potentiate each other. An example of this effect is the quantification of qualia. These epistemological reflections are compared with the interdisciplinary approach using the concrete case of the "Eulau Crime Scene".

The birth of modern criminology and gendered constructions of homosexual criminal identity

There is a dearth of engagement with LGBTQ populations, and sexual orientation and gender identity more broadly, in the field of criminology. This article analyzes the treatment of sexual orientation and gender identity at the birth of the discipline around the 1870 s. Through an analysis of Cesare Lombroso's writings, the article argues that a multifaceted stigma of deviance attached to homosexuality and gender nonconformity in early criminological theory. The article explains this multifaceted stigma in terms of broader political, social, cultural, and legal developments before and during the late nineteenth century that shaped modern Western conceptions of sexual orientation and gender identity.

[Truth curves on soot blackened paper--apparatus-supported lie detection in Graz in the 1920s]

In the 1920s, experiments with apparatus-supported lie detection and registration of expression were conducted at the Criminological Institute of the University of Graz in order to establish a sound methodological basis for testimony research. For this purpose, the criminologist Ernst Seelig used a method of lie detection developed by the psychologist Vittorio Benussi, which focuses on the analysis of breathing. Benussi had stated that the expiration after telling a lie was faster than after telling the truth, but Seelig could not verify this rule in forensic practice. Consequently, this method of lie detection was of no practical use for criminology. Seelig also carried out experiments with the method of registration of expression developed by the psychiatrist Otto Lowenstein. He registered the examinee's thoracic and abdominal breathing and the movements of the extremities with the help of a kymograph. By interpretation of the curves recorded on soot blackened paper, conclusions concerning the mental elements of an offence as well as the existence of certain dispositions and of amnesia should have been made possible. Seelig was convinced of the efficiency of this method. These experiments can be regarded as early attempts at finding not only simple facts but also answers to quasi-metaphysical questions concerning the "true nature" of man with the help of methods based on natural science and modern technology. Thus they are precursors of present-day neuroscience and neuro-imaging.

Cesare Lombroso: Methodological ambiguities and brilliant intuitions

This paper on Cesare Lombroso aims to assess his contribution to the criminological sciences. Although much praised worldwide, Lombroso was also the target of scathing criticism and unmitigated condemnation. Examination of Lombroso's method of data collection and analysis reveals his weakness. Indeed, his approach was extremely naive, simplistic and uncritical, aimed at irrefutably demonstrating the hypotheses that he championed, without exercising the methodological caution that was already beginning to characterize scientific research in his day. However, we must acknowledge that his biological theories of crime are undergoing new developments as a result of the recent success of biological psychiatry. On the other hand we should recognize that his work was not limited to his biological central theory; rather, it covered a range of cues and concepts, for the most part ignored, that demonstrate his interest in the economic, cultural and social factors that impact on crime. For these reasons, Lombroso appears to have anticipated many modern conceptions regarding delinquent behavior and criminal justice, such as those of restorative justice, the so-called "situational" theories of criminal behavior and white collar crime.

Freud's Mexican readers

This essay presents an overview of artists and writers who read Freud's work in Mexico between 1920 and 1968. The focus is on cultural readings of Freud: non-clinical interpretations of psychoanalysis that applied Freud's theory to literary, artistic, philosophical, or religious questions. The essay focuses on Salvador Novo, one of the poets associated with the Contemporáneos group, and his reading of the "Three Essays in the Theory of Sexuality;" Raúl Carrancá y Trujillo, a judge and criminologist who used psychoanalysis in his work, including the trial of Trotky's assassin; Octavio Paz, a poet and intellectual who wrote an essay on Mexican history, "The Labyrinth of Solitude," as a response to "Moses and Monotheism;" and Gregorio Lemercier, a Benedictine monk who placed his monastery in group analysis. These unorthodox readings of Freud opened the door for some of the most daring intellectual experiments in the 20th century.

[Traces of blood. The significance of blood in criminology at the turn of the 19th century]

In late 19th and early 20th century, criminology became institutionalized as an independent branch of science. Methodologically it focused on the 'exact' methods of the natural sciences, but also it tried to integrate the methods of the humanities. This mix of methods becomes visible in the treatment of blood, which on the one hand was an object of then brand new methods of scientific analysis (identification of human blood by the biological or precipitin method), and on the other hand was analyzed as a product of the magic and superstitious mentalities of criminals. The methodical tension resulting from this epistemological crossbreeding did not disturb the criminologists, for whom the reconciliation of opposite ways of thinking and researching seemed to be possible. In this encyclopaedic analysis of blood early criminology tried to combine the anthropological exploration of vampirism with the chemical and microscopic detection of antibodies and haemoglobin, thus mirroring the positivistic optimism that was then prevalent.

Punishing the mad bomber: questions of moral responsibility in the trials of French anarchist terrorists, 1886-1897

In late nineteenth-century France, several criminologists maintained that the perpetrators of the contemporary wave of anarchist terrorism were victims of mental disorders who deserved judicial leniency. French courts did not accept this theory, but instead declared the principal terrorists sane and fully responsible for their crimes and, based on this view, handed down severe sentences. Many criminologists accused the jurists of deliberately ignoring the mental illness of the anarchists because of government and public pressures to impose the death penalty, but evidence from the anarchist trials fails to support this charge. The controversy highlights the conflicts between the judicial establishment and the emerging discipline of criminology, whose pathological explanations of anarchist terrorism reflected a positivist attack on the traditional concepts of free will and moral responsibility, concepts the jurists viewed as fundamental to the legal system.

The Michael-Adler report (1933): criminology under the microscope

This paper details the responses made by social scientists as well as criminal justice practitioners during 1932 to a study focusing on the status of criminology by the Bureau of Social Hygiene. These responses ultimately led to the publication of the controversial Crime, Law and Social Science (1933), which gave much-needed direction to the development of criminology. Despite the importance of these responses to the creation of criminological thought, only one (by Edwin H. Sutherland) has previously been published. Examining the responses of all of the individual participants in the project gives a clearer picture of controversies and changes which ultimately occurred as the field of criminology gradually became institutionalized as an academic discipline.

[Hans Gross and the beginning of criminology on a scientific basis]

Modern criminology--if one wants to consider it a separate scientific discipline at all--is usually perceived as being mainly influenced by the methods of natural sciences supplemented by components from the field of psychology, which, at least in some of its conceptions, tends to define itself as a natural science, too. If we take a look at the history of science, we will see development of criminology in this direction was not necessarily inevitable. The scientific work of the Austrian Hans Gross (1847-1915), one of the founding fathers of scientific criminology, serves as an example of the way how natural sciences and their exact methods became established in the methodological apparatus of modern criminology, although in praxi his claim for the application of exact methods was all too often replaced by irrational and intuitive ways of working. Still, Hans Gross' fundamental decision for the exact methods derived from the natural sciences is an important step towards a criminology that can be understood as a part of natural sciences, largely superseding the methods of cultural sciences and anthropological philosophy. This approach made the (criminal) human being an object of measurement and can result in the concept of man as a mere phenomenon of quantity. This is, on the one hand, ethically questionable; on the other hand, it made modern criminology more efficient and successful.

An early work [1910-1913] in Biological Psychology by pioneer psychiatrist, criminologist and philosopher José Ingenieros, M.D. (1877-1925) of Buenos Aires

One of the earliest recorded works in Biological Psychology was published in 1910 by Argentine psychiatrist José Ingenieros (1877-1925), Professor of Experimental Psychology at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires. Ingenieros, a multifaceted personality and prolific author and educator famous for his lapidary aphorisms, has been considered a 'luminary' for generations. Trained as a physician, he was the first scientist to establish a comprehensive psychological system in Latin America. His long list of publications includes more than 300 titles generally divided in two periods: studies in mental pathology and criminology (1897-1908) and studies in philosophy, psychology and sociology (1908-1925). His works were never made particularly available to English-speaking audiences, despite the fact that certain of his books are still best-sellers in the Spanish-speaking world. We present an overview of Ingenieros' life and work, and a detailed account of his profoundly interesting work Principios de Psicología Biológica, in which he analyzes the development, evolution and social context of mental functions. We also provide an English translation of the Introduction contributed by Nobel laureate Wilhelm Ostwald (1853-1932) to the 1922 German edition of the work, pertinent to the energetic principles Ingenieros used and the study of Psychology as a natural science. It is a hope, 80 years after Ingenieros' parting, to bibliographically resurrect this champion of reason, who, until now, has not been given his due placement in the international psychological and biomedical literature.

Chronocentrism and British criminology

Criminologists display a largely unexamined propensity to ignore writings that are more than fifteen or so years old, with evident consequences for the public presentation and validation of expert knowledge. A citation study was combined with detailed observations from British criminologists to ascertain quite how that disavowal of the past was accomplished.