The Criminal Man by Cesare Lombroso - Essay Example

Lombroso’s focus is based on shifting of legal thinking to crime. His theories have actually influenced criminological developments throughout both United States and Europe. However, the theories are challenged and mostly discredited. His famous work was L’uomo delinquent (The Criminal Man). Crime results from various causes that range from psychological, biological, individual, and organizational to social factors like education and urbanization. Lombroso accumulated a considerable amount of data analyzing criminal’s physical and skull anomalies using both living subjects and cadavers.

The criminal tattoos, jargon and poetry, provides criminal portraits. Psychologically, he described the male offenders as vindictive, vain, delighting in orgies, lazy and dominated by thirsty blood (Lombroso, 2006). In addition, he researched on the relationships of crime to marital status, age, profession, sex, environment and diet. Following the analysis, he concludes that even though a small portion of crime is as a result of social conditions, most it is constitutional. Thus, Lombroso accentuated the influence of biological factors by environmental explanations.

The fundamental concepts of “The Criminal Man” were degeneration, atavism and the born-criminal idea. The first edition introduced the notion of atavism that explains deviant behavior and maintains its centrality in Lombroso theories. Atavism is thought to be an ancestral tendency of reproducing animals and plants and, where there is human concern, to be like one’s grandparent more than their parents (Becker & Wetzell, 2006). The atavistic criminal human signifies the early stage of human evolution.

Lombroso specified this type of atavism through various stigmatized physical characteristics, along with ear lobes, finger lengths and head bone structure. Supposing physical atavism was involved with moral corruption, it would