hi there this is Marcus from criminology web.com and in this video I'll talk about Cesare Lombroso Cesare Lombroso was born in 1835 in Verona in Italy he was an Italian doctor who did research and wrote on a variety of topics for example mental diseases scientific ways to study corpses and brain pathology but his most important work and certainly the work that he's best known for today is the book the criminal man in the criminal man first published in 1876 Lombroso developed his theory of criminal anthropology to explain why people commit crime his theory suggests that there are basic differences between offenders and non offenders more specifically according to Lombroso born criminals have certain physical characteristics or abnormalities that make them different Lombroso called these abnormalities atavistic characteristics atavistic comes from the word ova to switch means ancestors in Latin according to Lombroso the physical abnormalities that offenders have occurred because offenders were the products of an earlier stage of human evolution a stage were more primitive humans and apes existed thus offenders are basically throwbacks to earlier phases of human history connected to the idea of atavistic characteristics is the idea of degeneration according to Lombroso offenders have certain physical and mental characteristics of primitive humans and they commit crime because of these biological abnormalities long brazos ideas were based on his own research one of the things that he is known for is that he conducted very detailed studies of people and particularly studies of people's bodies different from many others who had gone before him Lombroso started to directly study offenders and measure and document the characteristics of their bodies over the course of his life he and his students studied thousands of people they studied different types of people namely offenders non offenders and also mentally ill people and they not only studied people who were alive but they also did autopsies on deceased people for example to study their skulls and their brains examples of things that Lombroso measured were people's height weight the span of their arms the average height of their body while seated the sizes of their hands next sized legs and feet and their eye color and so on so let's have a look at what he found in his research according to Lombroso the offender was a special type of human being an offender was not so much a non normal human but really a different type of human this different type of human had a variety of physical characteristics that made him or her different from regular people a couple of examples of these physical characteristics were an asymmetric face a large jaw excessively long arms and epilepsy people who had these characteristics were atavistic and thus were criminal in nature Lombroso even thought that one could recognize different types of offenders with thieves having different physical characteristics from violent offenders in the first edition of his book Lombroso very much leaned on these physical characteristics and measurements to distinguish born offenders from non offenders and he used his atavistic theory to explain why some people were born offenders but as he kept updating his book and published new versions of it he added things to it for example he also took other factors that may be linked to criminal behavior into consideration for example poverty alcohol and gangs there were also more psychological characteristics that Lombroso associated with being an offender such as lack of feelings of remorse or being cynical or impulsive but these factors are not often connected to Lombroso because he devoted a lot of his work to biology and physical abnormalities Cesare Lombroso is sometimes called the father of modern criminology and he's often seen as the founder of the positivist school the positivist school used measurements as a way to find evidence for the causes of criminal behavior in low brazos case that was done with his measurements of people's physical characteristics he was a well-known scholar in his time and many people both from Italy and from abroad visited him to discuss ideas with him Lombroso was certainly not the only one who saw that physical characteristics were linked to criminal behavior he had a lot of influence on other Italian criminologist too and together these scholars are often called the Italian school of Criminology Lombroso did not agree at all with the idea of free will so with the idea that people make decisions freely the philosophy of free will was important in Italy at the time but instead Lombroso was much more interested in factors outside of a person's free will that influence behavior and he was not the only one this was a time in world history where Darwin's evolutionary theory was gaining popularity and sociology was coming up where it was thought that every society in every individual was affected by outside forces such as war and famine and then wealth and class affected the way in which we live our lives this of course challenged the idea that humans have free will in other words Lombroso wasn't an outlier he fit right in with his time in fact he had significant influence on these ideas but as you might expect his ideas have also received a lot of criticism both during his own life and after his death in 1909 some of the most important criticisms were that he did not interpret his findings correctly and that he did not examine them critically it is now widely agreed upon that his findings were not accurate and do not support his theory of atavism and degeneration as a result Lombroso ideas about atavism have been abandoned and Lombroso himself is probably one of the more controversial figures in the history of criminology but other ideas that find their roots in his work such as the idea that there may be physical characteristics that can contribute to criminal behavior are very much alive in criminology today for example the idea that genes and brain structure are related to criminal behavior has seen an increasing amount of interest in the past few decades all in all on brochures ideas about crime atavism and generation are now widely believed to be biased and flawed but recent research in criminology has certainly seen an upswing when it comes to studying the biological causes of criminal behavior for more fascinating criminology and criminal justice stuff subscribe to this channel and turn on the alarm bell or go to criminology web.com and find new post there every week