The Truth Machine (4 page)

Usually associated with liberal politics, in the hands of Charles Bray and Joshua Toulmin Smith, phrenology could also be used to support radical causes.
⁶⁶
But a naturalistic approach to human character could be as easily deployed to serve reactionary ends. To a considerable degree criminology was based on the idea that because the criminals' mind exhibited inherent constitutional flaws it was necessary to adopt a vigilant attitude toward their governance. At the 1869 meeting of the British Association, Dr. G. Wilson read a paper, “The Moral Imbecility of Habitual Criminals as Exemplified by Cranial Measurement.” Having found that the average size of the heads of 464 criminals was less than that of the ordinary population, Wilson concluded “cranial deficiency is associated with real physical deterioration.”
⁶⁷
A few years later, in the Pavilion of Anthropological Sciences at the Universal Exhibition, a French Professor of Medical Geography claimed to have located a specific type of human being in his collection of thirty-six murderers' skulls. As Girard de Rialle explained to readers of
The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
, M. Bordier “was struck by the peculiar
formation of these skulls, which all showed characteristics of atavism, and reminded him of prehistoric types. His examination led him to the conclusion that the criminal man is an anachronism, a savage in civilized country, and he compares him to those restive animals which eventually appear in our tame species.”
⁶⁸
Of the thirty-six skulls, only three were neither abnormal nor pathological. Bordier disagreed with British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley that the criminals represented “intermediate types between men sane and insane.” He argued that had they been submitted “to a right cerebral orthopedy they would not have been guilty of such crimes.”
⁶⁹

In 1870, Dr. J. Bruce Thomson, Resident Surgeon of the General Prison for Scotland at Perth, concluded that criminals formed “a variety of the human family quite distinct from civil and social men.” Personal experience of criminals over many years had convinced him that “in by far the greatest proportion of offences
Crime is Hereditary.”
⁷⁰
Thomson noted that having visited the great prisons of England, Ireland, and Scotland, “the authorities, governors, chaplains, surgeons, warders, concur in stating that prisoners, as a class, are of mean and defective intellect, generally stupid, and many of them weak minded and imbecile.”
⁷¹
The criminal class was thought to possess “a low type of physique, indicating a deteriorated character which gives a family likeness to them all.” Thomson agreed with “an accomplished writer” that those born into crime were “as distinctly marked off from the honest industrial operative as ‘black-faced sheep are from the Cheviot breed.'” Crime was nothing less than “a moral disease of a chronic and congenital nature, intractable in the extreme, because transmitted from generation to generation.” Thomson quoted a Hebrew proverb that had a Lamarckian echo: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the teeth of the children are set on edge.”
⁷²

Fishermen, according to Thomson, thanks to their immobile habits, “intermarry among themselves, and preserve distinct physical and mental characteristics unchanged for centuries.” Miners, “who from generation to generation pursue the same calling—form a colony by themselves, and, being the latest of all the industrial classes to emerge from serfdom, are quite a marked variety of men and women.”
⁷³
Whereas the “common thief, or robber, or garrotter” possessed “a set of coarse, angular, clumsy, stupid set of features and dirty complexion,” clerks, railway officials, and “decent” industrial operatives could be distinguished by their “better physical appearance.”
⁷⁴
Thomson's argument rested on the assumption that criminality ran in families and suggested that the “evil propensities” of one family of five criminals seemed “to have been inherited from the mother; the mother also being a poor silly creature.”
⁷⁵
Thomson concluded that crime was “so nearly allied to insanity as to be chiefly a psychological study.”
⁷⁶

“A savage in a civilized country.” Carlo Gaudenzi's instrument for measuring the contours of the skull (1892). Cesare Lombroso,
Les applications de l'anthropologie criminelle
(Paris: Félix Alcan, 1892).

The prison surgeon's zealous diatribe was a link between Mayhew's vivid descriptors of a criminal underclass and Cesare Lombroso's biological typology of the born criminal. While Lombroso was undertaking his celebrated study of Giuseppe Villella's anomalous skull—the event that produced “the totem, the fetish of criminal anthropology” according to Lombroso himself
⁷⁷
—Thomson
was arguing that crime was “bred in the bone” and noting “the ugliness and deformities of criminals, their under size and weight, and other evidences of degeneration.” “On the border-land of Lunacy lie the criminal populations,” he suggested.
⁷⁸
The criminal class was marked by peculiar hereditary physical and mental characteristics that were allied to disorders of the mind. This class had a
“locale
and a community of their own” in the cities: “The greatest number are thieves, Ishmaelites, whose hand is against every civilized man. There is a thieves' quarter, a devil's den, for these city Arabs.” Born into crime, “as well as reared, nurtured, and instructed in it,” their criminal habits became “a new force, a second nature, superinduced upon their original moral depravity.”
⁷⁹
Invoking a medical metaphor, Thomson claimed that crime was “incurable … hereditary in the criminal class” and transmitted “like other hereditary maladies.”
⁸⁰
Thomson called for transportation to the colonies, the breaking up of criminal communities, and lengthy sentences for habitual criminals. He concluded on a melancholy note: “The criminal hereditary
caste
and character, if changeable, must be changed slowly, and how to do it must be to sociologists and philanthropists always a
questio vexata
, one of the most difficult state problems.”
⁸¹

The project of maintaining the boundary between savagery and civilization—a project shared by ethnographers and social analysts alike—remained a continuing source of unease for many Victorian commentators on crime.
⁸²
Despite their belief in the malleability of character, even the phrenologists argued that a small number of “irredeemables” were beyond recovery due to deficient intellectual organs. It was certain, Henry Maudsley asserted, “that lunatics and criminals are as much manufactured articles as are steam engines and calico-printing machines, only the processes of the organic manufactory are so complex that we are not able to follow them.”
⁸³
Anyone who had studied the “step-children of nature”
⁸⁴
recognized them to be “a distinct criminal class of beings, who herd together in our large cities in a thieves' quarter, giving themselves up to intemperance, rioting in debauchery, without regard to marriage ties or the bars of consanguinity, and propagating a criminal population of degenerate beings.” It was “a matter of observation,” Maudsley continued, “that this criminal class constitutes a degenerate or morbid variety of mankind, marked by peculiar low physical and mental characteristics… . An experienced detective officer or prison official could pick them out from any promiscuous assembly at church or market.”
⁸⁵
“There is a destiny made for a man by his ancestors,” he wrote, “and no-one can elude, were he able to attempt it, the tyranny of his organization.”
⁸⁶

Phrenology's radical faith in the malleability of human character helped to reorient criminal jurisprudence away from retribution and deterrence toward more systematic, proactive reformist principles. Its challenge to existing notions of criminal responsibility encouraged new ideas such as rehabilitation and reform, the proposal that the sentence must fit the criminal, and the concept of “criminal insanity.” Phrenology also inspired prison administrators to conceive of penology as a science that might professionalize prison management.
⁸⁷
By explaining criminality in terms of the mental faculties, phrenology promoted the idea that people varied in their propensity to offend. In endorsing the concept of crime-as-disease it profoundly influenced later approaches to criminality—such as those formulated by physicians and psychiatrists—that foregrounded degenerationist notions.
⁸⁸
But above all, phrenology was important to the emergence of criminology, as it played a fundamental role in creating criminology's central figure of the born criminal type. By the 1870s, as empirical criminology was beginning to emerge, the idea of the born criminal had become an item of faith across a variety of disciplines. Cesare Lombroso—the man whom history records as the “father of criminology”—was far from unusual in insisting that the criminal was a special type of degenerate human being. Nevertheless, the energy that he devoted to studying and promoting the concept of “L'uomo delinquente” was remarkable.

One day, in 1911, in Mantellate jail in Italy, a twenty-eight-year-old inmate who was serving a two-year sentence for wife beating was summoned from his cell.
⁸⁹
The peasant's obligation that day was to function as a case study for a class of police administrators. Professor Salvatore Ottolenghi examined the man, carefully measured his body parts, and pointed out certain features of his “antieurhythmic face.” He also drew attention to the prisoner's receding forehead, his overly developed cheeks, and protruding bones. Ottolenghi further noted the inmate's scars, calluses, and lack of tattoos. He then questioned the prisoner about his childhood, family, health, moral habits, and criminal record. The professor concluded that the offender was “un tipo inferiore,” a coarse criminal specimen. Here was a dangerous individual, the professor told his students, a man capable of committing violent crimes when under the influence of alcohol and when caught in a “morbid epileptic rage.”

Ottolenghi was a dedicated follower of the man he referred to as “that titanic figure, Cesare Lombroso.”
⁹⁰
It had long been Lombroso's ambition to transform policing into “a scientific instrument … which employs photography, the telegraph, notices in newspapers, and above all knowledge of criminal
man.”
⁹¹
But it was Ottolenghi who did most to bring Lombroso's vision for “a scientific police that knows, with mathematical exactness, the physical characteristics of criminals” to fruition.
⁹²
An intermediate-level bureaucrat, Ottolenghi transformed his mentor's unsystematic ideas into a new philosophy of policing and successfully introduced positivist criminology into government administration. The base for his operations was the School for Scientific Policing that he had established in Rome in 1902. He began publishing the
Bulletin of the School of Scientific Policing
in 1910. The school's extensive curriculum included the study of “Bertillionage” (criminal anthropometry), fingerprinting, photography, and criminal writings, as well as that of weapons, forged documents, and instruments for picking locks. Ottolenghi taught a course entitled “Applied Anthropology and Psychology” that instructed students how to recognize a criminal's “precise heredity, physical, ethnic, psychological, and pathological characteristics.”
⁹³
When the time eventually came, the ambitious Ottolenghi was anxious to seek Mussolini's support.

Lombroso's
L'uomo delinquente
of 1876 assimilated a number of threads of European thinking about crime into the single figure of the atavistic “born or instinctual criminal.” Its author would later claim that this simple concept had come to him in “a flash of inspiration” while examining the unusual skull of Giuseppe Villella, a thief and arsonist. After having studied 383 skulls, Lombroso concluded that the criminal was characterized by an enlarged middle occipital fossa and vermis. He elaborated on these findings with an indefatigable series of anatomical, physiological, psychological, and moral tests, buttressing his argument with analogical correlations from nature and ethnological and linguistic studies. Criminal man was “an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals.”
⁹⁴
Lombroso considered this unfortunate species of humanity a throwback to an earlier phase of evolution. Such criminals bore extensive signs of their degeneration on their bodies—apelike stigmata—that the expert eye could detect.

Lombroso had many intellectual debts. They included Gall's phrenology and Broca's craniology, the positivist philosophy of Comte, Haeckel's notion of recapitulation, and Spencer's psychology. As a medical student at the University of Pavia in the late 1850s, he had been impressed by the teratology and comparative anatomy of Bartolomeo Panizza. Morel's degeneration thesis and Marzolo's comparative linguistics were also important influences. Later on he drew on Darwin's ideas. Like the discipline he contributed so much to, Lombroso was an indefatigable assimilator. Although the idea of
the born criminal was fundamental to his philosophy, the concept did not remain static across the various editions of
L'uomo delinquente.
The book went through five editions between 1876 (when it was two hundred and fifty pages long) and 1897 (when it consisted of three volumes of two thousand pages in all, together with an
Atlas
of illustrations). French and German editions appeared in 1887, and a short summary of Lombrosoian doctrine,
Criminal Man
, was translated into English in 1911.