The father of criminology thought cheekbones could reveal a criminal
Cesare Lombroso, often called the father of criminology, insisted on evidence and measurement, which was new. But he believed physical traits such as the shape of cheekbones or the line of the hair could betray inborn criminal tendencies. His science was flawed, yet it shifted attention from the law to the lawbreaker.
Lombroso founded the Italian school of criminal anthropology in the late nineteenth century. According to the historian Mary Gibson, it radically redirected debate in Europe and the United States from crime as a legal matter to the criminal as a person. French scholars answered with sociological theories of delinquency, but kept that new focus. The word itself was probably coined in 1885 by the Italian law professor Raffaele Garofalo as criminologia.
An older tradition, the Classical school, had emerged a century earlier, rooted in utilitarian thinking. Its leading voices, Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham, argued that people seek pleasure and avoid pain, so punishment should deter. It ought to be public, prompt, established by law and no harsher than necessary, and its severity should match the actual harm done, not the offender's intent.
Positivists took a different view, tracing crime to forces beyond individual control. Psychological positivists looked inside the person, while social positivists blamed poverty, unemployment and poor schooling. Adolphe Quetelet used statistics to link crime with age, sex, poverty, education and alcohol. Later, Edwin Sutherland's theory of differential association proposed that people learn crime from those around them, becoming delinquent when attitudes favouring law-breaking outweigh those against it. Researchers note that personality traits correlate with offending, but correlation is not causation.
In the United States the field boomed in the twentieth century, moving from a golden age of research before 1930 to a golden age of theory until 1960. Federal funding after the 1960s spawned practical criminal justice programmes, straining ties with sociology; in 1963 some educators broke from the American Society of Criminology to form their own association. The two sides largely reconciled by the 1990s, and by 2020 nearly 50 doctoral programmes existed across the United States and Canada.
Source: Criminology
