The Perpetrator's Body Type

Characteristics of the physical form of criminals in Gina Lomboro's book are the eyes of murderers who are cold, like glass, immobile, and red, their noses are crooked, and are always thick, their hair is curly, abundant, and black.
A strong jaw, long ears, broad cheekbones, a scanty beard, extremely developed canines, thin lips, usually motion and contraction on one facet of the face, that shows canines in the form of a minacious smile, ar different characteristics of the killer.

Fraudsters and con artists wore a singular and stereotypical expression of hospitality on their pale faces, who seemed incapable of blushing and assumed only paler colors under any emotional stress. They have small eyes, hooked and large noses, become bald and gray-haired at an early age, and often have a feminine cast face.

In its early years (1911-1914), Laboratory research was influenced by longstanding beliefs about the existence of a type of physical crime. This was evident in Lab's first published study, The Mentality of Criminal Women in New York State (1916), written by Jean Weidensall. In this work Weidensall investigates two main theories. First, there is a relationship between specific physiological factors and crime discussed here.

The second, the theory of weakness of mind and its relation to crime, will be discussed in part two. At the time the Laboratory was founded the idea of ​​"it's a criminal type," although not as popular as it was, remains pervasive in criminological circles. It is part of a larger and widely accepted theory that is determined by the heredity of crime.

In order to understand the era's discourse about the types of physical crime we must become familiar with the work of two important criminologists, Alphonse Bertillon and Cesare Lombroso. In the late 1870s, Bertillon, a French criminologist, developed a system that used eleven specific physical measurements (head, arms and legs, etc.) and a complex filing system that recorded findings to describe and then re-identify all that entered the Paris justice system.

The Bertillon system attempted to crack down on recidivists, especially homeless people, who occupied Paris's streets. This system is not intended to label certain types of people as criminals, but to accurately identify recidivists. Never before has a method been so successful at identifying repeat offenders. The mug shots could stop resembling criminals, but their arm lengths and head circumference didn't change.

The Bertillon system quickly gained popularity throughout Europe and North America. For example, the form "Bertillonage," takes place in prisons in New York State, including Auburn Prison for Women. 26 As a result of its rapid and unsystematic deployment, the perceived purpose of the Bertillon system mutated.

A group of eugenicist criminologists known as "criminal anthropologists" adopted the Bertillon system as their own, combining the ability to identify recidivists using precise body measurements with the ability to read crime into the body itself. In addition, they used the data collected by the system to prove their own theory about the existence of this type of physical crime.

The most famous of these theorists was Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), an Italian doctor. Like many of his colleagues, Lombroso did not acknowledge any difference between the type of criminal, which he wanted to prove, and the recidivist criminal, Bertillon studied. Although Lombroso initially focused on men, in 1895 he published a book entitled, Female Actor.

In this work he uses phenology and other measurement-based methods to determine what he sees as physical similarities and differences between deviant and non-deviant women.

Lombroso claims, for instance, that criminal girls have, on average, a smaller “skull capacity” than traditional girls. That is, they really have less headroom in their brains. Lombroso states twenty eighth of prostitutes have “total insensitiveness to pain."

This led him to conclude that all women should be clearly less developed than men and generally prone to perversion and lies. However, he claims for the small set of women, those who belong to the "born criminals" type, "their criminal tendencies are stronger and more perverted than their prototype."

What he meant was: real female criminals are far worse than any man. Some scientists reject the type theory of crime and suggest a different way of looking at those who commit crimes. One of them is Frances Alice Kellor, an American criminologist who theorizes the economic and personal history of criminals contributes more to her bias than to her biology.

In 1900 Kellor revealed her findings in a piece entitled, "Psychological and Environmental Studies of feminine Criminals I" within the yank Journal of social science.

In this study Kellor came out mutually of the primary Americans to reject Lombroso's theory of the categories of physical crime. Historians like Freedman refer to his work as Kellor's Theory of Environmentalism.

Kellor's research offers a careful analysis of Lombroso's theories. He did this to initiate his precise experiments on a number of naughty American women, from both the correctional facility and the workplace, as well as non-criminal women.

Kellor tested the women for the following characteristics: weight, height, sitting height, chest strength, hand grip, cephalic index, distance between arches, orbit, eye angle, and crown to chin, nose index, ear, hand, and finger length. the width and thickness of the mouth, and the height of the mouth of the forehead.

Kellor chose these characteristics because they are the same used by Lombroso to prove there is a link between heredity and crime. Kellor then compared his results with those of Lombroso. For example, looking at Lombroso's claim that prostitutes tend to weigh more than “normal” women, and find the opposite to be true.

Kellor concluded that crime is the result of a person's environment, "an organism responding to and reacting to various stimuli," rather than their anatomy. By passing through Lombroso's ideas point by point, Kellor undermined Lombroso's theory.

Then in 1900, Kellor 'published, "Crime Among Women," which investigated the "Social and economic influences" leading to crime. Kellor goes on to claim that when women commit crimes, "often lost habits can be traced to domestic problems and to the struggle for existence." But one way in which Kellor, with Lombroso, is that in considering the economy of crime, Kellor takes an individualistic view of crime.

Instead of considering the role society should play in crime, it maintains a focus on each individual case. It is the individual "struggle for existence" rather than the systematic social factors of interest to Kellor.

It can be assumed that Kellor's research was known to the researchers in the Lab, as they were tackling the exact same topics. In addition, Kellor, like Lab scientists, studied at the University of Chicago in the same field at the same time. Researchers in Bedford used a method very similar to Kellor's in their experiment. Despite this overlap, however, Kellor's theory of environmentalism was not used in Bedford in the early phases of lab research, 1911-1914.

In 1913, more than a decade after Kellor published his studies against Lombroso, Charles Goring, an English criminologist, published The English Convict. This work is considered to have formally refuted Lombroso's criminal theory. It can do this, because of the size of the study, which analyzed hundreds of inmates.

However, for nearly twenty years, from 1895-1913, Lombroso and his theory of the female type of crime remained pervasive in criminological circles. And although Lombroso's theories had a significant effect on the work done in the Social Hygiene Laboratory, in time Kellor and Goring proved better replacement.