Criminology is a recently invented term denoting a new science—the branch of anthropology which deals with crime and criminals, sometimes called 'criminal anthropology.' The science is largely based on the researches and views of Dr Cesare Lombroso, born of Jewish stock at Verona in 1836, who, after serving as an army surgeon and holding posts as professor of mental diseases at Pavia and director of a lunatic asylum at Pesaro, was appointed professor of forensic medicine and psychiatry at Turin. He has written numerous works on insanity, criminal insanity, the anthropology of criminals, and the close connection between insanity and genius (The Man of Genius, trans. 1891); but his great work is L'Uomo Delinquente (1875; 4th ed. 1889), in which his theory of criminology is expounded. The criminologist holds that the congenital habitual criminal is marked by conspicuous physical and mental defects. Arrested cranial development and deformity, heavy jaws, ugly features, and many other minor abnormal physical characters, are associated with moral insensibility, low intelligence, vanity, and irregular emotional peculiarities verging on insanity. The occasional criminal who yields to severe or special temptations is treated as belonging to a wholly distinct category. The acceptance of these anthropological views would naturally lead to somewhat sweeping changes in the treatment of criminals, with a view to their reclamation, somewhat on the lines of the treatment in use at Elmira.
See, besides the works of Lombroso, the Archives de l'Anthropologie Criminelle, and The Criminal, by Havelock Ellis ('Contemp. Science' series, 1890); also the articles PRISONS, REFORMATORIES, INSANITY, CAPITAL PUNISHMENT.