CESARE LOMBROSO In his view on crime, Lombroso called for scientific explanations, focused on internal biological factors, and believed that people who engage in crime are throwbacks. Cesare Lombroso was born in Venice, Italy, in 1835. Educated in medicine and psychiatry, he became a professor of criminal anthropology at the University of Turin in 1906.22 In his book The Criminal Man, published in 1876, Lombroso explained criminal behavior on the basis of biological characteristics and heredity. Using various physiological and cranial measurements of known criminals, Lombroso developed the theory that certain persons who engage in criminal behavior are “born criminals.” Lombroso believed that criminals could be distinguished from noncriminals by a variety of what he termed physical stigmata, such as a long lower jaw, flattened nose, and long, apelike arms. The stigmata themselves did not cause criminal behavior; rather they were visible indicators of a personality type that was, in essence, a primitive atavism, a throwback on the Darwinian scale of human evolution.23 Lombroso’s approach “suggested that criminals are distinguished from noncriminals by the manifestation of multiple physical anomalies, which are of atavistic or degenerative origin. The concept of atavism (from Latin atavus, ancestor) postulated a reversion to a primitive or subhuman type of man, characterized physically by a variety of inferior morphological features reminiscent of apes and lower primates, occurring in the more simian fossil men and, to some extent, preserved in modern ‘savages.’”24 In addition, Lombroso’s theory implied that the “mentality of atavistic individuals is that of primitive man, that these are biological ‘throwbacks’ to an earlier stage of evolution, and that the behaviour of these ‘throwbacks’ will inevitably be contrary to the rules and expectations of modern civilized society.”25