measuring various bodily features and proportions—from the existence of tattoos to the shape of the cranium—in an effort to map criminal degeneracy.
Take out a mirror and you can begin to see yourself as the Lombrosians would have. Pointy head? Strong jaw? Pathetic beard? Receding brow?These were all on the list of criminal traits.
Lombroso’s project was greatly facilitated by an array of new technologies.There were devices to record a person’s skull capacity and form; his blood pressure; his senses of touch, smell, and sight; his sensitivity to pain and temperature; and the way he spoke, among numerous other things.Perhaps my favorite invention is Louis Frigerio’s “otometer,” an instrument to measure the diameter of the ear and the angle at which it meets the head—the ear being, according to Frigerio, among the most critical of organs in signaling degeneracy.Frigerio claimed that criminals and the insane possessed large, flat ears that jutted out from the head, which made sense, he said, since these types of ears were also common in apes and other “inferior animals.”
In the quest to record the physical state of the criminal for the purpose of objective comparison, no device was more promising than the camera.Although mug shots were initially used simply as a means of tracking criminals—with police departments assembling “rogues’ galleries” to help them spot known offenders—those interested in physiognomy had grander plans.One British innovator, Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, developed an approach that involved taking various images of criminals and overlaying them in a single photograph.What does a hotel thief look like?Galton would take the pictures ofsix known hotel thieves and combine them into one archetype.Conceivably, a person could then identify a rogue destined to be a pickpocket before he had ever reached into an overcoat. A new dawn seemed upon the horizon: knowing the signs of criminality and its animalistic causes, one might reduce crime—or perhaps eliminate it altogether.
But it was for naught.The work of Galton, Lombroso, and others turned out to be almost entirely incorrect.And far worse, their crackpot theories fed racist ideologies and were used to justify eugenic movements aimed at eradicating degeneracy by controlling who could have children.
It seems we have come a long way from the calipered past: our soldiers opened the gates of Dachau, after all.We teach the forcible sterilizations of the first half of the twentieth century as a tragic failing. And we laugh at people who still believe it’s possible to divine a person’s nature from his body.Those, like Sylvester Stallone’s mother, Jackie, who offer such theories—Jackie being a preeminent “rumpologist”—end up fodder for standup bits.
But much of our progress is an illusion. Having purged explicit, open physiognomy, we remain
closet
physiognomists, unaware that we are appraising a person based on the color of his skin, the thickness of his lips, or his uneven ears. That these assessments are implicit makes them all the more destructive.Working toward an objective and falsifiable system of classification, Lombroso and Galton put their claims into the public domain for inspection, testing, and appraisal. Our judgments, by contrast, are subjective and rarely scrutinized.
Just as problematic, in considering
why
a person committed a crime, we tend to rely on a specious “mug shot” notion of criminality: we focus on a paper-thin, one-sided conception of the perpetrator, at the expense of the surrounding situation.As a general matter, we’re inclined to believe that a person’s actions reflect a freely made choice based on a set of stable character traits, preferences, and beliefs.And when we hear about some horrible event,like a murder, we immediately produce a metaphorical “mug shot” of the perpetrator: an evil person who chose to disregard our most vital social norms to serve his own