anthropological criminology

Anthropological criminology (sometimes referred to as criminal anthropology, literally a combination of the study of the human species and the study of criminals) is a field of offender profiling, based on perceived links between the nature of a crime and the personality or physical appearance of the offender. Although similar to physiognomy and phrenology, the term criminal anthropology is generally reserved for the works of the Italian school of criminology of the late 19th century (Cesare Lombroso, Enrico Ferri, Raffaele Garofalo). Lombroso thought that criminals were born with inferior physiological differences which were detectable. He popularized the notion of "born criminal" and thought that criminality was an atavism or hereditary disposition. His central idea was to locate crime completely within the individual and utterly divorce it from the surrounding social conditions and structures. A founder of the Positivist school of criminology, Lombroso opposed the social positivism developed by the Chicago school and environmental criminology.