The Rise of Biocriminology Capturing Obs PDF

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The rise of biocriminology: Capturing observable bodily economies of

'criminal man'
Kevin Walby and Nicolas Carrier
Criminology and Criminal Justice 2010 10: 261
DOI: 10.1177/1748895810370314
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economies of ‘criminal man’

DOI: 10.1177/1748895810370314
http://crj.sagepub.com
Kevin Walby
Carleton University, Canada
Nicolas Carrier
Carleton University, Canada
Abstract
Revisiting the contributions of numerous foundational biocriminological works, this article uses
the concept ‘bodily economies’ to analyze the emergence and solidification of criminological
pathologizations of the bios dependent on the capture and analysis of human corporeal matter.
The scholars we discuss (Lombroso, Ellis, Goring, Hooton, and the Gluecks) each causally equate
some part of the body with inbuilt criminality. Through an exegesis of their work, we illustrate
how the boundaries of the social body are constituted in and through corporeal capturings
and classifications of ‘criminal man’. Our analysis investigates the biocriminological method of
locating sources of criminality inside the body, which still permeates the new ‘science of criminals’
used as a tool to define and protect the social body. We conclude by discussing the renewed
biocriminological interest in preventing criminality through forecasting it in various scientific
constructs and visualizations of the inner body.
Keywords
biocriminology, eugenics, human body, pathologization, social body
Introduction
Historical accounts of the development of a particular field of scientific inquiry focusing
on crime and criminals have proposed different, sometimes conflicting, analyses of how
criminology came to be defined as a relatively autonomous set of discourses and practices.
In the 1880s, oppositions to the label ‘criminal anthropology’, particularly by French
scholars and lawyers, led to various proposals, including criminalogie, science criminelle
Corresponding author:
Kevin Walby, Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto, 14 Queen’s Park Cres. W.,
Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3K9 Canada
email: kwalby@connect.carleton.ca

262 Criminology & Criminal Justice 10(3)
and sociologie criminelle (see Beirne, 1993: 233–7; Renneville, 1994: 199–202). Debates
concerning the correct denomination were fueled by deep discomforts with the growing
diffusion of work by representatives of La Scuola Positiva, and more particularly with
Lombroso’s ‘internationally acclaimed’ (d’Agostino, 2002: 320) conception of criminal
anthropology as well as its associated fundamental ‘discovery’: the ‘born criminal’.1
Criminology was ultimately accepted as the name for a blossoming yet heterogeneous
field, and the paternity of this denomination is now usually attributed to Garofalo, who
was the first to coin the term in his 1885 Criminologica.2 It is possible to see in those
debates about denomination that ‘criminology’ was, from the outset, a term used to signal
that the bodies of criminals3 could never be presented as the one and only legitimate site
of truth excavation. Nevertheless, the fundamentally zoological approach advocated by
criminal anthropology continued to play a central role in early criminological discourses
and practices, as we soon shall document. Preoccupations with the body have indeed been
integral to the consolidation of criminology, and an important branch of criminology, now
usually termed biocriminology, continued, at least up to the Gluecks, to indulge in an
obsession with the criminal physique.
Advances from Lombroso’s crude sizing up of jug ears to the techno-scientific mea-
surements of contemporary neuroscience have called for different biocriminological
concepts as well as an expansion of corporeal capturings that criminologists are inter-
ested in collecting to explain, measure, predict, and act on criminal propensities. From
Della Porta’s (1586) De Humana Physiognomonia and Lavater’s (1775) Physiognomische
Fragmente (see Labadie, 1995/2008: 320–3) to contemporary research on ‘new’ biologi-
cal determinants of crime,4 such as the causal role of a specific genotype in becoming a
‘gang member’ (Beaver et al., 2010), proto-criminological and criminological pathologi-
zations of the bios5 always ‘find’ the ultimate locus of criminal (or anti-social) behavior
in particular configurations of the body. This is so even when the bios–behavior relation-
ship is supposedly broken by the introduction of the social (e.g. in ‘interactionist’ or
‘holistic’ biological models, presented as avoiding crude determinism), since ‘the envi-
ronment’ is used solely as a (probabilistic) behavioral ‘trigger’ (see Spallone, 1998).
Throughout its whole history, biocriminology has relied on a fixed notion of the body
that Schilling (2003) refers to as the ‘naturalistic body’, where the biological body, how-
ever dynamic and potentially influenced by external ‘triggers’, is thought to determine
individual behavior patterns. A sociology of biocriminology requires a different notion
of the body. Our approach treats the bodily economies of ‘criminal man’ as cultural arti-
facts visualized, captured, constructed, and analyzed by criminologists. The concept
‘bodily economies’ refers to a non-essentialized notion of the body, one that is always in
flux. Here, it is mobilized to focus on the ways in which criminologists have isolated and
visualized particular parts, layers and sections of the body, and granted these elements of
human bodily economies causal powers in claims about past, actual and future behavior
of ‘criminal man’.
Discourses about the criminal body are not devoid of cultural, juridical and socio-
political implications and impacts (see d’Agostino, 2002; Rafter, 2008; Pavlich, 2009).
Truth productions about the criminal body also – sometimes implicitly, sometimes
explicitly – actively partake in defining the social body, and imagining defensive and
offensive strategies to cope with the threats posed by ‘criminal man’. Understandings of

Walby and Carrier 263
the criminal formed through a pathologizing gaze focused on bodily economies insert
themselves in various claims about protecting and improving the social body, and thus
about transforming, managing or eradicating criminal bodies. Different ways of invoking
the body (criminal body, punishable body, social body) and various segregated elements
of bodily economies (e.g. skulls, ears, hormones, genes) become tropes for establishing
such claims.
This article contributes to contemporary analyses of the solidification and dispersion,
within criminology, of the positivists’ causal relationship posited between bodily econo-
mies and criminality. We investigate how a prominent method of correlating criminality
with certain bodies – where parts of the human body are isolated and then picked at us
evidence – emerged and has been replicated in criminology up to the 1960s. We focus on
what we shall term, alternatively, criminological pathologizations of the bios or crimino-
logical biopathologizations. But we limit ourselves to criminological discourses and
practices, sometimes labeled as criminal anthropology, which are antecedents to post-
phenomenal criminological biopathologizations, that is, antecedents to the biocrimino-
logical revolution sparked by Eysenck’s (1964) Crime and Personality (see Rafter,
2006), in which the autonomic nervous system becomes the ultimate etiological locus of
crime. Ours is a history of the criminological habit to ‘discover’ on the ‘outer body’
(Featherstone, 1991) the symptoms of pathological dispositions. We leave aside the later
shift from medicalization to biomedicalization (see Clarke et al., 2003).
Rock (2007) has suggested that the Lombrosian moment essentially ended with
Goring’s (1913/1919) The English Convict.6 While we agree that Lombroso did not
enjoy a wide sweeping popularity in Britain, we suggest that his concern for measuring
criminal bodies and for excluding them from the social body has not only survived the
acclaimed English Convict, but that a typically Lombrosian logic operated within it.
Moreover, bodily economies of ‘criminal man’ are still intricately tied up with contem-
porary efforts to know and police ‘criminal man’.
The first section of this article more carefully locates biocriminological discourses
and practices within the field of criminology. This notably enables us to spotlight the
continuities, not just the ruptures or radical oppositions, between biological, psychologi-
cal and (some) sociological criminological theories. The second section discusses con-
cepts concerning the body as it regards the way biocriminologists attempt to capture and
measure elements of corporeality. Then we offer an exegesis of some classical texts from
the criminological canon, dissecting how ‘criminal man’ is constructed through overlap-
ping medical and folk perspectives regarding bodies. We demonstrate the discursive
regularities that unite biocriminological endeavors.
Locating Pathologizations of the Bios within Criminology

Despite important national idiosyncrasies, criminology’s eclectic content and internal
dynamism (Barak, 1994) has been traditionally and institutionally broken down into
three well-established disciplines: law, psychology, and sociology (see Pires, 1995/2008).
Instead of locating biocriminology as a mere branch of various theories placed under the
umbrella of ‘individual positivism’ (e.g. Einstadter and Henry, 2006), we contend, fol-
lowing Carrier (e.g. 2006b, 2008a), that biocriminology is instead one manifestation of

the most common type of criminological discourse and practice, which rests ultimately
on a process through which crime and criminals are produced as symptomatic. Thus, the
differentiation of ‘discursive formations’ within criminology – formations that can be
individualized not from their elements’ homogeneity but from the practices’ regularity
making such elements possible (Foucault, 1969: 95) – is not disciplinarily structured.
Instead, the differentiation rests on the different axiomatic principles organizing crimino-
logical discursive ‘practices that form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault, 1969:
66, our translation).
Pathologization is the most common axiomatic principle structuring criminological
discourses and practices, irrespective of disciplinary affiliations. Typically, this is
restricted to various research linking crime to pathological bodily economies (bio-
pathologization) or pathological psychological structures (psychopathologization),
although it is sometimes extended (e.g. Mills, 1943/1963) to early sociological theories,
such as the social disorganization thesis. Yet, even contemporary self-labeled construc-
tivist sociologists are habitually engaged in the exact same process of symptomatologi-
zation (Carrier, 2008b). From Bonger’s (1916) Criminality and Economic Conditions, to
The New Criminology (Taylor et al., 1973) and in our time the thesis of ‘governing
through crime’ (Simon, 2007), a massive set of sociological theories are enabled by
observing crime (i.e. criminalization) through a pathologizing gaze.7 Sharing the same
practice of symptomatologization facilitates the observation of multiple pathological
sites. Even sociological precursors such as Adolphe Quetelet (1871) and Émile Durkheim
(1893/2007) – known for clearly non-biological explanations of crime – saw no contra-
dictions in themselves biopathologizing (at least some) criminals (see Nye, 1982; Beirne,
1993: 88–92, 147–55).
In this article, we limit ourselves to the solidification and dispersion of early crimino-
logical pathologizations of the bios. We leave aside the other discursive formations
within criminology, those shaped by processes through which crime is understood either
as the result of a choice, or constituted by social practices (see Carrier, 2006b). Finally,
although we are drawing on some Foucauldian archeological concepts, we do not pre-
tend to provide the reader with a full-fledged archeology of early criminological bio-
pathologizations. This would imply, following Foucault, comprehensively analyzing
‘the function that the studied discourse has to exert in a field of non discursive practice’
(Foucault, 1969: 90, our translation; see also Frauley, 2007).
Imagining the Social Body through Criminological

Pathologizations of Bodily Economies
Social histories of criminological knowledge have paid little attention to the ways both
material and imagined bodies matter in biocriminological truth production practices.
Although biocriminological concerns with visualizations, measurements and analysis of
the body of ‘criminal man’ have been documented and scrutinized from various perspec-
tives, less attention has been paid to representations of the ‘social body’ that accompany
solutions advocated to deal with ‘anti-social anthropoids’. The idea of a social body did not
arise until the 18th century (Foucault, 2004). It is invoked to signal membership in some

social community through a topological practice: boundaries are established to assert that
they need to be protected from various threats and strengthened to guarantee group integ-
rity. The idea of a social body enforces a sense of collective belonging and, by extension,
defines who is to be defended against. Whereas ‘body politic’ is invoked when the alleged
order of a political regime is threatened, the idea of social body is invoked using references
to sickness when society’s ‘health’ appears endangered (see Foucault, 1980; Scheper-
Hughes and Lock, 1987; Csordas, 1994). Social body is a metaphor used to connote anxiet-
ies about, and dangers of, potential penetration, exposure to infection, and threats of
degeneration in ways the more static and non-metaphorical term ‘society’ does not. As
Douglas (1991: 115) puts it, ‘the body is a model which can stand for any bounded system.
Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious.’
Social body boundaries have been imagined – charted, surveyed, visualized – by
social scientists through the rise of ‘the statistical movement’ (Beirne, 1993) accompany-
ing western states’ consolidation of the monopolization not only of force, but also of
taxation (Elias, 1939/1994). From the 19th century onwards, proto-criminologists and
criminologists have partaken in producing social body boundaries by applying natural
and social scientific instruments and procedures8 to two general sets of threats: one the
one hand, crime as a ‘natural’ yet malleable phenomenon, produced by sociological
forces that could be identified and visualized through a physique sociale (social physics;
Quetelet, 1835) or statistique morale (moral statistics; Guerry, 1833); on the other hand,
crime as an abnormal phenomenon, produced by biological forces that could be identi-
fied and visualized in the bodily economies of public enemy number one: ‘criminal
man’. Our interest here is limited to the latter.
Criminological pathologizations of the bios are achieved through the capturing of
isolated or aggregated bodily economies of criminals. What this concept of bodily econ-
omies points to is an awareness of how the body is differently constituted by social and
natural scientists over time. The body is a fluid object. How we conceive of the human
body always changes. This concept of bodily economies refers not only to the discursive
constitution of human bodies by criminological knowledge, but also how the materiality
of criminal bodies is measured, pinched, cut into. As such, the ‘capture’ of bodily econo-
mies by biocriminologists always involves the scientific shaping of such objects. This
process of shaping is something which, of course, the positivistic naive realism of bioc-
riminology cannot recognize, since it would imply that there can be no such thing as a
(pathological) ‘body outside of cultural configurations’ (Shildrick, 1996: 7; also see Fox,
1997; Burkitt, 1999). Moreover, criminological biopathologizations do not operate on
the basis of scientific representations of the entire body. Biocriminologists investigate
parts, layers and sections of the body: the concept of bodily economies points to how the
criminal body is literally pulled apart as a means of producing an inventory of it, inquir-
ing into and mobilizing against it. Through capturing and examining bodily economies
of criminals, what is being presented as objective measurement, classification, analysis
of surfaces, structures and shapes of criminal bodies has a secondary effect: re-imagining
the contours of the social body.
Drawing from Gall’s and Spurzheim’s phrenological assumptions, inspired by ‘the
Darwinian imagination’ (Morrison, 2006: 109–31), and stimulated by Galton’s work on
composite photography (see Pavlich, 2009) as well as Quetelet’s work on anthropometry

(see Beirne, 1993), the Italian school of criminal anthropology develops the technical
skills of preserving and analyzing body-based evidence – ‘criminalistics’ in criminal
justice lingo today. Contemporary biocriminology cannot be reduced to a single and
simple progression of criminal anthropology forward; too many interrelations between
bio-, psycho-, and sociopathologizations are at work. Yet, as we demonstrate below,
there is, from Lombroso to the Gluecks, a definite regularity in early biocriminological
discourses and practices not only around the capturing of bodily economies of criminals,
but also grounded in the fact that these bodily incursions are performed not to assess the
criminal’s virility per se, but to erect and maintain boundaries that define and secure the
social body. The boundaries of the social body are constituted in and through corporeal
capturings and classification of so-called ‘criminal man’.9
We are focused on the claims made about and the metaphors used to discuss criminal
bodies, since ‘body metaphors illustrate the fact that we use the body as a convenient
way for talking or thinking about the moral and political problems of the day’ (Turner,
2003: 1). The contribution we make, beyond those of others (Beirne, 1993; Labadie,
1995/2008; Rafter, 1997; Horn, 2003) who have already mined the work of these bioc-
riminologists, is to trace the specific regularity in the claims Lombroso, Ellis, Goring,
Hooton, and the Gluecks make about criminal bodily economies, and to show how those
claims are always already about defining and defending the social body.10
Lombroso’s Criminal Man

Trained as a medical doctor, Lombroso was interested in physical asymmetries claimed
to mark criminals as diseased ancestral stocks. The body is Lombroso’s fundamental
object of analysis, in three ways. First, he is interested in the corporeal signs of atavism.
Criminality could be read off of the body for Lombroso, evinced in the way he used
crude forms of bodily economies to ‘scientifically’ prove dangerousness. ‘Habitual mur-
derers have a cold, glassy stare and eyes that are sometimes bloodshot and filmy …
nearly all criminals have jug ears, thick hair, thin beards, pronounced sinuses, protruding
chins and broad cheek bones’, wrote Lombroso (1876/2006: 51–3). Lombroso was inter-
ested in numerous corporeal capturings, and he even robbed graves to locate body parts
upon which to test his theories. He relied on data extracted using an algometer11 to argue
insensitivity to touch was a criminal trait. Tattoos on bodies were thought of as indicating
criminality, since to have them showed insensitivity atypical of healthy men. Failure to
blush, indicating vaso-motor irregularity, was taken as a sign of immorality. Criminal
anthropology used autopsies to ‘prove’ criminality.
Second, bodies figure greatly in Lombroso’s recommendations for punishment.
Whereas Beccaria rejected any substantive morality and advocated moderation in the
infliction of pain, Lombroso suggested that punishments should be equal to the danger-
ousness of the offender, advising incapacitation for born criminals and manual labour for
criminals of less danger. For punishment, Lombroso advocated judicial anthropometry
so legal experts could physically measure up who they were judging to assess guilt.
Lombroso (1895/2004: 80) writes these measurements are a form of ‘anthropometric
guillotine’. The body is treated both as a container of ‘evidence’ (Staples, 1997: 5) and
as a ‘carapace’ of the dangerous self (Fox, 1994: 145). Dense gatherings of bodies could

lead to criminal behavior, so Lombroso argues prisons should isolate prisoners in

separate cells. Needed to combat the pervasiveness of congenital criminality is what
Lombroso called ‘scientific policing’, which all public institutions should engage in.
Even primary school teachers can ‘identify in children the incurable signs of inborn
criminality’ (Lombroso, 1897/2006: 335). Efforts for reform should concentrate upon
occasional criminals, writes Lombroso (1895/2004: 79–80). Whereas lesser criminals
should be put to work, making their bodies productive, the bodies of born criminals are
useless, such that ‘born criminals are impervious to every social cure and must be elimi-
nated for our own defense, sometimes by the death penalty’ (Lombroso, 1876/2006:
354). Surveillance achieves nothing, since it does not ‘exterminate’ criminals and only
irritates them (Lombroso, 1918: 352).12
Third, Lombroso is concerned with the body in an extensive sense – the social body.
Lombroso’s Criminal Man was published shortly after Darwin’s (1871) Descent of
Man. Influenced by social Darwinist thinking about heredity, Lombroso was worried
criminal bodies would infiltrate and infect the social body, which manifests in panic-
talk concerning heredity and criminals as pathogens. A fervent nationalist, Lombroso
was worried about political agitators, especially anarchists (whom he referred to as
‘mattoids’) and ‘Southerners’. Lombroso, the appraiser of craniums, was influenced by
and attempted to address social and political turmoil related to Italian state formation
(see d’Agostino, 2002).
Lombroso’s focus on political figures such as ‘mattoids’ draws together all the ways
he took up the body as an object of criminal anthropology: the criminal body, the punish-
able body, and the social body. What troubled Lombroso about mattoids is they showed
few corporeal signs of degeneration: ‘several even had an intelligent and harmonious
physiognomy’ (Lombroso, 1889/2006: 254). He therefore included mattoidism ‘as a
branch on the tree of moral insanity’ (1876/2006: 287). Those who commit anarchist
deeds are ‘moral madmen’ (Lombroso, 1898/2004: 233) who threaten the boundaries of
the social body (see also Ruggerio, 2003). Execution of the mattoid achieves little, since
martyrdom is the plan. Revolutionary persuasions were to be resisted by normal people:
the idea of suppressing not the microbes of anarchy but the sick, or even worse, the physicians
of the disease, is one that cannot take shelter except among a people unworthy to live and enjoy
the light of modern civilization. (Lombroso, 1876/2006: 242)
Anarchists were an epidemic; as Pick (1986: 61) suggests, Lombroso’s designations of

criminal man ‘are bound up, in complex ways, with the opposing but reciprocal process
of defining the good citizen, or the good subject, in specific societies, in particular peri-
ods’. Mattoidism is represented as a form of illness plaguing the social body. In this way,
‘Lombroso and his followers wanted science to play a critical role in the construction of
the nation’ (1986: 77). Lombroso’s geographies of crime sought to show criminal ‘hot
spots’ in Italy so to intervene.
It would be wrong to assert that Lombroso came up with all of this himself. Ferri
coined the term ‘born criminal’ and set out the schedule of ‘conditions of dangerousness’
codified in Italian criminal law (see Digneffe, 1998/2008). Lombroso was only the chief
figure of a ‘broader intellectual and professional movement’ (Gibson, 2002: 44), situated

with tremendous institutional resources, which allowed for ‘a spectacular convergence

between human science and the concerns of social policy’ (Garland, 1988: 4). However,
the ways that Lombroso discusses the body (criminal body, punishable body, social
body) become key tropes in biocriminology.
Exporting the Lombrosian Turn: Havelock Ellis

Early criminological pathologizations of the bios epitomized in the work of Lombroso
were discourses and practices competing with other nascent ways of understanding
crime and criminal propensities. Without annihilating alternative, non-biological expla-
nations, the work of the Italian school of criminology becomes solidified domestically by
Lombroso’s followers, particularly Sergi and Niceforo, but also outside of Italy. In the
Anglophone realm, consolidation and dispersion of the discourses and practices of bioc-
riminological pathologizations were notably ‘channeled’ (Rafter, 1992) by a publication
trying to make criminal anthropology’s categories palatable for diverse audiences:
Havelock Ellis’ (1890) The Criminal.
Ellis (1890) introduces readers to all the categories of criminal Lombroso conjures up.
But instead of using the category ‘born criminal’, Ellis calls this category ‘instinctive
criminal’ (1890: 17). One of the key concepts in criminal anthropology is hence cleansed
of overt references to the congenital element of crime while the undertones of innate
criminality are retained. Ellis (1890: 24) paints a picture of criminal anthropology that
appears to take equal parts environmental, biological, and social factors. This obscures
how closely criminal anthropology adhered to the Lombrosian approach. Reproducing
criminal anthropology’s interest in degenerate corporeal surfaces, Ellis (1890: 72) wrote
‘[t]he beard in criminals is usually scanty’, and they have ‘large nipples’ (1890: 89). Ellis
argues that criminals were racially similar to ‘Mongolians and Negroids’, paraphrasing
Lombroso (1876/2006: 57), who suggested that in their atavism, ‘European criminals
bear a strong resemblance to Australian aborigines and Mongols.’
Ellis’ work shows an interest in the usual Lombrosian ‘facts’ of criminality: corporeal
asymmetry; atavism; and the inheritance of criminality. Criminals ‘present a far larger
proportion of anatomical abnormalities than the ordinary European population’, writes
Ellis (1890: 209). The criminal must be caught early and at its source, the body, because
he ‘directly injures the persons or property of the community’ (1890: 222). The purpose
of criminal anthropology for Ellis is to allow authorities to decipher kinds of criminals,
develop appropriate ways to make them productive for society, so to fight the ‘rising tide
of criminality’ (1890: 296). Ellis wanted the Italian school to be the model for Anglo-
criminology, and The Criminal was popular in scientific communities that were hitherto
skeptical of criminal anthropology.13
Methodic Criminological Pathologizations of the Bios:

Goring’s Convict
Lombroso marks a crucial moment of emergence in knowledge about the criminal body
(Pick, 1989), and Rafter (2004b) has gone as far as to suggest that he is the only figure in
the history of criminology to have generated a paradigm shift. In numerous national

contexts, La Scuola Positiva became the benchmark, with criminologists, anthropologists,

and others replicating its discourses and practices, even if purporting to refute the
Lombrosians.14 Goring’s The English Convict is a case in point. Lombroso’s corpus of
work was ‘dead from its birth’, writes Goring (1913/1919: 21). Lombroso’s problem,
according to Goring, is that he conflates the ‘normal’ and the ‘average’ without having
any knowledge of the standard statistical distribution of criminality. Yet, reading past the
introductory chapter of The English Convict, one finds Goring advancing a position par-
allel to Lombroso, replicating the idea that criminals are physically differentiated
although more invested in eugenic discourse.
Goring starts by associating different bodily economies with typical criminal activi-
ties. For instance, he claims that individuals who commit violent crimes do so because of
strength and health, that those who commit crimes of fraud lack strength, and that arson-
ists and thieves are such because of ‘relative bodily thinness’ (1913/1919: 110). But the
bodily economies of criminalized men would change over time: as convicts spend more
time confined, they become less robust. ‘Habitual criminals’, writes Goring (1913/1919:
117), with the exception of those convicted of fraud, ‘are markedly differentiated from
the non-criminal sections of the community’. Criminals are differentiated in stature and
weight, because criminals of inferior stature and weight are easily apprehended by the
police.15 On such basis Goring could confidently conclude, in a deeply Lombrosian
logic, that ‘physique selects crime’ (1913/1919: 120, emphasis added).
He shows concern with calculating the number of criminals who exist in the general
population at any given moment, as a means of evaluating the threats that criminals pose
to the social body. One particular threat identified by Goring is that un-imprisoned crimi-
nals are prolific in their reproduction rate. Criminals tend to ‘improvident marriage’,
which increases potential for habitual criminality. All this is taken as evidence of the
feeble-mindedness and infectiousness of criminals, and their potential to permeate and
pollute the stocks of the general population, to violate the social body’s boundaries.
Goring’s (1913/1919: 274) comments on heredity imply the Lombrosian interest in
defending the social body. The ‘crusade against crime’ Goring advocates can occur
through: (1) modification of the inherited tendency to criminality; (2) segregation and
supervision of the physically unfit; or (3) ‘and this is attacking evil at its very root – to
regulate the reproduction of degrees of constitutional qualities – feeble-mindedness,
inebriety, epilepsy, deficient social instinct – which conduce the committing of crime’.
Crime is contagion, transferred through heredity, which could infect the social body, so
‘battle’ must be directed against it.
With Goring we see a shift in how bodily economies are conceived as determinants of
criminality. One key difference between Lombroso and Goring is a change in methods of
representing the criminal. In Lombroso, the focus is on pictorial representations of body
parts that signal criminality. In Goring, statistics and charts are the illustrative devices rep-
resenting the correlation between bodily economies and criminal propensities. Rock (2007:
122) argues Goring is ‘Lombroso’s executioner’. Another reading is that Goring entrenched
curiosity about the physicality of the criminal in criminology (see Pfohl, 1985; Beirne,
1993). Where Lombroso’s interest in atavism led him to conclude incapacitation was best
for dealing with born criminals, Goring suggests a negative eugenics for hereditary inferi-
ors. However, in Anglophone criminology, interest in a ‘final solution’ for criminals took
hold most strongly not in Goring’s England, but in the USA, with the Harvard school.16

Americanizing Biocriminology: Hooton’s Criminal

With his American Criminal (1939a) and Crime and the Man (1939b), Hooton pursues
and invigorates Ellis’ attempts to make criminological pathologizations of the bios palat-
able to Americans. In Hooton we find an intensification of the tremendous impact
Lombroso’s Italian school had on racial science in the United States (see d’Agostino,
2002). Like other biocriminologists of his time, Hooton’s methods entail comparisons of
various directly observable bodily economies (morphology, head and body size, etc.) to
make claims about criminal behavior. Sheldon Glueck, who we discuss later, facilitated
Hooton’s data collection.17
Hooton (1939a: 127) confidently asserts that examination of criminals classified by
offense groups ‘shows unmistakably that the different classes of offenders show distinc-
tive excesses of means of measurements and indices’ and thus ‘proves’ criminality is
biological. Burglary is linked with being short and slender. Tall, slender people, includ-
ing ‘a considerable element of the ignorant agricultural feudists of the Tennessee and
Kentucky mountains’, are high in first and second degree murder, which ‘may reflect the
moonshining avocations of the Southern mountaineers’ (1939a: 176). Like Lombroso
and his Italian followers, but in a different socio-political context, Hooton views
‘Southerners’ as inferior stock. Like Lombroso (1918: 34), who tried to account for head
size by Italian province, Hooton charts physical ‘excesses’ by American state. ‘Since it
is not crime that molds the physique of the criminal’, writes Hooton (1939a: 275), phy-
sique selects them for crime, echoing Goring. This substantiates, suggests Hooton,
Lombroso’s claim that criminals are physically inferior en masse, and Goring’s claim
that inferiority is hereditary. As Hooton (1939a: 309) concludes The American Criminal:
‘the elimination of crime can be effected only by the extirpation of the physically, men-
tally and morally unfit, or by their complete segregation in a socially aseptic environ-
ment’. Criminal bodies must be removed to preserve the social body’s frail purity.
Crime and the Man (1939b), published the same year as The American Criminal but
intended for a lay audience, focuses more on racial comparisons. Whereas Lombroso
used stylized woodcuts to depict his criminals, Hooton uses cartoons to depict the bodies
of criminals but also the hierarchy of body types or national types for each offense. The
maps of Lombroso and Hooton of Italy and the USA are atlases of crime ‘hot spots’
where interventions should be made. Hooton (1939b: 204) defines a ‘race’ as ‘a great
division of mankind, the members of which are characterized by similar or identical
combinations of physical features which they owe to their common heredity’. Race is a
stronger determinant of crime than nationality, writes Hooton. Each race ‘produces its
pitifully few men of genius, its hordes of the mediocre, its masses of morons, and from
the very dregs of its germ plasm, its regiments of criminals’ (1939b: 252). Here the social
body is described as an organism, with criminals as unproductive parts. It is the ‘dark
haired races’ who combine insanity with criminal propensity:
A society which palliates and cherishes criminals, which fosters the insane and turns them loose
to breed, bids fair to evolve into a pandemonium of morons, imbeciles, and idiots, ruled by the
insane and by criminals. If these be the offspring of democracy, the end of human liberty is
imminent. I think that such a vile parturition is likely to produce those microcephalous Siamese
twins, the Isms – Fasc and Commun. (1939b: 289)18

Hooton argues the ‘Negro’ commits murder, as well as burglary and larceny, at a
much higher rate than ‘Old Americans’, native ‘whites’ with foreign parentage or foreign
born ‘whites’. ‘There can be no doubt,’ writes Hooton (1939b: 342), ‘that the marked
physical differences between the Negro and “white” divisions of mankind are accompa-
nied by physiological and probably psychological and temperamental divergences.’ And
what marks the ‘criminal Negro’ from the ‘white’ criminal? Hooton thinks it is the ‘sheer
ignorance and primitiveness’ (1939b: 356) ‘more commonly encountered in savages’
(1939b: 362). This is how Hooton takes ‘strong stands against racial and ethnic prejudice
while at the same time maintaining the old-fashioned distinction between degenerates
and nondegenerates’ (Rafter, 2004a: 758), to speak out against the Nazis and remain an
American Eugenics Society member.
While Hooton (1939b) purports to offer superior statistical methods to Goring, his
typology of criminals and their associated bodily economies are sometimes as folksy as
Lombroso’s. For Hooton, the sex offender is ‘full-bodied’, the thief is a ‘sneaky little con-
stitutional inferior’, robbers are ‘wiry’ or ‘hard-bitten tough’, and violent criminals are
‘large and brutish’ (1939b: 374). The difference between the ‘Negro’ and the ‘white’
American is that with ‘whites’ ‘the scum floats’ and ‘the heavy sediment has settled’,
whereas ‘the Negro population is a pool in which there has been a continual stirring and
churning’ such that the ‘better’ and the ‘worse’ biological parts ‘have not separated’ (1939b:
384). Hooton (1939c: 296, 300) uses the term ‘biological sin’ to refer to reproduction that
deliberately or ignorantly ‘accentuates original hereditary weakness’ since it leads to the
‘breakdown of social organization’ and threatens the ‘biological future’ of humans.
Hooton has ideas about what to do with criminal bodies as it regards punishment. The
first is to, on an island, ‘establish a reservation for permanent occupation by paroled
delinquents’ (Hooton, 1939b: 391). For those criminals who are ‘hopeless constitutional
inferiors’, Hooton recommended ‘permanent incarceration’. ‘Let us cease trying to make
the world safe for morons, and endeavor rather to save it from them’, advocates Hooton
(1940: 230). ‘The evil human being is the inferior biological organism’, writes Hooton
(1940: 226–8), and the purpose of biocriminology is to be able to ‘control and limit the
production of inferior and useless organisms and to improve the individual and save
society by bettering inheritance’. Hooton finishes Crime and the Man by stating ‘it
behooves us to learn our human parasitology and human entomology, to practice an arti-
ficial and scientific selection with intelligence, if we wish to save our skins’ (1939b: 398,
emphasis added), summing up the biocriminological theme of defending the social body
from ‘criminal man’.
Towards the Biomedical Turn: The Gluecks’ Delinquent

The Gluecks (1956: 2, emphasis in original) argue their work ‘is not animated by any
notion of respectful reawakening of the somnolent Lombrosian theory that “the crimi-
nal” is a distinct hereditary species of “atavistic” or of degenerative nature’. Yet their
claims are consistent with those made by other biocriminologists. The Gluecks argue
hereditary is constitutional in a way sociocultural influences cannot be: ‘by “constitu-
tional orientation” of a trait … we mean that it is significantly tied in with a physique
type, although we are unable to say whether it is directly (genetically) or indirectly’
(Glueck and Glueck, 1956: 13).19 Elsewhere the Gluecks (1966a: 132) argue ‘biologic

factors loom as more significant than the environmental’. Again: ‘bodily constitution …
is probably determined genetically’ (Glueck and Glueck, 1968: 18). With the Gluecks,
talk of the ‘gene’ becomes prominent and announces the biomedical turn, which leads
biocriminologists to reorient their focus on non-phenomenal bodily economies, pro-
duced through increasingly complex techno-scientific mediations. Theirs are indeed the
last colossal inquiries into the link between observable bodily economies and crime.
According to the Gluecks (1968: 19), mesomorphs have a special delinquency poten-
tial because of their sturdy, masculine bodies. Endomorphs, in contrast to mesomorphs,
would be dominated by digestive viscera, and are characterized by lesser energy, greater
inhibition and submissiveness to authority, which gives them a lower delinquency poten-
tial. Endomorphs – with bodily economies being characterized as fat, soft, and slow –
under-react to sociocultural influences (1968: 232). The relation of traits and physical
resources in endomorphs are ‘not conducive to a career of criminalistic aggression’ (1968:
234). Because the ectomorph lacks energy and has higher degrees of emotional instabil-
ity, fantasy and feelings of inadequacy, the ectomorph has low delinquency potential.
For the Gluecks, boys of different body types have varying pathways to delinquency,
thus it is important that parents and teachers deal with their behavior differently. Because
of the sensitivity of ectomorphs, for instance, ‘teachers and counselors might unwittingly
cause particular damage to them unless alerted to the special needs of children of this
physique and temperament’ (Glueck and Glueck, 1956: 255). Treatment and/or preven-
tion of delinquency should accord with bodily economies’ putative differential needs –
interventions’ ‘specific targets’ (Glueck and Glueck, 1950: 4) should be determined by
rigorous scientific inquiry into the causes of delinquency. As such, the Gluecks were
actively involved in strengthening criminological professional ideology (see Cullen and
Gendreau, 2001), where criminologists are presented as defenders of the social body
even before the threats manifest themselves, thus partaking in the colonization of the
family by a growing array of experts of the norm (see Rose, 1999).
Indeed, the ultimate purpose of criminology, for Eleanor Glueck (1958), is to develop
screening devices to identify delinquents before they start criminal careers, or ‘control’
them once delinquency has manifested. Echoing Lombroso’s comments regarding
scientific policing, the Gluecks (1966b: 101–2) write that criminal justice should use
‘scientific fitting’ of treatment to the biological delinquency potentialities, especially
during young ‘dangerous ages’ when criminogenic biological potentialities are actual-
ized. Delinquents come from ‘biologically unwholesome’ homes, and the task of dealing
with delinquency and crime requires, according to Sheldon Glueck (1952: 199–209),
‘continuous attack on all fronts of biologic and social pathology’. This includes volun-
tary sterilization laws and ‘a wide program of physical and mental hygiene … today
deemed indispensable to a civilized state’.
Our focus on biocriminological pathologizations in the Gluecks’ work is not meant to
suggest that they discounted the psyche and the social as other potentially pathological
sites that could be revealed through studying delinquents (see Debuyst et al., 2008:
89–126). In Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency, they pointed to the ‘dynamic interplay’
between ‘numerous factors and forces’ to explain delinquency, or at least ‘persistent
delinquency’ (Glueck and Glueck, 1950: 286). In contradistinction with Eysenck (1964),
for example, their interest in personality and its link to delinquency cannot be reduced to

a crude biological determinism. But what the Gluecks announce, and that Eysenck’s
work more forcefully launches, is openness to non-biological factors, which are consid-
ered only to the extent that they are possibly affecting the new bodily economies of the
criminals of which the biomedical revolution will enable the ‘discovery’ (e.g. genes). As
such, in the Anglophone realm, the Gluecks signal the end of a biocriminology based on
capturing observable bodily economies.
Biocriminology and the ‘Activist Reason’

The idea that the outer body of particular individuals show, at least to the trained eyes of
the biocriminological expert, the symptoms of past and present or even future criminality
was legitimized by Lombroso, who continued to explore a logical path posited by others
well before him (see Labadie, 1995/2008; Morrison, 2006).20 Those seduced by, or look-
ing to qualify, the Lombrosian turn, particularly Ellis, Goring, Hooton, Sheldon, and the
Gluecks, do, with different methodological strategies and within different socio-political
and scientific contexts, solidify the biological variant of this criminological discursive
formation. Pathologization (of the bios, of the psyche, of the social) always implies what
Tibon-Cornillot (1992) termed raison militante (an ‘activist reason’) – a reason guided
by a will to intervene (see Carrier, 2008a). In ‘discovering’ pathology, biocriminology
calls for various strategies of management, eradication, or correction of bodily econo-
mies. Those strategies are presented as necessary to the survival, protection and purity of
a social body imagined through the capturing of putative symptomatic bodily economies.
Such reasoning runs through the work of Lombroso, Ellis, Goring, Hooton, and the
Gluecks, which, besides all their obvious and subtle differences, assured the solidifica-
tion as well as dispersion of biocriminology prior to the biomedical revolution.
Lombroso forcefully suggested that criminal anthropology should know criminals
instead of focusing on crime. Being criminal, says Lombroso (1897/2006: 348), is part
of an evolutionary pattern: ‘born criminals, programmed to do harm, are atavistic repro-
ductions of not only savage men but also the most ferocious carnivores and rodents’.
Ellis (1890: 133) likewise believes ‘the stupidity and the cunning of the criminal are in
reality closely related, and they approximate him to savages and to the lower animals’.
Hooton (1939a: 306) says criminals are ‘the dregs of every population’. Certainly the
claims and foci of these authors differ. With Goring and Hooton, the focus is on the phy-
sique of the criminal as manifestation of a vague notion of heredity that determines
physical asymmetries. With the Gluecks, part of the focus is on genes, but becomes
clouded in talk of the criminal temperament and energy. In all cases, pathologized bodily
economies are read as indicators of possible criminal futures, which as a rule of thumb
becomes justification for isolating them from the social body. Biocriminology does not
discount influences external to the criminal, but argues, at best, these merely activate
pre-existing proclivities toward criminality. Such is a search for singularity, for the crim-
inal’s smoking gun: faulty bodily economies. Knowledge produced out of the corporeal
capturings of ‘criminal man’ becomes mobilized as a plea to prevent pathologized bodies
from infecting the ‘healthy’ stock of the population.
From Lombroso to the Gluecks, claims about physique, delinquency, as well as the
rationale for and means of punishing the criminal body, remain similar, but terms change.

Terms change to make the biocriminological discourse palatable for certain audiences
or to keep up with trends in knowledge about the body and ways to dissect or penalize
it. Lombroso’s criminals are ‘atavistic’ and ‘asymmetrical’. Goring’s convicts display
‘marked differentiation’ and ‘unusual selection’, while Hooton discusses ‘unfit’ crimi-
nals and their ‘excesses’. The Gluecks’ delinquents are ‘irregular’ and exhibit ‘internal
disharmony’. For biocriminologists, these body markers make criminality legible on the
outer body of those under scrutiny. Biocriminologists claim to have mastered the ulti-
mate problem of control necessary for efficient social defense: time (see notably Bogard,
1996; Lafontaine, 2004). Indeed, by knowing how to scientifically identify symptoms of
criminal propensities on the outer body, detection, normalization, and eradication no
longer need to be ex post facto. This is the common utopia of all past and current bioc-
riminologies, which was particularly explicit in the Gluecks’ fixation with precocious
detection, and which is nowadays pushing back the frontier of science-fiction: to know
bodily economies in such a way that pathological ones never reach their full potential, so
that social defense is made a thing of the past. Even if present in biocriminology before,
the Gluecks mark a tipping point after which prevention becomes, in the terms of Beck
(1986/2001: 145), a ‘legitimate totalitarianism’.
Although his ‘taxonomies’ might now appear as mere ‘historical curiosity’ (Warwick,
2006: 562), looking at criminological biopathologizations from Lombroso onwards
reveals the tremendous uniformity of biocriminology’s ‘solutions’ as to what regards the
criminal cum punishable body. Lombroso says ‘conciliate’ or ‘exterminate’. Goring
pleads for ‘modification’ and ‘segregation’. Hooton wants ‘selective reproduction’ and
‘permanent incarceration’. When it comes to claims about physique and how to deal with
the delinquent body, even the Gluecks are parallel to rather than divergent from
Lombroso; they advocate ‘control’, ‘attack’ and sterilization. Negative eugenic claims
tied to biocriminology’s trajectory have persisted into the late-20th century (Rafter,
1997, 2008), and contemporary pathologizations of bodily economies led some to talk of
a ‘new eugenics’ geared toward crime, homosexuality, and other (usual) ‘deviances’ (e.g.
Duster, 1990; Fernbach, 1998).
One typical sociological critique of biocriminological pathologizations attends to the
theme of medicalization, problematizing the ‘activist reason’ of (past and present) bioc-
riminologies. The critique of the ‘medicalization of deviance’ (e.g. Conrad and Schneider,
1980; Zola, 1990) presents itself in two ways (see Carrier and Quirion, 2003). On the one
hand, it corresponds to the extension of the objects that are signified and acted upon
through a medical, and now biomedical, gaze – here, one may point to the (bio)medical
colonization of everything from con(tra)ception to death. On the other hand, the critique
suggests that (bio)medicalized objects should instead be understood as social objects –
here, one may argue that early and contemporary biocriminologies are guilty of reduc-
tionism, and that the ‘true’ causes of crime lie in social inequality. Psychopathologists,
sociopathologists, and biopathologists are united in a will to intervene on the pathologies
that they ‘discover’. Yet, those discovered pathological sites are the product of an analo-
gous symptomatologizing gaze (see Carrier, 2006b).
The activist reason of biocriminologists, which constantly devises ‘solutions’ to man-
age, transform, or eradicate individuals because of their putative symptomatic bodily

economies, has also been critiqued by sociologically informed criminologists as it

regards conflation of criminalized individuals with ‘criminals’. For example, Pavlich
(2009: 186) recently argued that criminals lack any ontological stratum since they ‘are
always contingent creatures of context’, showing how the work of Galton rested on an
a-critical acceptation of ‘juridical definitions’, just like the work of biocriminologists
examined in this article. This critique has been taken into account by biocriminologists
and representatives of the ‘new biology of violence’ (e.g. Niehoff, 1999; Fishbein, 2001),
who condemn the lack of awareness of the socially constructed nature of crime in early
biocriminology.21 This is why numerous works in contemporary biocriminology now
focus instead on biopathologizations linked to violence and other putative anti-social
behavior, thus keeping alive a preoccupation with what Garofalo termed ‘natural crimes’.
Conclusion: From Jug Ears to Bad Genes

The rise of biocriminology that we have documented through its major markers (espe-
cially in the Anglophone realm) rested on the progressive sophistication, and combina-
tions of, visual and statistical strategies to capture putative pathological bodily economies.
We suggest that this symptomatologizing gaze is not peculiar to biocriminology, but is
instead a common starting point of scientific inquiries into crime and the criminal. What
is peculiar to it, as purported by Lombroso, Ellis, Goring, Hooton, and the Gluecks, is
that the mystery of the criminal cannot be ‘solved’ without paying close attention to the
bios – everything else (culture, socialization, enforcement activities, etc.) is causally
secondary, if not analytically superfluous. In turn, documenting the abnormalities of the
bodily economies of ‘criminal man’ is used to enforce a particular conception of the
social body and to advance a series of defensive and offensive strategies to protect it.
The solidification and dispersion of criminological pathologizations of the bios have
been reinvigorated, from the 1960s onwards, by the rise of neuroscience, genetics and the
corresponding biologization of scientifically pathologized psychological structures and
processes. There has been a slow displacement of the site of truth excavation, from the
outer observable body to its infinitesimal insides. Knowledge, categories, and methods
for interrogating the criminal’s body have conformed to geneticism. The target, as Taylor
(1984: 145–6) has put it, is now ‘genetic deviants’ or the otherwise ‘genetically impaired’.
The corporeal capturings of biocriminology have shifted from crude body measure-
ments and cuttings to other sorts of specimens. Most contemporary biocriminologists no
longer work with what could be described as capturings of bodily economies: the studied
bodily economies are less captured than visualized and simulated.22 For instance, a num-
ber of technologies that see through flesh, such as computerized tomography (CT) and
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), are used to assess brain structure and functioning in
relation to criminal conduct (e.g. Raine et al., 2000). Certainly the methodological strate-
gies of biocriminology have become more sophisticated, but its axiomatic principle
remains intact. The difference between the work of the biocriminologists studied in this
article and the work of contemporary biocriminologists is, in part, a matter of methodol-
ogy, the latter positing the need of a techno-scientific mediation to locate pathologized
bodily economies.23

Many contemporary biocriminologists depart from their predecessors as it regards the

conception of causality. In today’s biocriminology, fewer claims are posited about direct
causality (see Spallone, 1998). For example, in the work of DeLisi and colleagues (2008)
the claim about congenital criminality is tempered by a claim that this needs to be acti-
vated by the environment. Compared with original writings on XYY ‘super male’ chro-
mosomal anomaly (Jacobs et al., 1965), more recent writings (Ratcliffe, 1994) argue
XYY chromosomal anomaly increases ‘likelihood’ of antisocial acts (also see Walsh,
2002). The typical scare of sociologists about the discovery of the gene responsible for
(insert a type of criminalized activity) may be alleviated by carefully distinguishing
between scientific claims about bodily economies and communications, particularly
those of mass media, about those claims (see Rose, 2007).24
Through this shift from direct causation to the realm of potentialities, or risk, we see
how contemporary biocriminology reworks the association between the bios and other
factors, apparently avoiding biological reductionism. Numerous scholars, for instance,
examine genetic risk factors that are said to generate the ‘onset’ of delinquency (e.g.
Wright and Beaver, 2005; Beaver et al., 2007; DeLisi et al., 2008). These studies rely on
inspection and genetic typing of extracted buccal cells. Typifying the claims made by
scholars in this mélange of neuroscience and genetics, DeLisi and colleagues (2008: 220)
argue ‘the DRD2 gene was associated with an increase in the age of contact with the
police’ and that so-called anti-social behavior is ‘an event that is rife with protean nega-
tive consequences for healthy social development’. As such, the ultimate referent of the
biocriminological claim always regards what pathologized bodily economies are pro-
grammed to do – maybe after having been ‘triggered’ by a ‘socialized’ biological under-
standing of human behavior (e.g. Strueber et al., 2006).
Reversing the tempered causality discussed above, however, some contemporary
biocriminologists do suggest that genes predetermine so-called antisocial behavior. For
instance, Barkley (1997) argues genetic factors matter far more than environmental
factors. Echoing Hooton, Walsh (2004) goes so far as to argue that African Americans
are responsible for their own poverty. Walsh argues that crime causes poverty, and that
genetically determined neurotransmitter differences in Black communities cause crim-
inogenic subcultures. Wright (2009) repeats this claim when discussing the link
between the purported shrunken brain size of the ‘African’ race and crime rates among
Blacks in the USA.
Some recent biocriminological texts are far from bashful about their sense that the
bodily economies of ‘criminal man’ need to be eliminated. For the most part, however,
biocriminology sounds like public health (Rose, 2000). Identification and assessment are
still major modalities of biocriminological practice, but the ‘new biology of control’
(2000: 22) has more to do with clinical treatments, gene therapy and reproductive con-
sumerism than any ‘final solution’. Although the rise of biocriminology focused on
observable bodily economies, and biocriminology qua biomedicalization is concerned
with less blunt body parts, what links biocriminology today with work more directly in
debt to Lombroso is the intention of application (Gibson, 2002: 127), to aid in the iden-
tification of ‘criminal man’ and removal of his corpus from the social body.
This article has used the concept of bodily economies to examine the different claims
made about the relation between criminals and their bodies in the origins of criminology
as well as more recent biocriminology. The concept of bodily economies, used in this

way, is broad enough to be an analytical tool for assessing the different knowledges – be
it folklore, comparative anatomy, or geneticism – biocriminologists have used to depict
the human body without itself importing essentialism regarding how the human body
should be thought of. ‘Because bodies are part of the production of knowledge and
distribution of social power,’ writes Rafter (1997: 238), ‘ultimately born criminals must
be understood as epistemological phenomenon, as metaphors.’ The biocriminological
method of capturing parts of the corporeal then problematizing ‘criminal man’ on the
basis of that knowledge has continuously been linked to a need for defense of the social
body. Pathologization of the bios is a first step in attempting regulatory interventions.
The normative coordinates of this trajectory in biocriminology, perpetuated in different
contemporary guises, tends toward law and order and its affiliated measures, or worse,
segregation, evisceration, and extermination.
Notes
Thanks to Chris Hurl as well as the Criminology & Criminal Justice reviewers for their helpful
comments.
1. Although Lombroso’s work has had a tremendous influence, the idea of a ‘born criminal’ was
received differently in various national contexts and scientific circles. It is rapidly refused
in France by Lacassagne, only to assume a relatively similar focus on observable physical
symptoms of criminality (Renneville, 1994; Kaluszynski, 2002). La Scuola Positiva was one
central root of the birth of criminology in the Netherlands (van Swaaningen, 2006), while
Lombroso’s work strongly shaped the direction of criminological work in pre- and Fascist
Germany (Rafter, 2008). In sum, the international acclamation of Lombroso’s work should
not be equated with the adoption of the notion of the born criminal in ‘normal science’, but
with the scientific legitimization of the biocriminological project.
2. Rock (2007: 120) notes that ‘the first recorded English use of the term’ criminology is in a
1890 article published in The Antheneum. Beirne (1993: 236) notes that the term ‘criminolo-
gist’ was used in an 1857 article published in The Saturday Review, that is, before ‘criminol-
ogy’ was coined.
3. We will refrain from placing ‘criminal’ in scare quotes throughout this article, but the reader
should note that the criminal is taken here as law’s and criminology’s product.
4. For instance, see Mednick and Christiansen (1977), Jeffery (1979), Wilson and Herrnstein
(1985), Booth and Osgood (1993), Bock and Goode (1996).
5. As Hannah Arendt (1958), and more recently Giorgio Agamben (1995: 1), have reminded
us, the Greeks distinguished between two terms to grasp what we nowadays refer to as ‘life’:
‘zoē, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living (animals, men, or gods),
and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group’. The
rise of scientific knowledge regarding bios, concerning its pathologies, and, more generally,
concerning Man is, according to Foucault (1966: 398), not only the result of the fairly recent
‘invention’ of the concept of Man, but needs to be appreciated with the parallel development
of capitalist societies; as such, the bios is a ‘biopolitical reality’ (Foucault, 1977: 210).
6. Debuyst (1998b/2008: 502) makes the same claim, arguing that Goring provided ‘the first
scientific refutation of the born criminal theory’, and that the theory could not ‘survive’ this
refutation.

7. Thus, in what Foucault termed the ‘primary differentiation of objects’, sociopathologization

does not fundamentally differ from biopathologization and psychologization. Of course, the
locus of the pathos and the advocated ‘therapies’ are often irreconcilable.
8. There are two distinct methodological traditions in this biocriminological program: the visual
and the statistical. The first method involves visualizing criminal bodies to make some claim
about them and/or pictorial representation of bodies to an audience. Lombroso’s naturalist
approach relied on looking at the criminal body and judging, but also other forms of measure-
ment. Hooton relied less on visual measurements but as much on pictorial representation of
his findings to convey his argument. Phrenology’s heritage continues on in the composite
photographs that William Sheldon (1949/1970) believed represented an advance in biocrimi-
nological methods. With statistical methods, which are indebted to Malthus and Quetelet,
Goring was the pioneer in Anglophone criminology. Statistics, Goring believes, can be trusted
as ‘truth’. Hooton’s measurements and analysis align more with the statistical tradition, which
the Gluecks are invested in. For Deflem (1997: 174), such moral statistics are ‘part of a plu-
rality of activities directed at the fertility of territories and the health and movements of the
population’. Despite advances in method, the idea of ‘criminal man’ running from Lombroso
onwards, says Gibson (2005: 39), is a scientifically dressed folk narrative about policing the
boundaries of the social.
9. Our focus is on how men are constructed as criminal, since others (e.g. Brown, 1986;
Harrowitz, 1994) have already analyzed Lombrosian writings on ‘criminal’ and ‘normal’
women. Though the research we assess is about men and boys, a vision of the deviant woman
is never far. Focus on the femininities of criminal men is used to demonstrate individual
criminality (e.g. Lombroso’s arson, Hooton’s thief, Sheldon’s gynandromorph).
10. See also Pasquino (1991: 238), who has shown how homo criminalis was considered to be ‘a
veritable new species’ dangerous to the social body, and Garland (1985: 127), who suggested
that scientific knowledge concerning criminal propensities has been accompanied by differ-
ent practical concerns for appropriate ‘modes of elimination’ (reform, extinction, prevention).
11. A device used to measure a person’s sensitivity to pain caused by pressure.
12. In the fourth edition of Criminal Man Lombroso diversified his categorization of criminals.
There is the alcoholic criminal, the hysterical criminal (‘nearly always a young woman’
(1889/2006: 281)), the criminaloid, ‘who requires a great occasion to violate the law’, and the
occasional criminal, characterized by ‘minimal criminality, maximum environmental influ-
ence’ (1889/2006: 289).
13. Rafter (1992: 530) notes that ‘by 1911 the book was in its fourth edition and had gone through
nine printings’.
14. In France, for example, although the notion of the ‘born criminal’ was rejected in anthropo-
logical circles, the dissemination of the work of Lombroso nevertheless stimulated schol-
arship concerning physiological markers of a corporeal (criminal) degeneracy produced by
the ‘social milieu’, particularly in the influential work of Lacassagne (see Renneville, 1994;
Debuyst, 1998a/2008).
15. Such interpretations are powerfully rejected through Sutherland’s (1939) differential associa-
tion thesis, where he notoriously dismissed using the length of legs (in those too slow to run
away from the police) to explain crime. Yet, the contemporary credence of biocriminology
clearly shows that the influence of sociological explanations of crime within criminology
since the 1920s and 1930s should not be equated with the abandon of criminological patholo-
gizations of the bios. For example, even in the mid-1960s, a period usually associated with an

overwhelmingly sociological criminology, Sheldon’s (1949/1970) work on ‘criminal’ body

types was still considered important for understanding crime in Canada (see Ellenberger,
1969). Moreover, sociology’s strong impact on criminology should not obscure the continu-
ous strength, throughout the 20th century, of various criminological pathologizations of the
psyche (see Carrier, 2006b).
16. On criminological biopathologizations in Germany before and during the Third Reich, see
Agamben (2005) and Rafter (2008).
17. Hooton was friends with the Gluecks and William Sheldon at Harvard. Sheldon is a tone
down from Hooton’s racialized eugenics, but continues the Lombrosian tradition with
more palatable discourse. Lombroso ‘hooked something of tremendous importance’, argues
Sheldon (1949/1970: 759), in that he was gazing upon ‘the spoor of insufficiency’. In his
study of 200 delinquent youth, Sheldon finds a predominance of endomorphic mesomorphs
compared to the general population. Sheldon’s sample suffers from what he calls burgeoned
delinquency: where ‘the human body burgeons out in a kind of brash luxuriance’ (1949/1970:
786). Delinquency is like cancer: ‘these cancer cells express one kind of biological delin-
quency. They have thrown off the controls the organism cannot afford to relax … they might
be compared to criminals who disregard social controls which society cannot afford to relax’
(1949/1970: 793). Again, defense of the social body is invoked to justify a search for and
sequestering of delinquency. A ‘conscious control of reproduction’ (1949/1970: 806) is
required, writes Sheldon.
18. This fear that (American) society had evolved in such a way that its corrupted stock, which
would usually be eliminated according to the survival of the fittest maxim, could flourish, is
not limited to American biocriminologists. Even the ‘father’ of the concept of social control,
E.A. Ross (1901), proposed a similar analysis (see Carrier, 2006a).
19. See Laub and Sampson (1991) for an account of the ‘Sutherland–Glueck’ debate; according
to them, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck have been intellectually excluded from criminology.
20. Commenting on Lombroso’s methods, Labadie (1995/2008: 330) suggests that, thanks to the
influence of Lavater and Gall as well as the catalyzing effect of the invention of photography, a
‘true consensus’ developed around the idea that the outer body can ‘confess’ inner dispositions.
21. The condemnation of this lack of sensibility in biocriminology can be traced back at least to
Goring’s critique of Lombroso’s ‘born criminal’ (see Debuyst, 1998b/2008: 502–5).
22. This should not obscure the fact that the bodily economies captured by Lombroso and other
biocriminologists prior to the biomedical revolution were also, through this very activity of
capturing, produced by the observer.
23. Not all biocriminology today is concerned with genetic material. Anthropometrics have fallen
out of fashion, though some scholars (e.g. Eysenck and Gudjonsson, 1989) still claim that
body build selects criminals. A recent study links body mass index to criminality (Maddan
et al., 2008). Based on height and weight measurements of prisoners in Arkansas, Maddan
and colleagues (2008) attempt to vindicate Sheldon’s somatotyping, arguing that mesomorphs
are responsible more often for all types of crime. The authors advocate the collection of
somatic data for compiling body mass index scores for all offenders. See also the claims of
Ellis (2005) concerning the link between crime and epilepsy and mesomorphy.
24. Writing this does not, of course, imply that preoccupations regarding the socio-political, cul-
tural, and juridical impacts of contemporary biocriminologies are unwarranted. Criminological
truths concerning ‘criminal man’ obviously penetrate into non-academic spheres, where they
are appropriated and transformed by various institutions. Despite biocriminologists’ frequent

cautions about the solidity and universality of their ‘findings’ (cautions generally downplayed
by the ill-informed social critique efficiently evoking Auschwitz or Huxley’s (1932) dysto-
pian Brave New World), we can observe, from Lombroso to contemporary biocriminology,
the recurrent presence of a worrying specter: that ‘criminals’ are devoid of free will, thus
potentially threatening some vital juridical assumptions about human behavior (see Rose’s
2000, 2007 confident remarks on the ability of the juridical system to immunize itself against
such criminological truths). For example, in a special issue of a popular science magazine
regarding the biology of the‘criminal mind’, Strueber et al. (2006: 27, emphasis in the origi-
nal) ask: ‘does it really make sense to assume that a criminal can consciously choose to not
act violently?’
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Biographies
Kevin Walby is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the Centre of Criminology, University of
Toronto, and Prisoners’ Struggles Editor for the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons. He has
published in journals such as the British Journal of Criminology (2010, with J. Piché) and
Social & Legal Studies (2007). Areas of interest include surveillance, policing and law.
Nicolas Carrier is Assistant Professor of criminology, sociology and law at Carleton

University. He is notably the author of La politique de la stupéfaction : Pérennité de la
prohibition des drogues (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008).

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Criminology and Criminal

The rise of biocriminology: Capturing observable bodily economies of

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British Society of Criminology

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Criminology & Criminal Justice

The rise of biocriminology: 10(3) 261–285

Capturing observable bodily Reprints and permission: sagepub.

economies of ‘criminal man’

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Locating Pathologizations of the Bios within Criminology

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Imagining the Social Body through Criminological

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Lombroso’s Criminal Man

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lead to criminal behavior, so Lombroso argues prisons should isolate prisoners in

Anarchists were an epidemic; as Pick (1986: 61) suggests, Lombroso’s designations of

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with tremendous institutional resources, which allowed for ‘a spectacular convergence

Exporting the Lombrosian Turn: Havelock Ellis

Methodic Criminological Pathologizations of the Bios:

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contexts, La Scuola Positiva became the benchmark, with criminologists, anthropologists,

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Americanizing Biocriminology: Hooton’s Criminal

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Towards the Biomedical Turn: The Gluecks’ Delinquent

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Biocriminology and the ‘Activist Reason’

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economies, has also been critiqued by sociologically informed criminologists as it

Conclusion: From Jug Ears to Bad Genes

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Many contemporary biocriminologists depart from their predecessors as it regards the

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7. Thus, in what Foucault termed the ‘primary differentiation of objects’, sociopathologization

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overwhelmingly sociological criminology, Sheldon’s (1949/1970) work on ‘criminal’ body

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Ellis, L. (2005) ‘A Theory Explaining Biological Correlates of Criminality’, European Journal of

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Nicolas Carrier is Assistant Professor of criminology, sociology and law at Carleton

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