Cesare Lambroso Essay

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Cesare Lombroso Cesare Lombroso was born November 6 1835 and was the founder of the Italian School of Positivist criminology. He studied literature, linguistics, and archaeology at the Universities of Padua and graduated with a degree in medicine from the University of Turin. During the second war Lombroso worked as an army doctor. In the 1800 he was a criminologist who has come to be known as the father of criminology. He spent most of his working life studying prisoners. In 1871 while studying the skull of a famous Italian thief he thought he found something in the skull. He believed he found something in the brain. Lombroso thought he found what makes a criminal a criminal. He believed that the features of a criminals face could determine what kind of criminal they were; he believed that criminals were born deviant and lacked the free will and were not responsible for their own actions. He collected skulls, brains and photographs of the criminally insane which were later displayed in a museum. “Lombroso was the first to describe the observations of cortical dysplasia in patients with epilepsy. In attempting to predict criminality by the shapes of the skulls and other physical features of criminals, he had in effect created a new pseudoscience of forensic phrenology. For example, he and his collaborators were the first ever to describe and explain the form of epilepsy known now as Taylor’s dysplasia. However, they used their observations to support their scientific misconception regarding the relationship between criminality, epilepsy, and genius”; although his work is no longer considered an acceptable foundation for modern-day criminology., psychiatry has taken his idea of locating crime completely within the individual and completely removed from the surrounding social conditions and structures. Because I could not any information regarding why his theory was
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