Criminal Man, first published in 1876, went through five editions during Lombroso’s lifetime, each one greatly expanded both in length and in number of topics addressed. It is generally acknowledged that with this work, Lombroso founded criminal anthropology, although he continued to explore the related fields of legal medicine, forensic psychiatry, anthropology and statistics.
Criminal Man was translated into French (1887), German (1887–90), Russian (1889) and Spanish (1899). Despite its being considered the founding text of criminology, no complete English translation exists of any of the five editions. In 1911 Lombroso’s daughter, Gina Lombroso, published a short compendium of her father’s writings entitled Criminal Man (which should not be mistaken for a translation of the original work). In 1911 another volume was also published in English, Crime: Its Causes and Remedies, but this translated only a part of the fifth edition.
Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter in 2006, with the assistance of Mark Seymour, make available key excerpts in English from all five editions of Lombroso’s Criminal Man. The Italian fifth edition of Criminal Man was 1,902 pages long, but Gibson and Rafter have been able to summarize all five editions into about 350 pages. The work of Gibson and Rafter challenges the analysis of Lombroso’s thought available in most criminological textbooks and collections of criminological readings, and readers can follow the development of Lombroso’s ideas throughout his career.
The final edition of Criminal Man (1896–7) reached four volumes and is the culmination of Lombroso’s project. He revisited all topics from the fourth edition and expands his discussion of the aetiology, prevention and punishment of crime. Lombroso took a progressive stance on divorce, which he favoured to reduce adultery and domestic homicide, as well as on infanticide and abortion, whose perpetrators deserved leniency as occasional criminals. (Beccalossi, 2008)
Bibliography
Albrecht, A. (1910) Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 1, No. 2(Jul., 1910), pp. 71-83
Beccalossi, C. (2008) History of the Human Sciences 2008 21: 129
Curran, J.D. & Renzetti, M. C. (2001) Theories of Crime, Publisher: Pearson
Stronge, P (2007) Sociology 2007 41: 589, DOI: 10.1177/00380385070410031207
Karzon ,Sheikh Hafizur Rahman(2008).Theoritical and Applied Ciminology
