Nicole Hahn Rafter’s contributions to Lombroso studies

Among the wide array of topics that Nicky Rafter investigated during her prolific career, a special place should be reserved for Lombroso studies. This is both because her work on Cesare Lombroso was ensconced in a larger exploration of biological theories of crime and because it led her into a completely new path, that of translation. Her focus—even fascination—with Lombroso arose organically out of her more general research on the relationship between science—or purported science—and theories of crime. Her books on this nexus included White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies (Rafter, 1988) and Creating Born Criminals (Rafter, 1997), which predated the Lombroso translations, and The Criminal Brain (Rafter, 2008), which was recently re-issued in a second, updated edition. In all of these studies, she carefully examined both biological theories of crime and their effect on the labeling, criminalization, and punishment of different social groups throughout history.

In the context of this ongoing work, she called me in the late 1990s to propose a joint project to edit and translate Lombroso’s classic works, Criminal Man (Lombroso, 2006) and Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman (Lombroso and Ferrero, 2004). She was frustrated that English-language criminologists had only limited access to Lombroso’s theories through the few outdated and inadequate translations then available. Criminal Man had never been fully translated (Crime: Its Causes and Remedies represents only a limited part of the 5th edition), and Criminal Woman had been abridged to exclude the important section on “normal woman” and to sanitize the text of sexual content and language. As an Italian historian who was finishing a monograph on Lombroso, I was immediately interested because I knew from the original editions that his writings were much more complex and at the same time internally contradictory than commonly understood. I was also frustrated at the inadequacies of the old translations for the purpose of teaching. And—I must admit—I wrongly believed that translating a book would be much easier than writing one. In fact, the process was arduous, partly because we lived in different cities and both of us were traveling frequently for research. Translating Lombroso also forced many difficult linguistic choices as we attempted to adapt his old-fashioned and often unorganized prose into accurate and accessible English. Nicky admirably learned Italian for the project, and we spent several periods in Italy together working on our project, giving lectures, and visiting the Lombroso museum in Turin.

In our joint work together, and in her many writings on Lombroso, Nicky brought three innovative perspectives that enriched what has recently become a lively international field of Lombroso studies. The first was a determination to incorporate a gender analysis into our project, a goal that, as a women’s historian, I shared. Almost all commentary on Lombroso, both before and after our translation of Criminal Woman, has ignored his theory of female crime. This is surprising because Lombroso was one of the few criminologists before the dawn of feminist research in the 1970s to focus on gender as a central category of analysis. Much of his perspective was flawed and set up unfortunate tropes for the future of criminology, such as the assertion that prostitution constitutes the atavistic and typical form of female crime. Devoting the first third of his book to “normal women,” he claimed to have documented the universality of gender inferiority by demonstrating that women’s sexual role in the Darwinian struggle made them incapable of reaching the same biological, intellectual, and moral levels of men. Lombroso thus sexualized women’s crime and criminalized women’s sexuality. However, as our translation illustrates, Lombroso’s pronouncements were more nuanced when discussing individual cases of female criminality, and he was politically progressive—within the context of 19th-century Catholic Italy—in his support for divorce and opposition to harsh sentences for abortion and infanticide.

The second original perspective that Nicky contributed to Lombroso studies was a focus on his use of art and illustrations to embody his theories. Before we started work on our translations, she had already co-curated an exhibit with Susan Erony at the State University of New York at Albany entitled “Searching the Criminal Body: Art/Science/Prejudice” (Erony and Rafter, 2000). This experience made her particularly sensitive to the importance of the multiple images in Lombroso’s works, including the last volume of the 5th edition of Criminal Man, which consists entirely of drawings, photographs, maps, and tables. While I had always treated Lombroso’s illustrations as simply oddities, Nicky delved into their importance as data for his theories and as clues to his sometimes unconscious prejudices. To this end, we devoted much time (and had a lot of fun) poring over his images and choosing a representative sample. I learned from Nicky how to integrate most usefully Lombroso’s illustrations into our text by providing explanatory notes to each one. Nicky’s pioneering work on visual representation in Lombroso, and criminology in general, provides an inspired foundation for further work in the area.

Nicky’s third major achievement in Lombroso studies was to reconstruct his influence outside of Italy and particularly in the United States. Although Lombroso has been dubbed the “father of criminology” in many academic textbooks, no one had looked closely at the exact paths by which his work, little of which had been translated to English, reached American theorists and practitioners of criminal justice. In an important chapter of Creating Born Criminals, Nicky carefully identifies the American criminal anthropologists whom she characterizes as “channelers” of Lombroso’s theories. Between 1893 and 1909, nine books interpreted Lombroso for American specialists, most of whom were already aware of his European reputation but unable to read his work in the original. While none of the American studies was particularly innovative, as a group they put greater emphasis than did Lombroso on intellectual—rather than biological or psychological—anomalies among criminals and drew more radical and sometimes racist conclusions about the necessity of eugenics measures to eliminate the unfit. Through their subtle reinterpretation of Lombroso’s thought, these “channelers” refashioned him as a proponent of an emerging strain in American criminology beginning in the 1910s that would favor both intelligence testing and eugenic selection.

Through deep immersion in Lombroso’s writings, Nicky became convinced of the importance of biological theories of crime to the historical foundations of modern criminology, which she documented so well in her book, The Criminal Brain. She also developed a healthy skepticism, already apparent in her earlier work, about the ability of supposedly scientific theories to categorize individuals as “normal” or “criminal” and to predict their degrees of dangerousness to society. Historical research, if done well, militates against simplifications, and Nicky was a superb historian in her eager pursuit of primary sources and in her ability to place them into the political and social contexts of past eras. Her fine work on Lombroso constitutes just one example of the many ways in which she sought to restore historical memory to the field of criminology.