Turin's criminology museum

Abstract

[...] he also believed in rehabilitation for those he called criminaloids - criminals who displayed fewer of the morphological characteristics of delinquency such as a small head, large ears, a skull displaying prominent brow arches over large eye orbits, or bulky jaw bones. Adopting the view of his German contemporary Ernst Haeckel that 'ontology recapitulates phylogeny', Lombroso saw infancy as a period of development corresponding to that of primitive man: get stuck in it and you get stuck in a primitive state that fosters deviant behaviour.