Citation

Lindesmith A, Levin Y. Am. J. Sociol. 1937; 42(5): 653-671.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1937, University of Chicago Press)

DOI

10.1086/217542

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The prevailing conception in this country of Lombroso as the founder of scientific criminology may best be described as a myth. Many earlier studies of crime closely parallel contemporary sociological studies. An extensive literature upon juvenile delinquency, professional crime, crime causation, and other aspects of criminology was already in existence when Lombroso began his work. The use of autobiographical documents, the employment of official statistics, the ecological approach, and the study of the criminal "in the open," were understood and applied long before the time of the Italian school. From a sociological viewpoint, the advent of Lombroso represents a retrogression or an interlude in the progress of criminology rather than a step in advance. The eclipse of the earlier work may perhaps best be explained as a result of shifting prestige values associated with the importation of social Darwinism into the social sciences, with the growing popularity, in the later part of the nineteenth century, of psychiatric and other individualistic or biological theories, and with the isolation of American criminology from earlier European development.