Cesar Lombroso Research Paper

Cesar Lombroso, an italian physician in the late 1800’s most known for the Italian School of Positivist Criminology where he then got the title of ‘Father of Criminology’, said there was a basis to finding criminals where he thought criminals and their behaviour was inherited. Lombroso believed that identification of a criminal consisted of a large jaw, face, arms, ears, excessive hair and low narrow foreheads in addition to being dark skinned, obviously a very biased opinion of what criminals are identified. Even though Lombroso’s work was repudiated he did spawn more work in finding a systematic form of personal identification leading to the innovations of Alphonse Bertillon to Law Enforcement. Alphonse Bertillon was a French Police clerk who wanted to end the problem of repeat offenders traveling from area to area and causing crimes here and there with no consequence do to the fact of there not being a way of identifying they were criminals.

To the so innovative method of identifying criminals there also came problems. Data, who was to know that each police clerk would give correct measurements of the person or even perform the measurements. Even though there was faultiness to the method “bertillionage” (Bertillon's Method) remained as the primary method of identification for over twenty years, where Bertillon then Fathered the Mug Shot by including a picture to each identification card. Soon after Fingerprints were being included to identification cards, where soon after DNA was beginning to be used and placed into Law Enforcement database. Even though throughout the years there have been many innovations towards personal identification we still had not come across a method of identifying a criminal in all areas until we came across Next Generation identification and in more detail Iris