Cesare Lombroso was a nineteenth-century Italian criminologist who proposed that there was a hereditary class of criminals who were biological throwbacks to a more primitive stage of human evolution. Lombroso's theories, which are now discredited, posited that some individuals are "born criminal." During his lifetime Lombroso's theories proved influential and popular, as he appeared to have supplied a scientific method for determining members of a criminal class. In doing so he rejected environmental causes of crime.

Lombroso was born on November 6, 1835 in Verona, Italy. He studied at the universities of Padua, Vienna, and Paris and became a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pavia in 1862. In 1871 he became director of a mental asylum in Pesaro and in 1876 left Pavia to become a professor of forensic medicine and hygiene at the University of Turin. In 1896 he was made a professor of psychiatry at Turin, and ten years later...