criminal anthropology
an early positivist approach to criminology (see positivist criminology) associated with the theories of Italian criminologist and psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909). It embraced the notion of the “born criminal” or criminal type, based on the belief that criminals had certain physical characteristics (e.g., sloping forehead, large ears) that distinguished them from noncriminals. Lombroso identified these characteristics as “atavistic anomalies… that bring man closer to the inferior animals,” then developed a hypothesis that linked delinquency to constitutional anomalies and attributed the primal cause of crime to hereditary flaws.