Book Description
Lombroso’s research took him to police stations, prisons, and madhouses where he studied the tattoos, cranial capacities, and sexual behavior of criminals and prostitutes to establish a female criminal type. Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman anticipated today’s theories of genetic criminal behavior. Lombroso used Darwinian evolutionary science to argue that criminal women are far more cunning and dangerous than criminal men. Designed to make his original text accessible to students and scholars alike, this volume includes extensive notes, appendices, a glossary, and more than thirty of Lombroso’s own illustrations. Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson’s introduction, locating his theory in social context, offers a significant new interpretation of Lombroso’s place in criminology.
About the author
Nicole Hahn Rafter is Senior Research Fellow at Northeastern University. Among her many books are Partial Justice: Women, Prisons, and Social Control and Creating Born Criminals. Mary Gibson is Professor of History at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860-1915 and Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology.
