MEASURING BODIES H 3
Coda
Tolstoy's frustration with the Lombrosians lay in their invoca-
tion of science to avoid the deeper question that called for social
transformation as one potential resolution. Science, he realized,
often acted as the firm ally of existing institutions. His protagonist
Prince Nekhlyudov, trying to fathom a system that falsely con-
demned a woman he once wronged, studies the learned works of
criminal anthropology and finds no answer:
He also came across a tramp and a woman, both of whom repelled him
by their half-witted insensibility and seeming cruelty, but even in them he
failed to see the criminal type as described in the Italian school of crimi-
nology: he saw in them only people who were repulsive to him personally,
like others were whom he met outside prison walls—in swallowtail coats,
wearing epaulets or bedecked with lace....
At first he had hoped to find the answer in books, and bought every-
thing he could find on the subject. He bought the works of Lombroso and
Garofalo [an Italian baron and disciple of Lombroso], Ferri, Liszt, Maud-
sley and Tarde, and read them carefully. But as he read, he became more
and more disappointed.... Science answered thousands of very subtle
and ingenious questions touching criminal law, but certainly not the one
he was trying to solve. He was asking a very simple thing: Why and by
what right does one class of people lock up, torture, exile, flog, and kill
other people, when they themselves are no better than those whom they
torture, flog and kill? And for answers he got arguments as to whether
human beings were possessed of free will or not. Could criminal propen-
sities be detected by measuring the sk'ull, and so on? What part does hered-
ity play in crime? Is there such a thing as congenital depravity?
(Resurrection, 1899, 1966 edition translated by R. Edmonds, pp. 402-403.)Epilogue
We live in a more subtle century, but the basic arguments never
seem to change. The crudities of the cranial index have given way
to the complexity of intelligence testing. The signs of innate crim-
inality are no longer sought in stigmata of gross anatomy, but in
twentieth-century criteria: genes and fine structure of the brain.
ln the mid-1960s, papers began to appear linking a chromo-somal anomaly in males known as XYY with violent and criminal
avior. (Normal males receive a single X chromosome from their
ers and a Y from their fathers; normal females receive a sin-