Lombroso

The basic process described at the conference, Saleh-Hanna said, felt like a throwback to Lombroso: Scientists looked at the bodies of poor, marginalized people, isolated some biological characteristic, and used it to suggest that those people were inferior or dangerous.

When the criminologist Michael Rocque was in graduate school, he worked closely with the late Nicole Hahn Rafter, a feminist criminologist who devoted much of her career to studying Lombroso's grim legacy, including his influence on the American eugenics movement.

Lombroso's work has been widely discredited.

Saleh-Hanna sees that as a fundamental problem in the field, one going all the way back to Lombroso.

Talk with criminologists about biology, and one name comes up again and again: Cesare Lombroso.