![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
This article examines the employment in post-war Italy of positivist scientific policing originally inspired by the work of the criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso at the end of the nineteenth century and subsequently developed at the scientific policing institute (Scuola Superiore di Polizia) in Rome. It analyses how the post-war police addressed the fascist regime’s employment of scientific policing for oppressive purposes and how far post-war scientific policing reflected the legacy of fascism. The article argues that post-war police narratives stressed the international importance of Lombroso and Italian criminal anthropology in order to ‘normalize’ the activities of the Scuola Superiore di Polizia during the fascist period and legitimize its work after the Second World War. Positivist criminological theories continued to influence police repression and criminal investigations in post-war Italy. However, the extent to which police officers and officials working outside the Scuola Superiore were convinced by such theories is questionable.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Mary Gibson and Christian De Vito for advising on earlier drafts of the manuscript, and to Lorenzo Benadusi for his suggestions during the preparation phase.
Notes
1. This interpretative approach was originally inspired by Mulcahy’s research on the Royal Ulster Constabulary (see Mulcahy Citation1999, 2000).
2. According to Woods (2015, 136–140), the definition which Lombroso himself gave to male homosexuals shifted from that of atavistic criminal types in the first edition of his most popular work, Criminal Man (1876), to that of ‘insane criminals’ produced by both mental illness and atavism in the fourth edition (1889).
3. This was stressed in Luigi Salerno’s Enciclopedia di polizia (1938a, 160). According to Gibson (Citation2002, 150), the fascist Interior Minister, Luigi Federzoni, gave his name to the revised dossier of 1924.
4. For data illustrating the School’s registering, between 1927 and 1939, of over 1000 ‘homosexual offenders’ among inmates of the Regina Coeli jail in Rome, see Ebner (Citation2004, 144).
5. Benadusi’s study also highlights (148–149) how the fascist police showed greater indulgence towards ‘active’ male homosexuals who publicly behaved like ‘normal’ men, as opposed to ‘passive’ male homosexuals. According to Benadusi (208–216), some homosexuals were confined to mental asylums. This was principally to separate them from the rest of society because of their ‘dangerousness’, and there is evidence that psychiatrists at these institutions doubted the effectiveness of ‘treatment’.
6. On the congress, see also Christian De Vito (2000–2001, 247–249).
7. Born in 1891, Sorrentino started his career at the School in 1917, where he was promoted to the rank of Vice-Questore in 1938, then Questore in 1943. He retired from the police in 1956. See Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione Generale della Pubblica Sicurezza, Divisione Personale di Pubblica Sicurezza, Fascicoli Personale Fuori Servizio (henceforth ACS, FPFS), versamento 1963, b. 124, f. Sorrentino Ugo.
8. I am grateful to Christian De Vito for stressing this point to me.
9. For Lombroso’s reception outside Italy, see essays in Knepper and Ystehede (2013) and Becker and Wetzell (2006).
10. See, for example, Finke (Citation1947); Kern (Citation1948); “Führende Kriminalisten” (1952).
11. See various papers in Sorrentino’s personal file: ACS, FPFS, versamento 1963, b. 124, f. Sorrentino Ugo.
12. For further analysis, see Jonathan Dunnage (Citation2015).
13. ACS, FPFS, versamento 1973, b. 152 bis, f. Bianconi Pietro, Direttore Capo Divisione Personale di Pubblica Sicurezza to Consiglio di Amministrazione del Personale della Pubblica Sicurezza, 3 February 1947.
14. Documents in Bianconi’s personal file: ACS, FPFS, versamento 1973, b. 152 bis, f. Bianconi Pietro.
15. Ibid.
16. For Salerno’s career in the police, see Dunnage (2012, 147–149, 193–194).
17. For details of the law, sponsored by the socialist senator Lina Merlin, which passed successfully, see Gibson (1999, 207–214).
18. For the prosecution of male homosexuals in the UK, see Higgins (Citation1996). Regarding the Federal Republic of Germany, Roth (2009, 579–580) argues that in the 1950s the Kriminalpolizei discriminated against homosexuals, alongside prostitutes, juvenile delinquents and other groups, partly as a result of the practices they had adopted against ‘enemies’ of the ‘national community during the Third Reich’. For the prosecution of homosexuals in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s, see also Herzog (2005, 88–95).
19. See Ebner (2004, 140–142) for an analysis of why an article on homosexual acts was eventually omitted from the final version of the Rocco criminal code.
20. According to Mimmo Franzinelli (1999, 77–81), Camilleri was expelled from the police after he had tried to prevent communists from being tried for the bombing at the Milan trade fair in April 1928, which had killed 18 people, in his belief that the bomb had been planted by fascists. This is also referred to in the chapter of Camilleri’s book entitled ‘Un eccidio deliberatamente impunito’.
21. Ebner (Citation2004, 146), notes, for example, with reference to the fascist period, that: ‘Stereotypes and a visceral disgust for the behaviour, appearance and mannerisms of homosexual men drove police commissioners to persecute them’.