The prevention of deviance in Napoleone Colajanni’s criminal sociology

The positive school of criminal anthropology, founded by Cesare Lombroso, started from the postulate that - with some exceptions - the criminal is born as such, and therefore placed much more emphasis on crime repression than prevention. The death penalty was seen as a barrier to the spread of crime because it prevented biological reproduction. In contrast, the sociological approach in criminology, initiated by Enrico Ferri and fully developed by Napoleone Colajanni, took into account the social factors in the generation of crime and prioritized crime prevention. This research delves into Colajanni’s contribution to criminal sociology, highlighting how, ahead of his time, he identified poverty, illiteracy, and involuntary unemployment as the true causes of deviance. At the same time, he blamed criminal law and the prison system for contributing to the spread of crime rather than curbing it.