The Return of Lombroso? Ethical Aspects of (Visions of) Preventive Forensic Screening

Munthe, Christian; Radovic, Susanna

Regardless of exact version, the new Lombrosian vision is at heart a population screening approach to crime and criminality. Criminality is viewed as a societal problem of importance to prevent or mitigate through early identification of individuals at risk followed by effective interventions in the same way as ill health is viewed in the case of health screening programmes (Juth and Munthe, 2012) . The prima facie case for initially analysing the ethics of the new Lombrosian vision from this angle gains further support by the fact that the currently existing Lombrosian approaches all make use of tools and resources of medicine, health care and health science. In the next section, we will address the underlying theoretical issue of what difference the distinction between the goals of public health and those of criminal law policy may do for such an ethical analysis.