Enrico Ferri

Born Feb. 25, 1856, in San Benedetto Po; died Apr. 12, 1929, in Rome. Italian criminologist.

Ferri graduated from the University of Bologna in 1877. Beginning in 1884, he was a professor of criminal law at the universities of Bologna, Sienna, Pisa, and Rome. A follower of C. Lombroso, he further developed the ideas of the anthropological school of criminal law. In his works Criminal Sociology (1883) and A Study of Criminality (1901), Ferri rejected the concepts of fault, responsibility, amenability, corpus delicti, and punishment and proposed that they be replaced with such concepts as dangerous personality. In 1919, Ferri headed a commission to draft a criminal code, many provisions of which were later incorporated into the Fascist Italian criminal code of 1930.