The Criminal Couple (Translated)

When two people commit a crime together, who leads and who follows?

In The Criminal Couple, Italian criminologist Scipio Sighele (1868-1913) turns from the psychology of the crowd to its smallest possible unit: two people. Drawing on court cases, press reports, and the observations of physicians and jurists, he studies how a pair of lovers, spouses, or friends can commit crimes, and even suicide, that neither would have committed alone.

Sighele argues that in such pairs one partner usually dominates while the other yields, and he asks how law and science should judge responsibility when two minds act as one.

A landmark of the Italian positivist school of criminology, written in the age of Lombroso, Ferri, and Tarde, this book is a vivid window into how nineteenth-century science tried to understand love, influence, and crime.

About this edition

• New English translation by Stanislav Pavlovski
• Faithful to the original arguments and period terminology
• For readers of criminology, forensic psychology, true crime history, and the history of psychiatry