Enrico Ferri

Enrico Ferri was an Italian jurist who held a professorship in criminal law and served for decades in the Italian parliament, first for the Radical Party and from 1893 for the Socialist Party, for which he edited the newspaper Avanti. Trained in Cesare Lombroso's school of criminal anthropology, Ferri argued that social and economic conditions, not biology alone, drove criminal behavior, and his 1884 work Criminal Sociology became a foundational text of the positivist school of criminal law, later shaping Argentina's penal code. He chaired the commission that drafted a comprehensive draft Italian penal code in 1921, though it was not adopted in that form. In his later years Ferri, who had once championed crime prevention over punishment as a socialist deputy, became a supporter of Benito Mussolini's fascist government.