Title: The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901
Author: Ferri, Enrico, 1859-1929
Language: English
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THE POSITIVE SCHOOL OF CRIMINOLOGY

Three Lectures

Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901


By Enrico Ferri

Translated by Ernest Untermann


Chicago

Charles H. Kerr & Company

1908



THE POSITIVE SCHOOL OF CRIMINOLOGY


I.

My Friends:

When, in the turmoil of my daily occupation, I received an invitation,
several months ago, from several hundred students of this famous
university, to give them a brief summary, in short special lectures, of
the principal and fundamental conclusions of criminal sociology, I
gladly accepted, because this invitation fell in with two ideals of
mine. These two ideals are stirring my heart and are the secret of my
life. In the first place, this invitation chimed with the ideal of my
personal life, namely, to diffuse and propagate among my brothers the
scientific ideas, which my brain has accumulated, not through any merit
of mine, but thanks to the lucky prize inherited from my mother in the
lottery of life. And the second ideal which this invitation called up
before my mind's vision was this: The ideal of young people of Italy,
united in morals and intellectual pursuits, feeling in their social
lives the glow of a great aim. It would matter little whether this aim
would agree with my own ideas or be opposed to them, so long as it
should be an ideal which would lift the aspirations of the young people
out of the fatal grasp of egoistic interests. Of course, we positivists
know very well, that the material requirements of life shape and
determine also the moral and intellectual aims of human consciousness.
But positive science declares the following to be the indispensable
requirement for the regeneration of human ideals: Without an ideal,
neither an individual nor a collectivity can live, without it humanity
is dead or dying. For it is the fire of an ideal which renders the life
of each one of us possible, useful and fertile. And only by its help can
each one of us, in the more or less short course of his or her
existence, leave behind traces for the benefit of fellow-beings. The
invitation extended to me proves that the students of Naples believe in
the inspiring existence of such an ideal of science, and are anxious to
learn more about ideas, with which the entire world of the present day
is occupied, and whose life-giving breath enters even through the
windows of the dry courtrooms, when their doors are closed against it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Let us now speak of this new science, which has become known in Italy by
the name of the Positive School of Criminology. This science, the same
as every other phenomenon of scientific evolution, cannot be
shortsightedly or conceitedly attributed to the arbitrary initiative of
this or that thinker, this or that scientist. We must rather regard it
as a natural product, a necessary phenomenon, in the development of that
sad and somber department of science which deals with the disease of
crime. It is this plague of crime which forms such a gloomy and painful
contrast with the splendor of present-day civilization. The 19th century
has won a great victory over mortality and infectious diseases by means
of the masterful progress of physiology and natural science. But while
contagious diseases have gradually diminished, we see on the other hand
that moral diseases are growing more numerous in our so-called
civilization. While typhoid fever, smallpox, cholera and diphtheria
retreated before the remedies which enlightened science applied by means
of the experimental method, removing their concrete causes, we see on
the other hand that insanity, suicide and crime, that painful trinity,
are growing apace. And this makes it very evident that the science which
is principally, if not exclusively, engaged in studying these phenomena
of social disease, should feel the necessity of finding a more exact
diagnosis of these moral diseases of society, in order to arrive at some
effective and more humane remedy, which should more victoriously combat
this somber trinity of insanity, suicide and crime.

The science of positive criminology arose in the last quarter of the
19th century, as a result of this strange contrast, which would be
inexplicable, if we could not discover historical and scientific reasons
for its existence. And it is indeed a strange contrast that Italy should
have arrived at a perfect theoretical development of a classical school
of criminology, while there persists, on the other hand, the disgraceful
condition that criminality assumes dimensions never before observed in
this country, so that the science of criminology cannot stem the tide of
crime in high and low circles. It is for this reason, that the positive
school of criminology arises out of the very nature of things, the same
as every other line of science. It is based on the conditions of our
daily life. It would indeed be conceited on our part to claim that we,
who are the originators of this new science and its new conclusions,
deserve alone the credit for its existence. The brain of the scientist
is rather a sort of electrical accumulator, which feels and assimilates
the vibrations and heart-beats of life, its splendor and its shame, and
derives therefrom the conviction that it must of necessity provide for
definite social wants. And on the other hand, it would be an evidence of
intellectual short-sightedness on the part of the positivist man of
science, if he did not recognize the historical accomplishments, which
his predecessors on the field of science have left behind as indelible
traces of their struggle against the unknown in that brilliant and
irksome domain. For this reason, the adherents of the positive school of
criminology feel the most sincere reverence for the classic school of
criminology. And I am glad today, in accepting the invitation of the
students of Naples, to say, that this is another reason why their
invitation was welcome to me. It is now 16 years since I gave in this
same hall a lecture on positive criminology, which was then in its
initial stages. It was in 1885, when I had the opportunity to outline
the first principles of the positive school of criminology, at the
invitation of other students, who preceded you on the periodic waves of
the intellectual generations. And the renewal of this opportunity gave
me so much moral satisfaction that, I could not under any circumstances
decline your invitation. Then too, the Neapolitan Atheneum has
maintained the reputation of the Italian mind in the 19th century, also
in that science which even foreign scientists admit to be our specialty,
namely the science of criminology. In fact, aside from the two terrible
books of the Digest, and from the practical criminologists of the Middle
Ages who continued the study of criminality, the modern world opened a
glorious page in the progress of criminal science with the modest little
book of Cesare Beccaria. This progress leads from Cesare Beccaria, by
way of Francesco Carrara, to Enrico Pessina.

Enrico Pessina alone remains of the two giants who concluded the cycle
of classic school of criminology. In a lucid moment of his scientific
consciousness, which soon reverted to the old abstract and metaphysical
theories, he announced in an introductory statement in 1879, that
criminal justice would have to rejuvenate itself in the pure bath of the
natural sciences and substitute in place of abstraction the living and
concrete study of facts. Naturally every scientist has his function and
historical significance; and we cannot expect that a brain which has
arrived at the end of its career should turn towards a new direction. At
any rate, it is a significant fact that this most renowned
representative of the classic school of criminology should have pointed
out this need of his special science in this same university of Naples,
one year after the inauguration of the positive school of criminology,
that he should have looked forward to a time when the study of natural
and positive facts would set to rights the old juridical abstractions.
And there is still another precedent in the history of this university,
which makes scientific propaganda at this place very agreeable for a
positivist. It is that six years before that introductory statement by
Pessina, Giovanni Bovio gave lectures at this university, which he
published later on under the title of "A Critical Study of Criminal
Law." Giovanni Bovio performed in this monograph the function of a
critic, but the historical time of his thought, prevented him from
taking part in the construction of a new science. However, he prepared
the ground for new ideas, by pointing out all the rifts and weaknesses
of the old building. Bovio maintained that which Gioberti, Ellero,
Conforti, Tissol had already maintained, namely that it is impossible to
solve the problem which is still the theoretical foundation of the
classic school of criminology, the problem of the relation between
punishment and crime. No man, no scientist, no legislator, no judge, has
ever been able to indicate any absolute standard, which would enable us
to say that equity demands a definite punishment for a definite crime.
We can find some opportunistic expedient, but not a solution of the
problem. Of course, if we could decide which is the gravest crime, then
we could also decide on the heaviest sentence and formulate a descending
scale which would establish the relative fitting proportions between
crime and punishment. If it is agreed that patricide is the gravest
crime, we meet out the heaviest sentence, death or imprisonment for
life, and then we can agree on a descending scale of crime and on a
parallel scale of punishments. But the problem begins right with the
first stone of the structure, not with the succeeding steps. Which is
the greatest penalty proportional to the crime of patricide? Neither
science, nor legislation, nor moral consciousness, can offer an absolute
standard. Some say: The greatest penalty is death. Others say: No,
imprisonment for life. Still others say: Neither death, nor imprisonment
for life, but only imprisonment for a time. And if imprisonment for a
time is to be the highest penalty, how many years shall it last
--thirty, or twenty-five, or ten?

No man can set up any absolute standard in this matter. Giovanni Bovio
thus arrived at the conclusion that this internal contradiction in the
science of criminology was the inevitable fate of human justice, and
that this justice, struggling in the grasp of this internal
contradiction, must turn to the civil law and ask for help in its
weakness. The same thought had already been illumined by a ray from the
bright mind of Filangieri, who died all too soon. And we can derive from
this fact the historical rule that the most barbarian conditions of
humanity show a prevalence of a criminal code which punishes without
healing; and that the gradual progress of civilization will give rise
to the opposite conception of healing without punishing.

Thus it happens that this university of Naples, in which the illustrious
representative of the classic school of criminology realized the
necessity of its regeneration, and in which Bovio foresaw its sterility,
has younger teachers now who keep alive the fire of the positivist
tendency in criminal science, such as Penta, Zuccarelli, and others,
whom you know. Nevertheless I feel that this faculty of jurisprudence
still lacks oxygen in the study of criminal law, because its thought is
still influenced by the overwhelming authority of the name of Enrico
Pessina. And it is easy to understand that there, where the majestic
tree spreads out its branches towards the blue vault, the young plant
feels deprived of light and air, while it might have grown strong and
beautiful in another place.

The positive school of criminology, then, was born in our own Italy
through the singular attraction of the Italian mind toward the study of
criminology; and its birth is also due to the peculiar condition our
country with its great and strange contrast between the theoretical
doctrines and the painful fact of an ever increasing criminality.

The positive school of criminology was inaugurate by the work of Cesare
Lombroso, in 1872. From 1872 to 1876 he opened a new way for the study
of criminality by demonstrating in his own person that we must first
understand the criminal who offends, before we can study and understand
his crime. Lombroso studied the prisoners in the various penitentiaries
of Italy from the point of view of anthropology. And he compiled his
studies in the reports of the Lombardian Institute of Science and
Literature, and published them later together in his work "Criminal
Man." The first edition of this work (1876) remained almost unnoticed,
either because its scientific material was meager, or because Cesare
Lombroso had not yet drawn any general scientific conclusions, which
could have attracted the attention of the world of science and law. But
simultaneously with its second edition (1878) there appeared two
monographs, which constituted the embryo of the new school,
supplementing the anthropological studies of Lombroso with conclusions
and systematizations from the point of view of sociology and law.
Raffaele Garofalo published in the Neapolitan Journal of Philosophy and
Literature an essay on criminality, in which he declared that the
dangerousness of the criminal was the criterion by which society should
measure the function of its defense against the disease of crime. And in
the same year, 1878, I took occasion to publish a monograph on the
denial of free will and personal responsibility, in which I declared
frankly that from now on the science of crime and punishment must look
for the fundamental facts of a science of social defense against crime
in the human and social life itself. The simultaneous publication of
these three monographs caused a stir. The teachers of classic
criminology, who had taken kindly to the recommendations of Pessina and
Ellero, urging them to study the natural sources of crime, met the new
ideas with contempt, when the new methods made a determined and radical
departure, and became not only the critics, but the zealous opponents of
the new theories. And this is easy to understand. For the struggle for
existence is an irresistible law of nature, as well for the thousands of
germs scattered to the winds by the oak, as for the ideas which grow in
the brain of man. But persecutions, calumnies, criticisms, and
opposition are powerless against an idea, if it carries within itself
the germ of truth. Moreover, we should look upon this phenomenon of a
repugnance in the average intellect (whether of the ordinary man or the
scientist) for all new ideas as a natural function. For when the brain
of some man has felt the light of a new idea, a sneering criticism
serves us a touchstone for it. If the idea is wrong, it will fall by the
wayside; if it is right, then criticisms, opposition and persecution
will cull the golden kernel from the unsightly shell, and the idea will
march victoriously over everything and everybody. It is so in all walks
of life--in art, in politics, in science. Every new idea will rouse
against itself naturally and inevitably the opposition of the accustomed
thoughts. This is so true, that when Cesare Beccaria opened the great
historic cycle of the classic school of criminology, he was assaulted by
the critics of his time with the same indictments which were brought
against us a century later.

When Cesare Beccaria printed his book on crime and penalties in 1774
under a false date and place of publication, reflecting the aspirations
which gave rise to the impending hurricane of the French revolution;
when he hurled himself against all that was barbarian in the mediaeval
laws and set loose a storm of enthusiasm among the encyclopedists, and
even some of the members of government, in France, he was met by a wave
of opposition, calumny and accusation on the part of the majority of
jurists, judges and lights of philosophy. The abbé Jachinci published
four volumes against Beccaria, calling him the destroyer of justice and
morality, simply because he had combatted the tortures and the death
penalty.

The tortures, which we incorrectly ascribe to the mental brutality of
the judges of those times, were but a logical consequence of the
contemporaneous theories. It was felt that in order to condemn a man,
one must have the certainty of his guilty, and it was said that the best
means of obtaining tins certainty, the queen of proofs, was the
confession of the criminal. And if the criminal denied his guilt, it was
necessary to have recourse to torture, in order to force him to a
confession which he withheld from fear of the penalty. The torture
soothed, so to say, the conscience of the judge, who was free to condemn
as soon as he had obtained a confession. Cesare Beccaria rose with
others against the torture. Thereupon the judges and jurists protested
that penal justice would be impossible, because it could not get any
information, since a man suspected of a crime would not confess his
guilt voluntarily. Hence they accused Beccaria of being the protector of
robbers and murderers, because he wanted to abolish the only means of
compelling them to a confession, the torture. But Cesare Beccaria had on
his side the magic power of truth. He was truly the electric accumulator
of his time, who gathered from its atmosphere the presage of the coming
revolution, the stirring of the human conscience. You can find a similar
illustration in the works of Daquin in Savoy, of Pinel in France, and of
Hach Take in England, who strove to bring about a revolution in the
treatment of the insane. This episode interests us especially, because
it is a perfect illustration of the way traveled by the positive school
of criminology. The insane were likewise considered to blame for their
insanity. At the dawn of the 19th century, the physician Hernroth still
wrote that insanity was a moral sin of the insane, because "no one
becomes insane, unless he forsakes the straight path of virtue and of
the fear of the Lord."

And on this assumption the insane were locked up in horrible dungeons,
loaded down with chains, tortured and beaten, for lo! their insanity was
their own fault.

At that period, Pinel advanced the revolutionary idea that insanity was
not a sin, but a disease like all other diseases. This idea is now a
commonplace, but in his time it revolutionized the world. It seemed as
though this innovation inaugurated by Pinel would overthrow the world
and the foundations of society. Well, two years before the storming of
the Bastile Pinel walked into the sanitarium of the Salpetriere and
committed the brave act of freeing the insane of the chains that weighed
them down. He demonstrated in practice that the insane, when freed of
their chains, became quieter, instead of creating wild disorder and
destruction. This great revolution of Pinel, Chiarugi, and others,
changed the attitude of the public mind toward the insane. While
formerly insanity had been regarded as a moral sin, the public
conscience, thanks to the enlightening work of science, henceforth had
to adapt itself to the truth that insanity is a disease like all
others, that a man does not become insane because he wants to, but that
he becomes insane through hereditary transmission and the influence of
the environment in which he lives, being predisposed toward insanity and
becoming insane under the pressure of circumstances.

The positive school of criminology accomplished the same revolution in
the views concerning the treatment of criminals that the above named men
of science accomplished for the treatment of the insane. The general
opinion of classic criminalists and of the people at large is that crime
involves a moral guilt, because it is due to the free will of the
individual who leaves the path of virtue and chooses the path of crime,
and therefore it must be suppressed by meeting it with a proportionate
quantity of punishment. This is to this day the current conception of
crime. And the illusion of a free human will (the only miraculous factor
in the eternal ocean of cause and effect) leads to the assumption that
one can choose freely between virtue and vice. How can you still believe
in the existence of a free will, when modern psychology armed with all
the instruments of positive modern research, denies that there is any
free will and demonstrates that every act of a human being is the
result of an interaction between the personality and the environment of
man?

And how is it possible to cling to that obsolete idea of moral guilt,
according to which every individual is supposed to have the free choice
to abandon virtue and give himself up to crime? The positive school of
criminology maintains, on the contrary, that it is not the criminal who
wills; in order to be a criminal it is rather necessary that the
individual should find himself permanently or transitorily in such
personal, physical and moral conditions, and live in such an
environment, which become for him a chain of cause and effect,
externally and internally, that disposes him toward crime. This is our
conclusion, which I anticipate, and it constitutes the vastly different
and opposite method, which the positive school of criminology employs as
compared to the leading principle of the classic school of criminal
science.

In this method, this essential principle of the positive school of
criminology, you will find another reason for the seemingly slow advance
of this school. That is very natural. If you consider the great reform
carried by the ideas of Cesare Beccaria into the criminal justice of
the Middle Age, you will see that the great classic school represents
but a small step forward, because it leaves the penal justice on the
same theoretical and practical basis which it had in the Middle Age and
in classic antiquity, that is to say, based on the idea of a moral
responsibility of the individual. For Beccaria, for Carrara, for their
predecessors, this idea is no more nor less than that mentioned in books
47 and 48 of the Digest: "The criminal is liable to punishment to the
extent that he is morally guilty of the crime he has committed." The
entire classic school is, therefore, nothing but a series of reforms.
Capital punishment has been abolished in some countries, likewise
torture, confiscation, corporal punishment. But nevertheless the immense
scientific movement of the classic school has remained a mere reform.

It has continued in the 19th century to look upon crime in the same way
that the Middle Age did: "Whoever commits murder or theft, is alone the
absolute arbiter to decide whether he wants to commit the crime or not."
This remains the foundation of the classic school of criminology. This
explains why it could travel on its way more rapidly than the positive
school of criminology. And yet, it took half a century from the time of
Beccaria, before the penal codes showed signs of the reformatory
influence of the classic school of criminology. So that it has also
taken quite a long time to establish it so well that it became accepted
by general consent, as it is today. The positive school of criminology
was born in 1878, and although it does not stand for a mere reform of
the methods of criminal justice, but for a complete and fundamental
transformation of criminal justice itself, it has already gone quite a
distance and made considerable conquests which begin to show in our
country. It is a fact that the penal code now in force in this country
represents a compromise, so far as the theory of personal responsibility
is concerned, between the old theory of free will and the conclusions of
the positive school which denies this free will.

You can find an illustration of this in the eloquent contortions of
phantastic logic in the essays on the criminal code written by a great
advocate of the classic school of criminology, Mario Pagano, this
admirable type of a scientist and patriot, who does not lock himself up
in the quiet egoism of his study, but feels the ideal of his time
stirring within him and gives up his life to it. He has written three
lines of a simple nudity that reveals much, in which he says: "A man is
responsible for the crimes which he commits; if, in committing a crime,
his will is half free, he is responsible to the extent of one-half; if
one-third, he is responsible one-third." There you have the
uncompromising and absolute classic theorem. But in the penal code of
1890, you will find that the famous article 45 intends to base the
responsibility for a crime on the simple will, to the exclusion of the
free will. However, the Italian judge has continued to base the exercise
of penal justice on the supposed existence of the free will, and
pretends not to know that the number of scientists denying the free will
is growing. Now, how is it possible that so terrible an office as that
of sentencing criminals retains its stability or vacillates, according
to whether the first who denies the existence of a free will deprives
this function of its foundation?

Truly, it is said that this question has been too difficult for the new
Italian penal code. And, for this reason, it was thought best to base
the responsibility for a crime on the idea that a man is guilty simply
for the reason that he wanted to commit the crime; and that he is not
responsible if he did not want to commit it. But this is an eclectic way
out of the difficulty, which settles nothing, for in the same code we
have the rule that involuntary criminals are also punished, so that
involuntary killing and wounding are punished with imprisonment the same
as voluntary deeds of this kind. We have heard it said in such cases
that the result may not have been intended, but the action bringing it
about was. If a hunter shoots through a hedge and kills or wounds a
person, he did not intend to kill, and yet he is held responsible
because his first act, the shooting, was voluntary.

That statement applies to involuntary crimes, which are committed by
some positive act. But what about involuntary crimes of omission? In a
railway station, where the movements of trains represent the daily whirl
of traffic in men, things, and ideas, every switch is a delicate
instrument which may cause a derailment. The railway management places a
switchman on duty at this delicate post. But in a moment of fatigue, or
because he had to work inhumanly long hours of work, which exhausted all
his nervous elasticity, or for other reasons, the switchman forgets to
set the switch and causes a railroad accident, in which people are
killed and wounded. Can it be said that he intended the first act?
Assuredly not, for he did not intend anything and did not do anything.
The hunter who fires a shot has at least had the intention of shooting.
But the switchman did not want to forget (for in that case he would be
indirectly to blame); he has simply forgotten from sheer fatigue to do
his duty; he has had no intention whatever, and yet you hold him
responsible in spite of all that! The fundamental logic of your
reasoning in this case corresponds to the logic of the things. Does it
not happen every day in the administration of justice that the judges
forget about the neutral expedient of the legislator who devised this
relative progress of the penal code, which pretends to base the
responsibility of a man on the neutral and naive criterion of a will
without freedom of will? Do they not follow their old mental habits in
the administration of justice and apply the obsolete criterion of the
free will, which the legislator thought fit to abandon? We see, then,
as a result of this imperfect and insincere innovation in penal
legislation this flagrant contradiction, that the magistrates assume the
existence of a free will, while the legislator has decided that it shall
not be assumed. Now, in science as well as in legislation, we should
follow a direct and logical line, such as that of the classic school or
the positive school of criminology. But whoever thinks he has solved a
problem when he gives us a solution which is neither fish nor fowl,
comes to the most absurd and iniquitous conclusions. You see what
happens every day. If to-morrow some beastly and incomprehensible crime
is committed, the conscience of the judge is troubled by this question:
Was the person who committed this crime morally free to act or not? He
may also invoke the help of legislation, and he may take refuge in
article 46,[A] or in that compromise of article 47,[B] which admits
a responsibility of one-half or one-third, and he would decide on a
penalty of one-half or one-third.

All this may take place in the case of a grave and strange crime. And on
the other hand, go to the municipal courts or to the police courts,
where the magic lantern of justice throws its rays upon the nameless
human beings who have stolen a bundle of wood in a hard winter, or who
have slapped some one in the face during a brawl in a saloon.
And if they should find a defending lawyer who would demand the
appointment of a medical expert, watch the reception he would get from
the judge. When justice is surprised by a beastly and strange crime, it
feels the entire foundation of its premises shaking, it halts for a
moment, it calls in the help of legal medicine, and reflects before it
sentences. But in the case of those poor nameless creatures, justice
does not stop to consider whether that microbe in the criminal world who
steals under the influence of hereditary or acquired degeneration, or in
the delirium of chronic hunger, is not worthy of more pity. It rather
replies with a mephistophelian grin when he begs for a humane
understanding of his case.

[A] Article 46: "A person is not subject to punishment, if at the moment
of his deed he was in a mental condition which deprived him of
consciousness or of the freedom of action. But if the judge considers it
dangerous to acquit the prisoner, he has to transfer him to the care of
the proper authorities, who will take the necessary precautions."

[B] Article 47: "If the mental condition mentioned in the foregoing
article was such as to considerably decrease the responsibility, without
eliminating it entirely, the penalty fixed upon the crime committed is
reduced according to the following rules:

"I. In place of penitentiary, imprisonment for not less than six years.

"II. In place of the permanent loss of civic rights, a loss of these
rights for a stipulated time.

"III. Whenever it is a question of a penalty of more than twelve years,
it is reduced to from three to ten years; if of more than six years, but
not more than twelve, it is reduced to from one to five years; in other
cases, the reduction is to be one-half of the ordinary penalty.

"IV. A fine is reduced to one-half.

"V. If the penalty would be a restriction of personal liberty, the judge
may order the prisoner to a workhouse, until the proper authorities
object, when the remainder of the sentence is carried out in the usual
manner."

It is true that there is now and then in those halls of justice, which
remain all too frequently closed to the living wave of public sentiment,
some more intelligent and serene judge who is touched by this painful
understanding of the actual human life. Then he may, under the illogical
conditions of penal justice, with its compromise between the exactness
of the classic and that of the positive school of criminology, seek for
some expedient which may restore him to equanimity.

In 1832, France introduced a penal innovation, which seemed to represent
an advance on the field of justice, but which is in reality a denial of
justice: The expedient of _extenuating circumstances_. The judge does
not ask for the advice of the court physician in the case of some
forlorn criminal, but condemns him without a word of rebuke to society
for its complicity. But in order to assuage his own conscience he grants
him extenuating circumstances, which seem a concession of justice, but
are, in reality, a denial of justice. For you either believe that a man
is responsible for his crime, and in that case the concession of
extenuating circumstances is a hypocrisy; or you grant them in good
faith, and then you admit that the man was in circumstances which
reduced his moral responsibility, and thereby the extenuating
circumstances become a denial of justice. For if your conviction
concerning such circumstances were sincere, you would go to the bottom
of them and examine with the light of your understanding all those
innumerable conditions which contribute toward those extenuating
circumstances. But what are those extenuating circumstances? Family
conditions? Take it that a child is left alone by its parents, who are
swallowed up in the whirl of modern industry, which overthrows the laws
of nature and forbids the necessary rest, because steam engines do not
get tired and day work must be followed by night work, so that the
setting of the sun is no longer the signal for the laborer to rest, but
to begin a new shift of work. Take it that this applies not alone to
adults, but also to human beings in the growing stage, whose muscular
power may yield some profit for the capitalists. Take it that even the
mother, during the period of sacred maternity, becomes a cog in the
machinery of industry. And you will understand that the child must grow
up, left to its own resources, in the filth of life, and that its
history will be inscribed in criminal statistics, which are the shame of
our so-called civilization.

Of course, in this first lecture I cannot give you even a glimpse of the
positive results of that modern science which has studied the criminal
and his environment instead of his crimes. And I must, therefore, limit
myself to a few hints concerning the historical origin of the positive
school of criminology. I ought to tell you something concerning the
question of free will. But you will understand that such a momentous
question, which is worthy of a deep study of the many-sided physical,
moral, intellectual life, cannot be summed up in a few short words. I
can only say that the tendency of modern natural sciences, in physiology
as well as psychology, has overruled the illusions of those who would
fain persist in watching psychological phenomena merely within
themselves and think that they can understand them without any other
means. On the contrary, positive science, backed by the testimony of
anthropology and of the study of the environment, has arrived at the
following conclusions: The admission of a free will is out of the
question. For if the free will is but an illusion of our internal being,
it is not a real faculty possessed by the human mind. Free will would
imply that the human will, confronted by the choice of making
voluntarily a certain determination, has the last decisive word under
the pressure of circumstances contending for and against this decision;
that it is free to decide for or against a certain course independently
of internal and external circumstances, which play upon it, according to
the laws of cause and effect.

Take it that a man has insulted me. I leave the place in which I have
been insulted, and with me goes the suggestion of forgiveness or of
murder and vengeance. And then it is assumed that a man has his complete
free will, unless he is influenced by circumstances explicitly
enumerated by the law, such as minority, congenital deaf-muteness,
insanity, habitual drunkenness and, to a certain extent, violent
passion. If a man is not in a condition mentioned in this list, he is
considered in possession of his free will, and if he murders he is held
morally responsible and therefore punished.

This illusion of a free will has its source in our inner consciousness,
and is due solely to the ignorance in which we find ourselves concerning
the various motives and different external and internal conditions which
press upon our mind at the moment of decision.

If a man knows the principal causes which determine a certain
phenomenon, he says that this phenomenon is inevitable. If he does not
know them, he considers it as an accident, and this corresponds in the
physical field to the arbitrary phenomenon of the human will which does
not know whether it shall decide this way or that. For instance, some of
us were of the opinion, and many still are, that the coming and going of
meteorological phenomena was accidental and could not he foreseen. But
in the meantime, science has demonstrated that they are likewise subject
to the law of causality, because it discovered the causes which enable
us to foresee their course. Thus weather prognosis has made wonderful
progress by the help of a network of telegraphically connected
meteorological stations, which succeeded in demonstrating the connection
between cause and effect in the case of hurricanes, as well as of any
other physical phenomenon. It is evident that the idea of accident,
applied to physical nature, is unscientific. Every physical phenomenon
is the necessary effect of the causes that determined it beforehand. If
those causes are known to us, we have the conviction that that
phenomenon is necessary, is fate, and, if we do not know them, we think
it is accidental. The same is true of human phenomena. But since we do
not know the internal and external causes in the majority of cases, we
pretend that they are free phenomena, that is to say, that they are not
determined necessarily by their causes. Hence the spiritualistic
conception of the free will implies that every human being, in spite of
the fact that their internal and external conditions are necessarily
predetermined, should be able to come to a deliberate decision by the
mere fiat of his or her free will, so that, even though the sum of all
the causes demands a no, he or she can decide in favor of yes, and vice
versa. Now, who is there that thinks, when deliberating some action,
what are the causes that determine his choice? We can justly say that
the greater part of our actions are determined by habit, that we make up
our minds almost from custom, without considering the reason for or
against. When we get up in the morning we go about our customary
business quite automatically, we perform it as a function in which we do
not think of a free will. We think of that only in unusual and grave
cases, when we are called upon to make some special choice, the
so-called voluntary deliberation, and then we weigh the reasons for or
against; we ponder, we hesitate what to do. Well, even in such cases, so
little depends on our will in the deliberations which we are about to
take that if any one were to ask us one minute before we have decided
what we are going to do, we should not know what we were going to
decide. So long as we are undecided, we cannot foresee what we are going
to decide; for under the conditions in which we live that part of the
psychic process takes place outside of our consciousness. And since we
do not know its causes, we cannot tell what will be its effects. Only
after we have come to a certain decision can we imagine that it was due
to our voluntary action. But shortly before we could not tell, and that
proves that it did not depend on us alone. Suppose, for instance, that
you have decided to play a joke on a fellow-student, and that you carry
it out. He takes it unkindly. You are surprised, because that is
contrary to his habits and your expectations. But after a while you
learn that your friend had received bad news from home on the preceding
morning and was therefore not in a condition to feel like joking, and
then you say: "If we had known that we should not have decided to spring
the joke on him." That is equivalent to saying that, if the balance of
your will had been inclined toward the deciding motive of no, you would
have decided no; but not knowing that your friend was distressed and not
in his habitual frame of mind, you decided in favor of yes. This
sentence: "If I had known this I should not have done that" is an outcry
of our internal consciousness, which denies the existence of a free
will.

On the other hand, nothing is created and nothing destroyed either in
matter or in force, because both matter and force are eternal and
indestructible. They transform themselves in the most diversified
manner, but not an atom is added or taken away, not one vibration more
or less takes place. And so if is the force of external and internal
circumstances which determines the decision of our will at any given
moment. The idea of a free will, however, is a denial of the law of
cause and effect, both in the field of philosophy and theology. Saint
Augustine and Martin Luther furnish irrefutable theological arguments
for the denial of a free will. The omnipotence of God is irreconcilable
with the idea of free will. If everything that happens does so because a
superhuman and omnipotent power wants it _(Not a single leaf falls to
the ground without the will of God)_, how can a son murder his father
without the permission and will of God? For this reason Saint Augustine
and Martin Luther have written _de servo arbitrio_.

But since theological arguments serve only those who believe in the
concept of a god, which is not given to us by science, we take recourse
to the laws which we observe in force and matter, and to the law of
causality. If modern science has discovered the universal link which
connects all phenomena through cause and effect, which shows that every
phenomenon is the result of causes which have preceded it; if this is
the law of causality, which is at the very bottom of modern scientific
thought, then it is evident that the admission of free thought is
equivalent to an overthrow of this law, according to which every effect
is proportionate to its cause. In that case, this law, which reigns
supreme in the entire universe, would dissolve itself into naught at
the feet of the human being, who would create effects with his free will
not corresponding to their causes! It was all right to think so at a
time when people had an entirely different idea of human beings. But the
work of modern science, and its effect on practical life, has resulted
in tracing the relations of each one of us with the world and with our
fellow beings. And the influence of science may be seen in the
elimination of great illusions which in former centuries swayed this or
that part of civilized humanity. The scientific thought of Copernicus
and Galilei did away with the illusions which led people to believe that
the earth was the center of the universe and of creation.

Take Cicero's book _de Officiís_, or the _Divina Commedia_ of Dante, and
you will find that to them the earth is the center of creation, that the
infinite stars circle around it, and that man is the king of animals: a
geocentric and anthropocentric illusion inspired by immeasurable
conceit. But Copernicus and Galilei came and demonstrated that the earth
does not stand still, but that it is a grain of cosmic matter hurled
into blue infinity and rotating since time unknown around its central
body, the sun, which originated from an immense primitive nebula.
Galilei was subjected to tortures by those who realized that this new
theory struck down many a religious legend and many a moral creed. But
Galilei had spoken the truth, and nowadays humanity no longer indulges
in the illusion that the earth is the center of creation.

But men live on illusions and give way but reluctantly to the progress
of science, in order to devote themselves arduously to the ideal of the
new truths which rise out of the essence of things of which mankind is a
part. After the geocentric illusion had been destroyed, the
anthropocentric illusion still remained. On earth, man was still
supposed to be king of creation, the center of terrestrial life. All
Species of animals, plants and minerals were supposed to be created
expressly for him, and to have had from time immemorial the forms which
we see now, so that the fauna and flora living on our planet have always
been what they are today. And Cicero, for instance, said that the
heavens were placed around the earth and man in order that he might
admire the beauty of the starry firmament at night, and that animals
and plants were created for his use and pleasure. But in 1856 Charles
Darwin came and, summarizing the results of studies that had been
carried on for a century, destroyed in the name of science the superb
illusion that man is the king and center of creation. He demonstrated,
amid the attacks and calumnies of the lovers of darkness, that man is
not the king of creation, but merely the last link of the zoological
chain, that nature is endowed with eternal energies by which animal and
plant life, the same as mineral life (for even in crystals the laws of
life are at work), are transformed from the invisible microbe to the
highest form, man.

The anthropocentric illusion rebelled against the word of Darwin,
accusing him of lowering the human life to the level of the dirt or of
the brute. But a disciple of Darwin gave the right answer, while
propagating the Darwinian theory at the university of Jena. It was
Haeckel, who concluded: "For my part, and so far as my human
consciousness is concerned, I prefer to be an immensely perfected ape
rather than to be a degenerated and debased Adam."

Gradually the anthropocentric illusion has been compelled to give way
before the results of science, and today the theories of Darwin have
become established among our ideas. But another illusion still remains,
and science, working in the name of reality, will gradually eliminate
it, namely the illusion that the nineteenth century has established a
permanent order of society. While the geocentric and anthropocentric
illusions have been dispelled, the illusion of the immobility and
eternity of classes still persists. But it is well to remember that in
Holland in the sixteenth century, in England in the seventeenth, in
Europe since the revolution of 1789, we have seen that freedom of
thought in science, literature and art, for which the bourgeoisie
fought, triumphed over the tyranny of the mediaeval dogma. And this
condition, instead of being a glorious but transitory stage, is supposed
to be the end of the development of humanity, which is henceforth
condemned not to perfect itself any more by further changes. This is the
illusion which serves as a fundamental argument against the positive
school of criminology, since it is claimed that a penal justice
enthroned on the foundations of Beccaria and Carrara would be a
revolutionary heresy. It is also this illusion which serves as an
argument against those who draw the logical consequences in regard to
the socialistic future of humanity, for the science which takes its
departure front the work of Copernicus, Galilei and Darwin arrives
logically at socialism. Socialism is but the natural and physical
transformation of the economic and social institutions. Of course, so
long as the geocentric and anthropocentric illusions dominate, it is
natural that the lore of stability should impress itself upon science
and life. How could this living atom, which the human being is,
undertake to change that order of creation, which makes of the earth the
center of the universe and of man the center of life? Not until science
had introduced the conception of a natural formation and transformation,
of the solar system, as well as of the fauna and flora, did the human
mind grasp the idea that thought and action can transform the world.

For this reason we believe that the study of the criminal, and the
logical consequences therefrom, will bring about the complete
transformation of human justice, not only as a theory laid down in
scientific books, but also as a practical function applied every day to
that living and suffering portion of humanity which has fallen into
crime. We have the undaunted faith that the work of scientific truth
will transform penal justice into a simple function of preserving
society from the disease of crime, divested of all relics of vengeance,
hatred and punishment, which still survive in our day as living
reminders of the barbarian stage. We still hear the "public vengeance"
invoked against the criminal today, and justice has still for its symbol
a sword, which it uses more than the scales. But a judge born of a woman
cannot weigh the moral responsibility of one who has committed murder or
theft. Not until the experimental and scientific method shall look for
the causes of that dangerous malady, which we call crime, in the
physical and psychic organism, and in the family and the environment, of
the criminal, will justice guided by science discard the sword which now
descends bloody upon those poor fellow-beings who have fallen victims to
crime, and become a clinical function, whose prime object shall be to
remove or lessen in society and individuals the causes which incite to
crime. Then alone will justice refrain from wreaking vengeance, after a
crime has been committed, with the shame of an execution or the
absurdity of solitary confinement.

On the one hand, human life depends on the word of a judge, who may err
in the case of capital punishment; and society cannot end the life of a
man, unless the necessity of legitimate self-defense demands it. On the
other hand, solitary confinement came in with the second current of the
classic school of criminology, when at the same time, in which Beccaria
promulgated his ideas, John Howard traveled all over Europe describing
the unmentionable horrors of mass imprisonment, which became a center of
infection for society at large. Then the classic school went to the
other extreme of solitary confinement, after the model of America,
whence we adopted the systems of Philadelphia and Harrisburg in the
first half of the nineteenth century. Isolation for the night is also
our demand, but we object to continuous solitary confinement by day and
night. Pasquale Mancini called solitary confinement "a living grave," in
order to reassure the timorous, when in the name of the classic school,
whose valiant champion he was, he demanded in 1876 the abolition of
capital punishment. Yet in his swan song he recognized that the future
would belong to the positive school of criminology. And it is this
"living grave" against which we protest. It cannot possibly be an act of
human justice to bury a human being in a narrow cell, within four walls,
to prevent this being from having any contact with social life, and to
say to him at the end of his term: Now that your lungs are no longer
accustomed to breathing the open air, now that your legs are no longer
used to the rough roads, go, but take care not, to have a relapse, or
your sentence will be twice as hard.

In reality, solitary confinement makes of a human being either a stupid
creature, or a raving beast. And "s'io dico il vero, l'effeto nol
nasconde"--if I speak the truth, the facts will also reveal it--for
criminality increases and expands, honest people remain unprotected, and
those who are struck by the law do not improve, but become ever more
antisocial through the repeated relapses. And so we have that contrast
which I mentioned in the beginning of my lecture, that the theoretical
side of criminal science is so perfected, while criminal conditions are
painfully in evidence. The inevitable conclusion is the necessity of a
progressive transformation of the science of crime and punishment.



OF CRIMINOLOGY.


II.

We saw yesterday in a short historical review that the classic cycle of
the science of crime and punishment, originated by Cesare Beccaria more
than a century ago, was followed in our country, some twenty years
since, by the scientific movement of the positive school of criminology.
Let us see today how this school studied the problem of criminality,
reserving for tomorrow the discussion of the remedies proposal by this
school for the disease of criminality.

When a crime is committed in some place, attracting public attention
either through the atrocity of the case or the strangeness of the
criminal deed--for instance, one that is not connected with bloodshed,
but with intellectual fraud--there are at once two tendencies that make
themselves felt in the public conscience. One of them, pervading the
overwhelming majority of individual consciences, asks: How is this? What
for? Why did that man commit such a crime? This question is asked by
everybody and occupies mostly the attention of those who do not look
upon the case from the point of view of criminology. On the other hand,
those who occupy themselves with criminal law represent the other
tendency, which manifests itself when acquainted with the news of this
crime. This is a limited portion of the public conscience, which tries
to study the problem from the standpoint of the technical jurist. The
lawyers, the judges, the officials of the police, ask themselves: What
is the name of the crime committed by that man under such circumstances?
Must it be classed us murder or patricide, attempted or incompleted
manslaughter, and, if directed against property, is it theft, or illegal
appropriation, or fraud? And the entire apparatus of practical criminal
justice forgets at once the first problem, which occupies the majority
of the public conscience, the question of the causes that led to this
crime, in order to devote itself exclusively to the technical side of
the problem which constitutes the juridical anatomy of the inhuman and
antisocial deed perpetrated by the criminal.

In these two tendencies you have a photographic reproduction of the two
schools of criminology. The classic school, which looks upon the crime
as a juridical problem, occupies itself with its name, its definition,
its juridical analysis, leaves the personality of the criminal in the
background and remembers it only so far as exceptional circumstances
explicitly stated in the law books refer to it: whether he is a minor, a
deaf-mute, whether it is a case of insanity, whether he was drunk at the
time the crime was committed. Only in these strictly defined cases does
the classic school occupy itself theoretically with the personality of
the criminal. But ninety times in one hundred these exceptional
circumstances do not exist or cannot be shown to exist, and penal
justice limits itself to the technical definition of the fact. But when
the case comes up in the criminal court, or before the jurors, practice
demonstrates that there is seldom a discussion between the lawyers of
the defense and the judges for the purpose of ascertaining the most
exact definition of the fact, of determining whether it is a case of
attempted or merely projected crime, of finding out whether there are
any of the juridical elements defined in this or that article of the
code. The judge is rather face to face with the problem of ascertaining
why, under what conditions, for what reasons, the man has committed the
crime. This is the supreme and simple human problem. But hitherto it has
been left to a more or less perspicacious, more or less gifted,
empiricism, and there have been no scientific standards, no methodical
collection of facts, no observations and conclusions, save those of the
positive school of criminology. This school alone makes an attempt to
solve in every case of crime the problem of its natural origin, of the
reasons and conditions that induced a man to commit such and such a
crime.

For instance, about 3,000 cases of manslaughter are registered every
year in Italy. Now, open any work inspired by the classic school of
criminology, and ask the author why 3,000 men are the victims of
manslaughter every year in Italy, and how it is that there are not
sometimes only as many as, say, 300 cases, the number committed in
England, which has nearly the same number of inhabitants as Italy; and
how it is that there are not sometimes 300,000 such cases in Italy
instead of 3,000?

It is useless to open any work of classical criminology for this
purpose, for you will not find an answer to these questions in than. No
one, from Beccaria to Carrara, has ever thought of this problem, and
they could not have asked it, considering their point of departure and
their method. In fact, the classic criminologists accept the phenomenon
of criminality as an accomplished fact. They analyze it from the point
of view of the technical jurist, without asking how this criminal fact
may have been produced, and why it repeats itself in greater or smaller
numbers from year to year, in every country. The theory of a free will,
which is their foundation, excludes the possibility of this scientific
question, for according to it the crime is the product of the fiat of
the human will. And if that is admitted as a fact, there is nothing left
to account for. The manslaughter was committed, because the criminal
wanted to commit it; and that is all there is to it. Once the theory of
a free will is accepted as a fact, the deed depends on the fiat, the
voluntary determination, of the criminal, and all is said.

But if, on the other hand, the positive school of criminology denies, on
the ground of researches in scientific physiological psychology, that
the human will is free and does not admit that one is a criminal because
he wants to be, but declares that a man commits this or that crime only
when he lives in definitely determined conditions of personality and
environment which induce him necessarily to act in a certain way, then
alone does the problem of the origin of criminality begin to be
submitted to a preliminary analysis, and then alone does criminal law
step out of the narrow and arid limits of technical jurisprudence and
become a true social and human science in the highest and noblest
meaning of the word. It is vain to insist with such stubbornness as that
of the classic school of criminology on juristic formulas by which the
distinction between illegal appropriation and theft, between fraud and
other forms of crime against property, and so forth, is determined, when
this method does not give to society one single word which would throw
light upon the reasons that make a man a criminal and upon the
efficacious remedy by which society could protect itself against
criminality.

It is true that the classic school of criminology has likewise its
remedy against crime--namely, punishment. But this is the only remedy of
that school, and in all the legislation inspired by the theories of that
school in all the countries of the civilized world there is no other
remedy against crime but repression.

But Bentham has said: Every time that punishment is inflicted it proves
its inefficacy, for it did not prevent the committal of that crime.
Therefore, this remedy is worthless. And a deeper study of the cause of
crime demonstrates that if a man does not commit a certain crime, this
is due to entirely different reasons, than a fear of the penalty, very
strong and fundamental reasons which are not to be found in the threats
of legislators. These threats, if nevertheless carried out by police and
prison keepers, run counter to those conditions. A man who intends to
commit a crime, or who is carried away by a violent passion, by a
psychological hurricane which drowns his moral sense, is not checked by
threats of punishment, because the volcanic eruption of passion prevents
him from reflecting. Or he may decide to commit a crime after due
premeditation and preparation, and in that case the penalty is
powerless to check him, because he hopes to escape with impunity. All
criminals will tell you unanimously that the only thing which impelled
them when they were deliberating a crime was the expectation that they
would go scot free. If they had but the least suspicion that they might
be detected and punished they would not have committed the crime. The
only exception is the case in which a crime is the result of a mental
explosion caused by a violent outburst of passion. And if you wish to
have a very convincing illustration of the psychological inefficacy of
legal threats, you have but to think of that curious crime which has now
assumed a frequency never known to former centuries, namely the making
of counterfeit money. For since paper money--from want or for reasons of
expediency--has become a substitute of metal coin in the civilized
countries, the making of counterfeit paper money has become very
frequent in the nineteenth century. Now a counterfeiter, in committing
his crime, must compel his mind to imitate closely the inscription of
the bill, letter for letter, including that threatening passage, which
says: _"The law punishes counterfeiting_ ..." etc. Can you see before
your mind's eye a counterfeiter, in the act of engraving on the stone or
the others may ignore the penalty that awaits them, but he cannot. This
illustration is convincing, for in cases of other crimes one may always
assume that the criminal acted without thinking of the future, even when
he was not in a transport of passion. But in the case of the
counterfeiter the very act of committing the crime reminds him of the
threat of the law, and yet he is imperturbable while perpetrating it.

Crime has its natural causes, which lie outside of that mathematical
point called the free will of the criminal. Aside from being a juridical
phenomenon, which it would be well to examine by itself, every crime is
above all a natural and social phenomenon, and should be studied
primarily as such. We need not go through so hard a course of study
merely for the purpose of walking over the razor edge of juristic
definitions and to find out, for instance, that from the time Romagnosi
made a distinction between incompleted and attempted crime rivers of ink
have been spilled in the attempt to find the distinguishing elements of
these two degrees of crime. And finally, when the German legislator
concluded to make no distinction between incompleted and attempted crime
and to recognize only the completed crime in his code of 1871, we
witnessed the spectacle of Carrara praising that legislator for leaving
that subtile distinction out of his code. A strange conclusion on the
part of a science, which cudgels its brains for a century to find the
marks of distinction between attempted and incompleted crime, and then
praises the legislator for ignoring it. And another classic jurist,
Buccellati, proposed to do away with the theory of attempted crime by
simply defining it as a crime by itself, or as--a violation of police
laws! A science which comes to such conclusions is a science which moves
in metaphysical abstractions, and we shall see that all these finespun
questions which abound in classical science lose all practical value
before the necessity of saving society from the plague of crime.

The method which we, on the other hand, have inaugurated is the
following: Before we study crime from the point of view of a juristic
phenomenon, we must study the causes to which the annual recurrence of
crimes in all countries is due. These are natural causes, which I have
classified under the three heads of anthropological, telluric and
social. Every crime, from the smallest to the most atrocious, is the
result of the interaction of these three causes, the anthropological
condition of the criminal, the telluric environment in which he is
living, and the social environment in which he is born, living and
operating. It is a vain beginning to separate the meshes of this net of
criminality. There are still those who would maintain the one-sided
standpoint that the origin of crime may be traced to only one of these
elements, for instance, to the social element alone. So far as I am
concerned, I have combatted this opinion from the very inauguration of
the positive school of criminology, and I combat it today. It is
certainly easy enough to think that the entire origin of all crime is
due to the unfavorable social conditions in which the criminal lives.
But an objective, methodical, observation demonstrates that social
conditions alone do not suffice to explain the origin of criminality,
although it is true that the prevalence of the influence of social
conditions is an incontestable fact in the case of the greater number
of crimes, especially of the lesser ones. But there are crimes which
cannot be explained by the influence of social conditions alone. If you
regard the general condition of misery as the sole source of
criminality, then you cannot get around the difficulty that out of one
thousand individuals living in misery from the day of their birth to
that of their death only one hundred or two hundred become criminals,
while the other nine hundred or eight hundred either sink into
biological weakness, or become harmless maniacs, or commit suicide
without perpetrating any crime. If poverty were the sole determining
cause, one thousand out of one thousand poor ought to become criminals.
If only two hundred become criminals, while one hundred commit suicide,
one hundred end as maniacs, and the other six hundred remain honest in
their social condition, then poverty alone is not sufficient to explain
criminality. We must add the anthropological and telluric factor. Only
by means of these three elements of natural influence can criminality be
explained. Of course, the influence of either the anthropological or
telluric or social element varies from case to case. If you have a case
of simple theft, you may have a far greater influence of the social
factor than of the anthropological factor. On the other hand, if you
have a case of murder, the anthropological element will have a far
greater influence than the social. And so on in every case of crime, and
every individual that you will have to judge on the bench of the
criminal.

The anthropological factor. It is precisely here that the genius of
Cesare Lombroso established a new science, because in his search after
the causes of crime he studied the anthropological condition of the
criminal. This condition concerns not only the organic and anatomical
constitution, but also the psychological, it represents the organic and
psychological personality of the criminal. Every one of us inherits at
birth, and personifies in life, a certain organic and psychological
combination. This constitutes the individual factor of human activity,
which either remains normal through life, or becomes criminal or insane.
The anthropological factor, then, must not be restricted, as some laymen
would restrict it, to the study of the form of the skull or the bones
of the criminal. Lombroso had to begin his studies with the anatomical
conditions of the criminal, because the skulls may be studied most
easily in the museums. But he continued by also studying the brain and
the other physiological conditions of the individual, the state of
sensibility, and the circulation of matter. And this entire series of
studies is but a necessary scientific introduction to the study of the
psychology of the criminal, which is precisely the one problem that is
of direct and immediate importance. It is this problem which the lawyer
and the public prosecutor should solve before discussing the juridical
aspect of any crime, for this reveals the causes which induced the
criminal to commit a crime. At present there is no methodical standard
for a psychological investigation, although such an investigation was
introduced into the scope of classic penal law. But for this reason the
results of the positive school penetrate into the lecture rooms of the
universities of jurisprudence, whenever a law is required for the
judicial arraignment of the criminal as a living and feeling human
being. And even though the positive school is not mentioned, all profess
to be studying the material furnished by it, for instance, its analyses
of the sentiments of the criminal, his moral sense, his behavior before,
during and after the criminal act, the presence of remorse which people,
judging the criminal after their own feelings, always suppose the
criminal to feel, while, in fact, it is seldom present. This is the
anthropological factor, which may assume a pathological form, in which
case articles 46 and 47 of the penal code remember that there is such a
thing as the personality of the criminal. However, aside from insanity,
there are thousands of other organic and psychological conditions of the
personality of criminals, which a judge might perhaps lump together
under the name of extenuating circumstances, but which science desires
to have thoroughly investigated. This is not done today, and for this
reason the idea of extenuating circumstances constitutes a denial of
justice.

This same anthropological factor also includes that which each one of us
has: the race character. Nowadays the influence of race on the destinies
of peoples and persons is much discussed in sociology, and there are
one-sided schools that pretend to solve the problems of history and
society by means of that racial influence alone, to which they attribute
an absolute importance. But while there are some who maintain that the
history of peoples is nothing but the exclusive product of racial
character, there are others who insist that the social conditions of
peoples and individuals are alone determining. The one is as much a
one-sided and incomplete theory as the other. The study of collective
society or of the single individual has resulted in the understanding
that the life of society and of the individual is always the product of
the inextricable net of the anthropological, telluric and social
elements. Hence the influence of the race cannot be ignored in the study
of nations and personalities, although it is not the exclusive factor
which would suffice to explain the criminality of a nation or an
individual. Study, for instance, manslaughter in Italy, and, although
you will find it difficult to isolate one of the factors of criminality
from the network of the other circumstances and conditions that produce
it, yet there are such eloquent instances of the influence of racial
character, that it would be like denying the existence of daylight if
one tried to ignore the influence of the ethnical factor on
criminality.

In Italy there are two currents of criminality, two tendencies which are
almost diametrically opposed to one another. The crimes due to hot blood
and muscle grow in intensity from northern to southern Italy, while the
crimes against property increase from south to north. In northern Italy,
where movable property is more developed, the crime of theft assumes a
greater intensity, while crimes due to conditions of the blood are
decreasing on account of the lesser poverty and the resulting lesser
degeneration of the people. In the south, on the other hand, crimes
against property are less frequent and crimes of blood more frequent.
Still there also are in southern Italy certain cases where criminality
of the blood is less frequent, and you cannot explain this in any other
way than by the influence of racial character. If you take a
geographical map of manslaughter in Italy, you will see that from the
minimum, from Lombardy, Piedmont, and Venice, the intensity increases
until it reaches its maximum in the insular and peninsular extreme of
the south. But even there you will find certain cases in which
manslaughter shows a lesser intensity.

For instance, the province of Benevent is surrounded by other provinces
which show a maximum of crimes due to conditions of blood, while it
registers a smaller number. Naples, again, shows a considerably smaller
number of such cases than the provinces surrounding it, but it has a
greater number of unpremeditated cases of manslaughter. Messina, Catania
and Syracuse have a remarkably smaller number of blood crimes than
Trapani, Girgenti and Palermo. It has been attempted to claim that this
difference in criminality is due to social condition's, because the
agricultural conditions in eastern Sicily are less degrading than those
of Girgenti and Trapani, where the sulphur mines compel the miners to
live miserably. But we should like to ask the following question in
opposition to this idea: Why and in what respect are the agricultural
conditions in some provinces better than in others? This condition is
merely itself a result, not a cause of the first degree.

Since the theory of historical materialism, which I prefer to call
economic determinism, has demonstrated that political, moral and
intellectual phenomena are reactions on the economic conditions of any
time and place, the attempt has been made to interpret this theory very
narrowly and to pretend that the economic condition of a nation is a
primary cause and not determined by any other. For my part, ever since I
have demonstrated the perfect accord between the Marxian and the
Darwinian theories, I have said: Very well, the economic conditions of a
nation explain its political, moral, intellectual conditions, but the
economic condition is in its turn the result of other factors. For
instance, how can the industrialism of England in the nineteenth century
be explained? Take away the coal mines (the telluric environment), and
you could not have the economic conditions of England as they are. For
the economic conditions are a result of favorable or unfavorable
telluric conditions which are acted upon by the intelligence and energy
of a certain race. Catania, Messina, Syracuse, are in a better economic
condition, because they have better geographical conditions and a
different race (of Grecian blood) than the other Sicilian provinces. So
it is in Apulia and Naples, which have likewise a considerable mixture
of Grecian blood. The northern tourists are still attracted by our art
and visit the ruins of Taormina or Pesto, which are the relics of the
Grecian race. And it is the Grecian blood which explains the lesser
frequency of bloody crimes in those provinces. This is therefore
evidently the influence of the race. And I maintain that the same fact
is due in the province of Benevent to the admixture of Langobardian
blood. For the Duchy of Benevent has had an influx of Langobardian
elements since the seventh century. And as we know that the German and
Anglo-Saxon race has the smallest tendency towards bloody crimes, the
beneficial influence of this racial character in Benevent explains
itself. On the other hand, there is much Saracen blood in the western
and southern provinces of Sicily, and this explains the greater number
of bloody crimes there. It is evident that the organic character of the
inhabitants of that island, where you may still see the brutal and
barbarian features of the Saracen by the side of those of the blond,
cool and quiet Norman, contains a transfusion of the blood of diverse
races. But it is also true that wherever a certain race has been
predominant, there its influence is left behind in the individual and
collective life.

Let this be enough so far as the anthropological factor of criminality
is concerned. There are, furthermore, the telluric factors, that is to
say, the physical environment in which we live and to which we pay no
attention. It requires much philosophy, said Rousseau, to note the
things with which we are in daily contact, because the habitual
influence of a thing makes it more difficult to be aware of it. This
applies also to the immediate influence of the physical conditions on
human morality, notwithstanding the spiritualist prejudices which still
weigh upon our daily lives. For instance, if it is claimed in the name
of supernaturalism and psychism that a man is unhappy because he is
vicious, it is equivalent to making a one-sided statement. For it is
just as true to say that a man becomes vicious because he is unhappy.
Want is the strongest poison for the human body and soul. It is the
fountain head of all inhuman and antisocial feeling. Where want spreads
out its wings, there the sentiments of love, of affection, of
brotherhood, are impossible.

Take a look at the figures of the peasant in the far-off arid Campagna,
the little government employee, the laborer, the little shop-keeper.
When work is assured, when living is certain, though poor, then want,
cruel want, is in the distance, and every good sentiment can germinate
and develop in the human heart. The family then lives in a favorable
environment, the parents agree, the children are affectionate. And when
the laborer, a bronzed statue of humanity, returns from, his smoky shop
and meets his white-haired mother, the embodiment of half a century of
immaculate virtue and heroic sacrifices, then he can, tired, but assured
of his daily bread, give room to feelings of affection, and he will
cordially invite his mother to share his frugal meal. But let the same
man, in the same environment, be haunted by the spectre of want and lack
of employment, and you will see the moral atmosphere in his family
changing as from day into night. There is no work, and the laborer comes
home without any wages. The wife, who does not know how to feed the
children, reproaches her husband with the suffering of his family. The
man, having been turned away from the doors of ten offices, feels his
dignity as an honest laborer assailed in the very bosom of his own
family, because he has vainly asked society for honest employment. And
the bonds of affection and union are loosened in that family. Its
members no longer agree. There are too many children, and when the poor
old mother approaches her son, she reads in his dark and agitated mien
the lack of tenderness and feels in her mother heart that her boy,
poisoned by the spectre of want, is perhaps casting evil looks at her
and harboring the unfilial thought: "Better an open grave in the
cemetery than one mouth more to feed at home!"

It is true, that want alone is not sufficient to prepare the soil in the
environment of that suffering family for the roots of real crime and to
develop it. Want will weaken the love and mutual respect among the
members of that family, but it will not be strong enough alone to arm
the hands of the man for a matricidal deed, unless he should get into a
pathological mental condition, which is very exceptional and rare. But
the conclusions of the positive school are confirmed in this case as in
any other. In order that crime may develop, it is necessary that
anthropological, social and telluric factors should act together.

We generally forget the conditions of the physical environment in which
we live, because supernatural prejudice tells us that the body is a
beast which we must forget in order to elevate ourselves into a
spiritual life. Manzoni could designate the Middle Ages by the term
"dirty." because they neglected the demands of elementary hygiene, and
thus of human morality. For where the requirements of our physical body
are neglected or offended, there no flower can bloom. The telluric
environment has a great influence on our physical activity, by way of
our nervous system. We feel differently disposed, according to whether a
south or a north wind blows. When Garibaldi was on the Pampas, he
observed that his companions were irascible and prone to violent
quarrels, when the Pampero blew, and that their behavior changed, when
this wind ceased. The great founders of criminal statistics, Quetelet
and Guerry, observed that the change of seasons carried with it a change
in criminality. Sexual crimes are less frequent in winter than in spring
and summer. And with reference to this point I have maintained, and
still maintain, that it is due to the combined effects of temperature
and social conditions, if crimes against property increase in winter.
For lack of employment, the want of food and shelter, intensify the
misery and lead to attacks on property. On the other hand, the cold by
itself reduces sexual crimes and personal assaults. And those who claim
that the longer intercourse between people in summer time has also a
social influence, are also partly in the right.

The most eloquent fact in this respect was mentioned by Murro, when he
pointed out that this change in the frequency of bloody crimes, greater
in the warm months than in winter, applied also to prisoners. Statistics
show that breach of discipline is most frequent in hot seasons. The
social factor does not enter there, because the social life is there the
same in winter and in summer. This is, therefore, a practical proof of
the influence of climate, and it is re-enforced by the fact that
delirium and epilepsy in insane asylums are also more frequent in hot
than in cold months. The influence of the telluric factors, then, cannot
be denied, and the influence of the social factor intensifies it, as I
have already shown by its most drastic and characteristic example, that
of want. One can, therefore, understand that a man, whose morality has
been shaken by the pressure of increasing want, may be led to commit a
crime against property or persons.

It is certainly quite evident, that economic misery has an undeniable
influence on criminality. And if you consider, that about 300,000
criminals are sentenced in Italy every year, 180,000 of them for minor
crimes, and 120,000 for crimes which belong to the gravest class, you
can easily see that the greater part of them due mainly to social
conditions, for which it should not be so very difficult to find a
remedy. The work of the legislator may be slow, difficult, and
inadequate, so far as the telluric and anthropological factors are
concerned. But it could surely be rapid, efficacious and prompt, so far
as the social factors influencing criminality are concerned.

We have now demonstrated that crime has its natural source in the
combined interaction of three classes of causes, the anthropological
(organic and psychological) factor, the telluric factor, and the social
factor. And by this last factor we must not only mean want, but any
other condition of administrative instability in political, moral, and
intellectual life. Every social condition which makes the life of man in
society insincere and imperfect is a social factor contributing towards
criminality. The economic factor is in evidence in our civilization
wherever the law of free competition, which is but a form of disguised
cannibalism, establishes the rule: _Your death is my life_. The
competition of laborers for a limited number of places is equivalent to
saying that those who secure a living do so at the expense of those who
do not. And this is a disguised form of cannibalism. While it does not
devour the competitor as primitive mankind did, it paralyzes him by
calumnies, recommendations, protection, money, which, secure the place
for the best bargainer and leave the most honest, talented, and
self-respecting to the pangs of starvation.

Moreover, the economic factor exerts its crime-breeding influence also
under the form of a superabundance of wealth. Indeed, in our present
society, which is in the downward stage of transition from glorious
bourgeois civilization, which constituted a golden page of human
history in the 19th century, wealth itself is a source of crime. For the
rich, who do not enjoy the advantage of manual or intellectual work,
suffer from the corruption of leisure and vice. Gambling throws them
into an unhealthy fever; the struggle and race for money poison their
daily lives. And although the rich may keep out of reach of the penal
code, still they have condemned themselves to a life devoted to
hypocritical ceremonies, which are devoid of moral sentiment. And this
life leads them to a sportive form of criminality. To cheat at gambling
is the inevitable fate of these parasites. In order to kill time they
give themselves up to games of chance, and those who do not care for
that devote themselves to the sport of adultery, which in that class is
a pastime even among the best friends, on account of sheer mental
poverty. And all because man's mind unoccupied is the devil's own forge,
as the English poet says.

We have now surveyed briefly the natural genesis of crime, as a natural
social phenomenon, brought about by the interaction of anthropological,
telluric, and social influences, which in any determined moment act
upon a personality standing on the cross road of vice and virtue, crime
and honesty. This scientific deduction gives rise to a series of
investigations which satisfy the mind and supply it with a real
understanding of things, far better than the theory that a man is a
criminal because he wants to be. No, a man commits crime because he
finds himself in certain physical and social conditions, from which the
evil plant of crime takes life and strength. Thus we obtain the origin
of that sad human figure which is the product of the interaction of
those factors, an abnormal man, a man not adapted to the conditions of
the social environment in which he is born, so that emigration becomes
an ever more permanent phenomenon for the greater portion of men, for
whom the accident of birth will less and less determine the course of
their future life. And the abnormal man who is below the minimum of
adaptability to social life and bears the marks of organic degeneration,
develops either a passive or an aggressive form of abnormality and
becomes a criminal.

Among these abnormal human beings, two groups must be particularly
distinguished. Limiting our observations to those who are true
aggressively antisocial abnormals, that is to say, who are not adapted
to a certain social order and attack it by crimes, we must distinguish
those who for egoistic or ferocious reasons attack society by atavistic
forms of the struggle for existence by committing socalled common crimes
in the shape of fraud or violence, thereby opposing or abolishing
conditions in which their fellow beings may live. This is the atavistic
type of criminals which represents an involutionary, or retrogressive,
form of abnormality, due to an arrested development or an atavistic
reversion to a savage and primitive type. These constitute the majority
in the world of criminals and must be distinguished from the minority,
who are evolutionary, or progressive, abnormals, that may also commit
crime in a violent form, but must not be confounded with the others,
because they do not act from egoistic motives, but rebel from altruistic
motives against the injustice of the present order. These altruistic
criminals feel the sufferings and horrors due to the injustice
surrounding them and may go so far as to commit murder, which must
always be condemned, but which must not be confounded with atavistic or
egoistic murder. Recourse to personal violence is always objectionable
from the point of view of higher manhood, which desires that human life
should always be held in respect. But the reasons for such a crime are
different, being egoistic in the one, and altruistic in the other case.
The evolutionary abnormal is often an instrument of human progress, not
in the form of criminality, but in that of intellectual and moral
rebellion against conditions which are sanctioned by laws that
frequently punish such an evolutionary rebellion harder than atavistic
crime, as they do in Russia, where capital punishment has been abolished
for common crimes, but retained for political violations of the law! We
are living in an epoch of transition from the old to the new, and
contemporaneous humanity has an uneasy moral conscience in this critical
time. The ruling classes are losing their clearness of vision, so that
they promise monuments to those political murderers who promoted their
own historical victories, but would condemn like any common criminal him
who now devotes his soul to a revolutionary ideal, would throw into
prison the pioneer of new human ideals, just as Russia is
excommunicating the rebel Tolstoi. I mention Leo Tolstoi advisedly for
the purpose of giving a precise illustration of my heterodox thought in
reference to this question. We are opposed to any form of personal
violence (with the sole exception of self-defense), we cannot approve of
any form of personal assault, no matter what may be its motive.
Therefore we cannot have words of praise or excuse for political murder,
though it may be inspired by altruistic motives. We can demand that the
legislator should distinguish between the psychological sources of these
two forms of murder, the egoistic and the altruistic form. But we
condemn them both, because they are inhuman forms of violence. Ideas do
not make victorious headway by force of arms. Ideas must be combatted by
ideas, and it is only by the propaganda of the idea that we can prepare
humanity for its future. Violence is always a means of preventing the
sincere and fruitful diffusion of an idea. We do not say this merely for
the abnormals of the lower classes. We refer with scientific serenity
also to the upper classes, who would suppress by violence every
manifestation of revolt against the social iniquities, every affirmation
of faith in a better future.

This is the conception of our science, which thus succeeds in
distinguishing traits of character even among the unlucky and forlorn
people of the criminal world, while the classic school of criminology
regards a criminal as a sort of abstract and normal man, with the
exception of cases of minors, deaf mutes, inebriates, and maniacs.

In fact, the classic school of criminology regards all thieves as THE
thief, all murderers as THE murderer, and the human shape disappears in
the mind of the legislator, while it re-appears before the judge. Before
the essayist and legislator, the criminal is a sort of moving dummy, on
whose hack the judge may paste an article of the penal code. If you
leave out of consideration the established cases of exceptional and rare
human psychology mentioned in the penal code, all other cases serve the
judge merely as an excuse to select from the criminal code the number of
that article which will fit the criminal dummy, and if he should paste
404 instead of 407 on its back, the court of appeals would resist, any
change of numbers. And if this dummy came to life and said: "The
question of my number may be very important for you, but if you would
study all the conditions that compelled me to take other people's
things, you would realize that this importance is very diagrammatic,"
the judge would answer: "That's all right for the justice of the future,
but it isn't now. You are number 404 of the criminal code, and after
leaving this court room with this number pasted legally on your back,
you will receive another number, for you will enter prison as number 404
and will exchange it for entry number 1525, or some other, because your
personality as a man disappears entirely before the enactment of social
justice!" And then it is pretended that this man, whose personality is
thus absurdly ignored, should leave prison cured of all degeneration,
and if he falls back into the path of thorns of his misery and commits
another crime, the judge simply pastes another article over the other,
by adding number 80 or 81, which refer to cases of relapse, to number
404!

In this way the classic school of criminology came to its unit of
punishment, which it heralded as its great progress. In the Middle
Ages, the diversity of punishment was greater. But in the 19th century
the classic school of criminology combatted dishonoring punishment,
corporeal punishment, confiscation, professional punishment, capital
punishment, with its ideal of one sole penalty, the only panacea for
crime and criminals, _prison_.

We have, indeed, prohibitory measures and fines even today. But in
substance the whole punitive armory is reduced to imprisonment, since
fines are likewise convertible into so many days or months of
imprisonment. Solitary confinement is the ideal of the classic school of
criminology. But experience proves that this penalty has as much effect
on the disease of criminality, as the remedy of a physician would have,
who would sit in the door of a hospital and tell every patient seeking
relief: "Whatever may be your disease, I have only one medicine and that
is a decoction of rhubarb. You have heart trouble? Well, then, the
problem for me is simply--how big a dose of rhubarb decoction shall I
give you?"

And measuring doses of penalty is the foundation of the criminal code.
That is so true that this code is in its last analysis but a table of
criminal logarithms for figuring out penalties. Woe to the judge who
makes a mistake in sentencing a 19 year old offender who was drunk when
he sinned, but had premeditated his deed. Woe to the judge, if he misses
his calculation in adding or subtracting the third, or sixth, or one
half, corresponding to the prescribed extenuating or aggravating
circumstances! If he makes a miscalculation, the court of appeals is
invoked by the defendant, and the inexorable court of appeals tells the
judge: "Figure this over again. You have been unjust." The only question
for the judge is this: Add your sums and subtract your deductions, and
the prisoner is sentenced to one year, seven months, and thirteen days.
Not one day more or less! But the human spectator asks: "If the criminal
should happen to be reformed before the expiration of his term, should
he be retained in prison?" The judge replies: "I don't care, he stays in
one year, seven months, and thirteen days!"

Then the human spectator says: "But suppose the criminal should not yet
be fit for human society at the expiration of his term?" The judge
replies: "At the expiration of his term he leaves prison, for when he
has absolved his last day, he has paid his debt!"

This is the same case as that of the imaginary physician who says: "You
have heart trouble? Then take a quart of rhubarb decoction and stay
twelve days in the hospital." Another patient says: "I have broken my
leg." And the doctor: "All right, take a pint of rhubarb decoction and
17 days in the hospital." A third has inflammation of the lungs, and the
doctor prescribes three quarts of rhubarb decoction and three months in
the hospital. "But if my inflammation is cured before that time?" "No
matter," says the doctor, "you stay in three months." "But if I am not
cured of my lung trouble after three months?" "No matter," says the
doctor, "you leave after three months."

To such results have wise men been led by a system of penal justice,
which is a denial of all elementary common sense. They have forgotten
the personality of the criminal and occupied themselves exclusively with
crime as an abstract juristic phenomenon. In the same manner, the old
style medicine occupied itself with disease as such, as an abstract
pathological phenomenon, without taking into account the personality of
the patient. The ancient physicians did not consider whether a patient
was well or ill nourished, young or old, strong or weak, nervous or
fullblooded. They cured fever as fever, pleurisy as pleurisy. Modern
medicine, on the other hand, declares that disease must be studied in
the living person of the patient. And the same disease may require
different treatment, if the condition of the patient is different.

Criminal justice has taken the same historical course of development as
medicine. The classic school of criminology is still in the same stage,
in which medicine was before the middle of the 19th century. It deals
with theft, murder, fraud, as such. But that which claims so much of the
attention of society has been forgotten by the classic school. For that
school has forgotten to study the murderer, the thief, the forger, and
without that study their crimes cannot be understood.

Crime is one of the conditions required for the study of the criminal.
But, the same crime may require the application of different remedies
to the personalities of different criminals, according to the different
anthropological and social conditions of the various criminals. There is
a fundamental distinction between the anthropological and social types
of criminals, whom I have divided into five categories, which are today
unanimously accepted by criminalist anthropologists, since the Geneva
congress offered an opportunity to explain the misapprehension which led
some foreign scientists to believe that the Italian school regarded one
of these types (the born criminal) merely as an organic anomaly.

Just a word concerning each one of these five types.

The _born criminal_ is a victim of that which I will call (seeing that
science has not yet solved this problem) criminal neurosis, which is
very analogous to epileptic neurosis, but which is not in itself
sufficient to make one a criminal. Our adversaries had the idea that the
mere possession of a crooked nose or a slanting skull stamped a man as
predisposed by birth to murder or theft. But a man may he a born
criminal, that is to say, he may have some congenital degeneration which
predisposes him toward crime, and yet he may die at the age of 80
without having committed any crime, because he was fortunate enough to
live in an environment which did not offer him any temptation to commit
crime. Again, are not many predisposed toward insanity without ever
becoming insane? If the same individual were to live under unfavorable
conditions, without any education, if he were to find himself in
unhealthy telluric surroundings, in a mine, a rice field, or a miasmatic
swamp, he would become insane. But if instead of living in conditions
that condemn him to lunacy he were to be under no necessity to struggle
for his daily bread, if he could live in affluence, he might exhibit
some eccentricity of character, but would not cross the threshold of an
insane asylum. The same happens in the case of criminality. One may have
a congenital predisposition toward crime, but if he lives in favorable
surroundings, he will live to the end of his natural life without
violating any criminal or moral law. At any rate we must drop the
prejudice that only those are criminals on whose backs the judge has
pasted a number. For there are many scoundrels at large who commit crime
with impunity, or who brush the edge of the criminal law in the most
repulsive immorality without violating it.

This misunderstanding was explained at the congress of Geneva by the
statement that the interaction of the social and telluric environment is
required also in the case of the born criminal. And now we may take it
for granted that my classification of five types is everywhere accepted.
These are the following: The _born criminal_ who has a congenital
predisposition for crime; the _insane criminal_ suffering from some
clinical form of mental alienation, and whom even our existing penal
code had to recognize; the _habitual criminal_, that is to say one who
has acquired the habit of crime mainly through the ineffective measures
employed by society for the prevention and repression of crime. A common
figure in our large industrial centers is that of the abandoned child
which has to go begging from its earliest youth in order to collect an
income for the enterprising boss or for its poor family, without an
opportunity to educate its moral sense in the filth of the streets. It
is punished for the first time by the law and sent to prison or to a
reformatory, where it is inevitably corrupted. Then, when such an
individual comes out of prison, he is stigmatized as a thief or forger,
watched by the police, and if he secures work in some shop, the owner is
indirectly induced to discharge him, so that he must inevitably fall
back upon crime.

Thus one acquires crime as a habit, a product of social rottenness, due
to the ineffective measures for the prevention and repression of crime.
There is furthermore the _occasional criminal_, who commits very
insignificant criminal acts, more because he is led astray by his
conditions of life than because the aggressive energy of a degenerate
personality impels him. If he is not made worse by a prison life, he may
find an opportunity to return to a normal life in society. Finally there
is the _passionate criminal,_ who, like the insane criminal, has
received attention from the positive school of criminology; which,
however, did not come to any definite conclusions regarding him, such as
may be gathered by means of the experimental method through study in
prisons, insane asylums, or in freedom. The relations between passion
and crime have so far been studied on a field in which no solution was
possible. For the classic school considers such a crime according to
the greater or smaller intensity and violence of passion and comes to
the conclusion that the degree of responsibility decreases to the extent
that the intensity of a passion increases, and vice versa. The problem
cannot be solved in this way. There are passions which may rise to the
highest degree of intensity without reducing the responsibility. For
instance, is one who murders from motives of revenge a passionate
criminal who must be excused?

The classic school of criminology says "No," and for my part I agree
with them. Francesco Carrara says: "There are blind passions, and others
which are reasonable. Blind passions deprive one of free will,
reasonable ones do not. Blind and excusable passions are fear, honor,
love, reasonable and inexcusable ones are hatred and revenge." But how
so? I have studied murderers who killed for revenge and who told me that
the desire for revenge took hold of them like a fever, so that they
"forgot even to eat." Hate and revenge can take possession of a man to
such an extent that he becomes blind with passion. The truth is that
passion must be considered not so far as its violence or quantity are
concerned, but rather as to its quality. We must distinguish between
social and anti-social passion, the one favoring the conditions of life
for the species and collectivity, the other antagonistic to the
development of the collectivity. In the first case, we have love,
injured honor, etc, which are passions normally useful to society, and
aberrations of which may be excused more or less according to individual
cases. On the other hand, we have inexcusable passions, because their
psychological tendency is to antagonize the development of society. They
are antisocial, and cannot be excused, and hate and revenge are among
them.

The positive school therefore admits that a passion is excusable, when
the moral sense of a man is normal, when his past record is clear, and
when his crime is due to a social passion, which makes it excusable.

We shall see tomorrow what remedies the positive school of criminology
proposes for each one of these categories of criminals, in distinction
from the measuring of doses of imprisonment advocated by the classic
school.

We have thus exhausted in a short and general review the subject of the
natural origin of criminality.--To sum up, crime is a social
phenomenon, due to the interaction of anthropological, telluric, and
social factors. This law brings about what I have called criminal
saturation, which means that every society has the criminality which it
deserves, and which produces by means of its geographical and social
conditions such quantities and qualities of crime as correspond to the
development of each collective human group.

Thus the old saying of Imetelet is confirmed: "There is an annual
balance of crime, which must be paid and settled with greater regularity
than the accounts of the national revenue." However, we positivists give
to this statement a less fatalistic interpretation, since we have
demonstrated that crime is not our immutable destiny, even though it is
a vain beginning to attempt to attenuate or eliminate crime by mere
schemes. The truth is that the balance of crime is determined by the
physical and social environment. But by changing the condition of the
social environment, which is most easily modified, the legislator may
alter the influence of the telluric environment and the organic and
psychic conditions of the population, control the greater portion of
crimes, and reduce them considerably. It is our firm conviction that a
truly civilized legislator can attenuate the plague of criminality, not
so much by means of the criminal code, as by means of remedies which are
latent in the remainder of the social life and of legislation. And the
experience of the most advanced countries confirms this by the
beneficent and preventive influence of criminal legislation resting on
efficacious social reforms.

We arrive, then, at this scientific conclusion: In the society of the
future, the necessity for penal justice will be reduced to the extent
that social justice grows intensively and extensively.


III.

In the preceding two lectures, I have given you a short review of the
new current in scientific thought, which studies the painful and
dangerous phenomena of criminality. We must now draw the logical
conclusions, in theory and practice, from the teachings of experimented
science, for the removal of the gangrenous plague of crime. Under the
influence of the positive methods of research, the old formula "Science
for science's sake" has given place to the new formula "Science for
life's sake." For it would be useless for the human mind to retreat into
the vault of philosophical concentration, if this intellectual mastery
did not produce as a counter-effect a beneficent wave of real
improvement in the destinies of the human race.

What, then, has the civilized world to offer in the way of remedies
against criminality? The classic school of criminology, being unable to
locate in the course of its scientific and historical mission the
natural causes of crime, as I have shown in the preceding lectures, was
not in a position to deal in a comprehensive and far-seeing manner with
this problem of the remedy against criminality. Some of the classic
criminologists, such as Bentham, Romagnosi, or Ellero, with a more
positive bent of mind than others, may have given a little of their
scientific activity to the analysis of this problem, namely the
prevention of crime. But Ellero himself had to admit that "the classic
school of criminology has written volumes concerning the death penalty
and torture, but has produced but a few pages on the prevention of
criminality." The historical mission of that school consisted in a
reduction of punishment. For being born on the eve of the French
revolution in the name of individualism and natural rights, it was a
protest against the barbarian penalties of the Middle Ages. And thus the
practical and glorious result of the classic school was a propaganda for
the abolition of the most brutal penalties of the Middle Ages, such as
the death penalty, torture, mutilation. We in our turn now follow up the
practical and scientific mission of the classic school of criminology
with a still more noble and fruitful mission by adding to the problem of
the _diminution of penalties_ the problem of the _diminution of crimes_.
It is worth more to humanity to reduce the number of crimes than to
reduce the dread sufferings of criminal punishments, although even this
is a noble work, after the evil plant of crime has been permitted to
grow in the realm of life. Take, for instance, the philanthropic
awakening due to the Congress of Geneva in the matter of the Red Cross
Society, for the care, treatment and cure of the wounded in war. However
noble and praiseworthy this mission may be, it would be far nobler and
better to prevent war than to heal the mutilated and wounded. If the
same zeal and persistence, which have been expended in the work of the
Red Cross Society, had been devoted to the realization of international
brotherhood, the weary road of human progress would show far better
results.

It is a noble mission to oppose the ferocious penalties of the Middle
Ages. But it is still nobler to forestall crime. The classic school of
criminology directed its attention merely to penalties, to repressive
measures after crime had been committed, with all its terrible moral
and material consequences. For in the classic school, the remedies
against criminality have not the social aim of improving human life, but
merely the illusory mission of retributive justice, meeting a moral
delinquency by a corresponding punishment in the shape of legal
sentences. This is the spirit which is still pervading criminal
legislation, although there is a sort of eclectic compromise between the
old and the new. The classic school of criminology has substituted for
the old absolutist conceptions of justice the eclectic theory that
absolute justice has the right to punish, but a right modified by the
interests of civilized life in present society. This is the point
discussed in Italy in the celebrated controversy between Pasquale
Stanislao Mancini and Terencio Mamiani, in 1847. This is in substance
the theory followed by the classic criminologists who revised the penal
code, which public opinion considers incapable of protecting society
against the dangers of crime. And we have but to look about us in the
realities of contemporaneous life in order to see that the criminal code
is far from being a remedy against crime, that it remedies nothing,
because either premeditation or passion in the person of the criminal
deprive the criminal law of all prohibitory power. The deceptive faith
in the efficacy of criminal law still lives in the public mind, because
every normal man feels that the thought of imprisonment would stand in
his way, if he contemplated tomorrow committing a theft, a rape, or a
murder. He feels the bridle of the social sense. And the criminal code
lends more strength to it and holds him back from criminal actions. But
even if the criminal code did not exist, he would not commit a crime, so
long as his physical and social environment would not urge him in that
direction. The criminal code serves only to isolate temporarily from
social intercourse those who are not considered worthy of it. And this
punishment prevents the criminal for a while from repeating his criminal
deed. But it is evident that the punishment is not imposed until after
the deed has been done. It is a remedy directed against effects, but it
does not touch the causes, the roots, of the evil.

We may say that in social life penalties have the same relation to crime
that medicine has to disease. After a disease has developed in an
organism, we have recourse to a physician. But he cannot do anything
else but to reach the effects in some single individual. On the other
hand, if the individual and the collectivity had obeyed the rules of
preventive hygiene, the disease would have been avoided 90 times in 100,
and would have appeared only in extreme and exceptional cases, where a
wound or an organic condition break through the laws of health. Lack of
providence on the part of man, which is due to insufficient expression
of the forces of the intellect and pervades so large a part of human
life, is certainly to blame for the fact that mankind chooses to use
belated remedies rather than to observe the laws of health, which demand
a greater methodical control of one's actions and more foresight,
because the remedy must be applied before the disease becomes apparent.
I say occasionally that human society acts in the matter of criminality
with the same lack of forethought that most people do in the matter of
tooth-ache. How many individuals do not suffer from tooth-ache,
especially in the great cities? And yet any one convinced of the
miraculous power of hygiene could easily clean his teeth every day and
prevent the microbes of tooth rot from thriving, thereby saving his
teeth from harm and pain. But it is tedious to do this every day. It
implies a control of one's self. It cannot be done without the
scientific conviction that induces men to acquire this habit. Most
people say: "Oh well, if that tooth rots, I'll bear the pain." But when
the night comes in which they cannot sleep for toothache, they will
swear at themselves for not having taken precautions and will run to the
dentist, who in most cases cannot help them any more.

The legislator should apply the rules of social hygiene in order to
reach the roots of criminality. But this would require that he should
bring his mind and will to bear daily on a legislative reform of
individual and social life, in the field of economics and morals as well
as in that of administration, politics, and intelligence. Instead of
that, the legislators permit the microbes of criminality to develop
their pathogenic powers in society. When crimes become manifest, the
legislator knows no other remedy but imprisonment in order to punish an
evil which he should have prevented. Unfortunately this scientific
conviction is not yet rooted and potent in the minds of the legislators
of most of the civilized countries, because they represent on an
average the backward scientific convictions of one or two previous
generations. The legislator who sits in parliament today was the
university student of 30 years ago. With a few very rare exceptions he
is supplied only with knowledge of outgrown scientific research. It is a
historical law that the work of the legislator is always behind the
science of his time. But nevertheless the scientist has the urgent duty
to spread the conviction that hygiene is worth as much on the field of
civilization as it is in medicine for the public health.

This is the fundamental conviction at which the positive school arrives:
That which has happened in medicine will happen in criminology. The
great value of practical hygiene, especially of social hygiene, which is
greater than that of individual hygiene, has been recognized after the
marvelous scientific discoveries concerning the origin and primitive
causes of the most dangerous diseases. So long as Pasteur and his
disciples had not given to the world their discovery of the pathogenic
microbes of all infectious diseases, such as typhoid fever, cholera,
diphtheria, tuberculosis, etc, more or less absurd remedies were
demanded of the science of medicine. I remember, for instance, that I
was compelled in my youth, during an epidemic of cholera, to stay in a
closed room, in which fumigation was carried on with substances
irritating the bronchial tubes and lungs without killing the cholera
microbes, as was proved later on. It was not until the real causes of
those infectious diseases were discovered, that efficient remedies could
be employed against them. An aqueduct given to a center of population
like Naples is a better protection against cholera than drugs, even
after the disease has taken root in the midst of the people of Naples.
This is the modern lesson which we wish to teach in the field of
criminology, a field which will always retain its repressive functions
as an exceptional and ultimate refuge, because we do not believe that we
shall succeed in eliminating all forms of criminality. Hence, if a crime
manifests itself, repression may be employed as one of the remedies of
criminology, but it should be the very last, not the exclusively
dominating one, as it is today.

It is this blind worship of punishment which is to blame for the
spectacle which we witness in every modern country, the spectacle that
the legislators neglect the rules of social hygiene and wake up with a
start when some form of crime becomes acute, and that they know of no
better remedy than an intensification of punishment meeted out by the
penal code. If one year of imprisonment is not enough, we'll make it ten
years, and if an aggravation of the ordinary penalty is not enough,
we'll pass a law of exception. It is always the blind trust in
punishment which remains the only remedy of the public conscience and
which always works to the detriment of morality and material welfare,
because it does not save the society of honest people and strikes
without curing those who have fallen a prey to guilt and crime.

The positive school of criminology, then, aside from the greater value
attributed to daily and systematic measures of social hygiene for the
prevention of criminality, comes to radically different conclusions also
in the matter of repressive justice. The classic school has for a
cardinal remedy against crime a preference for one kind of punishment,
namely imprisonment, and gives fixed and prescribed doses of this
remedy. It is the logical conclusion of retributive justice that it
travels by way of an illusory purification from moral guilt to the legal
responsibility of the criminal and thence on to a corresponding dose of
punishment, which has been previously prescribed and fixed.

We, on the other hand, hold that even the surviving form of repression,
which will be inevitable in spite of the application of the rules of
social prevention, should be widely different, on account of the
different conception which we have of crime and of penal justice.

In the majority of cases composed of minor crimes committed by people
belonging to the most numerous and least dangerous class of occasional
or passionate criminals, the only form of civil repression will be _the
compensation of the victim for his loss_. According to us, this should
he the only form of penalty imposed in the majority of minor crimes
committed by people who are not dangerous. In the present practice of
justice the compensation of the victim for his loss has become a
laughing stock, because this victim is systematically forgotten. The
whole attention of the classic school has been concentrated on the
juridical entity of the crime. The victim of the crime has been
forgotten, although this victim deserves philanthropic sympathy more
than the criminal who has done the harm. It is true, every, judge adds
to the sentence the formula that the criminal is responsible for the
injury and the costs to another authority. But the process of law puts
off this compensation to an indefinite time, and if the victim succeeds
a few years after the passing of the sentence in getting any action on
the matter, the criminal has in the meantime had a thousand legal
subterfuges to get away with his spoils. And thus the law itself becomes
the breeding ground of personal revenge, for Filangieri says aptly that
an innocent man grasps the dagger of the murderer, when the sword of
justice does not defend him.

Let us say at this point that the rigid application of compensation for
damages should never be displaced by imprisonment, because this would be
equivalent to sanctioning a real class distinction, for the rich can
laugh at damages, while the proletarian would have to make good a
sentence of 1000 lire by 100 days in prison, and in the meantime the
innocent family that tearfully waits for him outside, would be plunged
into desperate straits. Compensation for damages should never take
place in any other way than by means of the labor of the prisoner to an
extent satisfactory to the family of the injured. It has been attempted
to place this in an eclectic way on our law books, but this proposition
remains a dead letter and is not applied in Italy, because a stroke of
legislator's pen is not enough to change the fate of an entire nation.

These practical and efficient measures would be taken in the case of
lesser criminals. For the graver crimes committed by atavistic or
congenital criminals, of by persons inclining toward crime from acquired
habit or mental alienation, the positive school of criminology reserves
segregation for an indefinite time, for it is absurd to fix the time
beforehand in the case of a dangerous degenerate who has committed a
grave crime.

The question of indeterminate sentences has been recently discussed also
by Pessina, who combats it, of course, because the essence of the
classic school of criminology is retribution for a fault by means of
corresponding punishment. We might reply that no human judge can use any
other but the grossest scale by which to determine whether you are
responsible to the extent of the whole, one half, or one third. And
since there is no absolute or objective criterion by which the ratio of
crime to punishment can be determined, penal justice becomes a game of
chance. But we content ourselves by pointing out that segregation for an
indefinite time has so much truth in it, that even the most orthodox of
the classic school admit it, for instance in the case of criminals under
age. Now, if an indeterminate sentence is a violation of the principles
of the classic school, I cannot understand why it can be admitted in the
case of minors, but not in the case of adults. This is evidently an
expedient imposed by the exigencies of practical life, and only the
positive school of criminology can meet them by a logical
systematization. For the rest, indefinite segregation, such as we
propose for the most dangerous atavistic criminals, is a measure which
is already in use for ordinary lunatics as well us for criminal
lunatics. But it may be said that this is an administrative measure, not
a court sentence. Well, if any one is so fond of formulas as to make
this objection, he may get all the fun out of them that he likes. But it
is a fact that an insane person who has committed a crime is sent to a
building with iron bars on its gates such as a prison has. You may call
it an administrative building or a penal institute, the name is
unessential, for the substance alone counts. We maintain that congenital
or pathological criminals cannot be locked up for a definite term in any
institution, but should remain there until they are adapted for the
normal life of society.

This radical reform of principles carries with it a radical
transformation of details. Given an indeterminate segregation, there
should be organs of guardianship for persons so secluded, for instance
permanent committees for the periodical revision of sentences. In the
future, the criminal judge will always secure ample evidence to prove
whether a defendant is really guilty, for this is the fundamental point.
If it is certain that he has committed the crime, he should either be
excluded from social intercourse or sentenced to mate good the damage,
provided the criminal is not dangerous and the crime not grave. It is
absurd to sentence a man to five or six days imprisonment for some
insignificant misdemeanor. You lower him in the eyes of the public,
subject him to surveillance by the police, and send him to prison from
whence he will go out more corrupted than he was on entering it. It is
absurd to impose segregation in prison for small errors. Compensation
for injuries is enough. For the segregation of the graver criminals, the
management must be as scientific as it is now in insane asylums. It is
absurd to place an old pensioned soldier or a hardened bureaucrat at the
head of a penal institution. It is enough to visit one of those
compulsory human beehives and to see how a military discipline carries a
brutal hypocrisy into it. The management of such institutions must be
scientific, and the care of their inmates must be scientific, since a
grave crime is always a manifestation of the pathological condition of
the individual. In America there are already institutions, such as the
Elmira Reformatory, where the application of the methods of the positive
school of criminology has been solemnly promised. The director of the
institution is a psychologist, a physician. When a criminal under age is
brought in, he is studied from the point of view of physiology and
psychology. The treatment serves to regenerate the plants who, being
young, may still be straightened up. Scientific therapeutics can do
little for relapsed criminals. The present repression of crime robs the
prisoner of his personality and reduces him to a number, either in mass
imprisonment which corrupts him completely, or in solitary confinement,
which will turn him into a stupid or raving beast.

These methods are also gradually introduced in the insane asylums. I
must tell you a little story to illustrate this. When I was a professor
in Pisa, eight years ago, I took my students to the penitentiaries and
the asylum for the criminal insane in Montelupo, as I always used to do.
Dr. Algieri, the director of this asylum, showed us among others a very
interesting case. This was a man of about 45, whose history was shortly
the following: He was a bricklayer living in one of the cities of
Toscana. He had been a normal and honest man, a very good father, until
one unlucky day came, in which a brick falling from a factory broke a
part of his skull. He fell down unconscious, was picked up, carried to
the hospital, and cured of his external injury, but lost both his
physical and moral health. He became an epileptic.

And the lesion to which the loss of the normal function of his nervous
system was due transformed him from the docile and even-tempered man
that he had been into a quarrelsome and irritable individual, so that
he was less regular in his work, less moral and honest in his family
life, and was finally sentenced for a grave assault in a saloon brawl.
He was condemned as a common criminal to I don't know how many years of
imprisonment. But in prison, the exceptional conditions of seclusion
brought on a deterioration of his physical and moral health, his
epileptic fits became more frequent, his character grew worse. The
director of the prison sent him to the asylum for the insane criminals
at Montelupo, which shelters criminals suspected of insanity and insane
criminals.

Dr. Algieri studied the interesting case and came to the diagnosis that
there was splinter of bone in the man's brain which had not been noticed
in the treatment at the hospital, and that this was the cause of the
epilepsy and demoralization of the prisoner. He trepanned a portion of
the skull around the old wound and actually found a bone splinter lodged
in the man's brain. He removed the splinter, and put a platinum plate
over the trepanned place to protect the brain. The man improved, the
epileptic fits ceased, his moral condition became as normal as before,
and this bricklayer (how about the free will?) was dismissed from the
asylum, for he had given proofs of normal behavior for about five or six
months, thanks to the wisdom of the doctor who had relieved him of the
lesion which had made him epileptic and immoral. If this asylum for
insane criminals had not been in existence, he would have ended in a
padded cell, the same as another man whom I and my students saw a few
years ago in the Ancona penitentiary. The director, an old soldier, said
to me: "Professor, I shall show you a type of human beast. He is a man
who passes four fifths of the year in a padded cell." After calling six
attendants, "because we must be careful," we went to the cell, and I
said to that director: "Please, leave this man to me. I have little
faith in the existence of human beasts. Keep the attendants at a
distance." "No," replied the director, "my responsibility does not
permit me to do that."

But I insisted. The cell was opened, and the man came out of it really
like a wild beast with bulging eyes and distorted face. But I met him
with a smile and said to him kindly: "How are you?" This change of
treatment immediately changed the attitude of the man. He first had a
nervous fit and then broke into tears and told me his story with the
eloquence of suffering. He said that he had some days in which he was
not master of himself, but he recognized that he was good whenever the
attacks of temper were over. Without saying so, he thus invoked the
wisdom of human psychology for better treatment. There is indeed a
physician in those prisons, but he treats generally only the ordinary
diseases and is not familiar with special psychological knowledge. There
may be exceptions, and in that case it is a lucky coincidence. But the
prison doctor has also his practice outside and hurries through his
prison work. "They simulate sickness in order to get out of prison," he
says. And this will be so all the more that the physicians of our time
have not sufficient training in psychology to enable them to do justice
to the psychology of the criminal.

You must, therefore, give a scientific management to these institutions,
and you will then render humane even the treatment of those grave and
dangerous criminals, whose condition cannot be met by a simple
compensation of the injury they have done to others.

This is the function of repression as we look upon it, an inevitable
result of the positive data regarding the natural origin of crime.

We believe, in other words, that repression will play but an unimportant
role in the future. We believe that every branch of legislation will
come to prefer the remedies of social hygiene to those symptomatic
remedies and apply them from day to day. And thus we come to the theory
of the prevention of crime. Some say: "it is better to repress than to
prevent." Others say: "It is better to prevent than to repress." In
order to solve this conflict we must remember that there are two widely
different kinds of repression. There is the immediate, direct empirical
repression, which does not investigate the cause of criminality, but
waits until the crime is about to be committed. That is police
prevention. There is on the other hand a social prevention which has an
indirect and more remote function, which does not wait until crime is
about to be committed, but locates the causes of crime in poverty,
abandoned children, trampdom, etc, and seeks to prevent these
conditions by remote and indirect means. In Italy, prevention is
anonymous with arrest. That is to say, by repression is understood only
police repression. Under these circumstances, it is well to take it for
granted that some of the expected crimes will be carried out, for crimes
are not committed at fixed periods after first informing the police. The
damage done by criminality, and especially by political and social
criminality, against which police repression is particularly directed,
will be smaller than that done by the abuse inseparably connected with
police power. In the case of atavistic criminality, prevention does not
mean handcuffing of the man who is about to commit a crime, but devising
such economic and educational measures in the family and administration
as will eliminate the causes of crime or attenuate them, precisely
because punishment is less effective than prevention.

In other words, in order to prevent crime, we must have recourse to
measures which I have called "substitutes for punishment," and which
prevent, the development of crime, because they go to the source in
order to do away with effects.

Bentham narrates that the postal service in England, in the 18th
century, was in the hands of stage drivers, but this service was not
connected with the carrying of passengers, as became the custom later.
And then it was impossible to get the drivers to arrive on time,
because they stopped too often at the inns. Fines were imposed,
imprisonment was resorted to, yet the drivers arrived late. The
penalties did not accomplish any results so long as the causes remained.
Then the idea was conceived to carry passengers on the postal stages,
and that stopped the drivers from being late, because whenever they made
a halt, the passengers, who had an interest in arriving on time, called
the drivers and did not give them much time to linger. This is an
illustration of a substitute for punishment.

Another illustration. In the Middle Ages, up to the eve of our modern
civilization, piracy was in vogue. Is there anything that was not tried
to suppress piracy? The pirates were persecuted like wild beasts.
Whenever they were caught they were condemned to the most terrible forms
of death. Yet piracy continued. Then came the application of steam
navigation, and piracy disappeared as by magic. And robbery and
brigandage? They withstood the death penalty and extraordinary raids by
soldiers. And we witness today the spectacle of a not very serious
contest between the police who wants to catch a brigand, Musolino; and
a brigand who does not wish to be caught.

Wherever the woods are not traversed by railroads or tramways,
brigandage carries on its criminal trade. But wherever railroads and
tramways exist, brigandage is a form of crime which disappears. You may
insist on death penalties and imprisonment, but assault and robbery will
continue, because it is connected with geographical conditions. Use on
the other hand the instrument of civilization, without sentencing any
one, and brigandage and robbery will disappear before its light. And if
human beings in large industrial centers are herded together in
tenements and slum hotels, how can a humane judge aggravate the
penalties against sexual crimes? How can the sense of shame develop
among people, when young and old of both sexes are crowded together in
the same bed, in the same corrupted and corrupting environment, which
robs the human soul of every noble spark?

I might stray pretty far, if I were to continue these illustrations of
social hygiene which will be the true solution of the problem and the
supreme systematic, daily humane, and bloodless remedy against the
disease of criminality. However, we have not the simple faith that in
the near or far future of humanity crimes can ever be wholly eradicated.
Even Socialism, which looks forward to a fundamental transformation of
future society on the basis of brotherhood and social justice, cannot
elevate itself to the absolute and naive faith that criminality,
insanity, and suicide can ever fully disappear from the earth. But it is
our firm conviction that the endemic form of criminality, insanity, and
suicide will disappear, and that nothing will remain of them but rare
sporadic forms caused by lesion or telluric and other influences.

Since we have made the great discovery that malaria, which weighs upon
so many parts in Italy, is dependent for its transmission on a certain
mosquito, we have acquired the control of malarial therapeutics and are
enabled to protect individuals and families effectively against malaria.
But aside from this function of protecting people, there must be a
social prevention, and since those malarial insects can live only in
swampy districts, it is necessary to bring to those unreclaimed lands
the blessing of the hoe and plow, in order to remove the cause and do
away with the effects. The same problem confronts us in criminology. In
the society of the future we shall undertake this work of social
hygiene, and thereby we shall remove the epidemic forms of criminality.
And nine-tenths of the crimes will then disappear, so that nothing will
remain of them but exceptional cases. There will remain, for instance,
such cases as that of the bricklayer which I mentioned, because there
may always be accidents, no matter what may be the form of social
organization, and nervous disorders may thus appear in certain
individuals. But you can see that these would be exceptional cases of
criminality, which will be easily cured under the direction of science,
that will be the supreme and beneficent manager of institutes for the
segregation of those who will be unfit for social intercourse. The
problem of criminality will thus be solved as far as possible, because
the gradual transformation of society will eliminate the swamps in which
the miasma of crime may form and breed.

If we wish to apply these standards to an example which today attracts
the attention of all Italy to this noble city, if we desire to carry our
theories into the practice of contemporaneous life, if science is to
respond to the call of life, let us throw a glance at that form of
endemic criminality known as the Camorra in this city, which has taken
root here just as stabbing affrays have in certain centers of Turin, and
the Mafia in certain centers of Sicily. In the first place, we must not
be wilfully blind to facts and refuse to see that the citizens will
protect themselves, if social justice does not do so. And from that to
crime there is but a shot step. But which is the swampy soil in which
this social disease can spread and persist like leprosy in tin
collective organism? It is the economic poverty of the masses, which
lends to intellectual and moral poverty.

You have lately had in Naples a very fortunate struggle, which seems to
have overcome one of the representatives of the high Camorra. But can we
believe that the courageous work of a few public writers has touched the
roots of the Camorra in this city? It would be self-deception to think
so. For we see that plants blossom out again, even after the most
destructive hurricane has passed over them.

The healing of society is not so easy, that a collective plague may be
cured by the courageous acts of one or more individuals. The process is
much slower and more complicated. Nevertheless these episodes are
milestones of victory in the onward march of civilization, which will
paralyze the historical manifestations of social criminality. Here,
then, we have a city in which some hundred thousand people rise every
morning and do not know how to get a living, who have no fixed
occupation, because there is not enough industrial development to reach
that methodical application of labor which lifted humanity out of the
prehistoric forests. Truly, the human race progresses by two uplifting
energies: War and labor.

In primitive and savage society, when the human personality did not know
the check of social discipline, a military discipline held the members
of the tribe together. But war, while useful in primitive society, loses
its usefulness more and more, because it carries within itself the
cancer that paralyzes it.

While war compels collective groups to submit to the co-ordinating
discipline of human activity, it also decreases the respect for human
life. The soldier who kills his fellow man of a neighboring nation by a
stroke of his sword will easily lose the respect for the life of
members of his own social group. Then the second educational energy
interferes, the energy of labor, which makes itself felt at the decisive
moment of prehistoric development, when the human race passes from a
pastoral, hunting, and nomadic life Into an agriculture and settled
life. This is the historic stage, in which the collective ownership of
land and instruments of production is displaced by communal property,
family property, and finally individual property. During these stages,
humanity passes from individual and isolated labor in collective,
associated, co-ordinated labor. The remains of the neolithic epoch show
us the progress of the first workshops, in which our ancestors gathered
and fashioned their primitive tools and arms. They give us an idea of
associated and common labor, which then becomes the great uplifting
energy, because, unlike war, it does not carry within itself a disdain
or violation of the rights of others. Labor is the sole perennial energy
of mankind which leads to social perfection. But if you have 100,000
persons in a city like Naples who do not enjoy the certainty and
discipline of employment at methodical and common labor, you need not
wonder that the uncertainty of daily life, an illfed stomach, and an
anemic brain, result in the atrophy of all moral sentiment, and that the
evil plant of the Camorra spreads out over everything. The processes in
the law courts may attract the fleeting attention of public opinion, of
legislation, of government, to the disease from which this portion of
the social organism is suffering, but mere repression will not
accomplish anything lasting.

The teaching of science tells us plainly that in such a case of endemic
criminality social remedies must be applied to social evils. Unless the
remedy of social reforms accompanies the development and protection of
labor; unless justice is assured to every member of the collectivity,
the courage of this or that citizen is spent in vain, and the evil plant
will continue to thrive in the jungle.

Taught by the masterly and inflexible logic of facts, we come to the
adoption of the scientific method in criminal research and conclude that
a simple and uniform remedy like punishment is not adequate to cure such
a natural and social phenomenon as crime, which has its own natural and
social causes. The measures for the preservation of society against
criminality must be manifold, complex and varied, and must be the
outcome of persevering and systematic work on the part of legislators
and citizens on the solid foundation of a systematic collective economy.

Let me take leave of you with this practical conclusion, and give my
heart freedom to send to my brain a wave of fervent blood, which shall
express my enduring gratitude for the reception which you have given me.
Old in years, but young in spirit and energetic aspiration to every high
ideal, I tender you my sincere thanks. As a man and a citizen, I thank
you, because these three lectures have been for me a fountain of youth,
of faith, of enthusiasm. Thanks to them I return to the other fields of
my daily occupation with a greater faith in the future of my country and
of humanity. To you, young Italy, I address these words of thanks, glad
and honored, if my words have aroused in your soul one breath which will
make you stronger and more confident in the future of civilization and
social justice.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901" ***

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