Without counting fines or police detention, there were sentenced in Italy, in the ten years 1880-89, to various terms of imprisonment, 587,938 persons by the Pretors, and 465,130 by the Correctional Tribunals. That is, more than a million terms in the minor courts within ten years!
And the total number sentenced in Italy to various punishments, by Pretors, Tribunals, and Assize Courts, in the same ten years, was not less than 3,230,000.
As for recidivism, without repeating the familiar figures of its annual increase, it will suffice to recall the astounding fact to which I drew attention before the central Commission of Legal Judicial Statistics. <p 203>That is to say, amongst the prisoners condemned in 1887 for simple homicide, there were 224 who had been already condemned, either *for the same crime (63), or for a crime mentioned in the same section of the penal code (181); and even of those condemned for qualified manslaughter, 78 had already been condemned, either *for the same crime (8), or for one of like character.
In France we have figures equally striking, for they relate not to the effect of exceptional conditions, or conditions peculiar to this or that country, but to the uniform consequence of the classical theories of criminal law and prison organisation.
The total number condemned to imprisonment by the French tribunals, and detained by the police, in the ten years 1879-88, was 1,675,000; the Tribunal sentences under six days being 113,000.
And the total condemned to punishments of various kinds, by Assize Courts, Tribunals, and police courts, reached in the same ten years the enormous number of 6,440,000 individuals!
The meaning of this is that penal justice at the present moment is a vast machine, devouring and casting up again an enormous number of individuals, who lose amongst its wheels their life, their honour, their moral sense, and their health, bearing thenceforth the ineffaceable scars, and falling into the ever-growing ranks of professional crime and recidivism, too often without a hope of recovery.[19]
[19] As regards recidivism and the enormous numbers tried, England is in as bad a position as Italy and France. See my articles in _Nineteenth Century__, 1892, and _Fortnightly Review__, 1894.—ED.
It is impossible, then, to deny the urgent necessity <p 204>of substituting for our present penal organisation a better system corresponding to the governing conditions of crime, more effectual for social defence, and at the same time less gratuitously disastrous for the individuals with whom it deals.
The positive school, in addition to the partial reforms proposed by Lombroso, and by myself in the second edition of this work, has put forward in the Criminology of Garofalo a ``rational system of punishment,'' whereof it is desirable to give a summary.