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.