The Criminal Type
All the physical and psychic peculiarities of which we have spoken are found singly in many normal individuals. Moreover, crime is not always the result of degeneration and atavism; and, on the other hand, many persons who are considered perfectly normal are not so in reality. However, in normal individuals, we never find that accumulation of physical, psychic, functional, and skeletal anomalies in one and the same person, that we do in the case of criminals, among whom also entire freedom from abnormal characteristics is more rare than among ordinary individuals.
Just as a musical theme is the result of a sum of notes, and not of any single note, the criminal type results from the aggregate of these anomalies, which render him strange and terrible, not only to the scientific observer, but to ordinary persons who are capable of an impartial judgment.
Painters and poets, unhampered by false doctrines, divined this type long before it became the subject of a special branch of study. The assassins, executioners, and devils painted by Mantegna, Titian, and Ribera the Spagnoletto embody with marvellous exactitude the characteristics of the born criminal; and the descriptions of great writers, Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and Ibsen, are equally faithful representations, physically and psychically, of this morbid type.
The Criminal in Proverbial Sayings
The conclusions of instinctive observers have found expression in many proverbs, which warn the world against the very characteristics we have noted in criminals.
A proverb common in Romagna, says: "Poca barba e niun colore, sotto il cielo non vi ha peggiore" (There is nothing worse under Heaven than a scanty beard and a colourless face), and in Piedmont there is a saying, "Faccia smorta, peggio che scabbia" (An ashen face is worse than the itch). The Venetians have a number of proverbs expressing distrust of the criminal type: "Uomo rosso e femina barbuta da lontan xe megio la saluta" (Greet from afar the red-haired man and the bearded woman); "Vàrdete da chi te parla e guarda in la, e vàrdete da chi tiene i oci bassi e da chi camina a corti passi" (Beware of him who looks away when he speaks to you, and of him who keeps his eyes cast down and takes mincing steps); "El guerzo xe maledetto per ogni verso" (The squint-eyed are on all sides accursed); "Megio vendere un campo e una cà che tor una dona dal naso levà" (Better sell a field and a house than take a wife with a turned-up nose); "Naso che guarda in testa è peggior che la tempesta" (A turned-up nose is worse than hail); etc.
There are innumerable cases on record, in which persons quite ignorant of criminology have escaped robbery or murder, thanks to the timely distrust awakened in them by the appearance of individuals who had tried to win their confidence. My father once placed before forty children, twenty portraits of thieves and twenty representing great men, and 80% recognised in the first the portraits of bad and deceitful people.
In conclusion, the born criminal possesses certain physical and mental characteristics, which mark him out as a special type, materially and morally diverse from the bulk of mankind.
Like the little cage-bred bird which instinctively crouches and trembles at the sight of the hawk, although ignorant of its ferocity, an honest man feels instinctive repugnance at the sight of a miscreant and thus signalises the abnormality of the criminal type.