However, this applies only to serious crimes. For those of lesser gravity, statistics are at variance with the results obtained by the Modern School, which classes prostitutes as criminals. According to this mode of calculation, the difference between the criminality of the two sexes shows a considerable diminution, resulting perhaps in a slight prevalence of crime in women. In any case, female criminality tends to increase proportionally with the increase of civilisation and to equal that of men.
Age. The greater number of crimes are committed between the ages of 15 and 30, whereas, outbreaks of insanity between these ages are extremely rare, the maximum number occurring between 40 and 50. On the whole, criminality is far more precocious than mental alienation, and its precocity, which is greater among thieves than among murderers, swindlers, and those guilty of violence and assault is another proof of the congenital nature of crime and its atavistic origin, since precocity is a characteristic of savage races.
Seldom do we find among born criminals any indication of that so-called criminal scale, leading by degrees from petty offences to crimes of the most serious nature. As a general rule, they commence their career with just those crimes which distinguish it throughout, even when these are of the gravest kind, like robbery and murder. Rather may it be said that every age has its specific criminality, and this is the case especially with criminaloids. On the borderland between childhood and adolescence, there seems to be a kind of instinctive tendency to law-breaking, which by immature minds is often held to be a sign of virility. The Italian novelist and poet Manzoni describes this idea very well in his Promessi Sposi, when speaking of the half-witted lad Gervaso, who "because he had taken part in a plot savouring of crime, felt that he had suddenly become a man."
This idea lurks in the slang word omerta used by Italian criminals, which signifies not only to be a man but a man daring enough to break the law.
CHAPTER II
THE PREVENTION OF CRIME
The curability of crime is an entirely novel idea, due to the Modern Penal School. As long as, in the eyes of the world, the criminal was a normal individual, who voluntarily and consciously violated the laws, there could be no thought of a cure, but rather of a punishment sufficiently severe to prevent his recidivation and to inspire others with a salutary fear of offending the law.
The penalties excogitated in past centuries were varied: flogging, hard labour, imprisonment, and exile. During the last century they have been crystallised in the form of imprisonment, as being the most humane, although in reality it is the most illogical form, since it serves neither to intimidate the offender nor to reform him. In fact, although prison with its forced separation from home and family is a terrible penalty for those honest persons, who sometimes suffer with the guilty, it is a haven of rest for ordinary criminals, or at the worst, in no wise inferior to their usual haunts. There is a certain amount of privation of air, light, and food, but these disadvantages are fully counterbalanced by the enjoyment of complete leisure and the company of men of their own stamp.