Certain human actions by which the safety of society is endangered are no less determined than is the secretion of the urine or the heart’s beat. It is a stupid blunder to allow the social reaction in response to such actions to depend upon the blameworthiness of the offender. The social reaction has one purpose, and one only—the safety of society. Anthropology, utilizing all the methods at its disposal, will throw light on the determining causes of anti-social actions, and thus by anthropology we shall be guided in our choice of means for the preservation of social security.
That this view forbids us even to moot the idea of “responsibility” is perfectly obvious.[[42]] Thus it gives us no basis whatever for establishing or denying responsibility in the individual instance, or of determining its extent if it exists. Lombroso provides a scale of measurement neither for punishment nor for responsibility.
CHAPTER VI
CRIMINAL JURISPRUDENCE—PELLAGRA—AGRARIAN REFORM
Lombroso’s occupation with the problem of criminals and crime extended far beyond the bounds of criminal anthropology. He was led in this direction, in part by the need for the establishment of a purely anthropological characterization of the world of crime, and in part by his controversies with lawyers, philosophers, and psychiatrists, by which he was enabled to study other categories of criminal than the “born criminal”—categories whose existence he had never denied. Opportunities for investigation in this new field were offered him in the year 1876, when he removed to Turin—a city in which psychiatric studies were very actively pursued—by his observations as surgeon to the Turin prison for the detention of prisoners awaiting trial, and by a very exhaustive study of penal literature, by which he was led very speedily to formulate a system for the reform of criminal law and penal methods. He soon found himself in the position of chief of a school of criminology, whose influence made itself felt in Parliament, in the Courts, and in foreign countries. In Italy not long after, in the year 1880, Enrico Ferri, being appointed Professor of Criminal Jurisprudence in Bologna, gave his powerful support to Lombroso, and there resulted a rapid succession of works upon the insane criminal, the epileptic criminal, the criminal by passion, the habitual criminal, and the occasional criminal, which, in the year 1888, were published as the second volume of “L’uomo delinquente.” The progress of Lombroso’s ideas as chief of a “School of Positive Criminology,” from the year 1879, when he had become firmly established in Turin, to the year 1894, is indicated by his writings upon punishment, upon the increase of crime in Italy, upon the proposals for a new code of criminal law, and upon political crime and the revolution.[[43]]
In the middle of this fruitful period of twelve years (1884) was published Ferri’s “Sociologia Criminale,” and about the same time the reformatory and etiological ideas of Lombroso began to influence the Italian lawyers; and, notwithstanding the violent protests of the advocates of the “classical” jurisprudence (Lucchini, Brusa, Gabelli, and others), the Italian Attorney-General, Baron Garofalo, in the year 1885, displayed his adhesion to the ideas of the Positive School by the publication of his “Criminologia.”
In Germany there soon followed the celebrity of Mittelstaedt’s book, “Gegen die Freiheitsstrafe” (“Against Imprisonment”) (Leipzig, 1879). This was speedily followed by the yet more modern and humane work of Kraepelin, “Die Abschaffung des Strafmasses” (Stuttgart, 1880), an echo in many respects of the ideas of Garofalo and Lombroso.
In Kraepelin’s book it is impossible to overlook the influence of Lombroso’s ideas; and the same influence can be traced also in Von Liszt’s “Lehrbuch des Deutschen Strafrechts” (“Textbook of German Criminal Jurisprudence”), of which the first edition was published in 1881; but it could be foreseen that in the psychiatric and legal circles of Germany, this influence would be indirect and limited. I was myself convinced of this fact at the time when, in the year 1886, after long study of the writings of the Italian school, I had resolved to do my best to diffuse the views of that school in Germany, both verbally and in writing.
It is not possible to give a detailed account here of the diffusion of the ideas and methods of the “New School” outside Italy. The conservatism which inevitably results from a legal education gave rise to violent opposition on the part of lawyers in Italy, as well as elsewhere. It was, therefore, above all, necessary to approach the scientific leaders of the legal circles with the ideas of the “New School” of criminology. In this respect it was a fact no less impressive than useful that Lombroso, at the outset of his activity as chief of a school, published in the year 1881, in the first number of Von Liszt’s Zeitschrift für die gesamte Strafwissenschaft (Journal of Criminology), an article upon the origin, the essence, and the aims of the new criminal anthropological school in Italy. In this article he insists upon the importance of the different causes of criminality, its anthropological, social, and cosmic factors, upon the aim of repression as a means of social self-defence, and upon the importance of the substitutes for punishment (“sostituoi penali”), and the reforms necessary in the application of punishment. Finally, he deals with the “positive” character and the inductive methods of the new school.
Professor van Hamel describes this article as “The entrance of the positive school and of its founder, Lombroso, into the legal world through its chief portal—i.e., the German portal,” which was opened to him by Von Liszt. Van Hamel’s intention was to indicate the great importance attached at the outset by lawyers of the first rank to the introduction of modern criminology into the circle of the legal sciences. Van Hamel continues in the following terms: “Some years after this there ensued the foundation of l’Union Internationale de Droit Pénal, whose statutes have been recognized as providing the basic principles alike for criminological science and for practical penal methods.”
Since I estimate at a very high value Lombroso’s importance in relation to the origin and growth of the present international movement for the reform of our penal methods, I may be allowed to quote further from the learned Van Hamel, and to join with him in saying, in this connection: “Differences in matters of detail affect in no way the uniformity of principles. Such differences must, indeed, be regarded, not merely as inevitable, but positively as advantageous. They are inevitable owing to the differences in human temperament and in national character. They are advantageous because, owing to their existence, new ideas will find their way into acceptance in certain forms, when, if they had sought acceptance in other forms, they would certainly have been rejected. Differences of detail must never lead us to overlook uniformity of principle, nor to overlook the common origin of ideas thus differing in matters of detail. The advocates of the modern penal methods must never forget that these owe their very existence to the positive school of Italian thought.”