The criminal everywhere is incapable of prolonged and sustained exertion; an amount of regular work which would utterly exhaust the most vigorous and rebellious would be easily accomplished by an ordinary workman. He is essentially idle; the whole art of crime lies in the endeavour to avoid the necessity of labour. This constitutional laziness is therefore one of the chief organic bases of crime. Make idleness impossible and you have done much to make the criminal impossible. It is not without reason that French criminals call themselves pègres (from pigritia), the idle. Lemaire, a notorious French criminal of the beginning of the century, was speaking for all his class when he said to his judges: “I have always been lazy; it is a shame, I admit, but I am not adapted for work; to work one needs an effort, and I am incapable of it; I only have energy for evil; if one must work I do not care about life; I would rather be condemned to death.”
While he is essentially lazy, and exhibits this even in his general neglect of personal cleanliness (though sometimes dressed outwardly as an ordinary man of the world), the criminal is capable of moments of violent activity. He cannot, indeed, live without them; they are the chief events of his spiritual life.
Louis Desprez, an unfortunate littérateur, imprisoned at Saint-Pélagie for a literary offence, “summed up the psychology of criminals,” remarks M. Émile Gautier, “in one picturesque formula: They see the world under the aspect of an immense gaol alternating with an immense brothel. And this is true. For them imprisonment is the normal condition. Liberty is their holiday, an occasional transitory holiday, during which they wallow in the far niente and debauch, like sailors who consume in three days the earnings of eighteen months, but a holiday which will have an end, a foreseen and expected end.”
The criminal craves for some powerful stimulus, excitement, uproar, to lift him out of his habitual inertia. That is why the love of alcohol is in all countries so strong among criminals. The man who is organised as we have seen the criminal to be must have some powerful stimulant to take him out of himself, to give him a joy which is otherwise beyond his grasp, and alcohol is the stimulant which comes easiest to hand. When, as frequently happens, he is the child of alcoholic parents, the craving for drink soon obtains morbid intensity. Crime and drink are intimately bound together, although we must beware of too unreservedly setting down drink as the cause of crime. Both crime and drink are the morbid manifestations of organic defects which for the most part precede birth. The abuse of alcohol is not, however, universal among criminals, at all events when any intellectual ability is required. “It would not do to drink in our business,” said a sharper to Lombroso.
The criminal finds another strong form of excitement in gambling. The love of cards is even more widely spread among criminals than the love of drink. It frequently becomes a passion. Lauvergne tells of a band of criminals who played for two days without intermission. We hear of a French prisoner who gambled away his meagre rations of bread and wine and at last died of starvation; of another who in the excitement of the game forgot his approaching execution.
To all forms of sexual excitement, natural and unnatural, criminals of both sexes resort, often from a very early age. The prison, in which the criminal is confined alone, or with persons of the same sex, serves to develop perverted sexual habits to a high degree. Prince Krapotkine, speaking of the moral influence of prisons on prisoners in France, writes:—“The facts which we came across during our prison life surpass all that the most frenzied imagination could invent. One must have been for long years in a prison, secluded from all higher influences and abandoned to one’s own and that of a thousand convicts’ imaginations, to come to the incredible state of mind which is witnessed among some prisoners. And I suppose that I shall say only what will be supported by all intelligent and frank governors of prisons, if I say that the prisons are the nurseries for the most revolting category of breaches of moral law.”[63] There is unquestionable evidence that the same practices exist, notwithstanding all discipline, in English prisons.
Such practices grow up chiefly as a means of excitement and diversion in vacuous lives. Love, in its highest and strongest forms, seems to be extremely rare. This is true even when love is the cause of the crime. The love, even when strong, remains rather brutal. When a man was asked if he really loved the woman for whose sake he had murdered her husband, he replied: “Oh, if you had seen her naked!”
The craving for excitement, for intoxication, for uproar, finds its chief satisfaction in the love of orgy, which is now almost confined, at all events in its extreme forms, to the criminal and his intimate ally, the prostitute. The orgy is the criminal’s most sacred festival; here he attains his highest experiences of forgetful exhilaration. Vidocq, still a criminal at heart, even after he had become a police official, has described the orgy in his Memoirs:—“Imagine a rather large square hall, with walls, once white, now blackened by exhalations of every kind: such is, in all its simplicity, the aspect of a temple of Bacchus and Terpsichore. At first by a very natural optical illusion, one is only struck by the smallness of the place, but when the eye succeeds in piercing the atmosphere, thick with a thousand vapours which are not inodorous, the size becomes manifest by the details which escape from the chaos. This is the moment of creation; everything clears up; the mist dissipates, becomes peopled and animated; there is movement, agitation, not of empty shadows but of substantial forms which cross and interlace in every direction. What beatitude! What a joyous life! Never for epicureans were so many felicities gathered together as here for those who love to wallow in mire. Around, rows of tables, on which, without their ever being cleaned, disgusting libations are renewed a hundred times a day, serve to frame in a space which is reserved for what are called the dancers. At the end of this infectious den rises, supported by four worm-eaten pillars, a kind of platform, its construction hidden by two or three fragments of old tapestry. On this hencoop the musicians are perched, two clarinettes, a fiddle, a loud trombone, and a deafening drum.... In this receptacle one finds none but prostitutes and their bullies, sharpers of all kinds, swindlers of the lowest sort, and a good many of those disturbers of the night whose lives are divided into two parts, one consecrated to rowdyism, the other to robbery.”
More interesting than this resort to external sources of stimulus, and more significant of emotional instability, are the spontaneous outbursts of excitement common among criminals, curious self-evolved intoxications springing from mysterious and incalculable depths of the organism. Dostoieffsky has studied these outbursts and admirably described them. “A prisoner has lived tranquilly,” he tells us,[64] “for several consecutive years, and his conduct has been exemplary. All at once, to the great astonishment of his guardians, he mutinies and recoils before no crime, even murder or rape. Every one is astonished. This unexpected explosion is the anguished, convulsive manifestation of personality, an instinctive melancholy, a desire to affirm the degraded ego, an emotion which obscures the judgment. It is like a spasm, an access of epilepsy; the man who is buried alive and who suddenly awakes strikes in despair against his coffin-lid; he strives to push it back, to raise it; his reason convinces him of the uselessness of all his efforts, but reason has nothing to do with his convulsions. It must not be forgotten that nearly every manifestation of the personality of the prisoner is considered a crime; also that the question whether the manifestation is important or insignificant is perfectly indifferent to the prisoner. Risk for risk, it is better to go to the extreme, even to murder. It is only the first step that costs; little by little the man is carried away and can no longer be held in.” The prison has much to answer for in the development of these emotional outbreaks, and it is only in prison that there is opportunity of studying them. It would, however, be rash to conclude that they are entirely due to prison conditions. They are in harmony with all that we know of criminal psychology, and it is not alone under prison conditions that they are the causes of crime.
In Germany these periodic explosions (known as Zuchthaus-Knall) have been described by Delbrück and Krafft-Ebing. In Italy they have been noted by Lombroso, especially in very hot weather and at such times as epileptic attacks are most frequent, and he regards them as fresh proof of a close relationship between the instinctive criminal and the epileptic. In England they appear to be rare in men, but, on the other hand, common in women who have, in prison language, “broken out.” This wild fit of maniacal violence which from time to time seizes on the women confined in prisons, and might almost be regarded as an exaggerated or vicarious form of orgy, has been studied with some care in England. Here as well as abroad it is frequently supposed to be a voluntary insubordination deserving punishment.