Advanced physical and psycho-physical degeneration. Phrenasthenia. Moral idiocy. Instinctive criminality.
MEDICO-LEGAL AND SOCIAL CONSIDERATIONS.
This is the case of an instinctive criminal, a person fatally and immutably impelled to vagabondage, theft, and violence.
He bears the characters, physical and psycho-physical, of degeneration, of aberration, of constitutional abnormality, sufficient for recognition. Especially noteworthy are the lambdoidal depression, the marked plagiocephalia and plagio-prosopia, the superior prognathism, and the inferior dental irregularities, the thoracic asymmetry, the pallid complexion, the hypoalgesia, the weakness and perversion of some of the special senses, the unrestrained onanism, the predominant love of vagabondage, the furious and animal-like anger, the destructive tendencies.
It is clear that all the admonitions and punishments inflicted during seven years, besides failing to produce any good effects, succeeded in exercising, so to speak, the natural mechanism of his violent impulses, and thus brutalised him still further. He is, therefore, incorrigible.
Of this the Military Tribunal of Naples were, as the result of this examination, convinced, declared that our subject is irresponsible, and acquitted him.
But does the duty of science end here? Is this verdict sufficient for order and social security?
Surely not.
This individual, thus constituted, must be regarded as a perpetual source of danger. It is therefore necessary to adopt a mode of treatment which, instead of brutalising him, will endeavour to obtain from him the maximum social utility of which he is capable, while at the same time it will render it impossible for him to injure other persons who are unlike himself.
For this purpose sequestration is necessary, the method of moral treatment and the watchful care obtained within a criminal asylum.