In Holland, Professor Van Hamel, of Amsterdam, represents the new spirit of approaching the problems of criminality.
In Belgium, where Quetelet’s great work, Physique Sociale, inaugurated criminal sociology, and where prison reform, which has always attracted much attention, is now ably represented by Professor Adolphe Prins, the results of criminal anthropology have been received and discussed with interest and sympathy, and various researches have been carried on. Professor Héger and Dr. Semal of Mons should also be named here. In 1884 the Anthropological Society of Belgium nominated a commission for the investigation of criminal anthropology. This led to various interesting researches, none of them, however, of great importance.
In Spain and Portugal criminal anthropology is being prosecuted with much zeal. Among its chief representatives may be named especially Vera and Rafael Salillas (whose interesting book, La Vida Penal en España, gives a very vivid picture of life in the Spanish prisons), and at Lisbon Bernardo Lucas. D’Azevedo Castello Branco, sub-director of Lisbon prison, should also be mentioned. In 1889, at a congress held in Lisbon, the relation of criminal anthropology to penality, legal reform, and allied problems was fully discussed.
In the rapidly-developing Spanish countries of South America, especially in the Argentine Republic, criminal anthropology seems to be making great progress. It is officially taught at the University of Buenos Ayres. Luis del Drago, a judge in the Argentine Republic, with his Los hombres de Presa (1888), an able study of criminality, which has rapidly reached a second edition, thus showing the interest generally felt in these studies, and some other workers, witness to the progress made in this country. On the initiative of Dr. del Drago, with influential coadjutors, a society for the promotion of criminal anthropology was founded in Buenos Ayres in 1888, “to study the person of the criminal, to establish the degree of his dangerousness and of his responsibility, and to effect the gradual and progressive reform of penal law in accordance with the principles of the new school.” In Brazil Professor Viejra de Aranjo of Pernambuco is the chief representative of the science.
In Russia and Poland, although the study of criminal anthropology dates from very recent years, it is making considerable progress. Bielakoff, in the Archives of Psichiatry of Kharkoff, studied 100 homicides. Professor Troizki, of Warsaw, published a careful study of 350 prisoners. Dr. Prascovia Tarnowskaia examined 100 female thieves, whom she compared with 150 prostitutes and 100 peasant women. On the legal side, Dimitri Drill is engaged on a great work, of which one volume only is published at present, in which he deals thoroughly with the organic factors of crime, and with the social applications of criminal anthropology. The Russians seem to be characteristically audacious in their applications of the new science, and there is in Russia a feeling, not merely against imprisoning criminals, but even against secluding them. In 1885 a young girl assassinated a Jewish child to obtain possession for her lover of the money of the child’s father, a rich usurer. Professor Babinski declared that she was not mad, but entirely devoid of moral notions, that she was incurable, and that it would be quite useless (useless, that is, from a medical point of view) to put her in an asylum. She was acquitted.
In Great Britain alone during the last fifteen years there is no scientific work in criminal anthropology to be recorded. When Dr. Coutagne inaugurated, in 1888, a “Chronique Anglaise” in the Archives de l’Anthropologie Criminelle, he could not conceal his embarrassment. While the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian summaries are founded on a large series of works in criminal anthropology, in England there is absolutely no centre for the scientific study of criminality. “Legal medicine,” he remarks, “has there inspired no special publication, nor any learned society. At the International Medical Congress of London, in 1881, although so remarkably organised, it was less well treated than laryngology or dentistry, and formed the object of no section, state medicine being almost synonymous with hygiene. If we consult the scientific journals of England dealing with allied subjects, our baggage will receive very few additions.” In 1889 the International Association of Criminal Law was founded by Professor G. A. Van Hamel of Amsterdam, Professor Fr. von Liszt of Marburg, and Professor Adolphe Prins of Brussels. This association, which has a great future before it, represents, from the scientific and practical standpoint, the movement of reform in matters that relate to the criminal. It maintains that criminality and the repression of crime must be regarded as much from the social as from the legal point of view. It endeavours to establish this principle and its consequences in the science of criminal law as well as in penal legislation. The association already numbers between three and four hundred members, and includes well-known representatives from twenty-one different countries in Europe and America. England is among the least well represented of all; the English members rank in number with the Portuguese, Servian, and Argentine members. Germany is more than twenty times better represented.[15] No interest was felt in England in the International Congress of Criminal Anthropology recently held in Paris. At this Congress official delegates came from all parts of the civilised world, from Russia to Hawaii, but although there were two from the United States, there was not one from Great Britain. When some twelve months since I issued a series of Questions, dealing with some of the main points in the investigation of the criminal, to the medical officers of the larger prisons in Great Britain and Ireland, the answers that I received, while sometimes of much interest—and I am indebted to my correspondents for their anxiety to answer to the best of their ability—were amply sufficient to show that criminal anthropology as an exact science is yet unknown in England. Some of my correspondents, I fear, had not so much as heard whether there be a criminal anthropology.[16] England has, however, in the past been a home of studies connected with the condition of the criminal. The centenary of John Howard, which we have lately celebrated, is a brilliant witness to this fact. Fifty years ago Englishmen sought to distinguish themselves by the invention of patent improved tread-mills and similar now antiquated devices to benefit the criminal. We began zealously with the therapeutics of crime; it is now time to study the criminal’s symptomatology, his diagnosis, his pathology, and it is scarcely possible to imagine that in these studies England will long continue to lag so far behind the rest of the civilised world.
CHAPTER III.
CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY (PHYSICAL).