I.
Ad. Prins.
I cannot better give Professor Prins’s opinion upon the subject of my work than by quoting what he says in his book, “Criminalité et répression”, and especially in his first chapter entitled “De la criminalité en général. Des classes criminelles. Des délinquants d’accident et des délinquants de profession.” There we read: “There exists no abstract type of a moral man, nor of a guilty man; crime is not an individual phenomenon, but a social phenomenon. Criminality proceeds from the very elements of humanity itself; it is not transcendent, but immanent; we can see in it a sort of degeneration of the social organism.”[1]
There is an environment favorable to moral health, where the tendency to crime is almost wholly lacking; there is a social environment where the atmosphere is corrupt, where unwholesome elements are heaped up, where the most vigorous perish, where criminality spreads like the mould in the dunghill; the tendency toward crime there is formidable, and we can say in this sense that it is a social fact with a social cause, and that it is in intimate connection with a given social organization.
Let us consider our own epoch for a moment. A century of progress and refinement is a century of vices; the increasing complexity of our mechanism creates, with new temptations, new occasions of falling. The car of civilization, like that of Juggernaut, destroys many of those who throw themselves under its wheels. The world has enormous appetites that it cannot satisfy: sensuality, greed of gain, a taste for and facility in speculation; the contrast between [[179]]great wealth and extreme poverty; the brutal necessities of the struggle for existence in the face of the concentration of property and of capital; the defects of the industrial organization, which abandons the proletariat to chance, keeps no watch over apprenticeship, and leaves the child of the working-man to the excitations of the streets and the promiscuity of the workshop, and finally sharpens everywhere the obscure instincts of animalism; all this recoils upon criminality with deplorable certainty. How far wrong we should be in such an environment simply to contrast the delinquent with the honest man! It is two social states that are contrasted; the one is based upon comfortable means, sociability, mutual protection, useful work, and thrift; the other upon poverty, isolation, egoism, and unproductive labor. And in the great urban agglomerations, pauperism, mendicity and vagrancy, idleness, the spirit of adventure, prostitution, the dissipation of strength, everything, in short, naturally concurs in developing social anemia.
“Take any district whatsoever, however poor, uncivilized, and wild, and you will always find in the great cities, London or Paris, New York or San Francisco, a worse environment and greater depravity. It is here, in the lowest slums, where never a glimmer of physical or moral well-being penetrates, that the disinherited live. They get a glimpse of the splendor of luxury only to hate it; they respect neither property nor life, because neither property nor life has any real value for them; they are born, grow pale, struggle, and die, without suspecting that for certain persons existence is good fortune, property a right, virtue a habit, and calm a constant state. Such is the natural and fatal home of criminality.
“In a quarter subjected to detestable hygiene, built upon marshy soil, devoid of drainage and potable water, furrowed with narrow and filthy streets, covered with hovels without life or air, where an atrophied population vegetates, epidemics are inevitable and propagate themselves with great intensity. In the same way, crime finds an easy and certain prey in the environment of the poor of a great city. The illegitimate and abandoned children, the children of convicts and prostitutes, the vagrants, etc. are so many designated recruits. Without family, without traditions, without fixed home or settled occupation, without relations with the ruling classes, what wonder that they have no other motive than complete egoism, no other activity than selfish and transitory efforts for the immediate satisfaction of their material appetites? The emigration from the country to the city still further increases this army and multiplies the chances of [[180]]crime. When the sons of peasants leave the plow for the workshop and come to seek fortune in the furnace of great cities, they follow the spirit of adventure; they must have, at any price, a means of subsistence, and as competition is great and temptations arise at every step, the prisons profit by this overplus that the country gives to the city. Another consequence of the immigration from the country is that the population becomes excessive, places are lacking, and wages fall below the living expenses. Ducpetiaux showed, in 1856, that the budget of the working-man in the great cities is lower than the sum representing the budget of the working-man in prison. This situation has not changed, and the laboring class, badly lodged, badly nourished, vegetate at the mercy of economic crises. The working-man is always on the verge of vagrancy, the vagrant always on the verge of crime. The whole proletariat is thus exposed in the front rank, and whether it is a question of sickness or crime, it is the first to fall.”[2]
“Such are the conditions of the development of the criminal classes, that is to say of the classes where we meet the tendency to crime. And it is of importance to remark that we can determine their legal character; they are the vagrants and delinquents by profession. They are clearly differentiated from the vagabonds and delinquents by accident. This distinction, which modern statistics has brought into relief, is now the basis of penal science, and the judge can no longer overlook it.
“The occasional delinquents constitute the minority, their life is regular, their instincts are right; a sudden passion, an unpremeditated outburst, a passing depression of the will, leads them into crime; a sort of fever dominates them and, the fit once past, their normal life takes up its course again.