“On the other hand, the professional delinquents, who make up the largest part of the population of the prisons, are really the criminal class. They are the hardened, the incorrigible, the recidivists. They form, by the side of regular society, the great rebel tribe, where gather and mingle poverty, ignorance, vice, idleness, and prostitution. The soldiers of this army obey, not a momentary desire, but a permanent tendency. They do not always commit crime for crime’s sake, but the most trivial incident drives them to it; they profit by every opportunity, and we can say that, as in certain circles virtue is a reflex act, so crime is a reflex act with them. Further, they have, quite like the civilized world, a public opinion which supports them, [[181]]arouses them, gives them their own kind of popularity, and constitutes, in a word, an incentive for the heroes of vice, just as the other public opinion encourages the soldiers of duty.
“What is true of criminal society as a whole, is equally true of the individual as such. In each infraction of the law, besides the accidental factor, i.e. age, character, temperament, in a word, the personal disposition, there is the collective or social factor, i.e. the environment, the permanent conditions, the general laws. With the occasional delinquent the individual factor predominates, it is especially the man that appears. With the habitual delinquent, it is the social factor, the collectivity that comes upon the scene.
“In the well-to-do, polished, educated classes, who have lacked nothing and have had the benefit of civilizing influences from the cradle, the fault is chiefly personal, and it is the exception. In the lower strata, where everything is lacking, where, to combat evil, men have neither in the present, social protection, nor in the past, the generations of ancestors who have enjoyed power, wealth, and education, it is chiefly collective. In this sense, then, the collective forces have a dominant action in criminality; in order to combat it these must be attacked, and the legislator finds in the law only a blunted weapon if he does not understand this supreme truth, the social character of criminality.”[3]
II.
W. D. Morrison.
The preface to “Crime and its Causes” contains an abridgment of the opinion of the author upon the influence of economic conditions. He says there:
“Economic prosperity, however widely diffused, will not extinguish crime. Many people imagine that all the evils afflicting society spring from want, but this is only partially true. A small number of crimes are probably due to sheer lack of food, but it has to be borne in mind that crime would still remain an evil of enormous magnitude even if there were no such calamities as destitution and distress. As a matter of fact easy circumstances have less influence on conduct than is generally believed; prosperity generates criminal inclinations as well as adversity, and on the whole the rich are just as much addicted to crime as the poor.”[4]
The chapter “Climate and Crime” contains some observations that [[182]]are of interest in connection with our subject. In speaking of the great number of crimes against persons in Italy, the author says:
“Nor can it be said to be entirely due to economic distress. A condition of social misery has undoubtedly something to do with the production of crime. In countries where there is much wealth side by side with much misery, as in France and England, adverse social circumstances drive a certain portion of the community into criminal courses. But where this great inequality of social conditions does not exist—where all are poor as in Ireland or Italy—poverty alone is not a weighty factor in ordinary crime. In Ireland, for example, there is almost as much poverty as exists in Italy, and if the amount of crime were determined by economic circumstances alone, Ireland ought to have as black a record as her southern sister. Instead of that she is on the whole as free from crime as the most prosperous countries of Europe.”[5]