Second. Many persons remain honest, not for moral reasons, but [[577]]because they lack the courage, cleverness, or other qualities necessary for being otherwise, qualities which in themselves have nothing to do with crime.
Third. Still others remain honest for reasons based upon mature reflection. They find that it is too dangerous to commit an offense, but do not hesitate in the presence of acts essentially criminal, although they do not fall under the ban of the law.[407] No one is ignorant of this, and only certain anthropologists who examine no one but prisoners, have lost sight of it.
Those who compose the criminal world are by nature very diverse. Some are the most dangerous individuals that it is possible to imagine, others are rather weak than wicked. Among these last are ranged the occasional criminals, who, taken together, form a danger to society, but taken singly are not dangerous men in the strict sense. Leuss, who learned to know prisoners, not as judge, or as medical expert, but as a prisoner himself, says: “The great mass of prisoners are more good-natured than the average man; the good-nature of thieves corresponds with their weakness of will, that invincible obstacle to their maintaining themselves in the world of industry. Stress must constantly be laid upon the fact that these weak-willed, good-natured persons are the ones who swell the number of crimes.”[408]
When we place beside the occasional thieves, those who never steal but commit all sorts of reprehensible (though not illegal) acts, the comparison is not to the advantage of the latter. Their trickery, their pitiless egoism, often make them more dangerous to society than the others; which should be a reason for criminal anthropology not to build a system based solely upon investigations of prisoners.
Fourth. Finally many more crimes are committed than are mentioned by criminal statistics. Although I have already spoken of this (p. 84), I must return to it. In the first place, most criminal statistics give the figures only for those convicted. Those acquitted have no place, although, with few exceptions, a crime has nevertheless been committed. We know that the number of acquittals is very considerable. In Germany, there were 15 to 20 acquittals to 100 cases tried (1882–1896);[409] in Italy the number of acquittals ran as high as 51.37% (1890–1895).[410] [[578]]
In the second place, in many cases the prosecution is postponed for different reasons, with the result that there is neither an acquittal nor a condemnation. Then a great many cases never come to trial because justice cannot discover the authors of the crimes. In Germany, for example, of all the cases on the dockets in the criminal courts between 1881 and 1891, only 43 to 45% actually came before the judges.[411] During the period between 1886 and 1890, the examining judges dismissed on an average 8900 cases, either because the author of the crime was unknown, or because the proof was insufficient. During the same period and for the same reasons, 98,741 cases on the average were not prosecuted by the authorities.[412] The authors of about 25% of the crimes committed in Italy remained unknown (1887–1894).[413]
These two reasons by themselves show that the number of crimes is much greater than the statistics would generally lead one to suppose, even if one takes account of the fact that some of the complaints made to the prosecutors are false.
In the third place, we have been speaking so far of the cases that come to the notice of the officers, while in a great number of cases no complaint is made, especially in the matter of petty theft, either because the person injured wishes to avoid the annoyance of having to appear in the police court as witness, or because he wishes to spare the delinquent.
In the fourth place, a great many small thefts remain unknown even to the person injured, since he does not notice the loss that he has suffered.
All this goes to show that crime, taken in the strict sense, and especially theft, is much more extensive than one would expect at first, and the objection that might have been made to my thesis is hence without weight. It is evident that the number of criminals unpunished cannot be fixed with certainty. Dr. Puibaraud places it at 50%;[414] while Tarde believes that it is greater;[415] Yvernès, the well-known French statistician, says that 90% of the professional thieves remain unknown, and Dr. Thomsen, from whom I take this [[579]]last fact, says that this applies to other categories of criminals also.[416] However this may be the number in any case is very considerable.