THE RESULTS OF CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY.
So far I have been summarising the chief results obtained in the
investigation of the criminal up to the present date by many workers in
various lands. There is not very much doubt about the results here
recorded; even when they do not agree among themselves, it is still
generally possible to account for the divergency by the special character
of the group to which the individuals examined belong. But when we come to
consider the significance of the facts we are no longer on such safe and
simple ground. There is, however, no reason here for surprise when we
remember how youthful a science criminal anthropology is. Even the related
science of general anthropology is still young, and much of our progress
in it still lies in the unlearning of our errors, so that, as Virchow
recently remarked, we know considerably less about anthropology to-day
than we knew some years ago. The same is true of another related science,
the study of insanity. If therefore my conclusions as to the place of the
criminal in nature may seem to be somewhat cautious and tentative, it must
be remembered that we are still slowly feeling our way to firm ground. Few
as are the general conclusions which we may boldly assert, they are yet
sufficient to throw a flood of new light on the nature of the criminal,
and on his treatment and prevention.
I purpose to touch briefly on certain relationships of crime and the
criminal, the consideration of which will lead us naturally to a clearer
view of the criminal’s position. We will glance at (_a_) the biological
beginnings of crime, (_b_) crime among children, (_c_) the criminal woman
as distinct from the criminal man, (_d_) the relation of crime to vice,
(_e_) crime as a profession, (_f_) the relations of crime to epilepsy and
insanity.
(_a_) The biological beginnings of crime have been examined by Lombroso,
Lacassagne, and Ferri; and by some have even been traced as far back as
the vegetable world. Thus Lombroso seems to claim those insectivorous
plants studied by Darwin and others as belonging to the category of
criminals. I doubt whether by any tenable definition of the criminal such
a classification can be upheld, and Lomboso himself speaks with less than
his usual decision. An act which is common to a whole species cannot
reasonably be described as criminal. It may be unjust, even cruel, but it
does not thereby necessarily become criminal. If the _Dionea Muscipula_
that eats an insect is a criminal, much more must the European man who
eats beef or mutton be a criminal. To be criminal the deed must be
exceptional in the species, and must provoke a social reaction among the
other members of that species. We can scarcely hope to find genuine
vegetable criminals, even amongst the parasites.
When we are dealing with the criminality of animals, concerning which a
large body of evidence has now accumulated, it is necessary to
discriminate. It is well recognised by veterinary surgeons that certain
horses are inclined to be undisciplined and revengeful, and that these
characteristics are associated with distinct cranial anomalies; the Arabs
believe these qualities to be hereditary. There is here certainly a very
close analogy to the instinctive criminal; but we are dealing with an
animal greatly modified by man, and these vices are not recorded as
exercised against their own species so much as against man. The case
(apparently well authenticated) of the horse who pretended to be lame, to
avoid going on military exercise, can scarcely be called criminal; from a
horse’s point of view this might be regarded as a justifiable ruse. The
same may be said of the action of the dog who, finding his favourite place
occupied by another dog, went outside and set up such a furious barking
that the usurper came out to see what was the matter, when the rightful
owner immediately pounced on his old corner. Such a ruse, even though
perpetrated against one of the same species, is not anti-social. It is
only when we are dealing with animals of the very highest order of
intelligence that we find any manifestations that can be at all fairly
described as criminal. Thus among the highly intelligent castors, the lazy
castor is pitilessly chased away by his fellows, to die of hunger, alone,
far from the colony. Idleness, as we know, is a very fundamental
characteristic of the criminal, and the strongly marked social reaction
that we see here shows that the castors have recognised this. Something of
the same kind is seen among elephants. Certain elephants, called rogues,
lead a solitary and unnatural life, and are lacking in the humane and
gentle disposition peculiar to elephants generally. The anti-social
character of these elephants is recognised by their fellows, and when the
solitary elephant endeavours to penetrate into the family life of the
ordinary elephant he is everywhere repulsed, and naturally grows still
fiercer and more anti-social. Such examples as these are the nearest
approaches among animals to what we call criminality.
[Illustration: PLATE XIV.]
We have to realise clearly what constitutes criminality when we turn to
the lower human races. To say, as has been asserted, that among savages
criminality is the rule rather than the exception, is to introduce
confusion. Among many savages infanticide, parricide, theft and the rest,
far from being anti-social, subserve frequently some social end, and they
outrage, therefore, no social feeling. These acts are not anti-social; and
many recent investigations, such as those of Élie Reclus, show that there
is under the given conditions a certain reasonableness in them, although
among us they have ceased to be reasonable, and have become criminal. On
the other hand, many acts which the needs or traditions of a barbarous
society have caused to be criminal become in a higher phase of society
trivial or beneficial.
Tarde remarks, that of the ten crimes which the Hebraic law punished with
stoning, nine have even ceased to be offences in our modern European
societies, and the tenth (rape) has only remained a crime by entirely
changing its character; it has become a crime against the person instead
of a crime against property. He observes also that in a savage society one
of the chief criminal types would be that of the delicate and artistic
natures, sensuous and sensitive, ill adapted for pillaging neighbouring
tribes. Such individuals would be chased away relentlessly, as the
industrious castors chase away the lazy castor, and for the same reasons.
In our societies we have found a use for these people; they minister to
our pleasures, and we render them nothing but homage. But if we are wise
we shall be very tender in arousing our indignation against the social
habits of lower races, even when these involve such an act as parricide,
for the distance between ourselves and even the lowest races is quite
measurable. Our social code is not far removed from that of the Maori who
considered that it was murder to kill the man to whom he had given
hospitality, but not murder to run his spear through the stranger whom he
met on his morning walk. We to-day regard it as a great crime to kill our
own fathers or children; but even the most civilised European
nation--whichever that may be--regards it as rather glorious to kill the
fathers and children of others in war. We are not able yet to grasp the
relationship between men. In the same way, while we resent the crude
thefts practised by some lower races, we are still not civilised enough to
resent the more subtle thefts practised among ourselves which do not
happen to conflict with the letter of any legal statute.
Criminality, therefore, cannot be attributed indiscriminately even to the
lowest of races. It consists in a failure to live up to the standard
recognised as binding by the community. The criminal is an individual
whose organisation makes it difficult or impossible for him to live in
accordance with this standard, and easy to risk the penalties of acting
antisocially. By some accident of development, by some defect of heredity
or birth or training, he belongs as it were to a lower and older social
state than that in which he is actually living. It thus happens that our
own criminals frequently resemble in physical and psychical characters
the normal individuals of a lower race. This is that “atavism” which has
been so frequently observed in criminals and so much discussed. It is the
necessarily anti-social instinct of this lowlier organised individual
which constitutes the crime. This accounts for the fact that, while in
those districts where brigandage is opposed to popular feeling brigands
are often abnormally constituted individuals, in other districts where
there is no social feeling against brigandage (as in some outlying parts
of Italy) the brigand may present no unusual characteristic, mental or
physical. The social environment exerts no selective influence; there is
nothing to thrust the abnormal person into brigandage rather than into any
other occupation.
To admit, therefore, in the criminal, a certain psychical and even
physical element belonging to a more primitive age is simple and perfectly
reasonable. It has been observed over and over again, independently and
apart from any special theory of criminality. Thus Mr. L. Owen Pike, the
historian of crime in England, who is not an alienist or an
anthropologist, writes:--“Of a very great number of modern habitual
criminals it may be said that they have the misfortune to live in an age
in which their merits are not appreciated. Had they been in the world a
sufficient number of generations ago, the strongest of them might have
been chiefs of a tribe.... With the disposition and the habits of
uncivilised men which he has inherited from a remote past, the criminal
has to live in a country where the majority of the inhabitants have
learned new lessons of life, and where he is regarded more and more as an
outcast as he strives more and more to fulfil the yearnings of his
nature.”[76] Tarde, the cautious _juge d’instruction_, has expressed the
same idea in almost the same words: “Some of them at least would have been
the ornament and the moral aristocracy of a tribe of Red Indians.”[77]
Again, Professor Prins of Brussels, only slightly varying the same
formula, remarks: “The criminal of to-day is the hero of our old legends.
We put in prison to-day the man who would have been the dreaded and
respected chief of a clan or a tribe.” The energy with which Lombroso has
advocated the atavistic element in the criminal is well known; while
Colajanni, in many respects an opponent of Lombroso, remarks: “How many of
Homer’s heroes would to-day be in a convict prison, or at all events
despised as violent and unjust.”
That this resemblance is not merely superficial, but that some perversity
or arrest of development sometimes produces an individual inapt to our
civilisation, but apt to a lower civilisation which we have outgrown, and
which we call criminal, we have had occasion to observe repeatedly in our
brief summary of the facts of criminal anthropology. It is by no means an
extraordinary fact; it is not so extraordinary as that human beings should
occasionally be born with cervical auricles or supernumerary
breasts--reversions to very far more ancient days. It is not easy to
gather up into one statement the various real or apparent atavistic
anatomical peculiarities noted among criminals. Perhaps the most general
statement to be made is that criminals present a far larger proportion of
anatomical abnormalities than the ordinary European population. Now
this is precisely the characteristic of the anatomy of the lower human
races: they present a far larger proportion of anatomical abnormalities
than the ordinary European population. It is true that our knowledge of
the anatomy of the lower human races is still incomplete, but the evidence
so far as it goes is perfectly clear. It will be sufficient to quote the
distinguished anatomist to whom were entrusted the skulls collected during
the most important scientific expedition of modern times. Sir William
Turner, summing up the _Challenger Report_ concerning these crania,
writes:--“Although their number is certainly too limited to base any broad
generalisation on, as to the relative frequency of occurrence of
particular variations in the different races, there is obviously a larger
proportion of important variations than would occur in a corresponding
number of skulls of the white races.”[78]
[Illustration: PLATE XV.]
Our survey of the psychical characteristics of criminals showed that they
constantly reproduce the features of savage character--want of
forethought, inaptitude for sustained labour, love of orgy, etc. It may
not be out of place to remark that we must not attribute these to the
direct influence of atavism. When an original vice of organic constitution
has thrown an individual into a more primitive and remote strata of
society, the influence of environment will itself simulate the effects of
atavism and exaggerate its significance. If the organic impulses of a
man’s constitution have led him to throw in his lot with brigands, he will
not fail to live as a brigand lives--that is, as a barbarian lives. This
is not atavism, though it may be the outcome of atavism, or arrest of
development.[79]
(_b_) The development of crime is precocious. Rossi ascertained at what
age 46 of his 100 criminals commenced their criminal career. Of these 46,
no less than 40 began before the age of twenty--_i.e._, 1 at four years of
age, 2 at seven, 6 at eight, 1 at nine, 5 at ten, 1 at eleven, 3 at
twelve; and so on.[80] The evidence from France, from England, and from
America gives very similar results. Children may even become expert
professional criminals, and not in Europe alone. Thus, in India, where of
recent years professional poisoning has assumed great development, and to
a large extent taken the place of thuggi, “a Brahman boy at Bahraich, in
May 1885, drugged a party of men travelling with the agent of the Rajah of
Mohsan. Although only twelve years old, this was his fifth appearance in
the dock. Another boy, a few months later, cooked some pulse for three
pilgrims from Gaya; and the pilgrims were picked up shortly afterwards
insensible near the railway yard at Allahabad. This boy had been charged
with committing a similar offence in the May previous, but had got off
because the complainants, impatient of the law’s delay, changed their
story, and attributed their delirium to the heat of the sun.” The
Sonorias, again, in the north-west provinces of India, are wonderfully
expert pickpockets, and they train up their children in the same paths. “A
Sonoria boy of ten or twelve years, with his pretty innocent face and his
clean silk clothes, is a most attractive little object of villainy. His
hand slides into a pocket, and he hands over the contents to a man behind
him, who in his turn makes them over to a third, and returns to watch over
the urchin. If caught, the boy cries and protests his innocence, but his
volubility is against him, for no honest native child can talk like a
Sonoria boy.”[81]
It is more interesting to note that there is a certain form of criminality
almost peculiar to children, a form to which the term “moral insanity” may
very fairly be ascribed. This has been described by Krafft-Ebing, Mendel,
Savage, and others, and is characterised by a certain eccentricity of
character, a dislike of family habits, an incapacity for education, a
tendency to lying, together with astuteness and extraordinary cynicism,
bad sexual habits, and cruelty towards animals and companions. It shows
itself between the ages of five and eleven, and is sometimes united with
precocious intellectual qualities. There can be no doubt that many of
these develop into instinctive criminals. Sometimes these characters only
appear at puberty, together with exaggerated sexual tendencies, in
children who have previously been remarkable only for their mental
precocity, but whose energy seems now to be thrown into a new channel.
It is a very significant fact that these characters are but an
exaggeration of the characters which in a less degree mark nearly all
children. The child is naturally, by his organisation, nearer to the
animal, to the savage, to the criminal, than the adult. Although this has
frequently been noted in a fragmentary manner, it is only of recent years
that the study of childhood, a subject of the gravest importance, has been
seriously taken up by Perez and others.
The child lives in the present; the emotion or the desire of the moment is
large enough to blot out for him the whole world; he has no foresight, and
is the easier given up to his instincts and passions; our passions, as
Hobbes said, bring us near to children. Children are naturally egoists;
they will commit all enormities, sometimes, to enlarge their egoistic
satisfaction. They are cruel and inflict suffering on animals out of
curiosity, enjoying the manifestations of pain. They are thieves for the
gratification of their appetites, especially the chief, gluttony, and they
are unscrupulous and often cunning liars, not hesitating to put the blame
on the innocent when their misdeeds are discovered. The charm of childhood
for those who are not children lies largely in these qualities of frank
egotism and reckless obedience to impulse.
Most people who can recollect their own childhood--an ability which does
not, however, appear to be very common--can remember how they have
sometimes yielded to overmastering impulses which, although of a trivial
character, were distinctly criminal. The trifling, or even normal
character of such acts in childhood is too often forgotten by those who
have to deal with children. Mayhew, writing in 1862, when these childish
“crimes” were still taken seriously to a terrible extent, remarks:--“On
our return from Tothill Fields, we consulted with some of our friends as
to the various peccadilloes of their youth, and though each we asked had
grown to be a man of some little mark in the world, both for intellect and
honour, they, one and all, confessed to having committed in their younger
days many of the very “crimes” for which the boys at Tothill Fields were
incarcerated. For ourselves, we will frankly confess, that at Westminster
School, where we passed some seven years of our boyhood, such acts were
daily perpetrated; and yet if the scholars had been sent to the House of
Correction, instead of Oxford or Cambridge, to complete their education,
the country would now have seen many of our playmates working among the
convicts in the dockyards, rather than lending dignity to the senate or
honour to the bench.”
In many persons the impulses of childhood persist in a more or less
subdued form in adult age. The impulses are not yielded to so readily, or
at all, but they are still felt. The examples have often been quoted of
the distinguished alienist, Morel, who, as he narrates himself, seeing a
workman leaning over one of the Seine bridges, felt so strong an impulse
to throw the man into the river, that he had to rush away from the spot;
and of Humboldt’s nurse, who, at the sight and touch of the new-born
child’s rosy flesh, felt the temptation to kill it, and was obliged to
entrust it to some one else. These morbid impulses are perhaps more
closely related to insanity than to criminality, but it is on a borderland
that is common to both. Both child and criminal are subject to such
impulses.
In the criminal, we may often take it, there is an arrest of development.
The criminal is an individual who, to some extent, remains a child his
life long--a child of larger growth and with greater capacity for evil.
This is part of the atavism of criminals. Mental acuteness is often
observed among criminal children; it is rare among criminal adults. There
is evidently arrest of development at a very early age, probably a
precocious union of the cranial bones. Among savages, also, the young
children are bright, but development stops at a very early age. All who
have come very intimately in contact with criminals have noted their
resemblance to children. Thus that profound and sympathetic observer,
Dostoieffsky, in his _Recollections of the Dead-House_, summing up some of
the light-hearted, easy-going characters of the convicts, says: “In one
word they were children, true children, even at forty years of age.” And
elsewhere he quotes a saying concerning the exile: “The convict is a
child; he throws himself on everything that he sees.”
(_c_) It is interesting to consider the sexual variations of criminality.
Women are everywhere less criminal than men. The proportion varies,
however, greatly in different countries. In France it is usually about 4
to 1; in the United States it is about 12 to 1; in Italy and Spain the
proportion of women is very small. In Great Britain, on the other hand,
the proportion of criminal women is, except during the last year or two
(owing probably to changes in police regulations), extremely large,
especially for the greater crimes. There has indeed been on the whole a
steady increase in the proportion of women criminals in England; in 1834
they were less than 1 in 5; of recent years they have been more than 1 in
4. The greater tendency to recidivism in women has everywhere been noted,
and is extremely well marked in England, where it is rapidly increasing,
and is associated, it seems, with growing habits of alcoholism. Of
incorrigible recidivists a very large proportion in Great Britain are
women; and 40 per cent. of the women committed to prison during 1888 had
been previously committed more than ten times.[82] Even among the juvenile
offenders discharged from reformatory and industrial schools as
incorrigible, it appears that the proportion of girls is double that of
boys.
While men criminals are everywhere in a more or less marked majority,
there are certain crimes which both sexes commit about equally, and these
are usually the most serious. Thus, as Quetelet remarked, nearly as many
women are poisoners as men, and of parricides 50 per cent. are women. The
crimes of women are essentially domestic, against fathers and husbands and
children. A very large proportion are, directly or indirectly, of a
sexual character. It is curious in this connection to note that Marro
finds marked physical resemblances between women criminals generally and
the class of male criminals guilty of sexual offences; such are less
length of arms and hands, less cranial capacity and greater extension of
the transverse curve of the head.
It is worth while to enumerate briefly the probable causes of the sexual
variation in criminality. There are perhaps five special causes acting on
women: (1) physical weakness, (2) sexual selection, (3) domestic
seclusion, (4) prostitution, (5) maternity.
There are firstly the physical and psychical traditions of the race
embodied in the organisation of men and women. The extreme but rather
spasmodic energy of men favours outbursts of violence, while the
activities of women are at a lower but more even level, and their
avocations have tended to develop the conservative rather than the
destructive instincts. Apart from this, even if women were trained in
violence, the superior strength of men would still make crimes of violence
in women very hazardous and dangerous. Under existing circumstances, when
a woman wants a crime committed, she can usually find a man to do it for
her.
I have already frequently had occasion to note the approximation of
criminal women in physical character to ordinary men. This has always been
more or less carefully recorded, both in popular proverbs and in the
records of criminal trials. Thus Sarah Chesham, a notorious wholesale
poisoner, who killed several children, including her own, as well as her
husband, was described as “a woman of masculine proportions;” and a girl
called Bouhours, who was executed at Paris at the age of twenty-two, for
murdering and robbing several men who had been her lovers, is described as
of agreeable appearance, and of sweet and feminine manners, but of
remarkable muscular strength; she dressed as a man; her chief pleasure was
to wrestle with men, and her favourite weapon was the hammer.
Marro has recently suggested that sexual selection has exerted a marked
influence in diminishing the criminality of women. Masculine, unsexed,
ugly, abnormal women--the women, that is, most strongly marked with the
signs of degeneration, and therefore the tendency to criminality--would be
to a large extent passed by in the choice of a mate, and would tend to be
eliminated. It seems likely that this selection may have, at all events to
some extent, existed, and exerted influence; it is, however, not
universally accepted.
The domestic seclusion of women is an undoubted factor in the
determination of the amount of women’s criminality. In the Baltic
provinces of Russia, where the women share the occupations of the men, the
level of feminine criminality is very high. In Spain, the most backward of
the large countries of Europe, where the education of women is at a very
low level, and the women lead a very domesticated life, the level of
feminine criminality is extremely low; the same is true, to a less extent,
of Italy. In England, on the other hand, which has taken the lead in
enlarging the sphere of women’s work, the level of feminine criminality
has for half a century been rising. Reference may perhaps also here be
made to the fact that there is much more criminality among Irishwomen in
England than among Irishwomen at home who lead a more domestic life. It
is a very significant fact that Marro found among his women criminals, in
marked contrast to the men, a very large proportion (35 out of 41) who
possessed some more or less honourable occupation; a large proportion of
the women also were possessed of some property. It may not be out of place
to observe that the growing criminality of women is but the inevitable
accident of a beneficial transition. Criminality, we must remember, is a
natural element of life, regulated by natural laws, and as women come to
touch life at more various points and to feel more of its stress, they
will naturally develop the same tendency to criminality as exists among
men, just as they are developing the same diseases, such as general
paralysis. Our efforts must be directed, not to the vain attempt to
repress the energies of women, but to the larger task of improving the
conditions of life, and so diminishing the tendency to criminality among
both sexes alike.
Prostitution exerts an undoubted influence in diminishing the criminality
of women, in spite of the fact that the prostitute generally lives on the
borderland of crime. If, however, it were not for prostitution there would
be no alternative but crime for the large numbers of women who are always
falling out of the social ranks. As it is, in those families in which the
brothers become criminals, the sisters with considerable regularity join
the less outcast class of prostitutes; sometimes in league with their
criminal brothers, but yet possessing a more recognised means of
livelihood. There will be something more to say on this point a little
later on.
The strongest barrier of all against criminality in women is maternity.
The proportion of criminals among young women with children is very
small. Among men criminals the celibates are in a very large majority, but
among women maternity acts as a still greater deterrent. Not only are
young married women comparatively free from crime, but among married
women, as Bertillon pointed out, those with children are distinctly less
criminal than those without children. Of Marro’s 41 criminal women,
although all but one (who was undeveloped and ugly) confessed to having
had sexual relationships, 12 had never been married, 10 were widows, 14
were married, but of these 7 (50 per cent.) were separated from their
husbands. There is some significance, doubtless, also in the fact that
while in men the maximum of criminality falls at about the age of 25, in
women this is not so. That is the age of maximum child-bearing; the age of
maximum criminality in women is delayed until nearly the age of 35. In the
130 women condemned for premeditated murder, and studied by Salsotto, the
average age was 34. Marro found that for nearly every class of criminals
the average age of the women was much higher than that of the men. It is
clear that the woman without children is heavily handicapped in the race
of life; the stress that is upon her is written largely in these facts
concerning criminality.[83] One might suspect this beforehand. Crime is
simply a word to signify the extreme anti-social instincts of human
beings; the life led most closely in harmony with the social ends of
existence must be the most free from crime.
It may be said--to sum up our brief discussion of this large question of
women’s criminality--that certain great barriers, partly artificial,
partly natural, have everywhere served to protect women from crime. It is
not possible absolutely to prove this conclusion, because women cannot be
put strictly under the same conditions as men; a woman who lived under the
same conditions as men, it need scarcely be said, would no longer be a
woman. But it is made probable by the considerations here brought forward,
and by statistics. Thus let us take the statistics for one year in a
country where crime is so largely developed, and so carefully studied as
Italy; an average year, 1886, may be selected. It will be found that a
hundred condemned persons of each sex may be arranged according to age as
follows:--
+----------------------------------------------------+
| | Men. | Women. |
| |-----------------|-----------------|
| Below 14 | 1.29 per cent. | 1.41 per cent. |
| From 14 to 18 | 6.04 " | 6.02 " |
| " 18 " 21 | 13.39 " | 10.65 " |
| " 21 " 35 | 46.91 " | 39.38 " |
| " 35 " 50 | 23.29 " | 30.94 " |
| " 50 " 70 | 8.40 " | 11.63 " |
| Above 70 | 0.68 " | 0.57 " |
+----------------------------------------------------+
Thus below puberty the relative criminality of girls is rather greater
than that of boys, to become about equal at puberty; then during the
earlier and chief period of child-bearing the criminality of women falls
suddenly, becoming level with that of men at about the time of the
cessation of the child-bearing period; after this the criminality of women
becomes relatively much greater than that of men, becoming again about
the same, and in some years exceeding it, at the age of 70.
(_d_) One is inclined on first approaching the subject to make the clear
line of demarcation between crime and vice, which is necessary in
practical life. From the anthropological point of view, however, it
appears on closer examination impossible to draw this clear line.
In the course of Lombroso’s investigations he was surprised to find in the
examination of supposed normal persons certain individuals who presented
in a marked form those anthropologic signs of a low and degenerate type
which he had usually found among criminals. On further inquiry it appeared
that those individuals were of vicious character. Again, it is a
remarkable fact that prostitutes exhibit the physical and psychic signs
associated usually with criminality in more marked degree than even
criminal women. While criminal women correspond on the whole to the class
of occasional criminals, in whom the brand of criminality is but faintly
seen, prostitutes correspond much more closely to the class of instinctive
criminals. Thus their sensory obtuseness has been shown to be extreme, and
it is scarcely necessary to show that their psychical sensitiveness is
equally obtuse. Several valuable series of observations recently made on
prostitutes in Italy and elsewhere have brought out interesting results in
this respect. Thus, for example, Dr. Praskovia Tarnovskaia examined at St.
Petersburg fifty prostitutes who had been inmates of a brothel for not
less than two years, and she also examined, for the sake of comparison,
fifty peasant women of so far as possible the same age and intellectual
development. She found (1) that the prostitutes presented a shortening,
amounting to half a centimetre, of the anterior, posterior, and transverse
diameters of skull; (2) 84 per cent. showed various signs of physical
degeneration--irregular skull, asymmetry of face, anomalies of hard
palate, teeth, ears, etc.; (3) 82 per cent. had parents who were habitual
drunkards; (4) 18 per cent. were the last survivors of a large family of
eight to thirteen children who had died early. Prostitutes may fairly be
compared to the great class of vagabonds among men, who also live on the
borderlands of criminality, and who also present a larger proportion of
abnormalities than even criminals. Dugdale, in his valuable and thorough
study of the “Jukes” family of criminals in America, shows that while the
eldest sons in a criminal family carry on the criminal tradition, the
younger sons become paupers or vagabonds, and the sisters become
prostitutes. Of 250 recidivists condemned five times at Paris nearly all
have begun by vagabondage. Mendel has examined 58 vagabonds in the
workhouse at Berlin. He found 6 absolutely mad; 5 weak-minded; 8
epileptics; 14 with serious chronic disease; in the remaining 25 there was
without exception pronounced mental weakness. We see here the organic root
of the hopelessly idle, vicious character of the vagabond class. A
philanthropic gentleman at Paris offered employment of various kinds, with
payment at four francs a day, to all those who came to him complaining
that they were dying of hunger and could get no work. 545, out of 727, did
not even present themselves; some came and disappeared after the first
half-day, having claimed their two francs; only 18, or 1 in 40, continued
to work. It is not sufficiently known that these poor creatures, who form
such an extensive recruiting field for crime, are already, by the facts of
their physical organisation, cut off from the great body of humanity. They
need much more intelligent treatment than the antiquated workhouse is able
to supply.
We must be careful not to confuse vice and crime. At the same time we have
to recognise that they both spring from the same root. The criminal is
simply a person who is, by his organisation, directly anti-social; the
vicious person is not directly anti-social, but he is indirectly so. The
criminal directly injures the persons or property of the community to
which he belongs; the vicious person (in any rational definition of vice)
indirectly injures these. They are both anti-social because they are both
more or less unfitted for harmonious social action, both, from organic
reasons, more or less lazy. Criminals and prostitutes, as Féré remarks,
have this common character, that they are both unproductive. This is true
also of vagabonds, and of the vicious and idle generally, to whatever
class they belong. They are all members of the same family.
(_e_) We saw in Chapter I. that there is a fairly well-marked class of
professional criminals. They are the _élite_ of the criminal groups; they
present a comparatively small proportion of abnormalities; their crimes
are skilfully laid plots, directed primarily against property and on a
large scale; they never commit purposeless crimes, and in their private
life are often of fairly estimable character. They flourish greatly in a
civilisation of rapidly progressing material character, where wild and
unprincipled speculation is rife, as in the United States; their own
schemes have much of the character of speculations, with this difference,
that they are not merely unprincipled but are against the letter of the
law; notwithstanding the ability and daring they require, they are a
relatively unskilled kind of speculation.
Tarde, and perhaps one or two writers following him, have endeavoured to
show that all crime is professional, and that every physical and psychic
characteristic of the criminal may be explained by the influence of
profession. Tarde’s always alert and intelligent advocacy makes it
necessary to take note of this position, although in this unqualified
shape it has not met with much adhesion at the hands of scientific
investigators. I am persuaded, he says, that every large social class has
its own characteristics. “If one examined hundreds or thousands of judges,
lawyers, labourers, musicians, taken at random and in various countries,
noting their different characters, craniometric, algometric,
sphygmographic, graphologic, photographic, etc., as Lombroso has examined
hundreds and thousands of criminals, it is extremely probable that we
should ascertain facts not less surprising; thus, for instance, we might
succeed in finding _instinctive lawyers_--born to defend instinctive
criminals.... I should like to see the instinctive criminal opposed to the
instinctive man of science, or the religious man, or the artist. It would
be curious to see him compared to the moral man, and to learn if the
latter is the antipodes of the criminal physically as well as
morally.”[84]
Tarde has again more recently stated his position: “One knows that at the
first glance at a woman a skilful observer infallibly divines her habits
of prostitution.... Among the innumerable varieties of human nature which
appear at the surface of a race and proceed perhaps from its lowest depths
(for the variations of a theme are, I believe, its true _raison d’être_,
and not _vice versâ_), every social or anti-social profession operates a
selection to its own profit; it attracts the organisms most adapted to the
kind of life which it leads, and to the end which it pursues, so that if
one submitted to anthropometric measurement lawyers, doctors, priests,
merchants, especially those who have the most decided vocation for their
profession, we should not fail to find for each category the proportional
preponderance of a certain number of peculiarities, morphologic or
physiologic, elsewhere in less proportion. It must inevitably be so
whether a career is open to every one or shut up as a caste, for in the
latter case hereditary accumulation of acquired aptitudes from the use of
the same functions transmitted from generation to generation produces an
analogous effect, even with superior intensity.”[85] The recent
investigations of Bertillon at the Paris Prefecture of Police have shown
that by large photographs of the hand it is possible to detect the worker
at a large number of crafts. By such acquirement as this, as well as by a
process of natural selection, the men of every class develop a special set
of psychic and physical peculiarities; thus Tolstoï, in his _Death of Ivan
Ilyitch_, has admirably described the special attitude and manner common
to professional men generally, and in this general professional class
there are subdivisions, so that every professional man instinctively
recognises his fellows. It is so among criminals. Mr. Davitt sketches, for
instance, the special class of “hooks,” or professional pickpockets, “so
well outlined in gait, constant use of slang, furtive looks, almost total
want of tact in their ordinary conduct, with an instinctively suspicious
manner in almost all their actions, that they are as easily
distinguishable from the other criminals of a prison as they are
recognisable to their constant pursuers, the police, when abroad in the
world.”
If we were to look at the matter in a rather more thorough and scientific
manner, there can be no doubt that the previsions of Tarde would be
justified, and that men would fall into certain natural anthropologic
groups, according to their habitual modes of feeling and thinking and
acting, the nature of each person, to some extent, “subdued to what it
works in, like the dyer’s hand.” In each class there would be different
degrees in sensory perception, in cranial shape and size, in muscular
development. Such investigations will no doubt be systematically carried
out in time. At present, owing to the extraordinary apathy of
anthropologists, and consequently the general indifference to the
importance of studies connected with the development and varieties of men,
scarcely anything is known regarding the matter.
But important as professional selection is, it cannot account for
everything. Indeed no serious attempt has been made to substantiate it by
reference to the details of criminal anthropology. M. Tarde is a
magistrate; no scientific man would have attempted to account for all the
facts that have now accumulated by professional selection and acquired
habits.
It is interesting to note that Topinard, the distinguished anthropologist,
who has bestowed some severe and not unmerited criticism on portions of
Lombroso’s work,[86] while accepting the professional theory of crime, by
no means considers that it is sufficient to explain the whole of the
facts; remembering the teaching of Lélut and Baillarger, under whom he had
studied mental disease, he calls in the aid of the morbid
element:--“Criminals constitute a special professional category in
society, in the same way as men of letters, men of science, artists,
priests, the labouring classes, etc., but a complex category in which the
most diverse elements enter: the insane or those predisposed to insanity,
epileptics and those predisposed to epilepsy, the alcoholic, the
microcephalic, the macrocephalic, those predisposed by some vice of
organisation or of development, anterior or posterior to birth, betraying
itself sometimes by very evident anatomical anomalies, those who are
predisposed by family traditions and inclinations, those whose moral
instincts are perverted by individual education and social environment,
and finally those who are criminals by accident, without preparation or
predisposition.”[87] Professional characters will carry us a long way when
we are seeking to account for natural social groups. But in the
anti-social groups another and more morbid element enters. It is indeed
largely the presence of morbid elements which gives these groups their
anti-social character.
(_f_) The morbid element in criminality has sometimes been too strongly
emphasised, but it would be idle to attempt to deny its importance. The
frequency with which insanity appears among criminals, even when the
influence of imprisonment may with considerable certainty be excluded, is
well ascertained. Of recent years also the close connection between
criminality and epilepsy and general paralysis has often been shown. I
have several times pointed out that the resemblances between criminals
considered as a class and the insane so considered are by no means great;
at many points they are strongly contrasted. The resemblances with
epileptics, on the other hand, are anthropologically very marked, as
Lombroso was the first to point out in detail. He has also observed that
those regions of Italy which produce most epileptics produce also most
criminals. Epilepsy has a certain relationship to insanity; it tends
naturally to weak-mindedness, although some of the world’s greatest men
have been epileptics; and there is in epilepsy a tendency to the
development of brutal, unnatural, and bloodthirsty instincts. The slighter
and more concealed forms of epilepsy offer also a very fruitful field for
investigation in this respect.[88]
But the roots of criminality are not only deeper than professionalism,
they are deeper also than any merely acquired disease. I have frequently
had occasion to note the remarkable resemblances between criminals and
idiots. There is the same tendency to anatomical abnormalities of the
muscles, arteries, bones, etc.; in both the muscular system is weak; there
is the same tendency also to small and weak hearts, with valvular defects.
There is, again, the same sensory obtuseness, with the same exception in
the case of sight, which is remarkably good, with rarity, it seems, of
colour-blindness. Criminality, like idiocy, tends to run in the line of
the eldest sons, and in both the hereditary influences are frequently bad.
Cranial asymmetry is common in idiots as well as among criminals; and
while meningitis is a common cause of idiocy, such evidence as we possess
shows that it is also common in criminals. Tubercular disease is again
common in both. Epilepsy, to which so much importance has of late been
attached in connection with criminality, is notoriously common among
idiots, being found among nearly 25 per cent.[89] The relations of
criminality to idiocy have not yet been sufficiently studied.
The criminal is, however, by no means an idiot. He is not even a merely
weak-minded person. The idiot and the feeble-minded, as we know them in
asylums, rarely have any criminal or dangerous instincts. Another term is
frequently used to denote vicious or criminal instincts in a person who
is, mentally, little if at all defective; he is said to be “morally
insane.”
The term “moral insanity” was originated nearly half a century ago by an
Englishman, Dr. Prichard, who in his _Treatise on Insanity_ declared that
insanity exists sometimes with an apparently unimpaired state of the
intellectual faculties; and the conception has been developed by
Krafft-Ebing, Maudsley, and many others. The term itself is an unfortunate
one; the condition described by no means falls in easily as a subdivision
of insanity, and it is moreover frequently of a congenital character.
There is now a very general tendency to drop the expression “moral
insanity,” and to speak instead of “moral imbecility.”
The condition in question, by whatever name it is called, is described by
alienists as an incapacity to feel, or to act in accordance with, the
moral conditions of social life. Such persons, it has been said, are
morally blind; the psychic retina has become anæsthetic. The egoistic
impulses have become supreme; the moral imbecile is indifferent to the
misfortunes of others, and to the opinions of others; with cold logic he
calmly goes on his way, satisfying his personal interests and treading
under foot the rights of others. If he comes in contact with the law then
his indifference changes into hate, revenge, ferocity, and he is persuaded
that he is in the right. Although so defective on the moral side, these
persons are well able to make use of the abstracted intellectual
conceptions of honour, morality, philanthropy; such words are indeed
frequently on their lips, and it is quite impossible to convince them of
the unusual character of their acts. They are absolutely and congenitally
incapable of social education, systematically hostile to every moralising
influence. Being themselves morally blind, it is their firm conviction
that all others are in the same condition; they disbelieve in the
possibility of virtue, and being often possessed of considerable
intellectual ability, maintain anti-social theories with much skill.
“Moral insanity” does not probably stand for any definite morbid
condition. It is used as a convenient term to describe a certain group of
psychic symptoms which are not found in a developed condition in the
normal man. It is obvious that these symptoms closely resemble those we
have already described as characterising the criminal in his most
clearly-marked form--the instinctive criminal. The morally insane person
has been identified with the instinctive criminal by Lombroso, Marro,
Ferri, Benedikt, Colajanni, and many others. The fusion has, however, been
rejected by some--by Binswanger and Kraepelin, for instance. There can,
however, be little doubt that the two groups overlap in very large part.
The group of instinctive criminals therefore still stands fairly apart
among the other groups of criminals, approximating, but not fusing with,
these various morbid and atypical groups. The outlines blend, but each
group is distinct at the centre. It will be the work of the future to
arrange, and if necessary to re-form, these various groups.
It is much to be able to see, even so clearly as we do to-day, the human
classes of arrested or perverted development who lie in the dark pool at
the foot of our social ascent. Even our present knowledge is sufficient to
serve as the justification for a certain amount of social action. We owe
this to the labours of a succession of physiologists, alienists,
anthropologists, and criminologists during the past century.
Up to recent times the criminal has been regarded as a kind of algebraic
formula, to use Professor Ferri’s expression; the punishment has been
proportioned not to the criminal but to the crime. We are now learning to
regard the criminal as a natural phenomenon, the resultant of manifold
natural causes. We are striving to attain to scientific justice. We are
seeking in every direction to ascertain what is the reasonable treatment
of the eccentric and abnormal members of society, in their interest, and
in the still higher interests of the society to which we belong.
To seek for light in the fields of biology and psychology, of anthropology
and sociology, has seemed to many a discouraging task. The results are
sometimes so obscure; sometimes, it even seems, contradictory. In
practice, it is said, such considerations count for nothing. Law must only
concern itself with absolute certainties, with abstract formulæ, with
geometrical routine. But human nature will not fit in with formulæ; when
men and women are geometrical figures, an abstract legal system will
answer all their needs. If the path lies through a jungle, what is the use
of the best and straightest of roads that leads astray? If a critic were
to point out to a biologist--to take another illustration from Ferri--the
limitations of the microscope, he would be entitled to reply--But excuse
me, however imperfect the microscope may be, would it be better to
dispense with the microscope? Much less when we are dealing with
criminals, whether in the court of justice or in the prison, or in society
generally, can we afford to dispense with such science of human nature as
we may succeed in attaining.