logical consequences therefrom, will bring about the complete
transformation of human justice, not only as a theory laid down in
scientific books, but also as a practical function applied every day to
that living and suffering portion of humanity which has fallen into
crime. We have the undaunted faith that the work of scientific truth
will transform penal justice into a simple function of preserving
society from the disease of crime, divested of all relics of vengeance,
hatred and punishment, which still survive in our day as living
reminders of the barbarian stage. We still hear the "public vengeance"
invoked against the criminal today, and justice has still for its symbol
a sword, which it uses more than the scales. But a judge born of a woman
cannot weigh the moral responsibility of one who has committed murder or
theft. Not until the experimental and scientific method shall look for
the causes of that dangerous malady, which we call crime, in the
physical and psychic organism, and in the family and the environment, of
the criminal, will justice guided by science discard the sword which now
descends bloody upon those poor fellow-beings who have fallen victims to
crime, and become a clinical function, whose prime object shall be to
remove or lessen in society and individuals the causes which incite to
crime. Then alone will justice refrain from wreaking vengeance, after a
crime has been committed, with the shame of an execution or the
absurdity of solitary confinement.
On the one hand, human life depends on the word of a judge, who may err
in the case of capital punishment; and society cannot end the life of a
man, unless the necessity of legitimate self-defense demands it. On the
other hand, solitary confinement came in with the second current of the
classic school of criminology, when at the same time, in which Beccaria
promulgated his ideas, John Howard traveled all over Europe describing
the unmentionable horrors of mass imprisonment, which became a center of
infection for society at large. Then the classic school went to the
other extreme of solitary confinement, after the model of America,
whence we adopted the systems of Philadelphia and Harrisburg in the
first half of the nineteenth century. Isolation for the night is also
our demand, but we object to continuous solitary confinement by day and
night. Pasquale Mancini called solitary confinement "a living grave," in
order to reassure the timorous, when in the name of the classic school,
whose valiant champion he was, he demanded in 1876 the abolition of
capital punishment. Yet in his swan song he recognized that the future
would belong to the positive school of criminology. And it is this
"living grave" against which we protest. It cannot possibly be an act of
human justice to bury a human being in a narrow cell, within four walls,
to prevent this being from having any contact with social life, and to
say to him at the end of his term: Now that your lungs are no longer
accustomed to breathing the open air, now that your legs are no longer
used to the rough roads, go, but take care not, to have a relapse, or
your sentence will be twice as hard.
In reality, solitary confinement makes of a human being either a stupid
creature, or a raving beast. And "s'io dico il vero, l'effeto nol
nasconde"--if I speak the truth, the facts will also reveal it--for
criminality increases and expands, honest people remain unprotected, and
those who are struck by the law do not improve, but become ever more
antisocial through the repeated relapses. And so we have that contrast
which I mentioned in the beginning of my lecture, that the theoretical
side of criminal science is so perfected, while criminal conditions are
painfully in evidence. The inevitable conclusion is the necessity of a
progressive transformation of the science of crime and punishment.
OF CRIMINOLOGY.
II.
We saw yesterday in a short historical review that the classic cycle of
the science of crime and punishment, originated by Cesare Beccaria more
than a century ago, was followed in our country, some twenty years
since, by the scientific movement of the positive school of criminology.
Let us see today how this school studied the problem of criminality,
reserving for tomorrow the discussion of the remedies proposal by this
school for the disease of criminality.
When a crime is committed in some place, attracting public attention
either through the atrocity of the case or the strangeness of the
criminal deed--for instance, one that is not connected with bloodshed,
but with intellectual fraud--there are at once two tendencies that make
themselves felt in the public conscience. One of them, pervading the
overwhelming majority of individual consciences, asks: How is this? What
for? Why did that man commit such a crime? This question is asked by
everybody and occupies mostly the attention of those who do not look
upon the case from the point of view of criminology. On the other hand,
those who occupy themselves with criminal law represent the other
tendency, which manifests itself when acquainted with the news of this
crime. This is a limited portion of the public conscience, which tries
to study the problem from the standpoint of the technical jurist. The
lawyers, the judges, the officials of the police, ask themselves: What
is the name of the crime committed by that man under such circumstances?
Must it be classed us murder or patricide, attempted or incompleted
manslaughter, and, if directed against property, is it theft, or illegal
appropriation, or fraud? And the entire apparatus of practical criminal
justice forgets at once the first problem, which occupies the majority
of the public conscience, the question of the causes that led to this
crime, in order to devote itself exclusively to the technical side of
the problem which constitutes the juridical anatomy of the inhuman and
antisocial deed perpetrated by the criminal.
In these two tendencies you have a photographic reproduction of the two
schools of criminology. The classic school, which looks upon the crime
as a juridical problem, occupies itself with its name, its definition,
its juridical analysis, leaves the personality of the criminal in the
background and remembers it only so far as exceptional circumstances
explicitly stated in the law books refer to it: whether he is a minor, a
deaf-mute, whether it is a case of insanity, whether he was drunk at the
time the crime was committed. Only in these strictly defined cases does
the classic school occupy itself theoretically with the personality of
the criminal. But ninety times in one hundred these exceptional
circumstances do not exist or cannot be shown to exist, and penal
justice limits itself to the technical definition of the fact. But when
the case comes up in the criminal court, or before the jurors, practice
demonstrates that there is seldom a discussion between the lawyers of
the defense and the judges for the purpose of ascertaining the most
exact definition of the fact, of determining whether it is a case of
attempted or merely projected crime, of finding out whether there are
any of the juridical elements defined in this or that article of the
code. The judge is rather face to face with the problem of ascertaining
why, under what conditions, for what reasons, the man has committed the
crime. This is the supreme and simple human problem. But hitherto it has
been left to a more or less perspicacious, more or less gifted,
empiricism, and there have been no scientific standards, no methodical
collection of facts, no observations and conclusions, save those of the
positive school of criminology. This school alone makes an attempt to
solve in every case of crime the problem of its natural origin, of the
reasons and conditions that induced a man to commit such and such a
crime.
For instance, about 3,000 cases of manslaughter are registered every
year in Italy. Now, open any work inspired by the classic school of
criminology, and ask the author why 3,000 men are the victims of
manslaughter every year in Italy, and how it is that there are not
sometimes only as many as, say, 300 cases, the number committed in
England, which has nearly the same number of inhabitants as Italy; and
how it is that there are not sometimes 300,000 such cases in Italy
instead of 3,000?
It is useless to open any work of classical criminology for this
purpose, for you will not find an answer to these questions in than. No
one, from Beccaria to Carrara, has ever thought of this problem, and
they could not have asked it, considering their point of departure and
their method. In fact, the classic criminologists accept the phenomenon
of criminality as an accomplished fact. They analyze it from the point
of view of the technical jurist, without asking how this criminal fact
may have been produced, and why it repeats itself in greater or smaller
numbers from year to year, in every country. The theory of a free will,
which is their foundation, excludes the possibility of this scientific
question, for according to it the crime is the product of the fiat of
the human will. And if that is admitted as a fact, there is nothing left
to account for. The manslaughter was committed, because the criminal
wanted to commit it; and that is all there is to it. Once the theory of
a free will is accepted as a fact, the deed depends on the fiat, the
voluntary determination, of the criminal, and all is said.
But if, on the other hand, the positive school of criminology denies, on
the ground of researches in scientific physiological psychology, that
the human will is free and does not admit that one is a criminal because
he wants to be, but declares that a man commits this or that crime only
when he lives in definitely determined conditions of personality and
environment which induce him necessarily to act in a certain way, then
alone does the problem of the origin of criminality begin to be
submitted to a preliminary analysis, and then alone does criminal law
step out of the narrow and arid limits of technical jurisprudence and
become a true social and human science in the highest and noblest
meaning of the word. It is vain to insist with such stubbornness as that
of the classic school of criminology on juristic formulas by which the
distinction between illegal appropriation and theft, between fraud and
other forms of crime against property, and so forth, is determined, when
this method does not give to society one single word which would throw
light upon the reasons that make a man a criminal and upon the
efficacious remedy by which society could protect itself against
criminality.
It is true that the classic school of criminology has likewise its
remedy against crime--namely, punishment. But this is the only remedy of
that school, and in all the legislation inspired by the theories of that
school in all the countries of the civilized world there is no other
remedy against crime but repression.
But Bentham has said: Every time that punishment is inflicted it proves
its inefficacy, for it did not prevent the committal of that crime.
Therefore, this remedy is worthless. And a deeper study of the cause of
crime demonstrates that if a man does not commit a certain crime, this
is due to entirely different reasons, than a fear of the penalty, very
strong and fundamental reasons which are not to be found in the threats
of legislators. These threats, if nevertheless carried out by police and
prison keepers, run counter to those conditions. A man who intends to
commit a crime, or who is carried away by a violent passion, by a
psychological hurricane which drowns his moral sense, is not checked by
threats of punishment, because the volcanic eruption of passion prevents
him from reflecting. Or he may decide to commit a crime after due
premeditation and preparation, and in that case the penalty is
powerless to check him, because he hopes to escape with impunity. All
criminals will tell you unanimously that the only thing which impelled
them when they were deliberating a crime was the expectation that they
would go scot free. If they had but the least suspicion that they might
be detected and punished they would not have committed the crime. The
only exception is the case in which a crime is the result of a mental
explosion caused by a violent outburst of passion. And if you wish to
have a very convincing illustration of the psychological inefficacy of
legal threats, you have but to think of that curious crime which has now
assumed a frequency never known to former centuries, namely the making
of counterfeit money. For since paper money--from want or for reasons of
expediency--has become a substitute of metal coin in the civilized
countries, the making of counterfeit paper money has become very
frequent in the nineteenth century. Now a counterfeiter, in committing
his crime, must compel his mind to imitate closely the inscription of
the bill, letter for letter, including that threatening passage, which
says: _"The law punishes counterfeiting_ ..." etc. Can you see before
your mind's eye a counterfeiter, in the act of engraving on the stone or
the others may ignore the penalty that awaits them, but he cannot. This
illustration is convincing, for in cases of other crimes one may always
assume that the criminal acted without thinking of the future, even when
he was not in a transport of passion. But in the case of the
counterfeiter the very act of committing the crime reminds him of the
threat of the law, and yet he is imperturbable while perpetrating it.
Crime has its natural causes, which lie outside of that mathematical
point called the free will of the criminal. Aside from being a juridical
phenomenon, which it would be well to examine by itself, every crime is
above all a natural and social phenomenon, and should be studied
primarily as such. We need not go through so hard a course of study
merely for the purpose of walking over the razor edge of juristic
definitions and to find out, for instance, that from the time Romagnosi
made a distinction between incompleted and attempted crime rivers of ink
have been spilled in the attempt to find the distinguishing elements of
these two degrees of crime. And finally, when the German legislator
concluded to make no distinction between incompleted and attempted crime
and to recognize only the completed crime in his code of 1871, we
witnessed the spectacle of Carrara praising that legislator for leaving
that subtile distinction out of his code. A strange conclusion on the
part of a science, which cudgels its brains for a century to find the
marks of distinction between attempted and incompleted crime, and then
praises the legislator for ignoring it. And another classic jurist,
Buccellati, proposed to do away with the theory of attempted crime by
simply defining it as a crime by itself, or as--a violation of police
laws! A science which comes to such conclusions is a science which moves
in metaphysical abstractions, and we shall see that all these finespun
questions which abound in classical science lose all practical value
before the necessity of saving society from the plague of crime.
The method which we, on the other hand, have inaugurated is the
following: Before we study crime from the point of view of a juristic
phenomenon, we must study the causes to which the annual recurrence of
crimes in all countries is due. These are natural causes, which I have
classified under the three heads of anthropological, telluric and
social. Every crime, from the smallest to the most atrocious, is the
result of the interaction of these three causes, the anthropological
condition of the criminal, the telluric environment in which he is
living, and the social environment in which he is born, living and
operating. It is a vain beginning to separate the meshes of this net of
criminality. There are still those who would maintain the one-sided
standpoint that the origin of crime may be traced to only one of these
elements, for instance, to the social element alone. So far as I am
concerned, I have combatted this opinion from the very inauguration of
the positive school of criminology, and I combat it today. It is
certainly easy enough to think that the entire origin of all crime is
due to the unfavorable social conditions in which the criminal lives.
But an objective, methodical, observation demonstrates that social
conditions alone do not suffice to explain the origin of criminality,
although it is true that the prevalence of the influence of social
conditions is an incontestable fact in the case of the greater number
of crimes, especially of the lesser ones. But there are crimes which
cannot be explained by the influence of social conditions alone. If you
regard the general condition of misery as the sole source of
criminality, then you cannot get around the difficulty that out of one
thousand individuals living in misery from the day of their birth to
that of their death only one hundred or two hundred become criminals,
while the other nine hundred or eight hundred either sink into
biological weakness, or become harmless maniacs, or commit suicide
without perpetrating any crime. If poverty were the sole determining
cause, one thousand out of one thousand poor ought to become criminals.
If only two hundred become criminals, while one hundred commit suicide,
one hundred end as maniacs, and the other six hundred remain honest in
their social condition, then poverty alone is not sufficient to explain
criminality. We must add the anthropological and telluric factor. Only
by means of these three elements of natural influence can criminality be
explained. Of course, the influence of either the anthropological or
telluric or social element varies from case to case. If you have a case
of simple theft, you may have a far greater influence of the social
factor than of the anthropological factor. On the other hand, if you
have a case of murder, the anthropological element will have a far
greater influence than the social. And so on in every case of crime, and
every individual that you will have to judge on the bench of the
criminal.
The anthropological factor. It is precisely here that the genius of
Cesare Lombroso established a new science, because in his search after
the causes of crime he studied the anthropological condition of the
criminal. This condition concerns not only the organic and anatomical
constitution, but also the psychological, it represents the organic and
psychological personality of the criminal. Every one of us inherits at
birth, and personifies in life, a certain organic and psychological
combination. This constitutes the individual factor of human activity,
which either remains normal through life, or becomes criminal or insane.
The anthropological factor, then, must not be restricted, as some laymen
would restrict it, to the study of the form of the skull or the bones
of the criminal. Lombroso had to begin his studies with the anatomical
conditions of the criminal, because the skulls may be studied most
easily in the museums. But he continued by also studying the brain and
the other physiological conditions of the individual, the state of
sensibility, and the circulation of matter. And this entire series of
studies is but a necessary scientific introduction to the study of the
psychology of the criminal, which is precisely the one problem that is
of direct and immediate importance. It is this problem which the lawyer
and the public prosecutor should solve before discussing the juridical
aspect of any crime, for this reveals the causes which induced the
criminal to commit a crime. At present there is no methodical standard
for a psychological investigation, although such an investigation was
introduced into the scope of classic penal law. But for this reason the
results of the positive school penetrate into the lecture rooms of the
universities of jurisprudence, whenever a law is required for the
judicial arraignment of the criminal as a living and feeling human
being. And even though the positive school is not mentioned, all profess
to be studying the material furnished by it, for instance, its analyses
of the sentiments of the criminal, his moral sense, his behavior before,
during and after the criminal act, the presence of remorse which people,
judging the criminal after their own feelings, always suppose the
criminal to feel, while, in fact, it is seldom present. This is the
anthropological factor, which may assume a pathological form, in which
case articles 46 and 47 of the penal code remember that there is such a
thing as the personality of the criminal. However, aside from insanity,
there are thousands of other organic and psychological conditions of the
personality of criminals, which a judge might perhaps lump together
under the name of extenuating circumstances, but which science desires
to have thoroughly investigated. This is not done today, and for this
reason the idea of extenuating circumstances constitutes a denial of
justice.
This same anthropological factor also includes that which each one of us
has: the race character. Nowadays the influence of race on the destinies
of peoples and persons is much discussed in sociology, and there are
one-sided schools that pretend to solve the problems of history and
society by means of that racial influence alone, to which they attribute
an absolute importance. But while there are some who maintain that the
history of peoples is nothing but the exclusive product of racial
character, there are others who insist that the social conditions of
peoples and individuals are alone determining. The one is as much a
one-sided and incomplete theory as the other. The study of collective
society or of the single individual has resulted in the understanding
that the life of society and of the individual is always the product of
the inextricable net of the anthropological, telluric and social
elements. Hence the influence of the race cannot be ignored in the study
of nations and personalities, although it is not the exclusive factor
which would suffice to explain the criminality of a nation or an
individual. Study, for instance, manslaughter in Italy, and, although
you will find it difficult to isolate one of the factors of criminality
from the network of the other circumstances and conditions that produce
it, yet there are such eloquent instances of the influence of racial
character, that it would be like denying the existence of daylight if
one tried to ignore the influence of the ethnical factor on
criminality.
In Italy there are two currents of criminality, two tendencies which are
almost diametrically opposed to one another. The crimes due to hot blood
and muscle grow in intensity from northern to southern Italy, while the
crimes against property increase from south to north. In northern Italy,
where movable property is more developed, the crime of theft assumes a
greater intensity, while crimes due to conditions of the blood are
decreasing on account of the lesser poverty and the resulting lesser
degeneration of the people. In the south, on the other hand, crimes
against property are less frequent and crimes of blood more frequent.
Still there also are in southern Italy certain cases where criminality
of the blood is less frequent, and you cannot explain this in any other
way than by the influence of racial character. If you take a
geographical map of manslaughter in Italy, you will see that from the
minimum, from Lombardy, Piedmont, and Venice, the intensity increases
until it reaches its maximum in the insular and peninsular extreme of
the south. But even there you will find certain cases in which
manslaughter shows a lesser intensity.
For instance, the province of Benevent is surrounded by other provinces
which show a maximum of crimes due to conditions of blood, while it
registers a smaller number. Naples, again, shows a considerably smaller
number of such cases than the provinces surrounding it, but it has a
greater number of unpremeditated cases of manslaughter. Messina, Catania
and Syracuse have a remarkably smaller number of blood crimes than
Trapani, Girgenti and Palermo. It has been attempted to claim that this
difference in criminality is due to social condition's, because the
agricultural conditions in eastern Sicily are less degrading than those
of Girgenti and Trapani, where the sulphur mines compel the miners to
live miserably. But we should like to ask the following question in
opposition to this idea: Why and in what respect are the agricultural
conditions in some provinces better than in others? This condition is
merely itself a result, not a cause of the first degree.