economic determinism, has demonstrated that political, moral and
intellectual phenomena are reactions on the economic conditions of any
time and place, the attempt has been made to interpret this theory very
narrowly and to pretend that the economic condition of a nation is a
primary cause and not determined by any other. For my part, ever since I
have demonstrated the perfect accord between the Marxian and the
Darwinian theories, I have said: Very well, the economic conditions of a
nation explain its political, moral, intellectual conditions, but the
economic condition is in its turn the result of other factors. For
instance, how can the industrialism of England in the nineteenth century
be explained? Take away the coal mines (the telluric environment), and
you could not have the economic conditions of England as they are. For
the economic conditions are a result of favorable or unfavorable
telluric conditions which are acted upon by the intelligence and energy
of a certain race. Catania, Messina, Syracuse, are in a better economic
condition, because they have better geographical conditions and a
different race (of Grecian blood) than the other Sicilian provinces. So
it is in Apulia and Naples, which have likewise a considerable mixture
of Grecian blood. The northern tourists are still attracted by our art
and visit the ruins of Taormina or Pesto, which are the relics of the
Grecian race. And it is the Grecian blood which explains the lesser
frequency of bloody crimes in those provinces. This is therefore
evidently the influence of the race. And I maintain that the same fact
is due in the province of Benevent to the admixture of Langobardian
blood. For the Duchy of Benevent has had an influx of Langobardian
elements since the seventh century. And as we know that the German and
Anglo-Saxon race has the smallest tendency towards bloody crimes, the
beneficial influence of this racial character in Benevent explains
itself. On the other hand, there is much Saracen blood in the western
and southern provinces of Sicily, and this explains the greater number
of bloody crimes there. It is evident that the organic character of the
inhabitants of that island, where you may still see the brutal and
barbarian features of the Saracen by the side of those of the blond,
cool and quiet Norman, contains a transfusion of the blood of diverse
races. But it is also true that wherever a certain race has been
predominant, there its influence is left behind in the individual and
collective life.
Let this be enough so far as the anthropological factor of criminality
is concerned. There are, furthermore, the telluric factors, that is to
say, the physical environment in which we live and to which we pay no
attention. It requires much philosophy, said Rousseau, to note the
things with which we are in daily contact, because the habitual
influence of a thing makes it more difficult to be aware of it. This
applies also to the immediate influence of the physical conditions on
human morality, notwithstanding the spiritualist prejudices which still
weigh upon our daily lives. For instance, if it is claimed in the name
of supernaturalism and psychism that a man is unhappy because he is
vicious, it is equivalent to making a one-sided statement. For it is
just as true to say that a man becomes vicious because he is unhappy.
Want is the strongest poison for the human body and soul. It is the
fountain head of all inhuman and antisocial feeling. Where want spreads
out its wings, there the sentiments of love, of affection, of
brotherhood, are impossible.
Take a look at the figures of the peasant in the far-off arid Campagna,
the little government employee, the laborer, the little shop-keeper.
When work is assured, when living is certain, though poor, then want,
cruel want, is in the distance, and every good sentiment can germinate
and develop in the human heart. The family then lives in a favorable
environment, the parents agree, the children are affectionate. And when
the laborer, a bronzed statue of humanity, returns from, his smoky shop
and meets his white-haired mother, the embodiment of half a century of
immaculate virtue and heroic sacrifices, then he can, tired, but assured
of his daily bread, give room to feelings of affection, and he will
cordially invite his mother to share his frugal meal. But let the same
man, in the same environment, be haunted by the spectre of want and lack
of employment, and you will see the moral atmosphere in his family
changing as from day into night. There is no work, and the laborer comes
home without any wages. The wife, who does not know how to feed the
children, reproaches her husband with the suffering of his family. The
man, having been turned away from the doors of ten offices, feels his
dignity as an honest laborer assailed in the very bosom of his own
family, because he has vainly asked society for honest employment. And
the bonds of affection and union are loosened in that family. Its
members no longer agree. There are too many children, and when the poor
old mother approaches her son, she reads in his dark and agitated mien
the lack of tenderness and feels in her mother heart that her boy,
poisoned by the spectre of want, is perhaps casting evil looks at her
and harboring the unfilial thought: "Better an open grave in the
cemetery than one mouth more to feed at home!"
It is true, that want alone is not sufficient to prepare the soil in the
environment of that suffering family for the roots of real crime and to
develop it. Want will weaken the love and mutual respect among the
members of that family, but it will not be strong enough alone to arm
the hands of the man for a matricidal deed, unless he should get into a
pathological mental condition, which is very exceptional and rare. But
the conclusions of the positive school are confirmed in this case as in
any other. In order that crime may develop, it is necessary that
anthropological, social and telluric factors should act together.
We generally forget the conditions of the physical environment in which
we live, because supernatural prejudice tells us that the body is a
beast which we must forget in order to elevate ourselves into a
spiritual life. Manzoni could designate the Middle Ages by the term
"dirty." because they neglected the demands of elementary hygiene, and
thus of human morality. For where the requirements of our physical body
are neglected or offended, there no flower can bloom. The telluric
environment has a great influence on our physical activity, by way of
our nervous system. We feel differently disposed, according to whether a
south or a north wind blows. When Garibaldi was on the Pampas, he
observed that his companions were irascible and prone to violent
quarrels, when the Pampero blew, and that their behavior changed, when
this wind ceased. The great founders of criminal statistics, Quetelet
and Guerry, observed that the change of seasons carried with it a change
in criminality. Sexual crimes are less frequent in winter than in spring
and summer. And with reference to this point I have maintained, and
still maintain, that it is due to the combined effects of temperature
and social conditions, if crimes against property increase in winter.
For lack of employment, the want of food and shelter, intensify the
misery and lead to attacks on property. On the other hand, the cold by
itself reduces sexual crimes and personal assaults. And those who claim
that the longer intercourse between people in summer time has also a
social influence, are also partly in the right.
The most eloquent fact in this respect was mentioned by Murro, when he
pointed out that this change in the frequency of bloody crimes, greater
in the warm months than in winter, applied also to prisoners. Statistics
show that breach of discipline is most frequent in hot seasons. The
social factor does not enter there, because the social life is there the
same in winter and in summer. This is, therefore, a practical proof of
the influence of climate, and it is re-enforced by the fact that
delirium and epilepsy in insane asylums are also more frequent in hot
than in cold months. The influence of the telluric factors, then, cannot
be denied, and the influence of the social factor intensifies it, as I
have already shown by its most drastic and characteristic example, that
of want. One can, therefore, understand that a man, whose morality has
been shaken by the pressure of increasing want, may be led to commit a
crime against property or persons.
It is certainly quite evident, that economic misery has an undeniable
influence on criminality. And if you consider, that about 300,000
criminals are sentenced in Italy every year, 180,000 of them for minor
crimes, and 120,000 for crimes which belong to the gravest class, you
can easily see that the greater part of them due mainly to social
conditions, for which it should not be so very difficult to find a
remedy. The work of the legislator may be slow, difficult, and
inadequate, so far as the telluric and anthropological factors are
concerned. But it could surely be rapid, efficacious and prompt, so far
as the social factors influencing criminality are concerned.
We have now demonstrated that crime has its natural source in the
combined interaction of three classes of causes, the anthropological
(organic and psychological) factor, the telluric factor, and the social
factor. And by this last factor we must not only mean want, but any
other condition of administrative instability in political, moral, and
intellectual life. Every social condition which makes the life of man in
society insincere and imperfect is a social factor contributing towards
criminality. The economic factor is in evidence in our civilization
wherever the law of free competition, which is but a form of disguised
cannibalism, establishes the rule: _Your death is my life_. The
competition of laborers for a limited number of places is equivalent to
saying that those who secure a living do so at the expense of those who
do not. And this is a disguised form of cannibalism. While it does not
devour the competitor as primitive mankind did, it paralyzes him by
calumnies, recommendations, protection, money, which, secure the place
for the best bargainer and leave the most honest, talented, and
self-respecting to the pangs of starvation.
Moreover, the economic factor exerts its crime-breeding influence also
under the form of a superabundance of wealth. Indeed, in our present
society, which is in the downward stage of transition from glorious
bourgeois civilization, which constituted a golden page of human
history in the 19th century, wealth itself is a source of crime. For the
rich, who do not enjoy the advantage of manual or intellectual work,
suffer from the corruption of leisure and vice. Gambling throws them
into an unhealthy fever; the struggle and race for money poison their
daily lives. And although the rich may keep out of reach of the penal
code, still they have condemned themselves to a life devoted to
hypocritical ceremonies, which are devoid of moral sentiment. And this
life leads them to a sportive form of criminality. To cheat at gambling
is the inevitable fate of these parasites. In order to kill time they
give themselves up to games of chance, and those who do not care for
that devote themselves to the sport of adultery, which in that class is
a pastime even among the best friends, on account of sheer mental
poverty. And all because man's mind unoccupied is the devil's own forge,
as the English poet says.
We have now surveyed briefly the natural genesis of crime, as a natural
social phenomenon, brought about by the interaction of anthropological,
telluric, and social influences, which in any determined moment act
upon a personality standing on the cross road of vice and virtue, crime
and honesty. This scientific deduction gives rise to a series of
investigations which satisfy the mind and supply it with a real
understanding of things, far better than the theory that a man is a
criminal because he wants to be. No, a man commits crime because he
finds himself in certain physical and social conditions, from which the
evil plant of crime takes life and strength. Thus we obtain the origin
of that sad human figure which is the product of the interaction of
those factors, an abnormal man, a man not adapted to the conditions of
the social environment in which he is born, so that emigration becomes
an ever more permanent phenomenon for the greater portion of men, for
whom the accident of birth will less and less determine the course of
their future life. And the abnormal man who is below the minimum of
adaptability to social life and bears the marks of organic degeneration,
develops either a passive or an aggressive form of abnormality and
becomes a criminal.
Among these abnormal human beings, two groups must be particularly
distinguished. Limiting our observations to those who are true
aggressively antisocial abnormals, that is to say, who are not adapted
to a certain social order and attack it by crimes, we must distinguish
those who for egoistic or ferocious reasons attack society by atavistic
forms of the struggle for existence by committing socalled common crimes
in the shape of fraud or violence, thereby opposing or abolishing
conditions in which their fellow beings may live. This is the atavistic
type of criminals which represents an involutionary, or retrogressive,
form of abnormality, due to an arrested development or an atavistic
reversion to a savage and primitive type. These constitute the majority
in the world of criminals and must be distinguished from the minority,
who are evolutionary, or progressive, abnormals, that may also commit
crime in a violent form, but must not be confounded with the others,
because they do not act from egoistic motives, but rebel from altruistic
motives against the injustice of the present order. These altruistic
criminals feel the sufferings and horrors due to the injustice
surrounding them and may go so far as to commit murder, which must
always be condemned, but which must not be confounded with atavistic or
egoistic murder. Recourse to personal violence is always objectionable
from the point of view of higher manhood, which desires that human life
should always be held in respect. But the reasons for such a crime are
different, being egoistic in the one, and altruistic in the other case.
The evolutionary abnormal is often an instrument of human progress, not
in the form of criminality, but in that of intellectual and moral
rebellion against conditions which are sanctioned by laws that
frequently punish such an evolutionary rebellion harder than atavistic
crime, as they do in Russia, where capital punishment has been abolished
for common crimes, but retained for political violations of the law! We
are living in an epoch of transition from the old to the new, and
contemporaneous humanity has an uneasy moral conscience in this critical
time. The ruling classes are losing their clearness of vision, so that
they promise monuments to those political murderers who promoted their
own historical victories, but would condemn like any common criminal him
who now devotes his soul to a revolutionary ideal, would throw into
prison the pioneer of new human ideals, just as Russia is
excommunicating the rebel Tolstoi. I mention Leo Tolstoi advisedly for
the purpose of giving a precise illustration of my heterodox thought in
reference to this question. We are opposed to any form of personal
violence (with the sole exception of self-defense), we cannot approve of
any form of personal assault, no matter what may be its motive.
Therefore we cannot have words of praise or excuse for political murder,
though it may be inspired by altruistic motives. We can demand that the
legislator should distinguish between the psychological sources of these
two forms of murder, the egoistic and the altruistic form. But we
condemn them both, because they are inhuman forms of violence. Ideas do
not make victorious headway by force of arms. Ideas must be combatted by
ideas, and it is only by the propaganda of the idea that we can prepare
humanity for its future. Violence is always a means of preventing the
sincere and fruitful diffusion of an idea. We do not say this merely for
the abnormals of the lower classes. We refer with scientific serenity
also to the upper classes, who would suppress by violence every
manifestation of revolt against the social iniquities, every affirmation
of faith in a better future.
This is the conception of our science, which thus succeeds in
distinguishing traits of character even among the unlucky and forlorn
people of the criminal world, while the classic school of criminology
regards a criminal as a sort of abstract and normal man, with the
exception of cases of minors, deaf mutes, inebriates, and maniacs.
In fact, the classic school of criminology regards all thieves as THE
thief, all murderers as THE murderer, and the human shape disappears in
the mind of the legislator, while it re-appears before the judge. Before
the essayist and legislator, the criminal is a sort of moving dummy, on
whose hack the judge may paste an article of the penal code. If you
leave out of consideration the established cases of exceptional and rare
human psychology mentioned in the penal code, all other cases serve the
judge merely as an excuse to select from the criminal code the number of
that article which will fit the criminal dummy, and if he should paste
404 instead of 407 on its back, the court of appeals would resist, any
change of numbers. And if this dummy came to life and said: "The
question of my number may be very important for you, but if you would
study all the conditions that compelled me to take other people's
things, you would realize that this importance is very diagrammatic,"
the judge would answer: "That's all right for the justice of the future,
but it isn't now. You are number 404 of the criminal code, and after
leaving this court room with this number pasted legally on your back,
you will receive another number, for you will enter prison as number 404
and will exchange it for entry number 1525, or some other, because your
personality as a man disappears entirely before the enactment of social
justice!" And then it is pretended that this man, whose personality is
thus absurdly ignored, should leave prison cured of all degeneration,
and if he falls back into the path of thorns of his misery and commits
another crime, the judge simply pastes another article over the other,
by adding number 80 or 81, which refer to cases of relapse, to number
404!
In this way the classic school of criminology came to its unit of
punishment, which it heralded as its great progress. In the Middle
Ages, the diversity of punishment was greater. But in the 19th century
the classic school of criminology combatted dishonoring punishment,
corporeal punishment, confiscation, professional punishment, capital
punishment, with its ideal of one sole penalty, the only panacea for
crime and criminals, _prison_.
We have, indeed, prohibitory measures and fines even today. But in
substance the whole punitive armory is reduced to imprisonment, since
fines are likewise convertible into so many days or months of
imprisonment. Solitary confinement is the ideal of the classic school of
criminology. But experience proves that this penalty has as much effect
on the disease of criminality, as the remedy of a physician would have,
who would sit in the door of a hospital and tell every patient seeking
relief: "Whatever may be your disease, I have only one medicine and that
is a decoction of rhubarb. You have heart trouble? Well, then, the
problem for me is simply--how big a dose of rhubarb decoction shall I
give you?"
And measuring doses of penalty is the foundation of the criminal code.
That is so true that this code is in its last analysis but a table of
criminal logarithms for figuring out penalties. Woe to the judge who
makes a mistake in sentencing a 19 year old offender who was drunk when
he sinned, but had premeditated his deed. Woe to the judge, if he misses
his calculation in adding or subtracting the third, or sixth, or one
half, corresponding to the prescribed extenuating or aggravating
circumstances! If he makes a miscalculation, the court of appeals is
invoked by the defendant, and the inexorable court of appeals tells the
judge: "Figure this over again. You have been unjust." The only question
for the judge is this: Add your sums and subtract your deductions, and
the prisoner is sentenced to one year, seven months, and thirteen days.
Not one day more or less! But the human spectator asks: "If the criminal
should happen to be reformed before the expiration of his term, should
he be retained in prison?" The judge replies: "I don't care, he stays in
one year, seven months, and thirteen days!"
Then the human spectator says: "But suppose the criminal should not yet
be fit for human society at the expiration of his term?" The judge
replies: "At the expiration of his term he leaves prison, for when he
has absolved his last day, he has paid his debt!"
This is the same case as that of the imaginary physician who says: "You
have heart trouble? Then take a quart of rhubarb decoction and stay
twelve days in the hospital." Another patient says: "I have broken my
leg." And the doctor: "All right, take a pint of rhubarb decoction and
17 days in the hospital." A third has inflammation of the lungs, and the
doctor prescribes three quarts of rhubarb decoction and three months in
the hospital. "But if my inflammation is cured before that time?" "No
matter," says the doctor, "you stay in three months." "But if I am not
cured of my lung trouble after three months?" "No matter," says the
doctor, "you leave after three months."
To such results have wise men been led by a system of penal justice,
which is a denial of all elementary common sense. They have forgotten
the personality of the criminal and occupied themselves exclusively with
crime as an abstract juristic phenomenon. In the same manner, the old
style medicine occupied itself with disease as such, as an abstract
pathological phenomenon, without taking into account the personality of
the patient. The ancient physicians did not consider whether a patient
was well or ill nourished, young or old, strong or weak, nervous or
fullblooded. They cured fever as fever, pleurisy as pleurisy. Modern
medicine, on the other hand, declares that disease must be studied in
the living person of the patient. And the same disease may require
different treatment, if the condition of the patient is different.
Criminal justice has taken the same historical course of development as
medicine. The classic school of criminology is still in the same stage,
in which medicine was before the middle of the 19th century. It deals
with theft, murder, fraud, as such. But that which claims so much of the
attention of society has been forgotten by the classic school. For that
school has forgotten to study the murderer, the thief, the forger, and
without that study their crimes cannot be understood.
Crime is one of the conditions required for the study of the criminal.
But, the same crime may require the application of different remedies
to the personalities of different criminals, according to the different
anthropological and social conditions of the various criminals. There is
a fundamental distinction between the anthropological and social types
of criminals, whom I have divided into five categories, which are today
unanimously accepted by criminalist anthropologists, since the Geneva
congress offered an opportunity to explain the misapprehension which led
some foreign scientists to believe that the Italian school regarded one
of these types (the born criminal) merely as an organic anomaly.
Just a word concerning each one of these five types.