by Pessina, who combats it, of course, because the essence of the
classic school of criminology is retribution for a fault by means of
corresponding punishment. We might reply that no human judge can use any
other but the grossest scale by which to determine whether you are
responsible to the extent of the whole, one half, or one third. And
since there is no absolute or objective criterion by which the ratio of
crime to punishment can be determined, penal justice becomes a game of
chance. But we content ourselves by pointing out that segregation for an
indefinite time has so much truth in it, that even the most orthodox of
the classic school admit it, for instance in the case of criminals under
age. Now, if an indeterminate sentence is a violation of the principles
of the classic school, I cannot understand why it can be admitted in the
case of minors, but not in the case of adults. This is evidently an
expedient imposed by the exigencies of practical life, and only the
positive school of criminology can meet them by a logical
systematization. For the rest, indefinite segregation, such as we
propose for the most dangerous atavistic criminals, is a measure which
is already in use for ordinary lunatics as well us for criminal
lunatics. But it may be said that this is an administrative measure, not
a court sentence. Well, if any one is so fond of formulas as to make
this objection, he may get all the fun out of them that he likes. But it
is a fact that an insane person who has committed a crime is sent to a
building with iron bars on its gates such as a prison has. You may call
it an administrative building or a penal institute, the name is
unessential, for the substance alone counts. We maintain that congenital
or pathological criminals cannot be locked up for a definite term in any
institution, but should remain there until they are adapted for the
normal life of society.
This radical reform of principles carries with it a radical
transformation of details. Given an indeterminate segregation, there
should be organs of guardianship for persons so secluded, for instance
permanent committees for the periodical revision of sentences. In the
future, the criminal judge will always secure ample evidence to prove
whether a defendant is really guilty, for this is the fundamental point.
If it is certain that he has committed the crime, he should either be
excluded from social intercourse or sentenced to mate good the damage,
provided the criminal is not dangerous and the crime not grave. It is
absurd to sentence a man to five or six days imprisonment for some
insignificant misdemeanor. You lower him in the eyes of the public,
subject him to surveillance by the police, and send him to prison from
whence he will go out more corrupted than he was on entering it. It is
absurd to impose segregation in prison for small errors. Compensation
for injuries is enough. For the segregation of the graver criminals, the
management must be as scientific as it is now in insane asylums. It is
absurd to place an old pensioned soldier or a hardened bureaucrat at the
head of a penal institution. It is enough to visit one of those
compulsory human beehives and to see how a military discipline carries a
brutal hypocrisy into it. The management of such institutions must be
scientific, and the care of their inmates must be scientific, since a
grave crime is always a manifestation of the pathological condition of
the individual. In America there are already institutions, such as the
Elmira Reformatory, where the application of the methods of the positive
school of criminology has been solemnly promised. The director of the
institution is a psychologist, a physician. When a criminal under age is
brought in, he is studied from the point of view of physiology and
psychology. The treatment serves to regenerate the plants who, being
young, may still be straightened up. Scientific therapeutics can do
little for relapsed criminals. The present repression of crime robs the
prisoner of his personality and reduces him to a number, either in mass
imprisonment which corrupts him completely, or in solitary confinement,
which will turn him into a stupid or raving beast.
These methods are also gradually introduced in the insane asylums. I
must tell you a little story to illustrate this. When I was a professor
in Pisa, eight years ago, I took my students to the penitentiaries and
the asylum for the criminal insane in Montelupo, as I always used to do.
Dr. Algieri, the director of this asylum, showed us among others a very
interesting case. This was a man of about 45, whose history was shortly
the following: He was a bricklayer living in one of the cities of
Toscana. He had been a normal and honest man, a very good father, until
one unlucky day came, in which a brick falling from a factory broke a
part of his skull. He fell down unconscious, was picked up, carried to
the hospital, and cured of his external injury, but lost both his
physical and moral health. He became an epileptic.
And the lesion to which the loss of the normal function of his nervous
system was due transformed him from the docile and even-tempered man
that he had been into a quarrelsome and irritable individual, so that
he was less regular in his work, less moral and honest in his family
life, and was finally sentenced for a grave assault in a saloon brawl.
He was condemned as a common criminal to I don't know how many years of
imprisonment. But in prison, the exceptional conditions of seclusion
brought on a deterioration of his physical and moral health, his
epileptic fits became more frequent, his character grew worse. The
director of the prison sent him to the asylum for the insane criminals
at Montelupo, which shelters criminals suspected of insanity and insane
criminals.
Dr. Algieri studied the interesting case and came to the diagnosis that
there was splinter of bone in the man's brain which had not been noticed
in the treatment at the hospital, and that this was the cause of the
epilepsy and demoralization of the prisoner. He trepanned a portion of
the skull around the old wound and actually found a bone splinter lodged
in the man's brain. He removed the splinter, and put a platinum plate
over the trepanned place to protect the brain. The man improved, the
epileptic fits ceased, his moral condition became as normal as before,
and this bricklayer (how about the free will?) was dismissed from the
asylum, for he had given proofs of normal behavior for about five or six
months, thanks to the wisdom of the doctor who had relieved him of the
lesion which had made him epileptic and immoral. If this asylum for
insane criminals had not been in existence, he would have ended in a
padded cell, the same as another man whom I and my students saw a few
years ago in the Ancona penitentiary. The director, an old soldier, said
to me: "Professor, I shall show you a type of human beast. He is a man
who passes four fifths of the year in a padded cell." After calling six
attendants, "because we must be careful," we went to the cell, and I
said to that director: "Please, leave this man to me. I have little
faith in the existence of human beasts. Keep the attendants at a
distance." "No," replied the director, "my responsibility does not
permit me to do that."
But I insisted. The cell was opened, and the man came out of it really
like a wild beast with bulging eyes and distorted face. But I met him
with a smile and said to him kindly: "How are you?" This change of
treatment immediately changed the attitude of the man. He first had a
nervous fit and then broke into tears and told me his story with the
eloquence of suffering. He said that he had some days in which he was
not master of himself, but he recognized that he was good whenever the
attacks of temper were over. Without saying so, he thus invoked the
wisdom of human psychology for better treatment. There is indeed a
physician in those prisons, but he treats generally only the ordinary
diseases and is not familiar with special psychological knowledge. There
may be exceptions, and in that case it is a lucky coincidence. But the
prison doctor has also his practice outside and hurries through his
prison work. "They simulate sickness in order to get out of prison," he
says. And this will be so all the more that the physicians of our time
have not sufficient training in psychology to enable them to do justice
to the psychology of the criminal.
You must, therefore, give a scientific management to these institutions,
and you will then render humane even the treatment of those grave and
dangerous criminals, whose condition cannot be met by a simple
compensation of the injury they have done to others.
This is the function of repression as we look upon it, an inevitable
result of the positive data regarding the natural origin of crime.
We believe, in other words, that repression will play but an unimportant
role in the future. We believe that every branch of legislation will
come to prefer the remedies of social hygiene to those symptomatic
remedies and apply them from day to day. And thus we come to the theory
of the prevention of crime. Some say: "it is better to repress than to
prevent." Others say: "It is better to prevent than to repress." In
order to solve this conflict we must remember that there are two widely
different kinds of repression. There is the immediate, direct empirical
repression, which does not investigate the cause of criminality, but
waits until the crime is about to be committed. That is police
prevention. There is on the other hand a social prevention which has an
indirect and more remote function, which does not wait until crime is
about to be committed, but locates the causes of crime in poverty,
abandoned children, trampdom, etc, and seeks to prevent these
conditions by remote and indirect means. In Italy, prevention is
anonymous with arrest. That is to say, by repression is understood only
police repression. Under these circumstances, it is well to take it for
granted that some of the expected crimes will be carried out, for crimes
are not committed at fixed periods after first informing the police. The
damage done by criminality, and especially by political and social
criminality, against which police repression is particularly directed,
will be smaller than that done by the abuse inseparably connected with
police power. In the case of atavistic criminality, prevention does not
mean handcuffing of the man who is about to commit a crime, but devising
such economic and educational measures in the family and administration
as will eliminate the causes of crime or attenuate them, precisely
because punishment is less effective than prevention.
In other words, in order to prevent crime, we must have recourse to
measures which I have called "substitutes for punishment," and which
prevent, the development of crime, because they go to the source in
order to do away with effects.
Bentham narrates that the postal service in England, in the 18th
century, was in the hands of stage drivers, but this service was not
connected with the carrying of passengers, as became the custom later.
And then it was impossible to get the drivers to arrive on time,
because they stopped too often at the inns. Fines were imposed,
imprisonment was resorted to, yet the drivers arrived late. The
penalties did not accomplish any results so long as the causes remained.
Then the idea was conceived to carry passengers on the postal stages,
and that stopped the drivers from being late, because whenever they made
a halt, the passengers, who had an interest in arriving on time, called
the drivers and did not give them much time to linger. This is an
illustration of a substitute for punishment.
Another illustration. In the Middle Ages, up to the eve of our modern
civilization, piracy was in vogue. Is there anything that was not tried
to suppress piracy? The pirates were persecuted like wild beasts.
Whenever they were caught they were condemned to the most terrible forms
of death. Yet piracy continued. Then came the application of steam
navigation, and piracy disappeared as by magic. And robbery and
brigandage? They withstood the death penalty and extraordinary raids by
soldiers. And we witness today the spectacle of a not very serious
contest between the police who wants to catch a brigand, Musolino; and
a brigand who does not wish to be caught.
Wherever the woods are not traversed by railroads or tramways,
brigandage carries on its criminal trade. But wherever railroads and
tramways exist, brigandage is a form of crime which disappears. You may
insist on death penalties and imprisonment, but assault and robbery will
continue, because it is connected with geographical conditions. Use on
the other hand the instrument of civilization, without sentencing any
one, and brigandage and robbery will disappear before its light. And if
human beings in large industrial centers are herded together in
tenements and slum hotels, how can a humane judge aggravate the
penalties against sexual crimes? How can the sense of shame develop
among people, when young and old of both sexes are crowded together in
the same bed, in the same corrupted and corrupting environment, which
robs the human soul of every noble spark?
I might stray pretty far, if I were to continue these illustrations of
social hygiene which will be the true solution of the problem and the
supreme systematic, daily humane, and bloodless remedy against the
disease of criminality. However, we have not the simple faith that in
the near or far future of humanity crimes can ever be wholly eradicated.
Even Socialism, which looks forward to a fundamental transformation of
future society on the basis of brotherhood and social justice, cannot
elevate itself to the absolute and naive faith that criminality,
insanity, and suicide can ever fully disappear from the earth. But it is
our firm conviction that the endemic form of criminality, insanity, and
suicide will disappear, and that nothing will remain of them but rare
sporadic forms caused by lesion or telluric and other influences.
Since we have made the great discovery that malaria, which weighs upon
so many parts in Italy, is dependent for its transmission on a certain
mosquito, we have acquired the control of malarial therapeutics and are
enabled to protect individuals and families effectively against malaria.
But aside from this function of protecting people, there must be a
social prevention, and since those malarial insects can live only in
swampy districts, it is necessary to bring to those unreclaimed lands
the blessing of the hoe and plow, in order to remove the cause and do
away with the effects. The same problem confronts us in criminology. In
the society of the future we shall undertake this work of social
hygiene, and thereby we shall remove the epidemic forms of criminality.
And nine-tenths of the crimes will then disappear, so that nothing will
remain of them but exceptional cases. There will remain, for instance,
such cases as that of the bricklayer which I mentioned, because there
may always be accidents, no matter what may be the form of social
organization, and nervous disorders may thus appear in certain
individuals. But you can see that these would be exceptional cases of
criminality, which will be easily cured under the direction of science,
that will be the supreme and beneficent manager of institutes for the
segregation of those who will be unfit for social intercourse. The
problem of criminality will thus be solved as far as possible, because
the gradual transformation of society will eliminate the swamps in which
the miasma of crime may form and breed.
If we wish to apply these standards to an example which today attracts
the attention of all Italy to this noble city, if we desire to carry our
theories into the practice of contemporaneous life, if science is to
respond to the call of life, let us throw a glance at that form of
endemic criminality known as the Camorra in this city, which has taken
root here just as stabbing affrays have in certain centers of Turin, and
the Mafia in certain centers of Sicily. In the first place, we must not
be wilfully blind to facts and refuse to see that the citizens will
protect themselves, if social justice does not do so. And from that to
crime there is but a shot step. But which is the swampy soil in which
this social disease can spread and persist like leprosy in tin
collective organism? It is the economic poverty of the masses, which
lends to intellectual and moral poverty.
You have lately had in Naples a very fortunate struggle, which seems to
have overcome one of the representatives of the high Camorra. But can we
believe that the courageous work of a few public writers has touched the
roots of the Camorra in this city? It would be self-deception to think
so. For we see that plants blossom out again, even after the most
destructive hurricane has passed over them.
The healing of society is not so easy, that a collective plague may be
cured by the courageous acts of one or more individuals. The process is
much slower and more complicated. Nevertheless these episodes are
milestones of victory in the onward march of civilization, which will
paralyze the historical manifestations of social criminality. Here,
then, we have a city in which some hundred thousand people rise every
morning and do not know how to get a living, who have no fixed
occupation, because there is not enough industrial development to reach
that methodical application of labor which lifted humanity out of the
prehistoric forests. Truly, the human race progresses by two uplifting
energies: War and labor.
In primitive and savage society, when the human personality did not know
the check of social discipline, a military discipline held the members
of the tribe together. But war, while useful in primitive society, loses
its usefulness more and more, because it carries within itself the
cancer that paralyzes it.
While war compels collective groups to submit to the co-ordinating
discipline of human activity, it also decreases the respect for human
life. The soldier who kills his fellow man of a neighboring nation by a
stroke of his sword will easily lose the respect for the life of
members of his own social group. Then the second educational energy
interferes, the energy of labor, which makes itself felt at the decisive
moment of prehistoric development, when the human race passes from a
pastoral, hunting, and nomadic life Into an agriculture and settled
life. This is the historic stage, in which the collective ownership of
land and instruments of production is displaced by communal property,
family property, and finally individual property. During these stages,
humanity passes from individual and isolated labor in collective,
associated, co-ordinated labor. The remains of the neolithic epoch show
us the progress of the first workshops, in which our ancestors gathered
and fashioned their primitive tools and arms. They give us an idea of
associated and common labor, which then becomes the great uplifting
energy, because, unlike war, it does not carry within itself a disdain
or violation of the rights of others. Labor is the sole perennial energy
of mankind which leads to social perfection. But if you have 100,000
persons in a city like Naples who do not enjoy the certainty and
discipline of employment at methodical and common labor, you need not
wonder that the uncertainty of daily life, an illfed stomach, and an
anemic brain, result in the atrophy of all moral sentiment, and that the
evil plant of the Camorra spreads out over everything. The processes in
the law courts may attract the fleeting attention of public opinion, of
legislation, of government, to the disease from which this portion of
the social organism is suffering, but mere repression will not
accomplish anything lasting.
The teaching of science tells us plainly that in such a case of endemic
criminality social remedies must be applied to social evils. Unless the
remedy of social reforms accompanies the development and protection of
labor; unless justice is assured to every member of the collectivity,
the courage of this or that citizen is spent in vain, and the evil plant
will continue to thrive in the jungle.
Taught by the masterly and inflexible logic of facts, we come to the
adoption of the scientific method in criminal research and conclude that
a simple and uniform remedy like punishment is not adequate to cure such
a natural and social phenomenon as crime, which has its own natural and
social causes. The measures for the preservation of society against
criminality must be manifold, complex and varied, and must be the
outcome of persevering and systematic work on the part of legislators
and citizens on the solid foundation of a systematic collective economy.
Let me take leave of you with this practical conclusion, and give my
heart freedom to send to my brain a wave of fervent blood, which shall
express my enduring gratitude for the reception which you have given me.
Old in years, but young in spirit and energetic aspiration to every high
ideal, I tender you my sincere thanks. As a man and a citizen, I thank
you, because these three lectures have been for me a fountain of youth,
of faith, of enthusiasm. Thanks to them I return to the other fields of
my daily occupation with a greater faith in the future of my country and
of humanity. To you, young Italy, I address these words of thanks, glad
and honored, if my words have aroused in your soul one breath which will
make you stronger and more confident in the future of civilization and
social justice.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Positive School of Criminology, by Enrico Ferri