The Positive School of Criminology Part 2

The legislator should apply the rules of social hygiene in order to reach the roots of criminality. But this would require that he should bring his mind and will to bear daily on a legislative reform of individual and social life, in the field of economics and morals as well as in that of administration, politics, and intelligence. Instead of that, the legislators permit the microbes of criminality to develop their pathogenic powers in society. When crimes become manifest, the legislator knows no other remedy but imprisonment in order to punish an evil which he should have prevented. Unfortunately this scientific conviction is not yet rooted and potent in the minds of the legislators of most of the civilized countries, because they represent on an average the backward scientific convictions of one or two previous generations. The legislator who sits in parliament today was the university student of 30 years ago. With a few very rare exceptions he is supplied only with knowledge of outgrown scientific research. It is a historical law that the work of the legislator is always behind the science of his time. But nevertheless the scientist has the urgent duty to spread the conviction that hygiene is worth as much on the field of civilization as it is in medicine for the public health.

This is the fundamental conviction at which the positive school arrives: That which has happened in medicine will happen in criminology. The great value of practical hygiene, especially of social hygiene, which is greater than that of individual hygiene, has been recognized after the marvelous scientific discoveries concerning the origin and primitive causes of the most dangerous diseases. So long as Pasteur and his disciples had not given to the world their discovery of the pathogenic microbes of all infectious diseases, such as typhoid fever, cholera, diphtheria, tuberculosis, etc, more or less absurd remedies were demanded of the science of medicine. I remember, for instance, that I was compelled in my youth, during an epidemic of cholera, to stay in a closed room, in which fumigation was carried on with substances irritating the bronchial tubes and lungs without killing the cholera microbes, as was proved later on. It was not until the real causes of those infectious diseases were discovered, that efficient remedies could be employed against them. An aqueduct given to a center of population like Naples is a better protection against cholera than drugs, even after the disease has taken root in the midst of the people of Naples. This is the modern lesson which we wish to teach in the field of criminology, a field which will always retain its repressive functions as an exceptional and ultimate refuge, because we do not believe that we shall succeed in eliminating all forms of criminality. Hence, if a crime manifests itself, repression may be employed as one of the remedies of criminology, but it should be the very last, not the exclusively dominating one, as it is today.

It is this blind worship of punishment which is to blame for the spectacle which we witness in every modern country, the spectacle that the legislators neglect the rules of social hygiene and wake up with a start when some form of crime becomes acute, and that they know of no better remedy than an intensification of punishment meeted out by the penal code. If one year of imprisonment is not enough, we'll make it ten years, and if an aggravation of the ordinary penalty is not enough, we'll pa.s.s a law of exception. It is always the blind trust in punishment which remains the only remedy of the public conscience and which always works to the detriment of morality and material welfare, because it does not save the society of honest people and strikes without curing those who have fallen a prey to guilt and crime.

The positive school of criminology, then, aside from the greater value attributed to daily and systematic measures of social hygiene for the prevention of criminality, comes to radically different conclusions also in the matter of repressive justice. The cla.s.sic school has for a cardinal remedy against crime a preference for one kind of punishment, namely imprisonment, and gives fixed and prescribed doses of this remedy. It is the logical conclusion of retributive justice that it travels by way of an illusory purification from moral guilt to the legal responsibility of the criminal and thence on to a corresponding dose of punishment, which has been previously prescribed and fixed.

We, on the other hand, hold that even the surviving form of repression, which will be inevitable in spite of the application of the rules of social prevention, should be widely different, on account of the different conception which we have of crime and of penal justice.

In the majority of cases composed of minor crimes committed by people belonging to the most numerous and least dangerous cla.s.s of occasional or pa.s.sionate criminals, the only form of civil repression will be the compensation of the victim for his loss. According to us, this should he the only form of penalty imposed in the majority of minor crimes committed by people who are not dangerous. In the present practice of justice the compensation of the victim for his loss has become a laughing stock, because this victim is systematically forgotten. The whole attention of the cla.s.sic school has been concentrated on the juridical ent.i.ty of the crime. The victim of the crime has been forgotten, although this victim deserves philanthropic sympathy more than the criminal who has done the harm. It is true, every, judge adds to the sentence the formula that the criminal is responsible for the injury and the costs to another authority. But the process of law puts off this compensation to an indefinite time, and if the victim succeeds a few years after the pa.s.sing of the sentence in getting any action on the matter, the criminal has in the meantime had a thousand legal subterfuges to get away with his spoils. And thus the law itself becomes the breeding ground of personal revenge, for Filangieri says aptly that an innocent man grasps the dagger of the murderer, when the sword of justice does not defend him.

Let us say at this point that the rigid application of compensation for damages should never be displaced by imprisonment, because this would be equivalent to sanctioning a real cla.s.s distinction, for the rich can laugh at damages, while the proletarian would have to make good a sentence of 1000 lire by 100 days in prison, and in the meantime the innocent family that tearfully waits for him outside, would be plunged into desperate straits. Compensation for damages should never take place in any other way than by means of the labor of the prisoner to an extent satisfactory to the family of the injured. It has been attempted to place this in an eclectic way on our law books, but this proposition remains a dead letter and is not applied in Italy, because a stroke of legislator's pen is not enough to change the fate of an entire nation.

These practical and efficient measures would be taken in the case of lesser criminals. For the graver crimes committed by atavistic or congenital criminals, of by persons inclining toward crime from acquired habit or mental alienation, the positive school of criminology reserves segregation for an indefinite time, for it is absurd to fix the time beforehand in the case of a dangerous degenerate who has committed a grave crime.

The question of indeterminate sentences has been recently discussed also by Pessina, who combats it, of course, because the essence of the cla.s.sic 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 cla.s.sic 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 cla.s.sic 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 inst.i.tute, 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 inst.i.tution, 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 inst.i.tution. 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 inst.i.tutions 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 inst.i.tution 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 ma.s.s 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 a.s.sault 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 pa.s.ses 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 att.i.tude 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 "subst.i.tutes 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 pa.s.sengers, 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 pa.s.sengers on the postal stages, and that stopped the drivers from being late, because whenever they made a halt, the pa.s.sengers, who had an interest in arriving on time, called the drivers and did not give them much time to linger. This is an ill.u.s.tration of a subst.i.tute for punishment.

Another ill.u.s.tration. 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 a.s.sault 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 s.e.xual crimes? How can the sense of shame develop among people, when young and old of both s.e.xes are crowded together in the same bed, in the same corrupted and corrupting environment, which robs the human soul of every n.o.ble spark?

I might stray pretty far, if I were to continue these ill.u.s.trations 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 inst.i.tutes 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 n.o.ble 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 ma.s.ses, 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.ses 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 pa.s.ses from individual and isolated labor in collective, a.s.sociated, 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 a.s.sociated 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 a.s.sured 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 grat.i.tude 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.