Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/302

 288 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

1. Criminal anthropology informs us experimentally that the delinquent is not a normal man, but that, by reason of his organic and psychic anomalies, hereditary and acquired, he constitutes a special class, a variety of the human species.

2. Statistics prove that the beginning, development, and diminution of crimi- nality depend upon other causes than the penalties established by law and applied by the magistrates.

3. Finally, the positive psychology has demonstrated that the idea of free will is only an illusion.

Placed at the end of his introduction, this summary ought to be considered as the synthesis of Ferri's book and the doctrines of Lombroso. The author seems to think there is a necessary point of division, and it has pleased him to formulate in his own way the body of classical and spiritualist convictions, and that of the positivists. Between these two the choice is rigorously limited. If you accept the new dogmas, all is for the best. But if you remain faithful to the old and pure classical traditions, you become an adversary.

I do not think that at the present hour one meets with many classical criminolo- gists who are persuaded of the extreme preventive efficacy of punishment. It is already a long time since it has been agreed to recognize that punishment is neither the only nor the best method of combating crime, and that, notably in France, men of heart, who are at the same time distinguished theorists, have multiplied preventive institutions, without suspecting that they were realizing what the positive school was to call later the prophylactics of crime. To invent a word is not to invent the thing. Classical criminologists think so little of the correctional efficacy of punishment that the most authoritative among them have been known to become the champions of the indeterminate sentence. The only certain result of punishment, with regard to the delinquent, is to place him, during his confinement, beyond the possibility of commit- ting crime ; but it is very rarely that it prevents his becoming a criminal again ; no one of us conceals the fact that punishment is above all useful for honest people, whose moral sense it strengthens ; and for possible criminals, people of weak con- science, upon whom it exercises a beneficent check, of which Ferri himself recognizes all the importance.

The spiritualist school would deny the evidence if it refused to believe in the predispositions, the sway of which certain refractory natures, in greater or less degree, subordinate to moral influences. It does not prove faithless to these principles in

attributing these predispositions to atavism or to degeneracy That there are in

these predispositions, as in insanity, idiocy, and moral imbecility, causes the trace of which is to be found in the physiological and anatomical constitution of the subject, I firmly believe, even because of my spiritualistic convictions, and I wish that the com- plete and fixed nomenclature of these signs might some day be made out.

" It is necessary to add, besides, that if the classical school has appeared so con- ciliatory, the Italian positivists have, on their side, greatly weakened the absoluteness of their first conclusions, first by recognizing that the criminal type does not result alone from anatomical, but also, and especially, from physiological and functional anomalies ; next, in according to the social factors of crime more and more impor- tance ; finally, in admitting that the influence of the medium, or, as Ferri says, the earthly and social environment, may neutralize the evil impulses of organic predispo- sitions." PAUL CUCHE, in Revue ptnitentiaire, May, 1900.

W. C. McN.