Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/624

606 juvenile delinquents, •whom a gentle, loving care will rehabilitate better than a severe prison régime conducted on the old lines. Lombroso is greatly in favor of the Irish graduated cellular system, by which the culprit regains little by little an almost complete liberty. In this wise there results to the state a sensible economy—a fact not to be despised, seeing the large cost to society of these useless members of the body politic. He also lauds the Danish system, another graduated method founded on repaid labor, and provisional and conditional liberty. Nor does he forget Saxony, where the system which ho calls "of individualization" has given such excellent results.

He strongly urges that on quitting prison the interest only of the capital he has acquired by his labor should be accorded to the prisoner. This will help to keep him straight, and retain him under a moral control. The professor is absolutely opposed to deportation to colonies. For the incorrigible delinquent, Lombroso counsels, as the only way of supplanting capital punishment, to which in extreme cases he is not opposed, a perpetual exile from society, into which the criminal will not be able to return unless he gives irrefutable proofs of amendment.

"No matter that their criminality springs from infirmity," he writes, "they are equally dangerous to themselves, to us, and to their offspring; and their rigid isolation is more useful and less unjust than that of lunatics."

And this brings him by a natural transition to the very important question of criminal lunatic asylums, institutions counseled by humanity as well as by social security. Among delinquents, and those believed to be so, there are many who are and always were demented, and whom to imprison would be to treat unjustly. In Italy such persons are as yet provided for only by half measures which violate both morality and security. In England they have attempted for a century, and for sixty years have almost succeeded, in settling this question by instituting criminal madhouses. In 1786 this species of lunatics were confined in a certain part of Bedlam; in 1844: the state undertook to maintain two hundred and thirty-five in a private establishment in Fisherton House, but as the sad bands of those unhapyunhappy [sic] ones grew it ended by erecting special madhouses. In 1850 one was opened in Dundrum for Ireland, followed by one in Perth for Scotland, and in Broadmoor for England. In these houses, regulated by suitable decrees, admission is given not only to those that have committed crime in an access of madness or who have become mad during their trial, but there are also shut up those that on account of lunacy or idiocy are incapable of undergoing prison discipline. In America this reform has already brought about the criminal asylums of Auburn, in Pennsylvania,