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.

The _born criminal_ is a victim of that which I will call (seeing that
science has not yet solved this problem) criminal neurosis, which is
very analogous to epileptic neurosis, but which is not in itself
sufficient to make one a criminal. Our adversaries had the idea that the
mere possession of a crooked nose or a slanting skull stamped a man as
predisposed by birth to murder or theft. But a man may he a born
criminal, that is to say, he may have some congenital degeneration which
predisposes him toward crime, and yet he may die at the age of 80
without having committed any crime, because he was fortunate enough to
live in an environment which did not offer him any temptation to commit
crime. Again, are not many predisposed toward insanity without ever
becoming insane? If the same individual were to live under unfavorable
conditions, without any education, if he were to find himself in
unhealthy telluric surroundings, in a mine, a rice field, or a miasmatic
swamp, he would become insane. But if instead of living in conditions
that condemn him to lunacy he were to be under no necessity to struggle
for his daily bread, if he could live in affluence, he might exhibit
some eccentricity of character, but would not cross the threshold of an
insane asylum. The same happens in the case of criminality. One may have
a congenital predisposition toward crime, but if he lives in favorable
surroundings, he will live to the end of his natural life without
violating any criminal or moral law. At any rate we must drop the
prejudice that only those are criminals on whose backs the judge has
pasted a number. For there are many scoundrels at large who commit crime
with impunity, or who brush the edge of the criminal law in the most
repulsive immorality without violating it.

This misunderstanding was explained at the congress of Geneva by the
statement that the interaction of the social and telluric environment is
required also in the case of the born criminal. And now we may take it
for granted that my classification of five types is everywhere accepted.
These are the following: The _born criminal_ who has a congenital
predisposition for crime; the _insane criminal_ suffering from some
clinical form of mental alienation, and whom even our existing penal
code had to recognize; the _habitual criminal_, that is to say one who
has acquired the habit of crime mainly through the ineffective measures
employed by society for the prevention and repression of crime. A common
figure in our large industrial centers is that of the abandoned child
which has to go begging from its earliest youth in order to collect an
income for the enterprising boss or for its poor family, without an
opportunity to educate its moral sense in the filth of the streets. It
is punished for the first time by the law and sent to prison or to a
reformatory, where it is inevitably corrupted. Then, when such an
individual comes out of prison, he is stigmatized as a thief or forger,
watched by the police, and if he secures work in some shop, the owner is
indirectly induced to discharge him, so that he must inevitably fall
back upon crime.

Thus one acquires crime as a habit, a product of social rottenness, due
to the ineffective measures for the prevention and repression of crime.
There is furthermore the _occasional criminal_, who commits very
insignificant criminal acts, more because he is led astray by his
conditions of life than because the aggressive energy of a degenerate
personality impels him. If he is not made worse by a prison life, he may
find an opportunity to return to a normal life in society. Finally there
is the _passionate criminal,_ who, like the insane criminal, has
received attention from the positive school of criminology; which,
however, did not come to any definite conclusions regarding him, such as
may be gathered by means of the experimental method through study in
prisons, insane asylums, or in freedom. The relations between passion
and crime have so far been studied on a field in which no solution was
possible. For the classic school considers such a crime according to
the greater or smaller intensity and violence of passion and comes to
the conclusion that the degree of responsibility decreases to the extent
that the intensity of a passion increases, and vice versa. The problem
cannot be solved in this way. There are passions which may rise to the
highest degree of intensity without reducing the responsibility. For
instance, is one who murders from motives of revenge a passionate
criminal who must be excused?

The classic school of criminology says "No," and for my part I agree
with them. Francesco Carrara says: "There are blind passions, and others
which are reasonable. Blind passions deprive one of free will,
reasonable ones do not. Blind and excusable passions are fear, honor,
love, reasonable and inexcusable ones are hatred and revenge." But how
so? I have studied murderers who killed for revenge and who told me that
the desire for revenge took hold of them like a fever, so that they
"forgot even to eat." Hate and revenge can take possession of a man to
such an extent that he becomes blind with passion. The truth is that
passion must be considered not so far as its violence or quantity are
concerned, but rather as to its quality. We must distinguish between
social and anti-social passion, the one favoring the conditions of life
for the species and collectivity, the other antagonistic to the
development of the collectivity. In the first case, we have love,
injured honor, etc, which are passions normally useful to society, and
aberrations of which may be excused more or less according to individual
cases. On the other hand, we have inexcusable passions, because their
psychological tendency is to antagonize the development of society. They
are antisocial, and cannot be excused, and hate and revenge are among
them.

The positive school therefore admits that a passion is excusable, when
the moral sense of a man is normal, when his past record is clear, and
when his crime is due to a social passion, which makes it excusable.

We shall see tomorrow what remedies the positive school of criminology
proposes for each one of these categories of criminals, in distinction
from the measuring of doses of imprisonment advocated by the classic
school.

We have thus exhausted in a short and general review the subject of the
natural origin of criminality.--To sum up, crime is a social
phenomenon, due to the interaction of anthropological, telluric, and
social factors. This law brings about what I have called criminal
saturation, which means that every society has the criminality which it
deserves, and which produces by means of its geographical and social
conditions such quantities and qualities of crime as correspond to the
development of each collective human group.

Thus the old saying of Imetelet is confirmed: "There is an annual
balance of crime, which must be paid and settled with greater regularity
than the accounts of the national revenue." However, we positivists give
to this statement a less fatalistic interpretation, since we have
demonstrated that crime is not our immutable destiny, even though it is
a vain beginning to attempt to attenuate or eliminate crime by mere
schemes. The truth is that the balance of crime is determined by the
physical and social environment. But by changing the condition of the
social environment, which is most easily modified, the legislator may
alter the influence of the telluric environment and the organic and
psychic conditions of the population, control the greater portion of
crimes, and reduce them considerably. It is our firm conviction that a
truly civilized legislator can attenuate the plague of criminality, not
so much by means of the criminal code, as by means of remedies which are
latent in the remainder of the social life and of legislation. And the
experience of the most advanced countries confirms this by the
beneficent and preventive influence of criminal legislation resting on
efficacious social reforms.

We arrive, then, at this scientific conclusion: In the society of the
future, the necessity for penal justice will be reduced to the extent
that social justice grows intensively and extensively.


III.

In the preceding two lectures, I have given you a short review of the
new current in scientific thought, which studies the painful and
dangerous phenomena of criminality. We must now draw the logical
conclusions, in theory and practice, from the teachings of experimented
science, for the removal of the gangrenous plague of crime. Under the
influence of the positive methods of research, the old formula "Science
for science's sake" has given place to the new formula "Science for
life's sake." For it would be useless for the human mind to retreat into
the vault of philosophical concentration, if this intellectual mastery
did not produce as a counter-effect a beneficent wave of real
improvement in the destinies of the human race.

What, then, has the civilized world to offer in the way of remedies
against criminality? The classic school of criminology, being unable to
locate in the course of its scientific and historical mission the
natural causes of crime, as I have shown in the preceding lectures, was
not in a position to deal in a comprehensive and far-seeing manner with
this problem of the remedy against criminality. Some of the classic
criminologists, such as Bentham, Romagnosi, or Ellero, with a more
positive bent of mind than others, may have given a little of their
scientific activity to the analysis of this problem, namely the
prevention of crime. But Ellero himself had to admit that "the classic
school of criminology has written volumes concerning the death penalty
and torture, but has produced but a few pages on the prevention of
criminality." The historical mission of that school consisted in a
reduction of punishment. For being born on the eve of the French
revolution in the name of individualism and natural rights, it was a
protest against the barbarian penalties of the Middle Ages. And thus the
practical and glorious result of the classic school was a propaganda for
the abolition of the most brutal penalties of the Middle Ages, such as
the death penalty, torture, mutilation. We in our turn now follow up the
practical and scientific mission of the classic school of criminology
with a still more noble and fruitful mission by adding to the problem of
the _diminution of penalties_ the problem of the _diminution of crimes_.
It is worth more to humanity to reduce the number of crimes than to
reduce the dread sufferings of criminal punishments, although even this
is a noble work, after the evil plant of crime has been permitted to
grow in the realm of life. Take, for instance, the philanthropic
awakening due to the Congress of Geneva in the matter of the Red Cross
Society, for the care, treatment and cure of the wounded in war. However
noble and praiseworthy this mission may be, it would be far nobler and
better to prevent war than to heal the mutilated and wounded. If the
same zeal and persistence, which have been expended in the work of the
Red Cross Society, had been devoted to the realization of international
brotherhood, the weary road of human progress would show far better
results.

It is a noble mission to oppose the ferocious penalties of the Middle
Ages. But it is still nobler to forestall crime. The classic school of
criminology directed its attention merely to penalties, to repressive
measures after crime had been committed, with all its terrible moral
and material consequences. For in the classic school, the remedies
against criminality have not the social aim of improving human life, but
merely the illusory mission of retributive justice, meeting a moral
delinquency by a corresponding punishment in the shape of legal
sentences. This is the spirit which is still pervading criminal
legislation, although there is a sort of eclectic compromise between the
old and the new. The classic school of criminology has substituted for
the old absolutist conceptions of justice the eclectic theory that
absolute justice has the right to punish, but a right modified by the
interests of civilized life in present society. This is the point
discussed in Italy in the celebrated controversy between Pasquale
Stanislao Mancini and Terencio Mamiani, in 1847. This is in substance
the theory followed by the classic criminologists who revised the penal
code, which public opinion considers incapable of protecting society
against the dangers of crime. And we have but to look about us in the
realities of contemporaneous life in order to see that the criminal code
is far from being a remedy against crime, that it remedies nothing,
because either premeditation or passion in the person of the criminal
deprive the criminal law of all prohibitory power. The deceptive faith
in the efficacy of criminal law still lives in the public mind, because
every normal man feels that the thought of imprisonment would stand in
his way, if he contemplated tomorrow committing a theft, a rape, or a
murder. He feels the bridle of the social sense. And the criminal code
lends more strength to it and holds him back from criminal actions. But
even if the criminal code did not exist, he would not commit a crime, so
long as his physical and social environment would not urge him in that
direction. The criminal code serves only to isolate temporarily from
social intercourse those who are not considered worthy of it. And this
punishment prevents the criminal for a while from repeating his criminal
deed. But it is evident that the punishment is not imposed until after
the deed has been done. It is a remedy directed against effects, but it
does not touch the causes, the roots, of the evil.

We may say that in social life penalties have the same relation to crime
that medicine has to disease. After a disease has developed in an
organism, we have recourse to a physician. But he cannot do anything
else but to reach the effects in some single individual. On the other
hand, if the individual and the collectivity had obeyed the rules of
preventive hygiene, the disease would have been avoided 90 times in 100,
and would have appeared only in extreme and exceptional cases, where a
wound or an organic condition break through the laws of health. Lack of
providence on the part of man, which is due to insufficient expression
of the forces of the intellect and pervades so large a part of human
life, is certainly to blame for the fact that mankind chooses to use
belated remedies rather than to observe the laws of health, which demand
a greater methodical control of one's actions and more foresight,
because the remedy must be applied before the disease becomes apparent.
I say occasionally that human society acts in the matter of criminality
with the same lack of forethought that most people do in the matter of
tooth-ache. How many individuals do not suffer from tooth-ache,
especially in the great cities? And yet any one convinced of the
miraculous power of hygiene could easily clean his teeth every day and
prevent the microbes of tooth rot from thriving, thereby saving his
teeth from harm and pain. But it is tedious to do this every day. It
implies a control of one's self. It cannot be done without the
scientific conviction that induces men to acquire this habit. Most
people say: "Oh well, if that tooth rots, I'll bear the pain." But when
the night comes in which they cannot sleep for toothache, they will
swear at themselves for not having taken precautions and will run to the
dentist, who in most cases cannot help them any more.

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 pass 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 classic 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 class of occasional
or passionate 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 classic school has been concentrated on the
juridical entity 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 passing 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 class 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
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.