Sighele ^ lays great stress upon moral contagion of all degrees from suggestion a deux to psychic epidemics of crime, and shows how a crowd is a medium in which the microbe of evil develops more readily than that of good. In large and small bodies, whether parties, sects, or mobs, mimetism and psy- chic ferment may lead to a kind of moral drunkenness in which the most degenerate, foolish, and even criminal influences dominate, and where a spirit of extreme cruelty may dictate acts which every individual member of the group would abhor. Sudden and unpremeditated crimes, which are selfish, without reflection, and therefore not entirely responsible, indicate al- most a kind of hypnotic state. Collective masses are especially prone to barbarism of an atavistic kind, and instability and caprice often increase almost directly as numbers.
The reading of romance has great influence upon the de- velopment of youthful passion. Werther has created a distinct psychosis known as Wertherism; just as Anthony has pro- duced Antoninism. Stendhal not only admires passional crime, but almost revels in murder because it indicates energy. He admires aptitude for violent and dangerous action, loves the beautiful color of blood, salutes assassins, thinks it a bad sign that France has less passional crimes than other nations. Barres eulogizes Spain because it can be at once exalted and fierce, mystic and cruel. Some of these " professors of energy " ^ consider crime, especially phrenetic, often '' not as an insanity but as a sane idea, almost a duty or at least a noble protestation." Lacenaire declares that all assassins are cour- ageous and have admirers and disciples.
Those who commit crimes by irresistible impulse are very rare, and their offenses are mostly against persons, so Lombroso calls occasional criminals criminaloids. We have abundant * La Foule Criminelle. Paris, 1901. Second edition, radically revised.
3^8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE classifications based upon the curative and defensive influences of punishment, but less upon organic, and fewest on psycho- logical characteristics. In most countries, the grave crimes are steady and constant, and minor crimes are marked by steady increase; it is especially these which civilization has made and not correctionalized. Although there are often rapid oscillations of crimes in unstable lands, like Ireland, there is an increase in the aggregate, according to Ferri's law, of criminal saturation. He says it is with penal laws as with steam, compression increases the expansive force, for crime and punishment belong to two very different spheres.
Lacassagne has prepared an interesting criminal calendar to show the monthly and other periodicities of crime, how those against person are in direct proportion to the elevation of the temperature and the length of the day; those against property to the length of the night and low temperature. Garraud and Bernard ^ have shown that offenses of chastity against chil- dren, which have been very steadily increasing and at a rapid rate since the beginning of the second quarter of the last cen- tury, are most frequent in the month of June, and least so in November, following thus the law of rut in the animal world and of fecundation in plants. Ferri has traced the variations in crime which follow the thermometer; others find the price of corn and cereals a standard, according to which they can pre- dict its amount. It follows wars, hard and flush times, hu- midity, altitude, urban or city life, with concomitant variations as Oettingen ^ has shown statistically, so that all cosmic in- fluences affect ethics in a way which to many seems to threaten human freedom. In suicides these telluric, seasonal, finerstial, diurnal, and social causes seem so contributory as to challenge faith in human freedom.
Crime ^ is often committed in or near the menstrual state, and Krafft-Ebbing, Westphal, Tuke, Pelmann, Mabille, Phi- loindicus, Bartel, Ball, Kirn, Hugo Miller, Girand, and others * Des Attentats k la Pudeur et des Viols sur les Enfants, ' Die moralstatistik in ihrer Bedeutung fiir eine Socialethik. Erlangen, 1882, * For a thoroughly detailed state of two typical cases, see The Menstrual State and Menstrual Psychoses, by Prof. P. I. Kovalevsky, in the Arch, de Psychol., JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 3^9 have collected many cases, illustrative of the nerve and soul storms that break out near this period or are connected with its delay, suppression, or excess. Excitement, rising some- times to mania, depressing states shading toward suicide, tics, aches, tensions, flaccidities, pains local and general, imperative ideas, impulsive acts as violence to others, setting of fires, perversion of appetite, prsecordial anxiety, sleeplessness, de- lusion of persecution, nervous coughs, irritability, etc., and crimes done in epileptoid and more or less unconscious states, fear and vague dreads, aptly characterized by Cowles as fear of fear, religious states of consciousness of abnormal intensity or kind, a series of such phenomena more or less pronounced and repeated with great uniformity every twenty-eight days for years, or as in other cases so protean that no two periods are alike, sometimes preceding, sometimes during, and sometimes after the flow itself, gravely complicate all classes of legal re- sponsibility.
Tarde, who thinks that most of the traits peculiar to crimi- nals are due to the professional exercise of crime, and who thus magnifies the acquired in comparison with the instinctive and hereditary factors, would by no means ignore the connection between negroid, mongoloid, mattoid, or epileptoid types of crime.
Ferri makes three great types of delinquents with two minor varieties. All have the common traits of impulsiveness of abnormal action with either absence or feebleness of resist- ance. These are as follows: ( i ) Criminals by birth or instinct with hereditary absence of moral sense, without feeling for the suffering of their victims, with cynicism, indifference, and ab- sence of remorse afterward, and with improvidence of the con- sequence of their actions. (2) The insane criminal, a variety of the preceding class. In these cases there may be good conduct preceding the crime, but with a fixed idea of repulsion to it and with efforts to subdue it, and great fury in the accomplish- ment of the act itself. The victims may be chosen from among friends with no obvious motive, such as vengeance or cupidity. (3) The criminal of passion, personal or social, involving love, anger, honor, and followed often by a sincere and deep re- gret. (4) The occasional criminal, a variety of the passional, 390 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE characterized by feebleness of the moral sense and with a consti- tution which makes him the victim of circumstances. (5) The habitual criminal, an intermediate type often developed from the occasional criminal, with the moral sense finally ef- faced owing to an imperfect constitution or unfavorable envi- ronment.
Lombroso finds two general types of criminals — first, those impelled by causes external to their own organization, whether occasional or habitual, and here he includes those led to crime by passion. A second class comprises criminals by organic defects and includes: (I) Those with acquired defects, whether due to special diseases, paralysis, hysteria, or to common dis- eases like consumption, syphilis, or those caused by senility, drugs, alcohol, or those with an insane taint, monomania, mel- ancholia, acquired epilepsy, etc. (II) Criminals by internal or- ganic defect, and of these he makes four subdivisions: ( i ) Epileptic, degenerative, asymmetrical, those with obtuse touch and pain sense, color blind, lascivious, irascible, hyper- religious, delirious, impulsive, ferocious. (2) Moral imbeciles, often macrocephalic, without beard and with abnormalities of nose, ears, hair, etc., with a psychic character like that of epilep- tics, but less pronounced. (3) Criminals with innate psychotic traits, mattoids, idiots, cretins, monomaniacs, but not quite imbeciles. (4) Born criminals, thieves, assaulters, violators, etc., each with their own peculiar traits.
Marro's categories are three: (i) Criminals by external causation, whether predisposing or determining. These are usually lazy, quarrelsome, and perhaps vagabonds, neuropathic, precocious, consumptive or alcoholic, with few marks of somatic degeneration, with no grave lesions of sensation or motility. They are impulsive and affectionate, with average intellect, may be very religious, and are usually curable. (2) Criminals in whom external or internal causes counterbalance, many recidival thieves, participants in graver crimes, with bad heredity, cupidity of wealth and pleasure, frequent deformi- ties of skull and face, rickety, with frequent alternations of sensibility and intelligence, now normal and now defective, with precocious malice, feeble will, and doubtful courageability. (3) Criminals in whom internal causes predominate markedly over external: (a) where the internal causes are hered- JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 39 ^ itary, prone to crimes of luxury, incendiarism, wounds without premeditation, crimes in unusual age or youth, with special sus- ceptibility to seasonal changes and to momentary impulses, often blond and sanguine in temperament, with signs of arrested de- velopment in body, obtuse senses, dementia, ignorance, and rarely curable; (b) criminals in whom the predominant internal causation is morbid, thieves committing rapine and depredation, murder with premeditation, of delinquent parentage, addicted to alcoholism, fondness for orgy and vengeance, with physical de- velopment usually normal but the facial bones excessively large, lesions and scars not uncommon, fierce physiognomy, tattooing, deformities of the skull, exaggerated reflexes, low sensibility and a high degree of tolerance for alcohol, intelligence perhaps normal but moral sense degraded, suicidal tendencies, cynicism, and usually incorrigibility; (c) criminals who are such by coincidence of internal causes and those morbidly acquired, murderers and assassins, drunkards, epileptics, prone to ex- alted and rapt states, mental lesions, etc., these constituting the most dangerous and incurable types of all.^ The extreme severity of penalties in the past, the cross, stake, torture chamber, the lash, the scavenger's daughter, the iron maiden, mutilations, branks, stocks, hulks, the arena, early prisons, transportations, penal colonies, etc., indicated not that man had a deeper sense of the sinfulness of sin in the past than now, but that these were relics of a yet more barbaric and cruel age when man could readily become a wolf to his fel- low man. No animal has equaled man in ferocity, and yet we must believe that in their time many of these abominations were necessary for the devlopment of society. Sometimes the latter went down and the worse elements terrorized over the best. So falsely has the line between the licet and the non-licet often been drawn, that our sympathies are frequently with the great but wicked, and sometimes even with those who have deemed it a shame not to be infamous; with those who have regarded temp- tation as an inspiration; or with heroes like Hercules and Ulysses, if not most of the great in antiquity, perhaps including even Jesus, who, if they undertook to live out their lives in any modern metropolis, would speedily find their way to prison.
* See A. Corr^: Las Criminels. Paris, 1889.
392 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Prison psychology, it may be said in passing, is yet to be written, but the glimpses of it which we have in penological lit- erature are interesting. Some convicts wear a mask consistently through their entire term. They are more or less adaptable to all the rules, to moral and even religious influences, and the chaplain often has hopes of them, but is utterly deceived. All idealize their past, and often slowly evolve romances about it that are tissues of criminal idealization and which make the old life attractive by a lurid and diabolical glamour. When they go out all the prison life seems pallid and unreal and like a long nightmare. The day of release is one of palpitating anticipa- tion, and the best resolutions wilt in a moment, like hothouse plants when exposed where they are unacclimated. They re- vert with organic fatality to a freedom which is the liberty of wild beasts. The sex tension is often extreme and may gener- ate erotic illusions and hallucinations. Some cynics say every one will lie about sex because it is simply impossible to tell the truth, and it is certain that prisoners evolve the most false and lascivious images and stories. Here we see the crankiness and freakiness so characteristic of the masturbators, who always have some kink in their social relations, and the moralization of the debauchee, who as he approaches eviration prates of how women and wine relax all moral fiber and of the honor of wives, mothers, daughters as a tissue of moonshine that vanishes and leaves not a rack behind when passion finds freedom. We find strange paradoxes in the prison world — murderers who are in for life are proverbially the best behaved, while those who are the best men outside often have the worst prison records. The most heartless assassin is often most tender to sweetheart and mother, or agonizes over sparrows he had tamed, and almost dies if they do. The whole heart of a prisoner in solitary con- finement may go out to a tender plant that grows between the paving-stones of his yard, as did that of Pellico, who watched and tended it daily as a mother ministers to a puny child. Some women, amenable enough outside, can not be subdued, and will literally die rather than be tamed. Some nurse revenge and plan a vendetta. Some, previously virtuous, take a revengeful delight in degrading themselves. Some harlots pray daily for pardon for sins that they charge up to cruel circum- stances and for dear ones in a home they love, but never wish to JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 393 see again. Some break out, scream, and smash everything, not always periodically, but whenever many crosses accumulate and reach a saturation point, as when the Malay runs amuck. To all not fully in their confidence, nearly all prisoners lie, till one inexperienced would think prisons were built for the pure and innocent. It is not well, as I have learned from much ex- perience with prisoners, in addressing them collectively to speak of courts of justice, and many have a deep feeling that religion is a sham and virtue either an ideal or a pretense. Not only men but women pall in a schoolgirl mash, but women can not organize or complot. Thieves are sometimes enthusiastically in love with their vocations, and regard all business as thievery and without principle. Some become political reformers, and one bequeathed his hair for plaster, his bones for lime, his skin for a drumhead to arouse the people against their oppressors, and his intestines for fiddle strings to enliven their hearts. The new penology is no longer actuated by vengeance, and does not look at the moral gravity of the offense, but solely at the protection of society, which must, not so much punish, as protect itself. " Judge not " is its maxim. In place of the old prison, which was a moral pesthouse and incubator of crime by contagion, we have the moral hospital, the director and officers of which become in a sense compurgators for working such re- forms in the prisoner that he will be no longer dangerous to society. The special type of crime no more classifies it than do the specific acts of a lunatic indicate his form of insanity. Courts, too, have changed, and it is now a commonplace that if punishment is sure it need not be half as severe to work the same deterrents as if its severity were doubled on one-half the offenders, while the other half escaped. Justice now is asking with great earnestness after the state of mind and body of the accused. Individual study, which begins with the external details of the Bertillon system, is now postulated for all the deeper and more inward instincts, history, heredity, etc., while preventive education, which is perhaps the very best test of any pedagogic system, has led penologists and criminologists last of all to focus their attention upon juvenile crime as needing special consid- eration and as most susceptible to all reformatory influences.* ^ Ferriani. Minderjahrige Verbrecher. Strafgesetzgebungen,p. 30,and Ueberdu Bestrafung, p. 409; F. H. Lowe's Punishment and Reformation, ch. xiii and xiv.
394 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Despine^ conceives natural psychology as that of instinct, and this he would characterize for each age, sex, race, etc. The intellect he regards somewhat in the sense of Horwicz, as an instrument to express and to aid in the modification of the deeper and all-dominant instincts. We think as we feel. The young often can not think a thing without saying or even doing it, so that even dissimulation may be a form of self-con- trol. These instincts include sentiments and passions, but the mind being made to serve it, can not act against instinct, at least, unless there is a special moral sense, which is lacking in malefactors, so that they can have no free-will, and therefore no guilt, and thus moral treatment and not penalty is necessary. Superposed culture may even stand in the way of real psychic development, and ignorance is as good a point of departure as Cartesian doubt. In his final and summary statements he quotes approvingly Janet's dictum, that in philosophy igno- rance is favorable to invention; and Lemoine's argument, that the thought of a man of good sense, who is ignorant although knowing that he is so, is an admirable point of departure for the most precise and profound philosophic researches.
On this view, rigorously applied, we should have to accept perhaps the most drastic of all the cures of crime and degener- ation generally, which is that suggested by McKim.^ His plan is " the gentle removal from this life " of defectives and degenerates, committers of heinous crimes or chronic recidi- vists for less grave crimes, and all others whose bodily and mental characters and ancestry show them to be hopelessly in- corrigible. Idiots, and especially moral imbeciles, most epilep- tics that are hopelessly degenerate, and perhaps the worst habit- ual drunkards, should be selected for extinction, though not without a physical and mental examination. The essential question should be, to what degree the candidate is dangerous to society. Great discretion should always be used. Perhaps nocturnal house-breakers, who are more ruthlessly regardless of human rights than almost any others, should be included. Such have forfeited self-ownership and should come under the absolute control of the state, which should administer gentle and painless death. " In the United States," he says, " we have * Psychologic Naturelle. 3 vols. Paris * Heredity and Human Progress, by W. Duncan McKim. N. Y., 1900.
JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 395 gone up from 1,449 murders in 1886, to 14,000 murders in 1896, an average of 38 murders a day," so that unless some drastic remedy is adopted we shall soon come to live in sham- bles. Ultimately, his cure would so purify society that the cure itself would be no longer necessary. The world is hardly ready yet for this method.
Moral responsibility has generally been interpreted to be- gin at the age when right and wrong can first be distinguished. There is, of course, no exact, but only an arbitrary age, when it can be said to begin, and none when it can be said to be com- plete, and yet legislation has to assume an age for both, which differs much in different lands.
In Roman law, the child was entirely exempt from penalty up to its seventh year, and between this stage, called infantia, and puberty, there were two stages, infantice proximi and the piihertati proximi. Circumstances and the nature of the act decided whether the punishment should approximate that of the child or the adult. Canon law fixed this at seven years of age; the law of Italy at eight; Austria, Holland, and Sweden at nine; Germany at eleven; and England at sixteen. French law later decreed that when an offender had not yet reached the tenth year, it should be especially investigated, whether or not he acted with " discernment." In 185 1 Prussia copied this determination, and most German states followed, although Thuringia fixed upon the twelfth, and Nassau and Austria upon the fourteenth year as the age below which children, unless there were special inculpating circumstances, should not receive public punishment.^ The criminal code of the new German empire now excludes from legal responsibility, but not from guilt or from moral responsibility, those below twelve, while for those between twelve and eighteen legal responsibility is made conditional. This code gives a distinct place to reproof and ad- monition for first offenses.
In 1833 Wichern, aided by his mother, founded the Rauhe Haus, near Hamburg, for poor and exposed children, with the fundamental idea of the family. As his institution grew, he did not enlarge the house already in use, but built a second, and later still other houses, and thus grew an institution which has * Die Lehre von den jugendlichen Verbrechern im gemeinen deutschen Straf- recht und Strafprozessrecht: Hans von Slupecki, Tubingen, 1895.
39^ THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE set the pattern for very many others. Wichern was a great be- Hever in the power of the Word of God and in music. Every birthday in the house must be commemorated, and no teacher who could not enter into the plays of childhood was considered fit to come in contact with them. In France the Colonic Penitentiare Agricole of Mettray, founded by Demetz, was the pattern upon which many others were developed, though none of them were equal in elaborate organization to it. These marked an epoch in methods of juvenile reformation.
In most German states, legal responsibility begins with the completion of the twelfth year, but up to the eighteenth miti- gating circumstances are often taken into account. This period is divided into two equal parts at fifteen, and for both these periods crime increased at a greater rate than the population for the decennium ending 1890, when 15,654 children for the younger, and 26,346 for the older triennium were in various houses of detention. In 1890 out of 381,450 prisoners, 103,641 were between twelve and twenty-one. For offenders during both these periods, petty thefts led all other offenses, and then came in order, concealment, bodily injury, graver thefts, dam- age to property, insults, falsification of documents, threats, in- cendiarism, etc.^ In most countries, ten or twelve years marks the beginning and sixteen (France) or eighteen years (Ger- many) the completion of responsibility for young delinquents. Before this age special houses of detention for juvenile offenders have, in most civilized lands, been provided. As has often been pointed out, the power to know good from evil is a very different thing from the power to do the right that is recognized, and the former may be a small factor in the restraint of what Despine was the first to describe as the passional state, or in overcoming hereditary predisposition. Before the first age children are supposed to be irresponsible, and in some cases, after the latter the severest penalties, such as death and deportation, are rarely inflicted. Special penalties for this youthful period only some- times exist as reproof in Germany or custody at large in Italy. Not only are judges usually lenient, but in the actual infliction of penalties early age is a ground of mitigation, and special courts, often with privacy, are instituted, and educational con- * Was konnen die Schule und die Behorden thun, die Zunahme der jugendlichen Vergehen und Verbrechen zu verhiiten? W. Pfeifer. Giitersloh, 1894.
JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 397 ditions are often enforced in houses of detention for all under a certain age. In Germany youthful offenders are often sent to reform schools for a definite period after the completion of the sentence of confinement, and the duration of this compul- sory education is left to a special board, which makes it de- pendent upon the progress and conduct of the pupil. ^ The right of the state to assume the educational functions of the parents wherever there is grave danger of moral desola- tion, whether the child has done a penal act or not, is now gener- ally insisted upon in Germany. Aschrott ^ pleads for raising the age of legal responsibility to the end of the fourteenth year, and for compulsory education of all youth beween four- teen and eighteen, who thus come under the control of the state.
Rylands concludes that '* there is one way, and one only, by which embryo criminals may be caught and dealt with before inherited tendencies have had time to develop or evil example to make itself felt, and that is for the State to take under its own absolute control all children found in the streets without visible means of subsistence, or who seem to be neglected by their parents. If the State is to interfere in the matter at all, it can not logically stop short of this." Enforced habits of regular industry are his panacea.
Reddersen ^ deems it indispensible for the reduction of crime and the development of virtue and civilization, that all bad and stupid or recalcitrant children, even one of which may sap a teacher's energy, should be removed at once from the school before they poison the spirit of an entire class. In their growing numbers and abandon, he sees the chief cause of the progressive feralization of our youth. Perhaps, he thinks, a res- toration of some of the stern patria potestas of ancient heathen Rome might be a wholesome tonic, but pleads that the moral education of the child is not a subjective private right of the parent, but his first and highest ethical duty to the child, to society, and to the state. If he fail, the latter must intervene.