“Ah! too often it is forgotten,” wrote G. Ruscovitch, a prince among forgers, the accomplished student of science, the perfect master of half-a-dozen languages, “too often it is forgotten that criminals are members of society. All these bodies, sometimes abandoned by all except the satellites charged to guard them, are not all opaque; some of them are diaphanous and transparent. The vulgar sand which you tread under foot becomes brilliant crystal when it has passed through the furnace. The dregs may become useful if you know how to employ them; to tread them under foot with indifference and without thought is to undermine the foundations of society and to fill it with volcanoes. The man who has not visited the caverns, can he know the mountain well? The lower strata, for being situated deeper and farther from the light, are they less important than the external crust? There are deformities and diseases among us to make one shudder; but since when has horror forbidden study, and the disease driven away the physician?”
CHAPTER V.
THE RESULTS OF CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY.
So far I have been summarising the chief results obtained in the investigation of the criminal up to the present date by many workers in various lands. There is not very much doubt about the results here recorded; even when they do not agree among themselves, it is still generally possible to account for the divergency by the special character of the group to which the individuals examined belong. But when we come to consider the significance of the facts we are no longer on such safe and simple ground. There is, however, no reason here for surprise when we remember how youthful a science criminal anthropology is. Even the related science of general anthropology is still young, and much of our progress in it still lies in the unlearning of our errors, so that, as Virchow recently remarked, we know considerably less about anthropology to-day than we knew some years ago. The same is true of another related science, the study of insanity. If therefore my conclusions as to the place of the criminal in nature may seem to be somewhat cautious and tentative, it must be remembered that we are still slowly feeling our way to firm ground. Few as are the general conclusions which we may boldly assert, they are yet sufficient to throw a flood of new light on the nature of the criminal, and on his treatment and prevention.
I purpose to touch briefly on certain relationships of crime and the criminal, the consideration of which will lead us naturally to a clearer view of the criminal’s position. We will glance at (_a_) the biological beginnings of crime, (_b_) crime among children, (_c_) the criminal woman as distinct from the criminal man, (_d_) the relation of crime to vice, (_e_) crime as a profession, (_f_) the relations of crime to epilepsy and insanity.
(_a_) The biological beginnings of crime have been examined by Lombroso, Lacassagne, and Ferri; and by some have even been traced as far back as the vegetable world. Thus Lombroso seems to claim those insectivorous plants studied by Darwin and others as belonging to the category of criminals. I doubt whether by any tenable definition of the criminal such a classification can be upheld, and Lomboso himself speaks with less than his usual decision. An act which is common to a whole species cannot reasonably be described as criminal. It may be unjust, even cruel, but it does not thereby necessarily become criminal. If the _Dionea Muscipula_ that eats an insect is a criminal, much more must the European man who eats beef or mutton be a criminal. To be criminal the deed must be exceptional in the species, and must provoke a social reaction among the other members of that species. We can scarcely hope to find genuine vegetable criminals, even amongst the parasites.
When we are dealing with the criminality of animals, concerning which a large body of evidence has now accumulated, it is necessary to discriminate. It is well recognised by veterinary surgeons that certain horses are inclined to be undisciplined and revengeful, and that these characteristics are associated with distinct cranial anomalies; the Arabs believe these qualities to be hereditary. There is here certainly a very close analogy to the instinctive criminal; but we are dealing with an animal greatly modified by man, and these vices are not recorded as exercised against their own species so much as against man. The case (apparently well authenticated) of the horse who pretended to be lame, to avoid going on military exercise, can scarcely be called criminal; from a horse’s point of view this might be regarded as a justifiable ruse. The same may be said of the action of the dog who, finding his favourite place occupied by another dog, went outside and set up such a furious barking that the usurper came out to see what was the matter, when the rightful owner immediately pounced on his old corner. Such a ruse, even though perpetrated against one of the same species, is not anti-social. It is only when we are dealing with animals of the very highest order of intelligence that we find any manifestations that can be at all fairly described as criminal. Thus among the highly intelligent castors, the lazy castor is pitilessly chased away by his fellows, to die of hunger, alone, far from the colony. Idleness, as we know, is a very fundamental characteristic of the criminal, and the strongly marked social reaction that we see here shows that the castors have recognised this. Something of the same kind is seen among elephants. Certain elephants, called rogues, lead a solitary and unnatural life, and are lacking in the humane and gentle disposition peculiar to elephants generally. The anti-social character of these elephants is recognised by their fellows, and when the solitary elephant endeavours to penetrate into the family life of the ordinary elephant he is everywhere repulsed, and naturally grows still fiercer and more anti-social. Such examples as these are the nearest approaches among animals to what we call criminality.
We have to realise clearly what constitutes criminality when we turn to the lower human races. To say, as has been asserted, that among savages criminality is the rule rather than the exception, is to introduce confusion. Among many savages infanticide, parricide, theft and the rest, far from being anti-social, subserve frequently some social end, and they outrage, therefore, no social feeling. These acts are not anti-social; and many recent investigations, such as those of Élie Reclus, show that there is under the given conditions a certain reasonableness in them, although among us they have ceased to be reasonable, and have become criminal. On the other hand, many acts which the needs or traditions of a barbarous society have caused to be criminal become in a higher phase of society trivial or beneficial.
Tarde remarks, that of the ten crimes which the Hebraic law punished with stoning, nine have even ceased to be offences in our modern European societies, and the tenth (rape) has only remained a crime by entirely changing its character; it has become a crime against the person instead of a crime against property. He observes also that in a savage society one of the chief criminal types would be that of the delicate and artistic natures, sensuous and sensitive, ill adapted for pillaging neighbouring tribes. Such individuals would be chased away relentlessly, as the industrious castors chase away the lazy castor, and for the same reasons. In our societies we have found a use for these people; they minister to our pleasures, and we render them nothing but homage. But if we are wise we shall be very tender in arousing our indignation against the social habits of lower races, even when these involve such an act as parricide, for the distance between ourselves and even the lowest races is quite measurable. Our social code is not far removed from that of the Maori who considered that it was murder to kill the man to whom he had given hospitality, but not murder to run his spear through the stranger whom he met on his morning walk. We to-day regard it as a great crime to kill our own fathers or children; but even the most civilised European nation--whichever that may be--regards it as rather glorious to kill the fathers and children of others in war. We are not able yet to grasp the relationship between men. In the same way, while we resent the crude thefts practised by some lower races, we are still not civilised enough to resent the more subtle thefts practised among ourselves which do not happen to conflict with the letter of any legal statute.
Criminality, therefore, cannot be attributed indiscriminately even to the lowest of races. It consists in a failure to live up to the standard recognised as binding by the community. The criminal is an individual whose organisation makes it difficult or impossible for him to live in accordance with this standard, and easy to risk the penalties of acting antisocially. By some accident of development, by some defect of heredity or birth or training, he belongs as it were to a lower and older social state than that in which he is actually living. It thus happens that our own criminals frequently resemble in physical and psychical characters the normal individuals of a lower race. This is that “atavism” which has been so frequently observed in criminals and so much discussed. It is the necessarily anti-social instinct of this lowlier organised individual which constitutes the crime. This accounts for the fact that, while in those districts where brigandage is opposed to popular feeling brigands are often abnormally constituted individuals, in other districts where there is no social feeling against brigandage (as in some outlying parts of Italy) the brigand may present no unusual characteristic, mental or physical. The social environment exerts no selective influence; there is nothing to thrust the abnormal person into brigandage rather than into any other occupation.
To admit, therefore, in the criminal, a certain psychical and even physical element belonging to a more primitive age is simple and perfectly reasonable. It has been observed over and over again, independently and apart from any special theory of criminality. Thus Mr. L. Owen Pike, the historian of crime in England, who is not an alienist or an anthropologist, writes:--“Of a very great number of modern habitual criminals it may be said that they have the misfortune to live in an age in which their merits are not appreciated. Had they been in the world a sufficient number of generations ago, the strongest of them might have been chiefs of a tribe...With the disposition and the habits of uncivilised men which he has inherited from a remote past, the criminal has to live in a country where the majority of the inhabitants have learned new lessons of life, and where he is regarded more and more as an outcast as he strives more and more to fulfil the yearnings of his nature.”[76] Tarde, the cautious _juge d’instruction_, has expressed the same idea in almost the same words: “Some of them at least would have been the ornament and the moral aristocracy of a tribe of Red Indians.”[77] Again, Professor Prins of Brussels, only slightly varying the same formula, remarks: “The criminal of to-day is the hero of our old legends. We put in prison to-day the man who would have been the dreaded and respected chief of a clan or a tribe.” The energy with which Lombroso has advocated the atavistic element in the criminal is well known; while Colajanni, in many respects an opponent of Lombroso, remarks: “How many of Homer’s heroes would to-day be in a convict prison, or at all events despised as violent and unjust.”
That this resemblance is not merely superficial, but that some perversity or arrest of development sometimes produces an individual inapt to our civilisation, but apt to a lower civilisation which we have outgrown, and which we call criminal, we have had occasion to observe repeatedly in our brief summary of the facts of criminal anthropology. It is by no means an extraordinary fact; it is not so extraordinary as that human beings should occasionally be born with cervical auricles or supernumerary breasts--reversions to very far more ancient days. It is not easy to gather up into one statement the various real or apparent atavistic anatomical peculiarities noted among criminals. Perhaps the most general statement to be made is that criminals present a far larger proportion of anatomical abnormalities than the ordinary European population. Now this is precisely the characteristic of the anatomy of the lower human races: they present a far larger proportion of anatomical abnormalities than the ordinary European population. It is true that our knowledge of the anatomy of the lower human races is still incomplete, but the evidence so far as it goes is perfectly clear. It will be sufficient to quote the distinguished anatomist to whom were entrusted the skulls collected during the most important scientific expedition of modern times. Sir William Turner, summing up the _Challenger Report_ concerning these crania, writes:--“Although their number is certainly too limited to base any broad generalisation on, as to the relative frequency of occurrence of particular variations in the different races, there is obviously a larger proportion of important variations than would occur in a corresponding number of skulls of the white races.”[78] Our survey of the psychical characteristics of criminals showed that they constantly reproduce the features of savage character--want of forethought, inaptitude for sustained labour, love of orgy, etc. It may not be out of place to remark that we must not attribute these to the direct influence of atavism. When an original vice of organic constitution has thrown an individual into a more primitive and remote strata of society, the influence of environment will itself simulate the effects of atavism and exaggerate its significance. If the organic impulses of a man’s constitution have led him to throw in his lot with brigands, he will not fail to live as a brigand lives--that is, as a barbarian lives. This is not atavism, though it may be the outcome of atavism, or arrest of development.[79] (_b_) The development of crime is precocious. Rossi ascertained at what age 46 of his 100 criminals commenced their criminal career. Of these 46, no less than 40 began before the age of twenty--_i.e._, 1 at four years of age, 2 at seven, 6 at eight, 1 at nine, 5 at ten, 1 at eleven, 3 at twelve; and so on.[80] The evidence from France, from England, and from America gives very similar results. Children may even become expert professional criminals, and not in Europe alone. Thus, in India, where of recent years professional poisoning has assumed great development, and to a large extent taken the place of thuggi, “a Brahman boy at Bahraich, in May 1885, drugged a party of men travelling with the agent of the Rajah of Mohsan. Although only twelve years old, this was his fifth appearance in the dock. Another boy, a few months later, cooked some pulse for three pilgrims from Gaya; and the pilgrims were picked up shortly afterwards insensible near the railway yard at Allahabad. This boy had been charged with committing a similar offence in the May previous, but had got off because the complainants, impatient of the law’s delay, changed their story, and attributed their delirium to the heat of the sun.” The Sonorias, again, in the north-west provinces of India, are wonderfully expert pickpockets, and they train up their children in the same paths. “A Sonoria boy of ten or twelve years, with his pretty innocent face and his clean silk clothes, is a most attractive little object of villainy. His hand slides into a pocket, and he hands over the contents to a man behind him, who in his turn makes them over to a third, and returns to watch over the urchin. If caught, the boy cries and protests his innocence, but his volubility is against him, for no honest native child can talk like a Sonoria boy.”[81] It is more interesting to note that there is a certain form of criminality almost peculiar to children, a form to which the term “moral insanity” may very fairly be ascribed. This has been described by Krafft-Ebing, Mendel, Savage, and others, and is characterised by a certain eccentricity of character, a dislike of family habits, an incapacity for education, a tendency to lying, together with astuteness and extraordinary cynicism, bad sexual habits, and cruelty towards animals and companions. It shows itself between the ages of five and eleven, and is sometimes united with precocious intellectual qualities. There can be no doubt that many of these develop into instinctive criminals. Sometimes these characters only appear at puberty, together with exaggerated sexual tendencies, in children who have previously been remarkable only for their mental precocity, but whose energy seems now to be thrown into a new channel.
It is a very significant fact that these characters are but an exaggeration of the characters which in a less degree mark nearly all children. The child is naturally, by his organisation, nearer to the animal, to the savage, to the criminal, than the adult. Although this has frequently been noted in a fragmentary manner, it is only of recent years that the study of childhood, a subject of the gravest importance, has been seriously taken up by Perez and others.
The child lives in the present; the emotion or the desire of the moment is large enough to blot out for him the whole world; he has no foresight, and is the easier given up to his instincts and passions; our passions, as Hobbes said, bring us near to children. Children are naturally egoists; they will commit all enormities, sometimes, to enlarge their egoistic satisfaction. They are cruel and inflict suffering on animals out of curiosity, enjoying the manifestations of pain. They are thieves for the gratification of their appetites, especially the chief, gluttony, and they are unscrupulous and often cunning liars, not hesitating to put the blame on the innocent when their misdeeds are discovered. The charm of childhood for those who are not children lies largely in these qualities of frank egotism and reckless obedience to impulse.
Most people who can recollect their own childhood--an ability which does not, however, appear to be very common--can remember how they have sometimes yielded to overmastering impulses which, although of a trivial character, were distinctly criminal. The trifling, or even normal character of such acts in childhood is too often forgotten by those who have to deal with children. Mayhew, writing in 1862, when these childish “crimes” were still taken seriously to a terrible extent, remarks:--“On our return from Tothill Fields, we consulted with some of our friends as to the various peccadilloes of their youth, and though each we asked had grown to be a man of some little mark in the world, both for intellect and honour, they, one and all, confessed to having committed in their younger days many of the very “crimes” for which the boys at Tothill Fields were incarcerated. For ourselves, we will frankly confess, that at Westminster School, where we passed some seven years of our boyhood, such acts were daily perpetrated; and yet if the scholars had been sent to the House of Correction, instead of Oxford or Cambridge, to complete their education, the country would now have seen many of our playmates working among the convicts in the dockyards, rather than lending dignity to the senate or honour to the bench.”
In many persons the impulses of childhood persist in a more or less subdued form in adult age. The impulses are not yielded to so readily, or at all, but they are still felt. The examples have often been quoted of the distinguished alienist, Morel, who, as he narrates himself, seeing a workman leaning over one of the Seine bridges, felt so strong an impulse to throw the man into the river, that he had to rush away from the spot; and of Humboldt’s nurse, who, at the sight and touch of the new-born child’s rosy flesh, felt the temptation to kill it, and was obliged to entrust it to some one else. These morbid impulses are perhaps more closely related to insanity than to criminality, but it is on a borderland that is common to both. Both child and criminal are subject to such impulses.
In the criminal, we may often take it, there is an arrest of development. The criminal is an individual who, to some extent, remains a child his life long--a child of larger growth and with greater capacity for evil. This is part of the atavism of criminals. Mental acuteness is often observed among criminal children; it is rare among criminal adults. There is evidently arrest of development at a very early age, probably a precocious union of the cranial bones. Among savages, also, the young children are bright, but development stops at a very early age. All who have come very intimately in contact with criminals have noted their resemblance to children. Thus that profound and sympathetic observer, Dostoieffsky, in his _Recollections of the Dead-House_, summing up some of the light-hearted, easy-going characters of the convicts, says: “In one word they were children, true children, even at forty years of age.” And elsewhere he quotes a saying concerning the exile: “The convict is a child; he throws himself on everything that he sees.”
(_c_) It is interesting to consider the sexual variations of criminality. Women are everywhere less criminal than men. The proportion varies, however, greatly in different countries. In France it is usually about 4 to 1; in the United States it is about 12 to 1; in Italy and Spain the proportion of women is very small. In Great Britain, on the other hand, the proportion of criminal women is, except during the last year or two (owing probably to changes in police regulations), extremely large, especially for the greater crimes. There has indeed been on the whole a steady increase in the proportion of women criminals in England; in 1834 they were less than 1 in 5; of recent years they have been more than 1 in 4. The greater tendency to recidivism in women has everywhere been noted, and is extremely well marked in England, where it is rapidly increasing, and is associated, it seems, with growing habits of alcoholism. Of incorrigible recidivists a very large proportion in Great Britain are women; and 40 per cent. of the women committed to prison during 1888 had been previously committed more than ten times.[82] Even among the juvenile offenders discharged from reformatory and industrial schools as incorrigible, it appears that the proportion of girls is double that of boys.
While men criminals are everywhere in a more or less marked majority, there are certain crimes which both sexes commit about equally, and these are usually the most serious. Thus, as Quetelet remarked, nearly as many women are poisoners as men, and of parricides 50 per cent. are women. The crimes of women are essentially domestic, against fathers and husbands and children. A very large proportion are, directly or indirectly, of a sexual character. It is curious in this connection to note that Marro finds marked physical resemblances between women criminals generally and the class of male criminals guilty of sexual offences; such are less length of arms and hands, less cranial capacity and greater extension of the transverse curve of the head.
It is worth while to enumerate briefly the probable causes of the sexual variation in criminality. There are perhaps five special causes acting on women: (1) physical weakness, (2) sexual selection, (3) domestic seclusion, (4) prostitution, (5) maternity.
There are firstly the physical and psychical traditions of the race embodied in the organisation of men and women. The extreme but rather spasmodic energy of men favours outbursts of violence, while the activities of women are at a lower but more even level, and their avocations have tended to develop the conservative rather than the destructive instincts. Apart from this, even if women were trained in violence, the superior strength of men would still make crimes of violence in women very hazardous and dangerous. Under existing circumstances, when a woman wants a crime committed, she can usually find a man to do it for her.
I have already frequently had occasion to note the approximation of criminal women in physical character to ordinary men. This has always been more or less carefully recorded, both in popular proverbs and in the records of criminal trials. Thus Sarah Chesham, a notorious wholesale poisoner, who killed several children, including her own, as well as her husband, was described as “a woman of masculine proportions;” and a girl called Bouhours, who was executed at Paris at the age of twenty-two, for murdering and robbing several men who had been her lovers, is described as of agreeable appearance, and of sweet and feminine manners, but of remarkable muscular strength; she dressed as a man; her chief pleasure was to wrestle with men, and her favourite weapon was the hammer.
Marro has recently suggested that sexual selection has exerted a marked influence in diminishing the criminality of women. Masculine, unsexed, ugly, abnormal women--the women, that is, most strongly marked with the signs of degeneration, and therefore the tendency to criminality--would be to a large extent passed by in the choice of a mate, and would tend to be eliminated. It seems likely that this selection may have, at all events to some extent, existed, and exerted influence; it is, however, not universally accepted.
The domestic seclusion of women is an undoubted factor in the determination of the amount of women’s criminality. In the Baltic provinces of Russia, where the women share the occupations of the men, the level of feminine criminality is very high. In Spain, the most backward of the large countries of Europe, where the education of women is at a very low level, and the women lead a very domesticated life, the level of feminine criminality is extremely low; the same is true, to a less extent, of Italy. In England, on the other hand, which has taken the lead in enlarging the sphere of women’s work, the level of feminine criminality has for half a century been rising. Reference may perhaps also here be made to the fact that there is much more criminality among Irishwomen in England than among Irishwomen at home who lead a more domestic life. It is a very significant fact that Marro found among his women criminals, in marked contrast to the men, a very large proportion (35 out of 41) who possessed some more or less honourable occupation; a large proportion of the women also were possessed of some property. It may not be out of place to observe that the growing criminality of women is but the inevitable accident of a beneficial transition. Criminality, we must remember, is a natural element of life, regulated by natural laws, and as women come to touch life at more various points and to feel more of its stress, they will naturally develop the same tendency to criminality as exists among men, just as they are developing the same diseases, such as general paralysis. Our efforts must be directed, not to the vain attempt to repress the energies of women, but to the larger task of improving the conditions of life, and so diminishing the tendency to criminality among both sexes alike.
Prostitution exerts an undoubted influence in diminishing the criminality of women, in spite of the fact that the prostitute generally lives on the borderland of crime. If, however, it were not for prostitution there would be no alternative but crime for the large numbers of women who are always falling out of the social ranks. As it is, in those families in which the brothers become criminals, the sisters with considerable regularity join the less outcast class of prostitutes; sometimes in league with their criminal brothers, but yet possessing a more recognised means of livelihood. There will be something more to say on this point a little later on.
The strongest barrier of all against criminality in women is maternity. The proportion of criminals among young women with children is very small. Among men criminals the celibates are in a very large majority, but among women maternity acts as a still greater deterrent. Not only are young married women comparatively free from crime, but among married women, as Bertillon pointed out, those with children are distinctly less criminal than those without children. Of Marro’s 41 criminal women, although all but one (who was undeveloped and ugly) confessed to having had sexual relationships, 12 had never been married, 10 were widows, 14 were married, but of these 7 (50 per cent.) were separated from their husbands. There is some significance, doubtless, also in the fact that while in men the maximum of criminality falls at about the age of 25, in women this is not so. That is the age of maximum child-bearing; the age of maximum criminality in women is delayed until nearly the age of 35. In the 130 women condemned for premeditated murder, and studied by Salsotto, the average age was 34. Marro found that for nearly every class of criminals the average age of the women was much higher than that of the men. It is clear that the woman without children is heavily handicapped in the race of life; the stress that is upon her is written largely in these facts concerning criminality.[83] One might suspect this beforehand. Crime is simply a word to signify the extreme anti-social instincts of human beings; the life led most closely in harmony with the social ends of existence must be the most free from crime.