The instinctive criminal, in his fully developed form, is a moral monster. In him the absence of guiding or inhibiting social instincts is accompanied by unusual development of the sensual and self-seeking impulses. The _occasional criminal_, as he is usually called, is a much commoner and more normally constituted person. In him the sensual instincts need not be stronger than usual, and the social elements, though weaker than usual, need not be absent. Weakness is the chief characteristic of the occasional criminal; when circumstances are not quite favourable he succumbs to temptation. Occasional crime is one of the commonest forms of crime; it is also that for whose existence and development society is most directly responsible; very often it might equally well be called social crime. Here is an example. Two lads of honest life, the sons of agricultural labourers, being unable to obtain a scanty subsistence at home, start one day in a fit of desperation for a distant town in search of work. Without food or shelter, sleeping under a hedge, they reach a farm-house. Looking through a window they see a plum-pudding; they open the window, seize the pudding, and go a few yards off to devour it. In a few hours they are on the way to the lock-up, to receive, later on, a sentence of six months’ imprisonment. “At the close of it they were provided with an outfit and an introduction to an employer of labour in Canada; and when we last heard of them they were doing extremely well, with excellent prospects before them.”[8] This sequel (which would have been better had it come before the seizure of the plum-pudding) proves that we are not dealing with instinctive criminals. Take another case mentioned by the same writer. A woman with a drunken husband who spends his last penny in the public-house, is driven by actual starvation to commit her first crime. She steals a small piece of meat to feed her hungry children. She is sent to prison. “We heard of her afterwards leading a most consistent and almost saintly life.” These persons, it is clear, were not the criminals but the victims; society was the criminal. Now and then, as in the cases just cited, it happens that the occasional criminal who is thus recklessly flung into prison is assisted to live a human life. In the great majority of cases he is ruined for life, familiarised with the prison, introduced to bad company. We have, as well as we are able, manufactured him into what is called the _habitual criminal_.
The steps by which the occasional criminal, aided on the one hand by neglect, on the other by the hot-bed of the prison, develops into the habitual criminal are slow and subtle; that is one of the tragedies of life. M. Joly has recorded the experiences of the police concerning the thefts that take place at the great Parisian shops, the Louvre, and the Bon-Marché. “This is the beginning. From a gallery one sees a woman--rich or well-to-do-who buys a certain number of objects and pays for them; but without asking permission she takes some little, almost insignificant object--a little ribbon to fasten a parcel, a more commodious paper-bag. No one will say that she is stealing; no one will think of speaking to her or disturbing her. But she is observed and even watched, for one expects to see her again some time after taking, as she walks along, say, a flower worth twenty-five centimes. A little later she will appropriate an article of greater value, and henceforth she will take for the pleasure of taking. The inclination, which at the beginning had in it nothing instinctive or fatal, will grow as all habits grow. Another time a woman who had no intention of stealing, but whose conscience is probably elastic, grows impatient at the delay in attending to her wants. It is, let us suppose, a purse worth ninety-five centimes, and the shopman is busy with purchasers of more expensive objects. Suddenly the woman nervously yields to a swift temptation; she does not wish to wait longer, but instead of replacing the purse on the counter she slips it into her pocket and turns on her heels without paying. ‘From that moment,’ said the inspector, ‘_she is lost_; she will come back to steal, but she will steal intentionally and deliberately.’”[9] The world and the criminal’s friends are startled some day by a great crime, but that crime is linked on to a chain of slight, occasional, sporadic vices and offences. Sometimes we can trace out these links. Barré and Lebiez were two young French criminals who attracted attention some years ago. They were both of good family, both very intelligent, the former about to enter on a commercial life, the latter on the eve of becoming a doctor of medicine. At this point they murdered an old woman to rob her, and cut up the body to dispose of it. The crime was deliberate and carefully prepared; there was nothing romantic or obviously morbid about it, and a few days after the crime Lebiez delivered an able and eloquent lecture on Darwinism and the Church. In each of these young men there were, M. Joly observes, nine stages in the path of crime. Let us first note those of Barré:--1. His employer is obliged to dismiss him on account of misconduct with a servant girl. 2. He writes untruthful letters to his family, describing habits of work which do not exist. 3. He acquires an extravagant taste for speculation on the Stock Exchange. So far his course, though not exemplary, was one that has often enough been traversed by persons who have never reached the scaffold. 4. He speculates with the savings which two girls had entrusted to him for investment. 5. To obtain money from his father, to whom he talks of establishing himself, he forges letters. 6. He embezzles various sums of money by an aggravated form of the same process. 7. He steals a watch from a prostitute’s rooms. 8. He steals eight francs from the same. 9. He decides on the murder of the old milk-woman with whom he has had business relations, and whose savings, as he knows, are considerable. Lebiez went through the following stages:--1. His violent language to his mother is remarked. 2. He is, notwithstanding very small means, known to be living with a mistress, and he procures obscene photographs. 3. On account of irregularity he is sent away from an institution where he gave lessons. 4. He speculates on the Stock Exchange, which, being poor, he could only do by accepting profit and refusing to meet loss. 5. He steals books from his friends and sells them. 6. He several times leaves his lodgings clandestinely, without paying the rent. 7. He participates in the theft of the watch by Barré. 8. He shares the profits of the second theft. 9. They decide on the murder together. Such are the slow steps by which the occasional criminal becomes the _habitual criminal_ or the _professional criminal_. It must be remembered that the lines which separate these from each other, and both from the instinctive criminal, are often faint or imperceptible. “Natural groups,” as Mr. Galton remarks, “have nuclei but no outlines.” In the habitual criminal, who is usually unintelligent, the conservative forces of habit predominate; the professional criminal, who is usually intelligent, is guided by rational motives, and voluntarily takes the chances of his mode of life; while in the instinctive criminal the impulses usually appear so strong, and the moral element so conspicuously absent, that we feel we are in the presence of a natural monster. It is not, however, always possible to make these distinctions.
The professional criminal, though not of modern development, adapts himself to modern conditions. In intelligence, and in anthropological rank generally, he represents the criminal aristocracy. He has deliberately chosen a certain method of earning his living. It is a profession which requires great skill, and in which, though the risks are great, the prizes are equally great.[10] Lacenaire, a famous criminal of the beginning of the century, has sometimes been regarded as the type of the professional criminal, and to complete this classificatory outline it may be well to sketch his career. He was born at Lyons about the beginning of the century, received a good average education, and was very intelligent, though not distinguishing himself at college. He was ambitious and, at the same time, incapable of sustained work. He came to Paris to study law; but his father’s resources were inadequate, and he became a clerk, frequently changing his situation, growing tired of work at length, and engaging as a soldier. So far no offence is recorded. When he returned to France his father, become bankrupt, had fled. Some friends came to the young man’s help, and gave him 500 francs. He hastened to Paris and spent it in enjoyment. Then he entered the literary Bohemia, and wrote verses and political articles, fighting a duel with a nephew of Benjamin Constant and killing him. He said, later on, that the sight of his victim’s agony had caused him no emotion. Soon his love of enjoyment outran his means of getting money, though these might have been considerable had he cared to work steadily, and he obtained money by theft and swindling. Condemned to prison, he soon formed connections with professional criminals, and associated them in his schemes and joined them in their orgies. He adopted false names, multiplied forgeries and disguises, and preyed actively on society. After an orgy at this time he committed a murder, and he attempted to murder a man who had won a large sum from him in gambling. The crime and the attempt both remained unpunished. Gifted with intelligence, and still more with vanity and audacity, Lacenaire continued his career of systematic crime until finally he met the guillotine. He was a professional criminal, but also, it will be seen, he was something of an habitual, something of an instinctive criminal.[11] We have glanced briefly at the circles of crime--circles that extend from heaven to very murky depths of hell, and that yet are not far from any one of us. It is still necessary to touch on the various ways in which the causes and nature of this vast field of crime may be approached.
There are, first, the _cosmic_ causes of crime; that is to say, all the influences of the external inorganic world, the influence of temperature on crime, the increase of crimes of violence in hot weather, the periodicity of other kinds of crime, the influence of climate, the influence of diet.
Then there is the _biological_ factor. Under this head we include the consideration of all the personal peculiarities of the individual, anatomical, physiological, psychological. These peculiarities may be atavistic, atypic, or morbid.
Lastly, there is the _social_ factor in crime. Criminal sociology deals with the production of crime by social influences, and by economic perturbations. Infanticide is nearly always related to the social factor; and the study of the various social influences which promote or hinder infanticide is extremely instructive. The relations between crimes against the person and the price of alcohol, and between crimes against property and the price of wheat, also belong to this department of the study of crime. Society prepares crimes, as Quetelet said; the criminal is the instrument that executes them. “The social environment,” Lacassagne has well said, “is the cultivation medium of criminality; the criminal is the microbe, an element which only becomes important when it finds the medium which causes it to ferment: _every society has the criminals that it deserves_.”
It is impossible to over-estimate the importance of the social factor in crime. To some extent it even embraces the others, and can be made to regulate and neutralise them. But we cannot deal wisely with the social factor of crime, nor estimate the vast importance of social influences in the production or prevention of crime, unless we know something of the biology of crime, of the criminal’s anatomical, physiological, and psychological nature. This book is concerned with the study of the criminal man.
CHAPTER II.
THE STUDY OF THE CRIMINAL.
When Homer described Thersites as ugly and deformed, with harsh or scanty hair, and a pointed head, like a pot that had collapsed to a peak in the baking-- ἄισχιστος δὲ ἀνὴρ ὑπὸ Ἴλιον ἦλθεν. φολκὸς ἔην, χωλὸς δ’ ἕτερον πόδα. τὼ δέ οἱ ὤμω κυρτώ, ἐπὶ στῆθος συνοχωκότε. αὐτὰρ ὕπερθεν φοζὸς ἔην κεφαλὴν, ψεδνὴ δ’ ἐπενήνοθε λάχνη --he furnished evidence as to the existence of a criminal type of man. These physical characters of Thersites are among those which in these last days have been submitted to scientific observation, and to statistics, and have been largely justified. The epigrammatic utterances in which primitive peoples crystallise and pass on their philosophy and science, include many sayings which prove the remote period at which men began to perceive the organic peculiarities which separate the criminal man from the average man. There are some proverbs of this character, such as those indicating the widespread dislike of the red-haired, for which no solid justification has yet been found; but among various races, and in many countries, numerous proverbs are in harmony with the results of modern research: _A vultu vitium_, the old Roman saying; _Au vis_ [_visage_] _le vice_, the old French saying; “Salute from afar the beardless man and the bearded woman;” “Distrust the woman with a man’s voice;” “A pale face is worse than the itch.” Such are a few that might be easily increased.
At a very early period such popular generalisations as these were embodied in that empirical science of physiognomy, which found many professors among the Greeks and Romans. According to the well-known story, a Greek physiognomist who examined Socrates’ face judged that the philosopher was brutal, sensuous, and inclined to drunkenness; and Socrates declared to his disciples that such, although he had overcome it, was his natural disposition. He was himself a physiognomist; he disliked a certain man who was of pale and dark complexion, such signs, he said, indicating envy and murder; the peculiar dark and pallid complexion of the instinctive criminal has of late years been frequently noted.
Aristotle, that great master of all the sciences, clearly recognised not merely the physiognomic signs of habits, vices, and crimes, including many signs that are in accordance with modern scientific observation, but he also observed a connection between the shape of the head and the mental disposition, and he recognised the hereditary character of vicious and criminal instincts. Galen, who inaugurated the experimental study of the brain, adopted the views of Aristotle, and pointed out the influence of the abuse of alcohol in the production of crime; he was of opinion, also, anticipating a modern doctrine, that when the criminal is a criminal by nature he ought to be destroyed, not in revenge, but for the same reason that scorpions and vipers are destroyed.[12] Although these feeble beginnings of criminal anthropology received the sanction of the highest scientific authorities, as well as of the people, and later on a mediæval law declared that if two persons fell under suspicion of crime the uglier or more deformed was to be regarded as more probably guilty, they were not universally admitted, and some, like Pliny, regarded it as absurd that the outward form could indicate the inward disposition. Whatever art or science there was in the matter was left, then and long after, to the physiognomists, of whom Polemon may be taken as a distinguished example, and these were ready to supply the most elaborate physical signs to correspond to any vicious or criminal disposition. Polemon wrote of the criminal that he was of pallid complexion, with long hair, large ears, and small eyes, and he proceeded to give the characteristics of various classes of criminals, his observations often showing keen insight. This pseudo-science was passed on from physiognomist to physiognomist, usually with added absurdities, until in the sixteenth century we reach the Neapolitan Dalla Porta, at once the greatest (and except Lavater the last) of the physiognomists of the old school and the first of the new. He treated judicial astrology with contempt, and at the same time wrote a treatise of celestial physiognomy; he gathered up all that his predecessors had done, and at the same time laid the foundations of a more scientific treatment.
Passing by Lavater, with his fine intuition and genial humanity, which formed, however, no epoch in the scientific study of criminal anthropology, at the beginning of the present century we reach Gall, a very great figure in the history of science, and the representative of the most important moment in the development of our knowledge of the brain.
Before speaking of Gall, however, it is necessary to give a word, in passing, to Grohmann, who slightly preceded him, and who anticipated many of the conclusions relative to facial and cranial characteristics reached by modern criminal anthropologists. Thus, in 1820, he wrote:--“I have often been impressed in criminals, and especially in those of defective development, by the prominent ears, the shape of the cranium, the projecting cheek-bones, the large lower jaws, the deeply-placed eyes, the shifty, animal-like gaze.”
Gall thrust aside for ever the credulous fancies of the physiognomists; and he has been described, not altogether without reason, as the founder of the modern science of criminal anthropology. He was certainly its most brilliant pioneer. Lavater believed in the homogeneity of the human organism, but he was not a man of science, and he had been content to study the surface of the body; Gall, with true scientific instinct, tried to get to the root of the matter; following the great English anatomist, Willis, who had made some attempt at cerebral localisation, he studied the brain, sought to differentiate the functions of its various parts, and the effects of its varying development on the skull.
For Gall the varying development of the brain was the cause of the divergent mental and moral qualities of the individual; he was firmly convinced that all the facts of psychical life are rooted in the physical organisation; he wished to write the natural history of every primitive moral and intellectual force, in health as well as in disease. To the best of his ability he carried out this programme in detail, by an unceasing study of all the varieties of the brain and of the living head that he could find; he pursued his studies throughout Europe, in lunatic asylums and in prisons, as well as among the ordinary population, and he foresaw the extent of the applications of the science he was opening up to medicine and to law, to morality and to education. While his work extended far beyond the borders of what we should now call criminal anthropology,[13] he devoted much attention to the problems of the criminal organisation, and even to its varieties, many of his observations according well with the results of recent investigation. More than this, following Galen and Diderot (who had written, fifty years earlier, “The evil-doer is one whom we must destroy, not punish”), he clearly advocated a method of dealing with the criminal which is now widely regarded as the only right and reasonable method. “There can be no question,” he said, “of culpability or of justice in the severe sense; the question is of the necessity of society preventing crime. The measure of culpability and the measure of punishment cannot be determined by a study of the illegal act, but only by a study of the individual committing it.” In his great work, _Les Fonctions du Cerveau_ (1822), Gall has summed up his conclusions.
It has been the misfortune of this great and truly scientific investigator to give origin to an empiric art of phrenology which took the place of the old art of physiognomy he had done so much to destroy. He has consequently, until recent years, been popularly known chiefly by his mistakes, especially perhaps by his localisation of the sexual instinct in the cerebellum--a localisation, however, which he supported by a large body of evidence. The influence of dubious phrenological doctrines hardened into a system somewhat impairs the value of Lauvergne’s _Les Forçats_ (1841), which seems to have been the first book of any importance devoted entirely to the study of convict nature, physical, moral, and intellectual. Lauvergne, who was the chief medical officer to the hospital for convicts at Toulon, appears to have been a man of humanitarian instincts, whose wit and _bonhomie_ enabled him to maintain friendly relations with the criminals he was studying; he had little capacity for scientific analysis, but he wrote fully of what he had seen and known, and his book contains many keen observations which have been since verified. He fully recognises also the importance of the social factor in the production of criminals.
Lauvergne had observed how many of his subjects were insane or diseased; the students of the criminal who followed him all insisted on the pathological element. Dally maintained that the criminal and the lunatic are identical, and both equally irresponsible. Prosper Lucas, in his valuable _Traité philosophique de l’hérédite_ (1847), showed how deeply rooted in the organism are the morbid tendencies of crime. Lélut compared the length and breadth of head in criminals. Voisin noted their defects in cerebral organisation. It was, however, Morel who, in his _Des Dégénérescences_ (1857), chiefly developed this aspect of criminality, and his influence is still strong among French students of the criminal. Morel regarded crime as one of the forms taken on by degeneration in the individual or the family; and degeneration he defined as “a morbid deviation from the normal type of humanity.” The causes of degeneration which he recognised were intoxications, famines, social environment, industries, unhealthy occupations, poverty, heredity, pathological transformations, moral causes. “My principal aim,” he says, “has been the study of these causes, and of the influences which they exercise, firstly on the constitution of individuals, and afterwards on that of their descendants.” Among these causes he gives a chief place to the manifold effects on the children of alcoholism in the parents. In his pamphlet _De la Formation du Type dans les variétés dégénérés_ (1864), Morel proposed to give the name of morbid anthropology to “that part of the natural science of man, the aim of which is to study the characters due to certain special diseased influences, as well as to hereditary transmissions of bad nature.”
Despine, by his great work, _Psychologie Naturelle_ (1868), made a new and important step in criminology. Leaving aside the study of the criminal’s physical nature, he sought to make an exhaustive study of his mental nature. No one has done more than Despine to prove that what we should now call the instinctive criminal is, on the psychological side, a natural anomaly, a mental monstrosity. He brought into clear relief the unforeseeing imprudence, the entire lack of moral sensibility and of remorse, which characterise the instinctive criminal. He recognised that the criminal is not necessarily an insane or diseased person, and he showed that his abnormality is not of the kind that intellectual education can remedy. “No physiologist,” he said, “has yet occupied himself with the insanity of the sane;” he considered the criminal as “morally mad,” and therefore irresponsible. Maudsley, from an opposite philosophic standpoint, came to very similar conclusions. Without bringing any fresh contribution of importance, he re-affirmed emphatically the conclusions already reached. Speaking in his _Responsibility in Mental Disease_ (1872) of instinctive criminals, he remarks, “It is a matter of observation that this criminal class constitutes a degenerate or morbid variety of mankind, marked by peculiarly low physical and mental characteristics.” Like Despine, he drew from this the conclusion, since widely accepted, that the criminal, being morally insane and usually incurable, should be treated in the same way as the intellectually insane person. “If the matter be considered deeply, it may appear that it would, perhaps, in the end make little difference whether the offender were sentenced in anger and sent to the seclusion of prison, or were sentenced more in sorrow than in anger, and consigned to the same sort of seclusion under the name of an asylum. The change would probably not lead to an increase or to a decrease in the number of crimes committed in a year.” An artist as much as a man of science, master of a sombre and weighty style, illumined by vivid flashes of imagination, Maudsley by his numerous works popularised the new ideas, and is justly regarded abroad as a pioneer of criminal anthropology.
Broca, who, by initiating the Anthropological Society of Paris in 1859, has been regarded as the founder of the modern science of anthropology, gave attention also to the special science of criminal anthropology by noting the peculiarities of the skulls and brains of criminals. At the Exeter meeting of the British Association in 1869, Dr. G. Wilson read a paper on “The Moral Imbecility of Habitual Criminals as exemplified by cranial measurements.” He had measured 464 heads of criminals, and found that habitual thieves presented well-marked signs of insufficient cranial development, specially anteriorly. “The cranial deficiency,” he observed, “is associated with real physical deterioration. Forty per cent. of all the convicts are invalids, more or less; and that percentage is largely increased in the professional thief class.” He argued that a prisoner must be treated on reforming principles, and not allowed unrestricted liberty until there was reasonable evidence to show that he would not prove dangerous to society. About the same time, also (in 1870), J. Bruce Thomson, Resident-Surgeon to the General Prison for Scotland at Perth, published in the _Journal of Mental Science_ a summary of his observations on over 5000 prisoners. From the decisiveness of his utterances and the large number of prisoners of whom he was able to speak, this summary gave a stimulus to the study of the criminal throughout Europe. Thomson enumerated some of the physical characteristics of the instinctive criminal now generally recognised, pointed out the semi-imbecility prevalent among the juvenile criminals under his observation, the frequency of accumulated morbid appearances at _post-mortem_ examinations, and the large proportion of cases at Perth needing treatment for mental diseases soon after admission, “apparently from congenital causes.” Thomson’s facts and opinions were too curtly, and, probably, too emphatically stated. Dr. Nicolson, writing also in the same journal from 1873 to 1875, dealt with the morbid psychology of the criminal, the unstable, emotional element in him, his proneness to delusions, his insensibility, and his weak-mindedness. Dr. Nicolson’s papers, all written before the latest and most fruitful era of criminal anthropology began, were, so far as I have been able to trace, the latest original contributions from the scientific side made in England to the study of the criminal. Such knowledge as has been furnished since has come from writers who have, almost of necessity, dealt with what may be called the mental and social symptomatology of criminals. Among the books which supply more or less valuable or interesting information of this kind may be mentioned the Rev. J. W. Horsley’s _Jottings from Jail_, Michael Davitt’s _Leaves from a Prison Diary_, and the _Scenes from a Silent World_, by a Prison Visitor, which appeared in _Blackwood’s Magazine_ during 1889. An earlier book of this class, Mayhew’s _London Labour and the London Poor_ (vol. iv.), is perhaps still the most valuable.
Italy is to-day the home of criminal anthropology, and not of criminal anthropology only, but of all the sciences that are connected with crime and the criminal; the Zanardelli criminal code, which has recently become law, while by no means entirely satisfactory from the scientific point of view, shows the influence of the new movement. In this respect Italy remains true to traditions that are two thousand years old; in the sixteenth century Italy was still the centre of studies in penal law, and, to keep to modern times, it is enough to mention the great names of Beccaria, and, still more recently, Romagnosi. It was under the auspices of Beltrani-Scalia, well known in connection with prison reform, that the earlier Italian studies in criminal anthropology were published, from 1870 onwards, in the _Rivista delle discipline carcerarie_, a journal which continues to publish valuable monographs. In this journal Lombroso published, in 1872, the results of some investigations which he had made on prisoners at Padua.
Professor Cesare Lombroso, of Turin, occupies a position of such importance in the development of criminal anthropology that it is necessary to have a clear idea of his aims and methods and the nature of his achievement. Born in 1836, of Venetian parentage, the various and restless activities of Lombroso’s career are characteristic of the man who has been all his life opening up new paths of investigation and enlarging the horizon of human knowledge. At the age of eleven he composed romances, poems, and tragedies in the manner of Alfieri; at twelve he developed a passion for classical antiquity, and published two small works on Roman archæology. At thirteen he was attracted to the study of sociology from a linguistic point of view (chiefly, we are told, with relation to Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, and Coptic); at the same time he was drawn to natural science, being interested especially in the formation of crystals, and before entering the University he had published two books of a somewhat evolutionary character. While a student he was led, by the combined study of ancient religions and of medicine, to the subject of mental diseases. He began with studies on cretinism in Lombardy and Liguria, his conclusions being afterwards adopted by Virchow and others. In the eventful year of 1859 he became first a soldier, and afterwards a military surgeon. In 1862 he was in charge of the department of mental diseases at Pavia University, and he initiated there an institution for