Enrico Ferri (1901)

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When a crime is committed in the same place, attracting public attention either through the atrocity of the case or the strangeness of the criminal deed – for instance, one that is not connected with bloodshed, but with intellectual fraud – there are at once two tendencies that make themselves felt in the public conscience.  One of them, pervading the overwhelming majority of individual consciences, asks: How is this?  What for?  Why did that man commit such a crime?  This question is asked by everybody and occupies mostly the attention of those who do not look upon the case from the point of view of criminology.  On the other hand, those who occupy themselves with criminal law represent the other tendency, which manifests itself when acquainted with news of this crime.  This is a limited portion of the public conscience, which tries to study the problem from the standpoint of the technical jurist.  The lawyers, the judges, the officials of the police, ask themselves: What is the name of the crime committed by that man under such circumstances?  Must it be classed as murder or patricide, attempted or incompleted manslaughter, and, if directed against property, is it theft, or illegal appropriation, or fraud?  And the entire apparatus of practical criminal justice forgets at once the first problem, which occupies the majority of public conscience, the question of the causes that led to this crime, in order to devote itself exclusively to the technical side of the problem, which constitutes the juridical anatomy of the inhuman and antisocial deed perpetrated by the criminal.

                In these two tendencies you have a photographic reproduction of the two schools of criminology.  The classic school, which looks upon the crime as a juridical problem, occupies itself with its name, its definition, its juridical analysis, leaves the personality of the criminal in the background and remembers it only so far as exceptional circumstances explicitly stated in the law books refer to it: whether he is a minor, deaf-mute, whether it is a case of insanity, whether he was drunk at the time the crime was committed.  Only in these strictly defined cases does the classic school occupy itself theoretically with the personality of the criminal […]

                Before we study crime from the point of view of a juristic phenomenon, we must study the causes to which the annual recurrence of crimes in all countries is due.  These are natural causes, which I have classified under the three heads of anthropological, telluric and social.  Every crime, from the smallest to the most atrocious, is the result of the interaction of these three causes, the anthropological condition of the criminal, the telluric environment in which he is living, and the social environment in which he is born, living and operating.  It is a vain beginning to separate the meshes of this net of criminality.  There are still those who would maintain the one-sided standpoint that the origin of crime may be traced to only one of these elements, for instance, to the social element alone.  So far as I am concerned, I have combatted this opinion from the very inauguration of the positive school of criminology, and I combat it today.  It is certainly easy enough to think that the entire origin of all crime is due to the unfavourable social conditions in which the criminal lives.  But an objective, methodical, observation demonstrates that social conditions alone do not suffice to explain the origin of criminality, although it is true that the prevalence of the influence of social conditions is an incontestable fact in the case of the greater number of crimes, especially of the lesser ones.  But there are crimes which cannot be explained by the influence of social conditions alone.  If you regard the general condition of misery as the sole source of criminality, then you cannot get around the difficulty that out of one thousand individuals living in misery from the day of their birth to that of their death only one hundred or two hundred become criminals, while the other nine hundred or eight hundred either sink into biological weakness, or become harmless maniacs, or commit suicide without perpetrating any crime.  If poverty were the sole determining cause, one thousand out of one thousand poor ought to become criminals.  If only two hundred become criminals, while one hundred commit suicide, one hundred end as maniacs, and the other six hundred remain honest in their social condition, the poverty alone is not sufficient to explain criminality.  We must add the anthropological and telluric factor.  Only by means of these three elements of natural influence can criminality be explained. Of course, the influence of either the anthropological or telluric or social element varies from case to case.  If you have a case of simple theft, you may have a far greater influence of the social factor than of the anthropological factor.  On the other hand, if you have a case of murder, the anthropological element will have a far greater influence than the social.  And so on in every case of crime, and every individual that you will have to judge on the bench of the criminal.

                The anthropological factor.  It is precisely here that the genius of Cesare Lombroso established a new science, because in his search after the causes of crime he studied the anthropological condition of the criminal.  This condition concerns not only the organic and anatomical construction, but also the psychological, it represents the organic and psychological personality of the criminal.  Every one of us inherits at birth, and personifies in life, a certain organic and psychological combination.  This constitutes the individual factor of human activity, which either remains normal through life, or becomes criminal or insane.  The anthropological factor, then, must not be restricted, as some laymen would restrict it, to the study of the form of the skull of the bones of the criminal.  Lombroso had to begin his studies with the anatomical conditions of the criminal, because the skulls may be studied most easily in the museums.  But he continued by also studying the brain and the other physiological conditions of the individual, the state of sensibility, and the circulation of matter.  And this entire series of studies is but a necessary scientific introduction to the study of the psychology of the criminal, which is precisely the one problem that is of direct and immediate importance.  It is this problem which the lawyer and the public prosecutor should solve before discussing the juridical aspect of any crime, for this reveals the causes which induced the criminal to commit a crime […]

                This same anthropological factor also includes that which each one of us has: the race character.  Nowadays the influence of race on the destinies of peoples and persons is much discussed in sociology, and there are one-sided schools that pretend to solve the problems of history and society by means of that racial influence alone, to which they attribute an absolute importance.  But while there are some who maintain that the history of peoples is nothing but the exclusive product of racial character, there are others who insist that the social conditions of peoples and individuals are alone determining.  The one is as much a one-sided and incomplete theory as the other.  The study of collective society or of the single individual has resulted in the understanding that the life of society and of the individual is always the product of the inextricable net of the anthropological, telluric and social elements.  Hence the influence of the race cannot be ignored in the study of nations and personalities, although it is not the exclusive factor which would suffice to explain the criminality of a nation or an individual.  Study, for instance, manslaughter in Italy, and, although you will find it difficult to isolate one of the factors of criminality from the network of other circumstances and conditions that produce it, yet there are such eloquent instances of the influence of racial character, that it would be like denying the existence of daylight if one tried to ignore the influence of the ethnical factor on criminality […]

                Let this be enough so far as the anthropological factor of criminality is concerned.  There are, furthermore, the telluric factors, that is to say, the physical environment in which we live and to which we pay no attention.  It requires much philosophy, said Rousseau, to note the things with which we are in daily contact, because the habitual influence of a thing makes it more difficult to be aware of it.  This applies also to the immediate influence of the physical conditions on human morality, notwithstanding the spiritualist prejudices which still weigh upon our daily lives.  For instance, if it is claimed in the name of supernaturalism and psychism that a man is unhappy because he is vicious, it is equivalent to making a one-sided statement.  For it is just as true to say that a man becomes vicious because he is unhappy.  Want is the strongest poison for the human body and soul.  It is the fountain head of all inhuman and antisocial feeling.  Where want spreads out in wings, there the sentiments of love, of affection, of brotherhood, are impossible.  Take a look at the figures of the peasant in the far-off arid Campagna, the little government employee, the labourer, the little shopkeeper.  When work is assured, when living is certain, though poor, then want, cruel want, is in the distance, and every good sentiment can germinate and develop in the human heart.  The family then lives in a favourable environment, the parents agree, the children are affectionate.  And when the labourer, a bronzed statue of humanity, returns from his smoky shop and meets his white-haired mother, the embodiment of half a century of immaculate virtue and heroic sacrifices, that he can, tired, but assured of his daily bread, give room to feelings of affection, and he will cordially invite his mother to share his frugal meal.  But let the same man, in the same environment, be haunted by the spectre of want and lack of employment, and you will see the moral atmosphere in his family changing as from day into night.  There is no work, and the labourer comes home without any wages.  The wife, who does not know how to feed the children, reproaches her husband with the suffering of his family.  The man, having been turned away from the doors of ten offices, feels his dignity as an honest labourer assailed in the very bosom of his own family, because he has vainly asked society for honest employment.  And the bonds of affection and union are loosened in that family.  Its members no longer agree.  There are too many children, and when the poor old mother approaches her son, she reads in his dark and agitated mien the lack of tenderness and feels in her mother heart that her boy, poisoned by the spectre of want, is perhaps casting evil looks at her and harbouring the unfilial thought: ‘Better an open grave in the cemetery than one more mouth to feed at home!’

                It is true that want alone is not sufficient to prepare the soil in the environment of that suffering family for the roots of real crime and to develop it.  Want will weaken the love and mutual respect among the members of that family, but it will not be strong enough alone to arm the hands of the man for a matricidal deed, unless he should get into a pathological mental condition, which is very exceptional and rare.  But the conclusions of the positive school are confirmed in this case as in any other.  In order that crime may develop, it is necessary that anthropological, social and telluric factors should act together […]

                We have now surveyed briefly the natural genesis of crime as a natural social phenomenon, […] which in any determined moment [acts] upon a personality standing on the cross road of vice and virtue, crime and honesty.  This scientific deduction gives rise to a series of investigations which satisfy the kind and supply it with a real understanding of things, far better than the theory that a man is a criminal because he wants to be.  No, a man commits crime because he finds himself in certain physical and social conditions, from which the evil plant of crime takes life and strength […]

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