Holtzendorff, one of the best known of the classical school, frankly confessed that ``the prison systems have made shipwreck.'' So also in Italy we have had disquisitions ``on the futility of repression,'' and in Germany it has been held that ``existing criminal law is powerless against crime.'' Thus the necessity of taking steps to counteract this failure is forced upon us more and more every day. We must proceed either by way of legislative reforms, as effectual as we can make them, but always inspired by reaction against the established prison system, or by a propaganda on scientific lines. The most striking form which has been taken by the latter process is the International Union of Penal Law, which in 1891, two years after its foundation, numbered nearly six hundred members of various nationalities, and which in the second clause of its charter, in spite of the varied reservations of a few members, notably supported the positive theories. The defects of the penal system inspired by the <p 202>theories of the classical school of criminal law, and by the actual regulations of the classical prison school, may be briefly summed up. They are, a fallacious scale of moral responsibility; absolute ignorance and neglect of the physio-psychological types of criminals; intervals between verdict and sentence on the one hand, and between the sentence and its execution on the other, with a consequent abuse of pardons; disastrous practical effects of corruption and of criminal association in prisons; millions of persons condemned to short terms of imprisonment, which are foolish and absurd; and a continuous, inexorable increase of recidivism. So that the tribunals of Europe, as M. Prins observed, with the absolute impersonality of modern justice, allow their sentences to fall upon unhappy wretches as a tap allows water to fall drop by drop upon the ground. Without counting fines or police detention, there were sentenced in Italy, in the ten years 1880-89, to various terms of imprisonment, 587,938 persons by the Pretors, and 465,130 by the Correctional Tribunals. That is, more than a million terms in the minor courts within ten years! And the total number sentenced in Italy to various punishments, by Pretors, Tribunals, and Assize Courts, in the same ten years, was not less than 3,230,000. As for recidivism, without repeating the familiar figures of its annual increase, it will suffice to recall the astounding fact to which I drew attention before the central Commission of Legal Judicial Statistics. <p 203>That is to say, amongst the prisoners condemned in 1887 for simple homicide, there were 224 who had been already condemned, either _*for the same crime_ (63), or for a crime mentioned in the same section of the penal code (181); and even of those condemned for qualified manslaughter, 78 had already been condemned, either _*for the same crime_ (8), or for one of like character.