It is true that occasional offenders deserve consideration, from
the point of view of prevention in particular; but honest folk who
are injured by them deserve it still more.
I do not therefore agree with Garofalo, who proposed at Brussels
that the conditional sentence should be subject to the consent of
the injured party; but I think that it ought not to be permitted
until there has been an indemnification for the victims of the
offence, or at least a guarantee, either by the offender, or
directly by the State.
In short, for occasional criminals who commit slight offences, in
circumstances which show that they are not of a dangerous type, I
say, as I have said already, that reparation of the damage
inflicted would suffice as a defensive measure, without a
conditional sentence of imprisonment
As to the occasional criminals who commit serious offences, for
which reparation alone would not be sufficient, temporary removal
from the scene of the crime should be added in the less serious
cases, whilst in the cases of greater gravity, owing to material
and personal considerations, there should be indefinite
segregation in an agricultural colony, with lighter work and
milder discipline than those prescribed in colonies for born
criminals and recidivists.
The last category is that of criminals through an impulse of
passion, not anti-social but susceptible of excuse, such as love,
honour, and the like.
<p 283>
For these individuals all punishment is clearly useless, at any
rate as a psychological counteraction of crime, for the very
conditions of the psychological convulsion which caused them to
offend precludes any deterrent influence in a legal menace.
I therefore believe that in typical cases of criminals of passion,
where there is no clear demand for mental treatment in a criminal
lunatic asylum, imprisonment is of no use whatever. Strict
reparation of damage will suffice to punish them, whilst they are
punished already by genuine and sincere remorse immediately after
the criminal explosion of their legitimate passion. Temporary
removal from the scene of their crime and from the residence of
the victim's family might be superadded.
Nevertheless it must not be forgotten that I say this in
connection with criminals in whom the passionate impulse is really
exceptional, and who present the physiological and psychical
features of the genuine criminal of passion which I enumerated in
the first chapter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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