[5] Moreau, ``Souvenirs de la petite et grande Roquette,'' Paris, 1884, ii. 440. The born criminals and the occasional criminals constitute the majority of the characteristic and diverse types of homicide and thief. Prison governors call them ``gaol-birds.'' They pass on from the police to the judge and to the prison, and from the prison to the police and to the judge, with a regularity which has not yet impaired the faith of law-makers in the efficacy of punishment as a cure for crime.[6] [6] Wayland, ``The Incorrigible,'' in the _Journal of Mental Science_, 1888. Sichart, ``Criminal Incorrigibles.'' No doubt the idea of a born criminal is a direct challenge to the traditional belief that the conduct of every man is the outcome of his free will, or at most of his lack of education rather than of his original physio-psychical constitution. But, in the first place, even public opinion, when not prejudiced in favour of the so-called consequences of irresponsibility, recognises in many familiar and everyday cases that there are criminals who, without being mad, are still not as ordinary men; and the reporters call them ``human tigers,'' ``brutes,'' and the like. And in the second place, the scientific proofs of these hereditary tenden<p 30>cies to crime, even apart from the clinical forms of mental alienation, are now so numerous that it is useless to insist upon them further. The third class is that of the criminals whom, after my prison experience, I have called criminals by contracted habit. These are they who, not presenting the anthropological characteristics of the born criminals, or presenting them but slightly, commit their first crime most commonly in youth, or even in childhood-- almost invariably a crime against property, and far more through moral weakness, induced by circumstances and a corrupting environment, than through inborn and active tendencies. After this, as M. Joly observes, either they are led on by the impunity of their first offences, or, more decisively, prison associations debilitate and corrupt them, morally and physically, the cell degrades them, alcoholism renders them stupid and subject to impulse, and they continually fall back into crime, and become chronically prone to it. And society, which thus abandons them, before and after they leave their prison, to wretchedness, idleness, and temptations, gives them no assistance in their struggle to gain an honest livelihood, even when it does not thrust them back into crime by harassing police regulations, which prevent them from finding or keeping honest employment.[7] [7] Fliche, ``Comment en devient Criminel,'' Paris, 1886.