It is true that many criminologists, including Prof. Lombroso himself,
are of opinion that the best thing to do with the born criminal is to
kill him at once, since he can be only a curse to himself and others.
Very heroic treatment. We may inquire, Is he to be exterminated at birth
because of certain physical indications of his criminality? Such
neo-Spartanism would scarcely commend itself to any modern society.
Moreover the diagnosis might be wrong, even though we had a perpetual
and incorruptible commission of the learned to sit in inquiry upon every
pink-skinned little suspect three days old! What then? Is he to be let
go, as he is now, until he does some violent deed and then be judged
more hardly because of his natural defect? Either proposition seems not
only heartless and wicked but,--what the respectable world is often more
afraid of being than either,--ludicrous. If one is really a born
criminal he will manifest criminal tendencies in early life, and being
so recognized should be cared for according to the most humane methods
of treating the mentally afflicted.
The second, or criminaloid, class is the most numerous of the three.
These are criminals, first, because being endowed with strong desires
and unequal reasoning powers they cannot maintain the uneven battle
against a society wherein the majority of individuals must all the time
deny their natural appetites, if they are to remain unstained with
crime. They are, in short, the ordinary man (who, it must be admitted,
has a great deal of paste in him) plus an excess of wants of one sort
and another, but generally physical. Society outside of prisons is full
of these criminaloids, who sometimes have in place of the power of
genuine moral resistance a sneaking cunning by which they manage to
steer a shady course between the crime and the punishment.
It is true these people are not pleasant subjects to contemplate; but
then, through that very stage of development the whole human race has
had to pass in its progress from the beast to the man,--the stage, I
mean, of overplus of appetite opposed by weak moral resistance; and if
now some, it is not certain that their number is very great, have
reversed the proportion, it is only because they are the fortunate
inheritors of the results of thousands of years of struggle and failure,
struggle and failure, but _struggle_ again. It is precisely these
criminaloids who are most sinned against by society, for they are the
people who need to have the right of doing things made easy, and who,
when they act criminally, need the most encouragement to help the feeble
and humiliated moral sense to rise again, to try again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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