The Positive School of Criminology: Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901Ferri, Enrico
Science
The Positive School of Criminology: Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901
Ferri, Enrico
Criminal anthropology
If we wish to apply these standards to an example which today attracts
the attention of all Italy to this noble city, if we desire to carry our
theories into the practice of contemporaneous life, if science is to
respond to the call of life, let us throw a glance at that form of
endemic criminality known as the Camorra in this city, which has taken
root here just as stabbing affrays have in certain centers of Turin, and
the Mafia in certain centers of Sicily. In the first place, we must not
be wilfully blind to facts and refuse to see that the citizens will
protect themselves, if social justice does not do so. And from that to
crime there is but a shot step. But which is the swampy soil in which
this social disease can spread and persist like leprosy in tin
collective organism? It is the economic poverty of the masses, which
lends to intellectual and moral poverty.
You have lately had in Naples a very fortunate struggle, which seems to
have overcome one of the representatives of the high Camorra. But can we
believe that the courageous work of a few public writers has touched the
roots of the Camorra in this city? It would be self-deception to think
so. For we see that plants blossom out again, even after the most
destructive hurricane has passed over them.
The healing of society is not so easy, that a collective plague may be
cured by the courageous acts of one or more individuals. The process is
much slower and more complicated. Nevertheless these episodes are
milestones of victory in the onward march of civilization, which will
paralyze the historical manifestations of social criminality. Here,
then, we have a city in which some hundred thousand people rise every
morning and do not know how to get a living, who have no fixed
occupation, because there is not enough industrial development to reach
that methodical application of labor which lifted humanity out of the
prehistoric forests. Truly, the human race progresses by two uplifting
energies: War and labor.
In primitive and savage society, when the human personality did not know
the check of social discipline, a military discipline held the members
of the tribe together. But war, while useful in primitive society, loses
its usefulness more and more, because it carries within itself the
cancer that paralyzes it.
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