The Criminal

much doubt about the results here recorded; even when they do not agree among themselves, it is still generally possible to account for the divergency by the special ch

ecently remarked, we know considerably less about anthropology to-day than we knew some years ago. The same is true of another related science, the study of insanity. If therefore my conclusions as to the place of the criminal in nature may seem to be somewhat cautious and

iew of the criminal's position. We will glance at (a) the biological beginnings of crime, (b) crime among children, (c) the criminal woman as d

definition of the criminal such a classification can be upheld, and Lomboso himself speaks with less than his usual decision. An act which is common to a whole species cannot reasonably be described as criminal. It may be unjust, even cruel, but it does not thereby necessarily become criminal. If the Dionea Muscipula that

be called criminal; from a horse's point of view this might be regarded as a justifiable ruse. The same may be said of the action of the dog who, finding his favourite place occupied by another dog, went outside and set up such a furious barking that the usurper came out to see what was the matter, when the rightful owner immediately pounced on his old corner. Such a ruse, even though perpetrated against one of the same species, is not anti-social. It is only when we are dealing with animals of the very highest order of intelligence that we find any manifestations that can be at all fairly described as criminal. Thus among the highly intelligent castors, the lazy castor is pitilessly chased away by his fellows, to die of hunger, alone, far fro

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nd the rest, far from being anti-social, subserve frequently some social end, and they outrage, therefore, no social feeling. These acts are not anti-social; and many recent investigations, such as those of élie Reclus, show that there is under the given conditions a cert

s chase away the lazy castor, and for the same reasons. In our societies we have found a use for these people; they minister to our pleasures, and we render them nothing but homage. But if we are wise we shall be very tender in arousing our indignation against the social habits of lower races, even when these involve such an act as parricide, for the distance between ourselves and even the lowest races is quite measurable. Our social code is not far removed from that of the Maori who considered that it was murder to kill the man to whom he had given hospitality, but not murder to ru

as it were to a lower and older social state than that in which he is actually living. It thus happens that our own criminals frequently resemble in physical and psychical characters the normal individuals of a lower race. This is that "atavism" which has been so frequently observed in criminals and so much discussed. It is the necessarily anti-social instinct of this lowlier organised individual which constitutes the crime. This accounts for the fact that,

er of generations ago, the strongest of them might have been chiefs of a tribe.... With the disposition and the habits of uncivilised men which he has inherited from a remote past, the criminal has to live in a country where the majority of the inhabitants have learned new lessons of life, and where he is regarded more and more as an outcast as he strives more and more to fulfil the yearnings of his nature."[76] Tarde, the cautious juge d'instruction, has expressed the same idea in almost the same words: "Some of them at least would have been the ornament and the mora

o one statement the various real or apparent atavistic anatomical peculiarities noted among criminals. Perhaps the most general statement to be made is that criminals present a far larger proportion of anatomical abnormalities than the ordinary European population. Now this is precisely the characteristic of the anatomy of the lower human races: they present a far larger proportion of anatomical abnormalities than the ordinary European population. It is true that our knowledge of the anatomy of the lower human races is still incomplete, but the evidence so far as it goes is per

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hese to the direct influence of atavism. When an original vice of organic constitution has thrown an individual into a more primitive and remote strata of society, the influence of environment will itself simulate the effects of atavism and exaggerate its significan

thuggi, "a Brahman boy at Bahraich, in May 1885, drugged a party of men travelling with the agent of the Rajah of Mohsan. Although only twelve years old, this was his fifth appearance in the dock. Another boy, a few months later, cooked some pulse for three pilgrims from Gaya; and the pilgrims were picked up shortly afterwards insensible near the railway yard at Allahabad. This boy had been charged with committing a similar offence in the May previous, but had got off because the complainants, impatient of the law's delay, changed their story, and attributed their delirium to the heat of the sun."

slike of family habits, an incapacity for education, a tendency to lying, together with astuteness and extraordinary cynicism, bad sexual habits, and cruelty towards animals and companions. It shows itself between the ages of five and eleven, and is sometimes united with precocious intellectual qualities. Th

s naturally, by his organisation, nearer to the animal, to the savage, to the criminal, than the adult. Although this has frequently been noted in a fragm

ly egoists; they will commit all enormities, sometimes, to enlarge their egoistic satisfaction. They are cruel and inflict suffering on animals out of curiosity, enjoying the manifestations of pain. They are thieves for the gratification of their appetites, especially the chief, g

ll taken seriously to a terrible extent, remarks:-"On our return from Tothill Fields, we consulted with some of our friends as to the various peccadilloes of their youth, and though each we asked had grown to be a man of some little mark in the world, both for intellect and honour, they, one and all, confessed to having committed in their younger days many of the very "crimes" for which the boys at Tothill Fields were incarcerated. For

ates himself, seeing a workman leaning over one of the Seine bridges, felt so strong an impulse to throw the man into the river, that he had to rush away from the spot; and of Humboldt's nurse, who, at the sight and touch of the new-born child's rosy flesh, felt t

ts. There is evidently arrest of development at a very early age, probably a precocious union of the cranial bones. Among savages, also, the young children are bright, but development stops at a very early age. All who have come very intimately in contact with criminals have noted their resemblance to children. Thus that profound and sympathetic

owing probably to changes in police regulations), extremely large, especially for the greater crimes. There has indeed been on the whole a steady increase in the proportion of women criminals in England; in 1834 they were less than 1 in 5; of recent years they have been more than 1 in 4. The greater tendency to recidivism in women has everywhere been noted, and is extremely well marked in England, where it is rapidly increasi

f parricides 50 per cent. are women. The crimes of women are essentially domestic, against fathers and husbands and children. A very large proportion are, directly or indirectly, of a sexual character. It is curious in this connection to note that Ma

criminality. There are perhaps five special causes acting on women: (1) physical wea

ies of women are at a lower but more even level, and their avocations have tended to develop the conservative rather than the destructive instincts. Apart from this, even if women were trained in violence, the

a notorious wholesale poisoner, who killed several children, including her own, as well as her husband, was described as "a woman of masculine proportions;" and a girl called Bouhours, who was executed at Paris at the age of twenty-two, for murdering and rob

that is, most strongly marked with the signs of degeneration, and therefore the tendency to criminality-would be to a large extent passed by in the choice of a mate, and wou

, the level of feminine criminality has for half a century been rising. Reference may perhaps also here be made to the fact that there is much more criminality among Irishwomen in England than among Irishwomen at home who lead a more domestic life. It is a very significant fact that Marro found among his women criminals, in marked contrast to the men, a very large proportion (35 out of 41) who possessed some more or less honourable occupation; a large proportion of the women also were possessed of some property. It may not be out of place to observe that the growing criminality of women is but

uld be no alternative but crime for the large numbers of women who are always falling out of the social ranks. As it is, in those families in which the brothers become criminals, the sisters with considerable regularity

d ugly) confessed to having had sexual relationships, 12 had never been married, 10 were widows, 14 were married, but of these 7 (50 per cent.) were separated from their husbands. There is some significance, doubtless, also in the fact that while in men the maximum of criminality falls at about the age of 25, in women this is not so. That is the age of maximum child-bearing; the age of maximum criminality in women is delayed until nearly the age of 35. In the 130 women condemned for premeditated murder, and studied by Salsotto, the a

use women cannot be put strictly under the same conditions as men; a woman who lived under the same conditions as men, it need scarcely be said, would no longer be a woman. But it is made probable by the considerations here brought forward, and by statistics. Thus let

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iod of child-bearing the criminality of women falls suddenly, becoming level with that of men at about the time of the cessation of the child-bearing period; aft

between crime and vice, which is necessary in practical life. From the anthropological po

stitutes who had been inmates of a brothel for not less than two years, and she also examined, for the sake of comparison, fifty peasant women of so far as possible the same age and intellectual development. She found (1) that the prostitutes presented a shortening, amounting to half a centimetre, of the anterior, posterior, and transverse diameters of skull; (2) 84 per cent. showed various signs of physical degeneration-irregular skull, asymmetry of face, anomalies of hard palate, teeth, ears, etc.; (3) 82 per cent. had parents who were habitual drunkards; (4) 18 per cent. were the last survivors of a large family of eight to thirteen children who had died early. Prostitutes may fairly be compared to the great class of vagabonds among men, who also live on the borderlands of criminality, and who also present a larger proportion of abnormalities than even criminals. Dugdale, in his valuable and thorough study of the "Jukes" family of criminals in America, shows that while the eldest sons in a criminal family carry on the criminal tradition, the younger sons become paupers or vagabonds, and the

. The criminal directly injures the persons or property of the community to which he belongs; the vicious person (in any rational definition of vice) indirectly injures these. They are both anti-social because they are both more or less unfitted for harmonious social action, both, fr

and on a large scale; they never commit purposeless crimes, and in their private life are often of fairly estimable character. They flourish greatly in a civilisation of rapidly progressing material character, where wild and unprincipled speculation is rife, as in the United

gators. I am persuaded, he says, that every large social class has its own characteristics. "If one examined hundreds or thousands of judges, lawyers, labourers, musicians, taken at random and in various countries, noting their different characters, craniometric, algometric, sphygmographic, graphologic, photographic, etc., as Lombroso has examined hundreds and thousands of criminals, it is extremely probable that we shoul

d for each category the proportional preponderance of a certain number of peculiarities, morphologic or physiologic, elsewhere in less proportion. It must inevitably be so whether a career is open to every one or shut up as a caste, for in the latter case hereditary accumulation of acquired aptitudes from the use of the same functions transmitted from generation to generation produces an analogous effect, even with superior intensity."[85] The recent investigations of Bertillon at the Paris Prefecture of Police have shown that by large photographs of the hand it is possible to detect the worker at a large number of crafts. By such acquirement as this, as well as by a process of natural selection, the men of every class develop a special set of psychic and p

king and acting, the nature of each person, to some extent, "subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand." In each class there would be different degrees in sensory perception, in cranial shape and size, in muscular development. Such investigations will no doubt be s

o substantiate it by reference to the details of criminal anthropology. M. Tarde is a magistrate; no scientific man wou

n the same way as men of letters, men of science, artists, priests, the labouring classes, etc., but a complex category in which the most diverse elements enter: the insane or those predisposed to insanity, epileptics and those predisposed to epilepsy, the alcoholic, the microcephalic, the macrocephalic, those predisposed by some vice of organisation or of development, anterior or posterior to birth, betraying itself sometimes by very evident anatomical anomalies, those who are predisposed by f

en shown. I have several times pointed out that the resemblances between criminals considered as a class and the insane so considered are by no means great; at many points they are strongly contrasted. The resemblances with epileptics, on the other hand, are anthropologically very marked, as Lombroso was the first to point out in detail. He has also observed that those regions of Italy which produce most epil

hearts, with valvular defects. There is, again, the same sensory obtuseness, with the same exception in the case of sight, which is remarkably good, with rarity, it seems, of colour-blindness. Criminality, like idiocy, tends to run in the line of the eldest sons, and in both the hereditary influences are frequently bad. Cranial asymmetry is common in idiots as well as among criminals; and while meni

d, as we know them in asylums, rarely have any criminal or dangerous instincts. Another term is frequently used to denote

of the intellectual faculties; and the conception has been developed by Krafft-Ebing, Maudsley, and many others. The term itself is an unfortunate one; the condition described by no means falls in easily a

y, satisfying his personal interests and treading under foot the rights of others. If he comes in contact with the law then his indifference changes into hate, revenge, ferocity, and he is persuaded that he is in the right. Although so defective on the moral side, these persons are well able to make use of the abstracted intellectual conceptions of honour, morality, philanthropy; such words are indeed frequently on their lips, and it is quite i

hat these symptoms closely resemble those we have already described as characterising the criminal in his most clearly-marked form-the instinctive criminal. The morally insane person has been identified with the instinctive criminal by

imating, but not fusing with, these various morbid and atypical groups. The outlines blend, but each group is dist

ool at the foot of our social ascent. Even our present knowledge is sufficient to serve as the justification for a certain amount of social

me. We are now learning to regard the criminal as a natural phenomenon, the resultant of manifold natural causes. We are striving to attain to scientific justice. We are seeking in every dir

al routine. But human nature will not fit in with formul?; when men and women are geometrical figures, an abstract legal system will answer all their needs. If the path lies through a jungle, what is the use of the best and straightest of roads that leads astray? If a critic were to point out to a biologist-to take another illustration from Ferri-the limitations o