Criminal Anthropology
Criminal AnthropologyPREFACE.CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION.CHAPTER II. THE STUDY OF THE CRIMINAL.CHAPTER III. CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY (PHYSICAL).CHAPTER IV. CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY (PSYCHICAL).CHAPTER V. THE RESULTS OF CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY.CHAPTER VI. THE TREATMENT OF THE CRIMINAL.CHAPTER VII. CONCLUSIONS.APPENDIX APPENDIXCopyright
Criminal Anthropology
Havelock Ellis
PREFACE.
This little book is an attempt to present to the English reader a
critical summary of the results of the science now commonly called
criminal anthropology. In other words, it deals briefly with the
problems connected with the criminal as he is in himself and as he
becomes in contact with society; it also tries to indicate some of
the practical social bearings of such studies.
During the last fifteen years these studies have been carried on
with great activity. It seemed, therefore, that the time had come
for a short and comprehensive review of their present condition.
Such a review of a young and rapidly growing science cannot be
expected to reveal any final conclusions; yet by bringing together
very various material from many lands, it serves to show us how we
stand, to indicate the progress already made, and the nature of the
path ahead. In these matters we in England have of recent years
fallen far behind; no book, scarcely a solitary magazine article,
dealing with this matter has appeared among us. It seemed worth
while to arouse interest in problems which are of personal concern
to every citizen, problems which[Pg viii] are indeed the concern of
every person who cares about the reasonable organisation of social
life.
I would willingly have given the task to abler hands. But I found
no one in England who was acquainted with the present aspects of
these questions, and was compelled, therefore, after considerable
hesitation, to undertake a task which had long appealed to me from
various sides, medical, anthropological, and social.
There is, I believe, nothing original in this book. It simply
represents a very large body of intelligent opinion in many
countries. I have to acknowledge with gratitude the assistance,
always ungrudgingly rendered, which I have received from very many
directions. I would specially mention those medical officers of
prisons in Great Britain who answered my Questions issued at the
beginning of 1889, Dr. Hamilton Wey of the Elmira Reformatory, Dr.
Vans Clark, formerly Governor of Woking Prison, Professor Lombroso
of Turin, Dr. Antonio Marro, the Rev. J. W. Horsley, Dr. Langdon
Down, Dr. Hack Tuke, Dr. Francis Warner, etc. It would, however, be
impossible to enumerate all those to whom I am indebted. In such a
task as this the writer himself has the smallest part; the chief
shares belong to an innumerable company of workers, known and
unknown.
CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION.
Of criminals, actual or nominal, there are many kinds. It is
necessary, first of all, to enumerate the chief varieties.
There is the political criminal. By this term is meant the victim
of an attempt by a more or less despotic Government to preserve its
own stability. The word “criminal” in this expression is usually a
euphemism to express the suppression of a small minority by the
majority. The aims of the “political criminal” may be anti-social,
and in that case he is simply an ordinary criminal, but he is not
necessarily guilty of any anti-social offence; he simply tries to
overturn a certain political order which may itself be anti-social.
Consequently the “political criminal” of our time or place may be
the hero, martyr, saint, of another land or age. The political
criminal is, as Lombroso calls him, “the true precursor of the
progressive movement of humanity;” or, as Benedikt calls him, the
homo nobilis of whom the highest type is Christ. From any
scientific point of view the use of the word crime, to express a
difference of national feeling or of political opinion, is an abuse
of language. Such a conception may be necessary to ensure the
supremacy of a Government, just as the conception of heresy is
necessary to ensure the supremacy of a Church; the prison for
political dissentients corresponds to the stake for religious
dissentients. A criminality which is regulated partly by
chronology, partly by longitude, does not easily admit of
scientific discussion.
We have, again, the criminal by passion. He is usually a man of
wholesome birth and of honest life, possessed of keen, even
exaggerated sensibilities, who, under the stress of some great,
unmerited wrong, has wrought justice for himself. Stung to sudden
madness by some gross insult to his wife or wrong to his daughter,
he makes an attempt on the life of the offender. The criminal by
passion never becomes a recidivist; it is the social, not the
anti-social, instincts that are strong within him; his crime is a
solitary event in his life. Therefore he cannot figure as a serious
danger to society; in some respects he serves even to quicken the
social conscience and to check anti-social instincts. At the same
time it is not to the advantage of society that a private
individual should in a moment of passion even wreak justice; and
the criminal by passion cannot complain that he in his turn becomes
the victim of a social reaction.
We have also the insane criminal; that is to say, the person who,
being already in a condition of recognisable mental alienation,
performs some flagrantly anti-social act. A very large number of
crimes are committed by persons who are impelled by delusions, or
who have, before the commission of the crime, been in a condition
of mental alienation. Nearly a hundred persons every year in this
country are sent to prison to be found insane on admission. The
hanging of persons who are afterwards generally regarded as insane
has always, and is still, frequently carried on. In Germany Dr.
Richter has shown that out of 144 lunatics who were, as was
afterwards shown, at the date of their crimes in the highest degree
insane, only 38 were recognised as insane before the judge—i.e.,
106 madmen were, on account of their madness, condemned to severe
punishment. Out of 100 insane persons brought to the bar of justice
only 26 to 28 are recognised as insane.[1] The insane criminal is
clearly in a category of his own. He is only a criminal in the same
sense as an infant or an animal who performs some noxious act. The
lunatic may be influenced by the same motives that influence the
sane person, but he is at the same time impelled by other motives
peculiar to himself, and to which we may have no means of access.
To bring all the solemn formalities of law to bear against a
madman, and to condemn him to severe punishment, is in a civilised
country unreasonable.
The political criminal may usually be recognised without difficulty
when we lay aside political prejudice; the criminal by passion can
be recognised at once when we know his history. There is not
usually much difficulty in ascertaining the insanity of the
criminal who is insane in the strict and perhaps the only
legitimate sense of the word—i.e., intellectually insane. But at
this point we are no longer able to proceed with quite the same
clearness and certainty. We are approaching the criminal in the
proper sense, the criminal with whom we shall be chiefly
concerned.
The uncertainty on this borderland may be illustrated by the
following case. W. T. is a boy of fifteen, a very small
ugly-looking lad, with a small head, low in the forehead, larger in
the back, high narrow palate, heavy sullen aspect, and slight
external squint of left eye. His father and mother are healthy and
sober people; one of the father’s uncles died in an asylum, and one
of his aunts committed suicide. The boy had convulsions at the age
of eighteen months, and was very backward in walking and speaking;
at the age of twelve he could not dress himself. At school he was
very dull, apt to strike his companions if roused, solitary, fond
of reading, but not remembering what he had read. His schoolmaster,
an experienced teacher, had never known so peculiar a boy. But he
was not a bad or untruthful lad, and had no vices. When he left
school his father tried to teach him his own trade of shoemaking;
but, though he had no special distaste for the work, he could not
learn even the most elementary part of the trade. Other boys made
fun of him, and he complained of his little sister, ten years of
age, doing the same. One day, when he had been left quietly sitting
alone with this sister, he took up his father’s hammer, which was
at his feet, and struck her, smashing in her skull. Then he locked
the back door, as he always did on leaving home, and went out,
closing the front door after him. He returned in an hour, wet from
the rain which had begun to fall. He was taken to prison, and from
the first displayed no emotion; he ate and slept well, and was a
good, docile boy. The judge who tried him (Lord Coleridge) was
evidently in favour of a verdict of manslaughter. The jury fell in
with this suggestion, although the authority of Dr. Savage was in
favour of insanity, and the boy was condemned to ten years’ penal
servitude.[2] Such a case shows very well the inaccuracy of our
hard and fast lines of demarcation. Here was a person clearly of
abnormal or degenerate character, and liable to sudden violent
impulses; he would nowhere be popularly recognised as insane, and
possibly it is not desirable that he should be so recognised. On
the other hand, he cannot correctly be termed an instinctive
criminal; he is on the borderland between the two groups, and a
touch may send him in either direction.
Let us take another illustration. Miss B., nineteen years of age,
the daughter of a captain in the army, is described as a tall
robust-looking girl of lively temperament. When a few months old
she had an attack of meningitis. As a child she was always wilful
and troublesome. When she was eighteen years old she developed new
instincts of mischief. She would sometimes take off her clothes,
stuff them up the chimney, and set fire to them. When the servants
rushed in she would be sitting on the hearth clapping her hands:
“What a fine blaze!” She had frequently destroyed furniture,
clothing, and books; she liked to cut carefully the strings binding
a book, so that it would fall to pieces in the hands of the
unsuspecting person who took it up. She drenched a baby, and
frequently her own room, with water, without any reason. She once
attempted to throttle the attendant in whose care she was put. She
was backward for her age, though her education had not been
neglected; she could not keep accounts, and was fond of reading
children’s books. There was a history of bad sexual habits, and she
had a propensity to fall in love with every man she saw. She was
perfectly coherent and rational, and accused others of doing the
mischievous acts attributed to her. After being sent to a
clergyman’s house for some months she eventually recovered.[3] Here
there was, strictly speaking, no insanity; there were vicious and
criminal instincts which would no doubt have developed had the girl
been sent to prison instead of to a comfortable home, and there was
(as there very frequently is among instinctive criminals) a history
of brain mischief. How shall we classify her?
Let us take another example—this time from France—in which the
pathological element does not clearly appear. A gentleman named X.,
the French paper informs us, has been passing the summer at his
country house with his daughter, aged twenty-two, and his son, aged
twenty. From the moment of his arrival devastations occurred
everywhere on his property. The shrubs were cut; garden plants and
large branches of the birch trees removed; the doors and walls of
the house were soiled. The grounds and dwellings of other persons
in the neighbourhood were similarly treated. Windows were broken;
the emblems of religion were outrageously insulted; the walls and
doors of the church, the priest’s house, and even the altar, were
soiled with ordure. A drawing of the priest administering the
sacrament to a cow was found on the walls, and obscene letters,
containing also menaces of death and incendiarism, were received by
M. X., the priest, and others. Terror overspread the parish, and no
one dared to go out by night. At last M. X.’s son and daughter were
discovered in the act. Alexis, the least guilty, having been drawn
on by his sister, confessed his part in what had been done; he was
the accomplice and confidant of his sister. She denied everything,
even that she had aided her brother. There was no motive for these
acts, save the pleasure of spreading terror through the country;
they had had no intention of accomplishing their threats. The girl
carried her impudence and imprudence so far as to send an insulting
letter to the magistrate who was investigating her misdeeds, and to
break windows, unperceived, in his presence.[4] This is an example
of moral perversity, showing itself in malevolent and unsocial
acts. Possibly, if we possessed a scientific history of the case,
we might find a pathological element in it, but as it stands it is
but an extravagant example of anti-social instincts, on the
borderland of crime, which in a minor degree are far from
uncommon.
I will now give, in some detail, the history of a more decisive and
significant example of this same moral insensibility. It is in a
child, and I take it from German records. Marie Schneider, a
school-girl, twelve years of age, was brought before the Berlin
Criminal Court in 1886. She was well developed for her age, of
ordinary facial expression, not pretty, nor yet ugly. Her head was
round, the forehead receding slightly, the nose rather small, the
eyes brown and lively, the smooth, rather fair hair combed back.
With an intellectual clearness and precision very remarkable for
her age, she answered all the searching questions put by the
President of the Court without hesitation or shrinking. There was
not the slightest trace of any inner emotion or deep excitement.
She spoke in the same quiet equable tone in which a school-girl
speaks to her teacher or repeats her lesson. And when the questions
put to her became of so serious a character that the judge himself
involuntarily altered his voice and tone, the little girl still
remained self-possessed, lucid, childlike. She was by no means
bold, but she knew that she had to answer as when her teacher spoke
to her, and what she said bore the impress of perfect truth, and
agreed at every point with the evidence already placed before the
court. Her statement was substantially as follows:—“My name is
Marie Schneider. I was born on the 1st of May 1874, in Berlin. My
father died long ago, I do not know when; I never knew him. My
mother is still living; she is a machinist. I also have a younger
brother. I lost a sister a year ago. I did not much like her,
because she was better than I, and my mother treated her better. My
mother has several times whipped me for naughtiness, and it is
right that I should take away the stick with which she beat me, and
to beat her. I have gone to school since I was six years old. I
have been in the third class for two years. I stayed there from
idleness. I have been taught reading, writing, arithmetic,
geography, and history, and also religion. I know the ten
commandments. I know the sixth: it is, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ I
have some playfellows at school and in the neighbourhood, and I am
often with a young lady [believed to be of immoral life] who is
twenty years old and lives in the same house. She has told me about
her childhood, and that she was just as naughty as I am, and that
she struck the teacher who was going to punish her. Some time ago,
in playing in the yard, I came behind a child, held his eyes, and
asked him who I was. I pressed my thumbs deep in his eyes, so that
he cried out and had inflamed eyes. I knew that I hurt him, and, in
spite of his crying, I did not let go until I was made to. It did
not give me special pleasure, but I have not felt sorry. When I was
a little child I have stuck forks in the eyes of rabbits, and
afterwards slit open the belly. At least so my mother has often
said; I do not remember it. I know that Conrad murdered his wife
and children, and that his head was cut off. I have heard my aunt
read the newspapers. I am very fond of sweets, and have several
times tried to get money to buy myself sweets. I told people the
money was for some one else who had no small change. I know that
that was deceit. I know too what theft is. Any one who kills is a
murderer, and I am a murderess. Murder is punished with death; the
murderer is executed; his head is cut off. My head will not be cut
off, because I am still too young. On the 7th of July my mother
sent me on an errand. Then I met little Margarete Dietrich, who was
three and a half years old, and whom I had known since March. I
said to her that she must come with me, and I took her hand. I
wanted to take away her ear-rings. They were little gold ear-rings
with a coloured stone. I did not want the ear-rings for myself, but
to sell at a second-hand shop in the neighbourhood, to get money to
buy some cakes. When I reached the yard I wanted to go somewhere,
and I called to my mother to throw me down the key. She did so, and
threw me down some money too, for the errand that I was to go on. I
left little Margarete on the stairs, and there I found her again.
From the yard I saw that the second-floor window was half open. I
went with her up the stairs to the second floor to take away the
ear-rings, and then to throw her out of the window. I wanted to
kill her, because I was afraid that she would betray me. She could
not talk very well, but she could point to me; and if it came out,
my mother would have beaten me. I went with her to the window,
opened it wide, and set her on the ledge. Then I heard some one
coming down. I quickly put the child on the ground and shut the
window. The man went by without noticing us. Then I opened the
window and put the child on the ledge, with her feet hanging out,
and her face turned away from me. I did that because I did not want
to look in her face, and because I could push her easier. I pulled
the ear-rings out. Grete began to cry because I hurt her. When I
threatened to throw her out of the window she became quiet. I took
the ear-rings and put them in my pocket. Then I gave the child a
shove, and heard her strike the lamp and then the pavement. Then I
quickly ran downstairs to go on the errand my mother had sent me. I
knew that I should kill the child. I did not reflect that little
Grete’s parents would be sorry. It did not hurt me; I was not
sorry; I was not sorry all the time I was in prison; I am not sorry
now. The next day a policeman came to us and asked if I had thrown
the child out of the window. I said no, I knew nothing about it.
Then I threw away the ear-rings that I had kept hid; I was afraid
they would search my pockets and find them. Then there came
another policeman, and I told him the truth, because he said he
would box my ears if I did not tell the truth. Then I was taken
away, and had to tell people how it happened. I was taken in a cab
to the mortuary. I ate a piece of bread they gave me with a good
appetite. I saw little Grete’s body, undressed, on a bed. I did not
feel any pain and was not sorry. They put me with four women, and I
told them the story. I laughed while I was telling it because they
asked me such curious questions. I wrote to my mother from prison,
and asked her to send me some money to buy some dripping, for we
had dry bread.” That was what little Marie Schneider told the
judge, without either hesitation or impudence, in a completely
childlike manner, like a school-girl at examination; and she seemed
to find a certain satisfaction in being able to answer long
questions so nicely. Only once her eyes gleamed, and that was when
she told how in the prison they had given her dry bread to eat. The
medical officer of the prison, who had watched her carefully,
declared that he could find nothing intellectually wrong in her.
She was intelligent beyond her years, but had no sense of what she
had done, and was morally an idiot. And this was the opinion of the
other medical men who were called to examine her. The Court,
bearing in mind that she was perfectly able to understand the
nature of the action she had committed, condemned Marie Schneider
to imprisonment for eight years. The question of heredity was not
raised. Nothing is known of the father except that he is
dead.[5]
Marie Schneider differs from the previous cases, not merely by her
apparent freedom from pathological elements, but by her rational
motives and her intelligence. The young French woman intended
nothing very serious by her brutal and unfeeling practical jokes.
Marie Schneider was as thorough and as relentless in the
satisfaction of her personal desires as the Marquise de
Brinvilliers. But she was a child, and she would very generally be
described as an example of “moral insanity.” It is still necessary
to take a further step, although a very slight one, to reach what
every one would be willing to accept as an instinctive criminal.
The example I will select is an Englishman, Thomas Wainewright,
well known in his time as an essayist, much better known as a
forger and a murderer. R. Griffiths, L.L.D., Wainewright’s maternal
grandfather—to take his history as far back as possible—was an
energetic literary man and journalist, whose daughter, Ann, born of
a young second wife when he was well past middle life, “is supposed
to have understood the writings of Mr. Locke as well as perhaps any
person of either sex now living” (said the Gentleman’s Magazine)
and who married one Thomas Wainewright, and died in child-bed at
the age of twenty-one, the last survivor, even at that age, of the
second family. Thomas Wainewright, the father, himself died very
soon afterwards. Of him nothing is known, though there is some
reason to think that Dr. Griffiths regarded him with dislike or
suspicion.
The child seems then to have been born of a failing and
degenerating stock. He was clever, possessed of some means, and
grew up in a literary and artistic circle; but he was vain and
unstable, “ever to be wiled away,” as he says himself, “by new and
flashy gauds.” When still a lad, he went into the army for a time.
Then, after a while, being idle in town, “my blessed Art touched
her renegade; by her pure and high influences the noisome mists
were purged,” and he wept tears of happiness and gratitude over
Wordsworth’s poems. “But this serene state was broken,” he wrote,
several years before his career of crime had commenced, “like a
vessel of clay, by acute disease, succeeded by a relaxation of the
muscles and nerves, which depressed me
—‘low
As through the abysses of a joyless heart
The heaviest plummet of despair could go,’—
hypochondriasis! ever shuddering on the horrible abyss of mere
insanity! But two excellent secondary agents—a kind and skilful
physician, and a most delicately affectionate and unwearied (though
young and fragile) nurse—brought me at length out of those dead
black waters, nearly exhausted with so sore a struggle. Steady
pursuit was debarred me, and varied amusement deemed essential to
my complete revivification.” Then he began to write his essays and
criticisms, dealing chiefly with the later Italian and the French
artists, under the name of Janus Weathercock. He was a man of many
sentimentalities and super-refinements; he hated all vulgarity and
“sordid instincts.” His tastes were sensual in every respect.
Notwithstanding his means, they were not sufficient to satisfy his
desires for luxurious foods and drinks, for fine perfumes, for
large jewels to wear. He could not live without luxuries, just as
little Marie Schneider could not live without sweets. At about the
date that his chief literary activities ceased, and when he was
about thirty years of age, he forged a power of attorney with the
names of his trustees, assigning to himself the principal of £5000,
of which he was enjoying the interest. This was then a capital
offence; it remained undetected for twelve years. He is described
at this time as “a smart, lively, clever, heartless, voluptuous
coxcomb.” He was tall, stooping slightly, of dark hair and
complexion, deeply set eyes, stealthy but fascinating, a large and
massive head. He married a young lady who was poor, but a gay and
brilliant person, and she had a widowed mother and two
half-sisters. The young couple lived improvidently, and an uncle,
Mr. G. E. Griffiths, who was well off, offered them a home in his
own house. This welcome offer was accepted. A year after, Mr. G. E.
Griffiths, after a short illness, died very unexpectedly, leaving
his mansion and property to his nephew and niece. This money,
however, also went rather fast; and now too there were no longer
any expectations from relatives. The stepmother and her daughters,
the Abercrombies, were poor, and their schemes to make a living
were not successful. The Abercrombies were obliged to come and live
with the Wainewrights in the large mansion they had inherited, and
a very few months after this Mrs. Abercrombie died, like old Mr.
Griffiths, very suddenly, in a fit of convulsions. No benefits,
however, followed this death; affairs continued to grow worse, and
soon the bailiffs were in the house, and there was a bill of sale
on the furniture. The Wainewrights and Abercrombies migrated to
handsome lodgings in Conduit Street, near Regent Street. They
frequently went to the play, and one night, very soon after their
arrival, Helen Abercrombie, who wore the thin shoes that women then
always wore, got her feet wet, became ill, and was assiduously
attended by Wainewright and his wife, who held frequent
consultations as to her treatment by means of certain powders; in a
few days she was dead, with the same symptoms as her mother, the
same symptoms as Mr. Griffiths—“brain mischief,” the doctor called
it. She died on the very day on which the bill of sale became due,
and after her death it was found that her life had, during the same
year, been insured, in various offices, for £18,000. Helen
Abercrombie was a beautiful and very healthy girl, and her death
led to suspicions, and gave rise to law-suits, which on the
slighter but definite ground of misrepresentation were in favour of
the companies. In the meanwhile Wainewright found it convenient to
leave England (he had separated from his wife after the death of
Helen Abercrombie), and took refuge with a rather impecunious
gentleman who lived with his daughter at Boulogne. He persuaded
this gentleman to obtain money to effect a loan by insuring his
life. One night, after the policy had been effected, this gentleman
suddenly died. We next hear of Wainewright travelling in France,
doubtless for excellent reasons, under an assumed name. He fell
into the hands of the police, and not being able to give a good
account of himself, was imprisoned for six months. The French
police found that he carried about with him a certain powder, at
that time little known, called strychnine; this was put down to
English eccentricity. At this time there was a warrant out against
Wainewright for forgery; he was lured over to England by a
detective, with the aid of a woman, and arrested. He was tried for
forgery, and condemned to transportation for life. At the same time
the suspicions of the doctor who attended Helen Abercrombie were
roused, and Wainewright himself, after his condemnation, admitted
to visitors, with extraordinary vanity and audacity, his
achievements in poisoning, and elucidated his methods. It is also
said that he kept a diary in which he recorded his operations with
much complacency. The one thing that hurt little Marie Schneider
was the dry bread; the one thing that moved Wainewright was being
placed in irons in the hold of the ship. “They think me a
desperado! Me! the companion of poets, philosophers, artists, and
musicians, a desperado! You will smile at this—no, I think you will
feel for the man, educated and reared as a gentleman; now the mate
of vulgar ruffians and country bumpkins.” At Hobart Town on two
occasions he endeavoured to remove by poison persons who had
excited his animosity. He is described at this time by one who knew
him well as “a man with a massive head, in which the animal
propensities were largely developed. His eyes were deeply set in
his head; he had a square solid jaw; he wore his hair long, stooped
somewhat, and had a snake-like expression which was at once
repulsive and fascinating. He rarely looked you in the face. His
conversation and manner were winning in the extreme; he was never
intemperate, but nevertheless of grossly sensual habits, and an
opium-eater. As to moral character, he was a man of the very lowest
stamp. He seemed to be possessed by an ingrained malignity of
disposition which kept him constantly on the very confines of
murder, and he took a perverse pleasure in traducing persons who
had befriended him. He was a marked man in Hobart Town—dreaded,
disliked, and shunned by everybody. His sole living companion was a
cat, for which he evinced an extraordinary affection.” He died of
apoplexy in 1852, at the age of fifty-eight.[6] Wainewright
presents to us a perfect picture of the instinctive criminal in his
most highly developed shape, fortunately a rare phenomenon. It is
this instinctive propensity to crime which is sometimes called
“moral insanity.” This is, however, by no means a happy phrase,
since it leads to much fruitless disputation. It is wiser at
present to apply to such an individual the more simple term,
instinctive criminal.[7] There is, however, distinct interest in
noting that at one period of his life Wainewright was on the verge
of insanity, if not, as is more likely, actually insane; it is
extremely probable that he never recovered from the effects of that
illness. It may well be that if we possessed a full knowledge of
every instinctive criminal we should always be able to put our
hands on some definite organically morbid spot.
The instinctive criminal, in his fully developed form, is a moral
monster. In him the absence of guiding or inhibiting social
instincts is accompanied by unusual development of the sensual and
self-seeking impulses. The occasional criminal, as he is usually
called, is a much commoner and more normally constituted person. In
him the sensual instincts need not be stronger than usual, and the
social elements, though weaker than usual, need not be absent.
Weakness is the chief characteristic of the occasional criminal;
when circumstances are not quite favourable he succumbs to
temptation. Occasional crime is one of the commonest forms of
crime; it is also that for whose existence and development society
is most directly responsible; very often it might equally well be
called social crime. Here is an example. Two lads of honest life,
the sons of agricultural labourers, being unable to obtain a scanty
subsistence at home, start one day in a fit of desperation for a
distant town in search of work. Without food or shelter, sleeping
under a hedge, they reach a farm-house. Looking through a window
they see a plum-pudding; they open the window, seize the pudding,
and go a few yards off to devour it. In a few hours they are on the
way to the lock-up, to receive, later on, a sentence of six months’
imprisonment. “At the close of it they were provided with an outfit
and an introduction to an employer of labour in Canada; and when we
last heard of them they were doing extremely well, with excellent
prospects before them.”[8] This sequel (which would have been
better had it come before the seizure of the plum-pudding) proves
that we are not dealing with instinctive criminals. Take another
case mentioned by the same writer. A woman with a drunken husband
who spends his last penny in the public-house, is driven by actual
starvation to commit her first crime. She steals a small piece of
meat to feed her hungry children. She is sent to prison. “We heard
of her afterwards leading a most consistent and almost saintly
life.” These persons, it is clear, were not the criminals but the
victims; society was the criminal. Now and then, as in the cases
just cited, it happens that the occasional criminal who is thus
recklessly flung into prison is assisted to live a human life. In
the great majority of cases he is ruined for life, familiarised
with the prison, introduced to bad company. We have, as well as we
are able, manufactured him into what is called the habitual
criminal.
The steps by which the occasional criminal, aided on the one hand
by neglect, on the other by the hot-bed of the prison, develops
into the habitual criminal are slow and subtle; that is one of the
tragedies of life. M. Joly has recorded the experiences of the
police concerning the thefts that take place at the great Parisian
shops, the Louvre, and the Bon-Marché. “This is the beginning. From
a gallery one sees a woman—rich or well-to-do-who buys a certain
number of objects and pays for them; but without asking permission
she takes some little, almost insignificant object—a little ribbon
to fasten a parcel, a more commodious paper-bag. No one will say
that she is stealing; no one will think of speaking to her or
disturbing her. But she is observed and even watched, for one
expects to see her again some time after taking, as she walks
along, say, a flower worth twenty-five centimes. A little later she
will appropriate an article of greater value, and henceforth she
will take for the pleasure of taking. The inclination, which at the
beginning had in it nothing instinctive or fatal, will grow as all
habits grow. Another time a woman who had no intention of stealing,
but whose conscience is probably elastic, grows impatient at the
delay in attending to her wants. It is, let us suppose, a purse
worth ninety-five centimes, and the shopman is busy with purchasers
of more expensive objects. Suddenly the woman nervously yields to a
swift temptation; she does not wish to wait longer, but instead of
replacing the purse on the counter she slips it into her pocket and
turns on her heels without paying. ‘From that moment,’ said the
inspector, ‘she is lost; she will come back to steal, but she will
steal intentionally and deliberately.’”[9]
The world and the criminal’s friends are startled some day by a
great crime, but that crime is linked on to a chain of slight,
occasional, sporadic vices and offences. Sometimes we can trace out
these links. Barré and Lebiez were two young French criminals who
attracted attention some years ago. They were both of good family,
both very intelligent, the former about to enter on a commercial
life, the latter on the eve of becoming a doctor of medicine. At
this point they murdered an old woman to rob her, and cut up the
body to dispose of it. The crime was deliberate and carefully
prepared; there was nothing romantic or obviously morbid about it,
and a few days after the crime Lebiez delivered an able and
eloquent lecture on Darwinism and the Church. In each of these
young men there were, M. Joly observes, nine stages in the path of
crime. Let us first note those of Barré:—1. His employer is obliged
to dismiss him on account of misconduct with a servant girl. 2. He
writes untruthful letters to his family, describing habits of work
which do not exist. 3. He acquires an extravagant taste for
speculation on the Stock Exchange. So far his course, though not
exemplary, was one that has often enough been traversed
by persons who have never reached the scaffold. 4. He
speculates with the savings which two girls had entrusted to him
for investment. 5. To obtain money from his father, to whom he
talks of establishing himself, he forges letters. 6. He embezzles
various sums of money by an aggravated form of the same process. 7.
He steals a watch from a prostitute’s rooms. 8. He steals eight
francs from the same. 9. He decides on the murder of the old
milk-woman with whom he has had business relations, and whose
savings, as he knows, are considerable. Lebiez went through the
following stages:—1. His violent language to his mother is
remarked. 2. He is, notwithstanding very small means, known to be
living with a mistress, and he procures obscene photographs. 3. On
account of irregularity he is sent away from an institution where
he gave lessons. 4. He speculates on the Stock Exchange, which,
being poor, he could only do by accepting profit and refusing to
meet loss. 5. He steals books from his friends and sells them. 6.
He several times leaves his lodgings clandestinely, without paying
the rent. 7. He participates in the theft of the watch by Barré. 8.
He shares the profits of the second theft. 9. They decide on the
murder together. Such are the slow steps by which the occasional
criminal becomes the habitual criminal or the professional
criminal. It must be remembered that the lines which separate these
from each other, and both from the instinctive criminal, are often
faint or imperceptible. “Natural groups,” as Mr. Galton remarks,
“have nuclei but no outlines.” In the habitual criminal, who is
usually unintelligent, the conservative forces of habit
predominate; the professional criminal, who is usually intelligent,
is guided by rational motives, and voluntarily takes the chances of
his mode of life; while in the instinctive criminal the impulses
usually appear so strong, and the moral element so conspicuously
absent, that we feel we are in the presence of a natural monster.
It is not, however, always possible to make these
distinctions.
The professional criminal, though not of modern development, adapts
himself to modern conditions. In intelligence, and in
anthropological rank generally, he represents the criminal
aristocracy. He has deliberately chosen a certain method of earning
his living. It is a profession which requires great skill, and in
which, though the risks are great, the prizes are equally
great.[10]
Lacenaire, a famous criminal of the beginning of the century, has
sometimes been regarded as the type of the professional criminal,
and to complete this classificatory outline it may be well to
sketch his career. He was born at Lyons about the beginning of the
century, received a good average education, and was very
intelligent, though not distinguishing himself at college. He was
ambitious and, at the same time, incapable of sustained work. He
came to Paris to study law; but his father’s resources were
inadequate, and he became a clerk, frequently changing his
situation, growing tired of work at length, and engaging as a
soldier. So far no offence is recorded. When he returned to France
his father, become bankrupt, had fled. Some friends came to the
young man’s help, and gave him 500 francs. He hastened to Paris and
spent it in enjoyment. Then he entered the literary Bohemia, and
wrote verses and political articles, fighting a duel with a nephew
of Benjamin Constant and killing him. He said, later on, that the
sight of his victim’s agony had caused him no emotion. Soon his
love of enjoyment outran his means of getting money, though these
might have been considerable had he cared to work steadily, and he
obtained money by theft and swindling. Condemned to prison, he soon
formed connections with professional criminals, and associated them
in his schemes and joined them in their orgies. He adopted false
names, multiplied forgeries and disguises, and preyed actively on
society. After an orgy at this time he committed a murder, and he
attempted to murder a man who had won a large sum from him in
gambling. The crime and the attempt both remained unpunished.
Gifted with intelligence, and still more with vanity and audacity,
Lacenaire continued his career of systematic crime until finally he
met the guillotine. He was a professional criminal, but also, it
will be seen, he was something of an habitual, something of an
instinctive criminal.[11]
We have glanced briefly at the circles of crime—circles that extend
from heaven to very murky depths of hell, and that yet are not far
from any one of us. It is still necessary to touch on the various
ways in which the causes and nature of this vast field of crime may
be approached.
There are, first, the cosmic causes of crime; that is to say, all
the influences of the external inorganic world, the influence of
temperature on crime, the increase of crimes of violence in hot
weather, the periodicity of other kinds of crime, the influence of
climate, the influence of diet.
Then there is the biological factor. Under this head we include the
consideration of all the personal peculiarities of the individual,
anatomical, physiological, psychological. These peculiarities may
be atavistic, atypic, or morbid.
Lastly, there is the social factor in crime. Criminal sociology
deals with the production of crime by social influences, and by
economic perturbations. Infanticide is nearly always related to the
social factor; and the study of the various social influences which
promote or hinder infanticide is extremely instructive. The
relations between crimes against the person and the price of
alcohol, and between crimes against property and the price of
wheat, also belong to this department of the study of crime.
Society prepares crimes, as Quetelet said; the criminal is the
instrument that executes them. “The social environment,” Lacassagne
has well said, “is the cultivation medium of criminality; the
criminal is the microbe, an element which only becomes important
when it finds the medium which causes it to ferment: every society
has the criminals that it deserves.”
It is impossible to over-estimate the importance of the social
factor in crime. To some extent it even embraces the others, and
can be made to regulate and neutralise them. But we cannot deal
wisely with the social factor of crime, nor estimate the vast
importance of social influences in the production or prevention of
crime, unless we know something of the biology of crime, of the
criminal’s anatomical, physiological, and psychological nature.
This book is concerned with the study of the criminal man.
CHAPTER II. THE STUDY OF THE CRIMINAL.
When Homer described Thersites as ugly and deformed, with harsh or
scanty hair, and a pointed head, like a pot that had collapsed to a
peak in the baking—
ἄισχιστος δὲ ἀνὴρ ὑπὸ Ἴλιον ἦλθεν.
φολκὸς ἔην, χωλὸς δ’ ἕτερον πόδα. τὼ δέ οἱ ὤμω
κυρτώ, ἐπὶ στῆθος συνοχωκότε. αὐτὰρ ὕπερθεν
φοζὸς ἔην κεφαλὴν, ψεδνὴ δ’ ἐπενήνοθε λάχνη