664 CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY. 



existence ; and in order to establish with certainty this proposition, it 

 is proposed to give him a scientific psychologic examination. 



Man can be judged only by his acts. There may be a sort of latent 

 criminality always ready to explode under the shock of propitious cir- 

 cumstances, as an expression of a diathesis stage dominated by hered- 

 ity, and of which biologic science can enumerate the signs. A psycho- 

 logic analysis is indispensable in order to determine these questions. The 

 necessity of a psychologic examination of the delinquent is imposed 

 because it is the only method by which one can determine the existence 

 of such sentiments as will authorize the conditional liberation or ought 

 to postpone the punishment. 



(3) As to the practicability of this we have to remark that the pres- 

 ent theory and past experience has only resulted in a multiplication of 

 punishment without having reduced the extent of criminality; and 

 this, whether in the number of the crimes, their frequency, or their 

 grades. By the old system neither the genesis or evolution of crime 

 has been studied ; neither the legislator nor the jurist seem to have 

 ever considered why an evil-minded minority should persevere in the 

 commission of crime while the majority of people are honest, well dis- 

 l)Osed, and of good repute. It is therefore towards the modern school 

 of positivists that we must turn for a solution of this matter, because 

 it alone seems to have studied crime as a natural phenomenon arising 

 from multiple causes. 



(4) The principle of the reformation of the criminal by the opera- 

 tion of the penal sj^stem is in contradiction with the fixation in ad- 

 vance of the duration of the cure to which the delinquent has to sub- 

 mit. The new theory of jurisprudence will permit whoever or what- 

 ever criminal shall show himself to be repentant and inoffensive to be 

 conditionally liberated, and this offer should be made or the opportu- 

 nity given even to those who refuse or those who find themselves in 

 the impossibility to reform. The reformation of the delinquent, or at 

 least his resignation to and respect for social laws, is the essence of 

 this theory of conditional liberation. But, as one can count to a cer- 

 tain extent upon the vitality of the criminal instinct, and with the per- 

 sistence of the social conditions which nourished it, it is necessary to 

 prepare for the eventuality of a prolonged incarceration which may be 

 regarded as the result of incurability on the part of the criminal. The 

 idea is to proportion the length of the imprisonment according to the 

 nature of the delinquent, to the degree of his perversity, and the dan- 

 ger of his return to society before his evil tendencies shall have become 

 enfeebled or neutralized. It is evident that this is more rational than 

 to fix a time certain for his imprisonment according to the condition 

 of his offense, which may furnish only an isolated system of the moral 

 malady with which he has been attacked and which was the cause of 

 the commission of his crime. The proposed law of conditional libera- 



