6oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



magistrates hold that the cases are rare, nay, indeed exceptional, 

 in which the criminal is subject to distorted volition, and but too 

 frequently deem a jurist's highest earthly mission to consist in 

 laying down his legal judgments, which start from hard and fast 

 rules and admit of no gradations between the sane, the alienated, 

 and the criminal mind. Hence this type of lawgiver has one sole 

 idea, one single starting point, in assigning his verdicts. He has 

 but one regime of punishment to bestow on each individual crime, 

 and this is pronounced without preoccupying himself concerning 

 the divergences of climate, region, and habit whence the crime 

 has sprung. He judges the minds of others by his own, which 

 has probably been nourished on the most sublime speculations of 

 human wisdom. Hence, legal philosophers and legislators will 

 not, and perchance can not, descend from the proud heights of 

 metaphysics to the humble and arid territory of penal establish- 

 ments. Their opinions on these points are, therefore, almost 

 valueless. 



In a letter recently addressed to me, in reply to my query of 

 how he would treat the criminal, and what he thought of the 

 Elmira system, Prof. Lombroso replied : 



" To put it briefly, my idea is that so far all we have done is 

 mistaken, not excluding from this condemnation the American 

 reformatories. I hold that for women, for instance, except in 

 quite a few cases (perhaps twenty or thirty, speaking of Italy), 

 there is no need for prisons. A species of convent would suffice. 

 For young men it is necessary first of all to distinguish the con- 

 genital criminals from those who are sons of parents affected by 

 syphilis, or alcohol, or typhus. Then, accordingly, they should be 

 submitted to treatment, but not a commonplace one like that of 

 Elmira, but be dosed with homoeopathic sulphur, nux vornica, or 

 submitted to electricity. If, after such a cure, they show no signs 

 of improvement, then detain them for life in wide islands, where, 

 with the exception of bread and water, if they would not die, they 

 must gain the rest of their fare by working. If, after this, they 

 transgress repeatedly, sentence them to death. The educational 

 reformatories, with all those precautions practiced at Elmira, I 

 would reserve exclusively for young criminals guilty of crimes of 

 occasion or of passion, and to these I would accord conditional 

 liberty. The suspension of punishment, the study of the individ- 

 ual character, will help us to know them as much as the history 

 of their case. Adults under judgment I would keep in prison 

 cells whenever life in common does not facilitate the reciprocal 

 tale-bearing which renders detection easy. But here, too, if the 

 crime be one of occasion or passion, I would favor short-term 

 punishments, fines, floggings, fasts, douches, etc. If, instead, the 

 delinquency is instinctive, or recidivist, I would mostly inflict 



