6o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



juvenile delinquents, whom a gentle, loving care will rehabilitate 

 better than a severe prison regime conducted on the old lines. 

 Lombroso is greatly in favor of the Irish graduated cellular sys- 

 tem, by which the culprit regains little by little an almost com- 

 plete liberty. In this wise there results to the state a sensible 

 economy a fact not to be despised, seeing the large cost to soci- 

 ety of these useless members of the body politic. He also lauds 

 the Danish system, another graduated method founded on repaid 

 labor, and provisional and conditional liberty. Nor does he for- 

 get Saxony, where the system which he calls " of individualiza- 

 tion " has given such excellent results. 



He strongly urges that on quitting prison the interest only of 

 the capital he has acquired by his labor should be accorded to the 

 prisoner. This will help to keep him straight, and retain him 

 under a moral control. The professor is absolutely opposed to 

 deportation to colonies. For the incorrigible delinquent, Lom- 

 broso counsels, as the only way of supplanting capital punishment, 

 to which in extreme cases he is not opposed, a perpetual exile 

 from society, into which the criminal will not be able to return 

 unless he gives irrefutable proofs of amendment. 



" No matter that their criminality springs from infirmity," he 

 writes, " they are equally dangerous to themselves, to us, and to 

 their offspring ; and their rigid isolation is more useful and less 

 unjust than that of lunatics." 



And this brings him by a natural transition to the very im- 

 portant question of criminal lunatic asylums, institutions coun- 

 seled by humanity as well as by social security. Among delin- 

 quents, and those believed to be so, there are many who are and 

 always were demented, and whom to imprison would be to treat 

 unjustly. In Italy such persons are as yet provided for only by 

 half measures which violate both morality and security. In 

 England they have attempted for a century, and for sixty years 

 have almost succeeded, in settling this question by instituting 

 criminal madhouses. In 1786 this species of lunatics were con- 

 fined in a certain part of Bedlam ; in 1844 the state undertook to 

 maintain two hundred and thirty-five in a private establishment 

 in Fisherton House, but as the sad bands of those unhapy ones 

 grew it ended by erecting special madhouses. In 1850 one was 

 opened in Dundrum for Ireland, followed by one in Perth for 

 Scotland, and in Broadmoor for England. In these houses, regu- 

 lated by suitable decrees, admission is given not only to those 

 that have committed crime in an access of madness or who have 

 become mad during their trial, but there are also shut up those 

 that on account of lunacy or idiocy are incapable of under- 

 going prison discipline. In America this reform has already 

 brought about the criminal asylums of Auburn, in Pennsylvania, 



