Ellis The Criminal

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-3-7364-1022-0
Verlag: anboco
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 500 Seiten

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 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ellis, Havelock

Leseproben

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...