The female offender / by Cæsar Lombroso and William Ferrero ; with an introduction by W. Douglas Morrison.

  • Lombroso, Cesare, 1835-1909.
Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The female offender / by Cæsar Lombroso and William Ferrero ; with an introduction by W. Douglas Morrison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    for on the ground that it proceeds upon principles which are not resting on the facts of social experience. It is assumed, for instance, in every criminal code that the only remedy, or almost the only remedy, against the criminal population is the fear of punishment. As far as the average member of the community is concerned, it is not to be denied that the fear of penal consequences may exercise a salutary effect on his impulses and resolves at some critical moment in his career. To what extent the dread of coming into collision with the criminal law determines the course of human action is in the nature of things impossible to estimate. In any case it may safely be accepted that the ordinary man—that is to say, the man who habitually lives under ordinary social and biological conditions—is on critical occasions deterred from entertaining certain kinds of anti-social ideas by an apprehension that the practice of them will^ be followed by public indignation and public punish- ment. If the criminal population was composed of ordinary men it is possible that the purely punitive principles on which the penal code reposes would constitute an efficient check on the tendency to crime. But is it a fact that the criminal population is composed of ordinary men ? Is there any evidence to show that the great army of offenders who are passing through our prisons, penitentiaries, and penal servitude establishments in a ceaseless stream is made up of the same elements as the law-abiding sections of the community? On the contrary, there is eveiy reason to believe that vast numbers of the criminal