Note 23 — Chapter III · OPPOSITION TO LOMBROSO’S VIEWS—WOMAN AS CRIMINAL—THE POLITICAL CRIMINAL—CRIMINAL PSYCHOLOGY

This brilliant expert has given the best summary of his own aims in the speech which he delivered in the year 1870 in Cincinnati, at the Congress for Prison Reform. He said: “When the chains have been removed, when corporal punishment has been abolished, when the treatment of prisoners has become something altogether different from what it has been in the past, when, in a word, in penology severity has been replaced by mildness and consideration, still it will not be easy to say if and to what extent this humane spirit will have dammed the spreading flood of crime, nor should I find it easy to determine precisely the grounds by which we have been guided to a decision whether severity or mildness is to be preferred.

“To study the criminal, this is the first and the greatest need. After so many years filled with work and discussion we have arrived at the point from which we ought to have started, precisely because, after taking such an infinity of trouble, we have discovered nothing but emptiness.”