Note 40 — Chapter IV · THE FRENCH SCHOOL (THE SCHOOL OF THE ENVIRONMENT).

The work of Dr. Baer, “Der Verbrecher in anthropologischer Beziehung”, has only an indirect importance for our subject, as the title indicates. Since his medical and anthropological studies lead him to the conclusion that the social atmosphere is the fundamental cause of crime, it is worth while to note his opinion. For this it will be sufficient to quote the following: “For us crime is, as Prins excellently expresses it, not an individual phenomenon, but a social one. ‘Criminality is made up of the elements of human society itself, it is not transcendent but immanent. We can see in it a kind of degeneration of the social organism.… The criminal and the honest man are each dependent upon their environment. There are social conditions that are favorable to moral health, where there is no tendency, no inclination toward crime; there is a social environment where the atmosphere is corrupt, where unwholesome elements have accumulated, where crime settles as soot does in a flue, where the tendency toward crime bears fruit.’ Though Ferri has recently advocated the opinion that the criminal is the result of three factors, operative at the same time, and that these three causes are individual (i.e. anthropological), physical,40 and social; in our opinion, on the other hand, these three causes are actually to be reduced to a single one, if, as he himself points out, we take into consideration the fact that the first two are both dependent upon social conditions. The anthropological and physical stigmata of criminals are, as we have endeavored to show above, in most cases wholly conditioned by the influences and circumstances of their environment.