Note 41 — Chapter IV · THE FRENCH SCHOOL (THE SCHOOL OF THE ENVIRONMENT).

“Crime, we will close this work by saying, is not the consequence of a special organization of the criminal, an organization which is peculiar to the criminal alone, and which forces him to the commission of criminal acts. The criminal, such by habit and apparently born as such, bears many marks of bodily and mental deformity, which have, however, neither in their totality nor singly, so marked and peculiar a character as to differentiate the criminal from his fellows as a distinct type. The criminal bears the traces of degeneracy that are to be found in abundance among the lower classes from which he mostly takes his rise. These traces, acquired through social conditions and transmitted, in his case at times emerge in stronger form. Whoever would do away with crime must do away with the social wrongs in which crime takes root and grows, and, in establishing and applying forms of punishment, must give more weight to the individuality of the criminal than to the category under which the crime falls.”41