Criminal Psychology | Page 4

smaller dose
of calomel, a greater or less quantity of bloodletting, --this blindly indiscriminate mode of
treatment was regarded as orthodox for all common varieties of ailment. And so his
calomel pill and his bloodletting lances were carried everywhere with him by the doctor.
Nowadays, all this is past, in medical science. As to the causes of disease, we know that
they are facts of nature,--various, but distinguishable by diagnosis and research, and more
or less capable of prevention or control or counter-action. As to the treatment, we now
know that there are various specific modes of treatment for specific causes or symptoms,
and that the treatment must be adapted to the cause. In short, the individualization of
disease, in cause and in treatment, is the dominant truth of modern medical science.
The same truth is now known about crime; but the understanding and the application of it

are just opening upon us. The old and still dominant thought is, as to cause, that a crime
is caused by the inscrutable moral free will of the human being, doing or not doing the
crime, just as it pleases; absolutely free in advance, at any moment of time, to choose or
not to choose the criminal act, and therefore in itself the sole and ultimate cause of crime.
As to treatment, there still are just two traditional measures, used in varying doses for all
kinds of crime and all kinds of persons,-- jail, or a fine (for death is now employed in rare
cases only). But modern science, here as in medicine, recognizes that crime also (like
disease) has natural causes. It need not be asserted for one moment that crime is a disease.
But it does have natural causes,-- that is, circumstances which work to produce it in a
given case. And as to treatment, modern science recognizes that penal or remedial
treatment cannot possibly be indiscriminate and machine- like, but must be adapted to the
causes, and to the man as affected by those causes. Common sense and logic alike require,
inevitably, that the moment we predicate a specific cause for an undesirable effect, the
remedial treatment must be specifically adapted to that cause.
Thus the great truth of the present and the future, for criminal science, is the
individualization of penal treatment,--for that man, and for the cause of that man's crime.
Now this truth opens up a vast field for re-examination. It means that we must study all
the possible data that can be causes of crime,--the man's heredity, the man's physical and
moral

make-up, his emotional temperament, the surroundings of his youth, his
present home, and other conditions,--all the influencing circumstances. And it means that
the effect of different methods of treatment, old or new, for different kinds of men and of
causes, must be studied, experimented, and compared. Only in this way can accurate
knowledge be reached, and new efficient measures be adopted.
All this has been going on in Europe for forty years past, and in limited fields in this
country. All the branches of science that can help have been working,--anthropology,
medicine, psychology, economics, sociology, philanthropy, penology. The law alone has
abstained. The science of law is the one to be served by all this. But the public in general
and the legal profession in particular have remained either ignorant of the entire subject
or indifferent to the entire scientific movement. And this ignorance or indifference has
blocked the way to progress in administration.
The Institute therefore takes upon itself, as one of its aims, to inculcate the study of
modern criminal science, as a pressing duty for the legal profession and for the thoughtful
community at large. One of its principal modes of stimulating and aiding this study is to
make available in the English language the most useful treatises now extant in the
Continental languages. Our country has started late. There is much to catch up with, in
the results reached elsewhere. We shall, to be sure, profit by the long period of argument
and theorizing and experimentation which European thinkers and workers have passed
through. But to reap that profit, the results of their experience must be made accessible in
the English language.
The effort, in selecting this series of translations, has been to choose those works which
best represent the various schools of thought in criminal science, the general results
reached, the points of contact or of controversy, and the contrasts of method--having

always in view that class of works which have a more than local value and could best be
serviceable to criminal science in our country. As the science has various aspects and
emphases--the anthropological, psychological, sociological, legal, statistical, economic,
pathological--due regard was paid, in the selection, to a representation of all