The Positive School of Criminology | Page 3

school of
criminology, the problem of the relation between punishment and crime.
No man, no scientist, no legislator, no judge, has ever been able to

indicate any absolute standard, which would enable us to say that
equity demands a definite punishment for a definite crime. We can find
some opportunistic expedient, but not a solution of the problem. Of
course, if we could decide which is the gravest crime, then we could
also decide on the heaviest sentence and formulate a descending scale
which would establish the relative fitting proportions between crime
and punishment. If it is agreed that patricide is the gravest crime, we
meet out the heaviest sentence, death or imprisonment for life, and then
we can agree on a descending scale of crime and on a parallel scale of
punishments. But the problem begins right with the first stone of the
structure, not with the succeeding steps. Which is the greatest penalty
proportional to the crime of patricide? Neither science, nor legislation,
nor moral consciousness, can offer an absolute standard. Some say: The
greatest penalty is death. Others say: No, imprisonment for life. Still
others say: Neither death, nor imprisonment for life, but only
imprisonment for a time. And if imprisonment for a time is to be the
highest penalty, how many years shall it last --thirty, or twenty-five, or
ten?
No man can set up any absolute standard in this matter. Giovanni
Bovio thus arrived at the conclusion that this internal contradiction in
the science of criminology was the inevitable fate of human justice, and
that this justice, struggling in the grasp of this internal contradiction,
must turn to the civil law and ask for help in its weakness. The same
thought had already been illumined by a ray from the bright mind of
Filangieri, who died all too soon. And we can derive from this fact the
historical rule that the most barbarian conditions of humanity show a
prevalence of a criminal code which punishes without healing; and that
the gradual progress of civilization will give rise to the opposite
conception of healing without punishing.
Thus it happens that this university of Naples, in which the illustrious
representative of the classic school of criminology realized the
necessity of its regeneration, and in which Bovio foresaw its sterility,
has younger teachers now who keep alive the fire of the positivist
tendency in criminal science, such as Penta, Zuccarelli, and others,
whom you know. Nevertheless I feel that this faculty of jurisprudence

still lacks oxygen in the study of criminal law, because its thought is
still influenced by the overwhelming authority of the name of Enrico
Pessina. And it is easy to understand that there, where the majestic tree
spreads out its branches towards the blue vault, the young plant feels
deprived of light and air, while it might have grown strong and
beautiful in another place.
The positive school of criminology, then, was born in our own Italy
through the singular attraction of the Italian mind toward the study of
criminology; and its birth is also due to the peculiar condition our
country with its great and strange contrast between the theoretical
doctrines and the painful fact of an ever increasing criminality.
The positive school of criminology was inaugurate by the work of
Cesare Lombroso, in 1872. From 1872 to 1876 he opened a new way
for the study of criminality by demonstrating in his own person that we
must first understand the criminal who offends, before we can study
and understand his crime. Lombroso studied the prisoners in the
various penitentiaries of Italy from the point of view of anthropology.
And he compiled his studies in the reports of the Lombardian Institute
of Science and Literature, and published them later together in his work
"Criminal Man." The first edition of this work (1876) remained almost
unnoticed, either because its scientific material was meager, or because
Cesare Lombroso had not yet drawn any general scientific conclusions,
which could have attracted the attention of the world of science and law.
But simultaneously with its second edition (1878) there appeared two
monographs, which constituted the embryo of the new school,
supplementing the anthropological studies of Lombroso with
conclusions and systematizations from the point of view of sociology
and law. Raffaele Garofalo published in the Neapolitan Journal of
Philosophy and Literature an essay on criminality, in which he declared
that the dangerousness of the criminal was the criterion by which
society should measure the function of its defense against the disease of
crime. And in the same year, 1878, I took occasion to publish a
monograph on the denial of free will and personal responsibility, in
which I declared frankly that from now on the science of crime and
punishment must look for the fundamental facts of a science of social

defense