The Positive School of Criminology | Page 5

now a
commonplace, but in his time it revolutionized the world. It seemed as
though this innovation inaugurated by Pinel would overthrow the world

and the foundations of society. Well, two years before the storming of
the Bastile Pinel walked into the sanitarium of the Salpetriere and
committed the brave act of freeing the insane of the chains that
weighed them down. He demonstrated in practice that the insane, when
freed of their chains, became quieter, instead of creating wild disorder
and destruction. This great revolution of Pinel, Chiarugi, and others,
changed the attitude of the public mind toward the insane. While
formerly insanity had been regarded as a moral sin, the public
conscience, thanks to the enlightening work of science, henceforth had
to adapt itself to the truth that insanity is a disease like all others, that a
man does not become insane because he wants to, but that he becomes
insane through hereditary transmission and the influence of the
environment in which he lives, being predisposed toward insanity and
becoming insane under the pressure of circumstances.
The positive school of criminology accomplished the same revolution
in the views concerning the treatment of criminals that the above
named men of science accomplished for the treatment of the insane.
The general opinion of classic criminalists and of the people at large is
that crime involves a moral guilt, because it is due to the free will of the
individual who leaves the path of virtue and chooses the path of crime,
and therefore it must be suppressed by meeting it with a proportionate
quantity of punishment. This is to this day the current conception of
crime. And the illusion of a free human will (the only miraculous factor
in the eternal ocean of cause and effect) leads to the assumption that
one can choose freely between virtue and vice. How can you still
believe in the existence of a free will, when modern psychology armed
with all the instruments of positive modern research, denies that there is
any free will and demonstrates that every act of a human being is the
result of an interaction between the personality and the environment of
man?
And how is it possible to cling to that obsolete idea of moral guilt,
according to which every individual is supposed to have the free choice
to abandon virtue and give himself up to crime? The positive school of
criminology maintains, on the contrary, that it is not the criminal who
wills; in order to be a criminal it is rather necessary that the individual

should find himself permanently or transitorily in such personal,
physical and moral conditions, and live in such an environment, which
become for him a chain of cause and effect, externally and internally,
that disposes him toward crime. This is our conclusion, which I
anticipate, and it constitutes the vastly different and opposite method,
which the positive school of criminology employs as compared to the
leading principle of the classic school of criminal science.
In this method, this essential principle of the positive school of
criminology, you will find another reason for the seemingly slow
advance of this school. That is very natural. If you consider the great
reform carried by the ideas of Cesare Beccaria into the criminal justice
of the Middle Age, you will see that the great classic school represents
but a small step forward, because it leaves the penal justice on the same
theoretical and practical basis which it had in the Middle Age and in
classic antiquity, that is to say, based on the idea of a moral
responsibility of the individual. For Beccaria, for Carrara, for their
predecessors, this idea is no more nor less than that mentioned in books
47 and 48 of the Digest: "The criminal is liable to punishment to the
extent that he is morally guilty of the crime he has committed." The
entire classic school is, therefore, nothing but a series of reforms.
Capital punishment has been abolished in some countries, likewise
torture, confiscation, corporal punishment. But nevertheless the
immense scientific movement of the classic school has remained a
mere reform.
It has continued in the 19th century to look upon crime in the same way
that the Middle Age did: "Whoever commits murder or theft, is alone
the absolute arbiter to decide whether he wants to commit the crime or
not." This remains the foundation of the classic school of criminology.
This explains why it could travel on its way more rapidly than the
positive school of criminology. And yet, it took half a century from the
time of Beccaria, before the penal codes showed signs of the
reformatory influence of the classic school of criminology. So that it
has also taken quite a long time to establish it so well that it