Criminology

CRIMINOLOGY (from Latin crimen—crime and Greek logos—word, science), the "science of crime," i.e., the study of the manifestation and causes of criminality for the purpose of scientifically substantiating methods of combating crime, or so-called criminal policy. Of course, the "science of crime" in the West entirely reflects the punitive policy of bourgeois states and the socio-economic and political relations in capitalist society. From the point of view of anthropology and psychopathology, it is especially important to dwell on the struggle between two main criminological schools, which are still fighting among themselves to this day—the anthropological and the sociological. The anthropological school, founded in the 1870s by Cesare Lombroso, biologizes both the concept of the criminal and criminality. It recognizes the immutability and eternity of the category of the criminal for all times, peoples, and classes, just as the so-called classical school of criminal law, with which the anthropological school fought, did. Just as this eternal law of morality, according to Kant, was a categorical imperative, an attribute of the individual, an internal quality of theirs, so its antipode, "evil will," or the eternal law of immorality, for the classical school of criminal law, is also located within the individual. And a person is born with both. If a person is immoral, then, according to Kant, one should blame not society or the state, but the fact that the person is imperfect. This free evil will of the individual was recognized by the classical school of criminal law as the sole source or cause of the criminal behavior of the individual and of criminality, which is composed of the crimes of individual people. Since the source of the crime is clear, criminological study should be directed toward a purely formal legal analysis of the criminal act. Neither the criminal as a living, concrete personality nor criminality as a social phenomenon interested the adherents of the classical school of criminal law. From the doctrine of free and evil will also flowed the basic principle of criminal policy—the doctrine of punishment equivalent to the crime as a just retribution. Lombroso, in contrast to the classical school, in accordance with his naturalistic worldview, replaced this non-determined, free evil will with an innate inclination toward crime, determined by the laws of nature, i.e., by the force of nature, which is prevalent throughout the entire animal and even plant world and is characteristic of certain groups of people who have not reached the high moral development of the rest of humanity for one biological reason or another. "In general, crime," he says in the second volume of his celebrated work (L'uomo delinquente), "as both statistics and anthropological study (of the living offender) teach, represents a natural phenomenon of nature, and to use the language of philosophers—an inevitable phenomenon of nature, like birth, death, conception, mental diseases, of which it is often a sad variety. That is why, for example, there is no abyss separating the acts of instinctive cruelty of animals and even plants from those of the criminal human being." Thus, according to Lombroso, the criminal element is a necessary and natural attribute of certain living beings, like birth, death, etc.; it is embedded in the psychophysical nature of man. To commit a crime, one must be a carrier of a criminal inclination from birth, since far from all people commit crimes. It was psychological and anthropometric study of living criminals in Italian prisons that led Lombroso to such an assertion. Lombroso found in them not only psychic qualities characterizing their criminal essence, such as: vanity, lack of foresight, bloodthirstiness, cruelty, lack of a sense of remorse, vengefulness, greed, etc., but also specific physical structural features (in Lombroso's conviction) characteristic only of them and not found in non-criminal people, representing mainly various anomalies of the structure of the skull and brain, such as: relatively large dimensions of the facial part of the skull, prognathism, sloping forehead, metopic skull, protruding ears, developed canines and cheekbones, massive large lower jaw, etc. All these features are so characteristic that one can immediately recognize a criminal among a mass of people by them. Thus, one of the most prominent followers of Lombroso, Ferri (an eclectic who strove to synthesize the sociological "Marxist" direction with the anthropological, but who in essence remained a faithful adherent of the anthropological school and in the last years of his life—a fascist), recounts a case when he, while examining 700 soldiers, found in one "a very clearly expressed type of murderer (receding forehead, huge jaws, cold gaze, earthy pallor, thin lips), which was immediately confirmed by the soldier's confession that he had been convicted of a murder committed in childhood." And Lombroso himself found these signs not only in modern living criminals but also noted them on twelve skulls of medieval murderers. Thus, the true cause of crime, according to Lombroso, is a peculiar anthropological type of criminal, differing from other people—the born criminal. "Just as a wolf cannot become a vegetarian," says Kautsky, paraphrasing the Lombrosians, "no matter what environment you place it in, so the born criminal will, by necessity flowing from his nature, commit crimes, no matter what social environment you place him in." Since the true cause of crime for Lombroso and his followers is the born criminal, then the mass phenomenon—criminality—appears to him as a simple sum, an aggregate of individual criminal actions as inevitable natural actions of born criminals doomed to this by nature. Therefore, social factors, to which Lombroso attributed some significance in his later work "On the Causes of Crime and the Fight Against It" (1899), according to his doctrine, only change the form of the manifestations of the criminal essence of these people. They reduce some types of crimes and increase others, but the acting person always remains the same—the born criminal, for he is the true cause of the crime, just as with any infectious disease the true cause is the microbe, and a cold, the patient's psychic state, etc., are only conditions influencing the manifestation and course of the disease. Persons completely free of the physical signs of the born criminal, but who nevertheless commit a crime (and there are from 35% to 40% of born criminals among the entire mass of offenders, according to Lombroso), he, in agreement with Garofalo, does not recognize as true criminals and does not consider it possible to even call them criminals. Hence it is clear that for Lombroso, where there is not a born criminal, there is neither a criminal nor a crime, even if it is formally recognized by law. Thus, Lombroso biologizes first and foremost the concept of the criminal, localizing it in the born criminal as a peculiar psychophysically organized biological individual of the human race, and through the born criminal himself, he biologizes criminality, recognizing it as a simple aggregate of the criminal actions of these individual born criminals; thanks to this, the living personality of the criminal occupies a central and fundamental place for him. He explained the origin of the born criminal initially by atavism, the return of modern man to the biological stage of the savage, and then by epilepsy, which gives two related large branches, two types of insanity: moral insanity and the born criminal. From such an understanding of criminality and the criminal flows the criminal policy proposed by the anthropological school. The object of its policy is the born criminal, and here the principle formulated by Ferri with particular clarity must prevail: "there must be a correspondence between the remedy and the disease—such is the law of nature." The fight against criminality is a fight against criminals. There is, of course, no moral responsibility of the criminal, as a special anthropological type determined by the laws of nature and fatally doomed by nature to crime; hence, there cannot be punishment proportional to the guilt of the offender. Society should not punish him, but defend itself against him; at the same time, penitentiary institutions should be turned into institutions of physical and moral treatment with a regime adapted to various types of criminal inclinations, since in them one fights "not with the crime, but with the criminal for his crime" (Ferri). For the success of this struggle, it is necessary to correctly classify criminals, because if some criminals are hopeless in the sense of social readaptation and need only isolation, others can be adapted and are subject to re-education, while others are generally not dangerous; their criminal actions are accidental, they are pseudo-criminals, and it is sufficient to impose a fine on them for minor crimes in order to compensate for the harm caused to the victim.

Garofalo, one of the greatest adherents of Lombroso, provides an entire corresponding scale of punishments. In the anthropological school, the so-called sociological school in Criminology developed rapidly. First and foremost, the anatomical localization of the "criminal" in a specially organized type of born criminal was destroyed. The works of the German prison doctor Werth proved that the anthropological stigmata of the born criminal type are nothing other than degenerative stigmata, which are encountered in people who have never committed crimes no less frequently than in criminals. The assertion about the atavistic origin of criminality, about the similarity of the born criminal to a savage, also proved incorrect, since the latter, in a moral sense, is often not at all inferior to modern civilized man, and sometimes even superior. The entire doctrine of atavism is generally called into question by modern science. The connection of the "criminal" with epilepsy is also unconvincing, since among pronounced epileptics with the character changes typical of the latter, there is a huge number of patients who do not exhibit any criminal traits or inclinations. Finally, followers of the sociological school in criminology proved through a series of statistical works that criminality as a social phenomenon, and consequently an individual crime, which is not a biological act of the individual but a social one, is caused by social reasons. It is not the born criminal that is the cause of criminality, but those socio-economic disorders that exist in modern society: pauperism, wars, the right of capitalist property, the slavery of some, the dominance of others, lack of culture, etc. And the individual criminal himself is a product of social factors. In essence, these thoughts were expressed even before the formal organization of the sociological school, founded by Liszt, Prins, and Van Hamel at the 2nd Congress of Criminalists in 1889; they were expressed as early as the first half of the 19th century, first by the chief director of Belgian prisons, Ducpetiaux, and then by the well-known Quetelet. "Society," the latter asserts on the basis of a large amount of statistical material, "contains within itself the germs of all crimes that are to be committed, because it contains the conditions conducive to their development; it, so to speak, prepares the crimes, and the criminal is only an instrument. Every social state therefore presupposes a certain number and a certain order of offenses, which are the necessary consequence of its organization." However, several directions formed within the sociological school of Criminology, since the desire of its founders was to unite all criminological currents under the slogan of the so-called positive method of studying criminality. The Marxist criminological theory most consistently revealed the sociological point of view, recognizing criminality as a consequence of socio-economic and political relations in capitalist society and considering, according to Marx's teaching, a radical change in this system to be the radical remedy against criminality. The bourgeois wing of the sociological school, to which the head of the sociological direction, Franz von Liszt, himself belonged, sought to reconcile the anthropological and sociological directions and proposed only partial social reforms for the eradication of criminality. Franz von Liszt, while denying the born criminal as an anthropological type and as a cause of criminality and recognizing the main significance in the origin of criminality as a social factor, nevertheless attributed a certain significance to the individual factor in the etiology of crimes. This gave room for the revival of Lombrosianism in new clothes, for the emergence of so-called neo-Lombrosianism. This is a psychiatric doctrine about the antisocial type of psychopath, who is free from any physical signs of the born criminal, but due to a special hereditarily conditioned defectiveness of the psychic makeup (hereditary psychopathy) he is antisocial from birth and by virtue of this enters the criminal path at an early age, regardless of the influence of the outside world. Three types of hereditary, or (as they say now) constitutional psychopaths, according to Homburger, exhibit a special inclination toward criminal behavior: these are emotionally dull psychopaths, some weak-willed ones with pronounced impulsivity, and pseudologues. This is verified in two ways: either by investigating the fate of children who grew up in completely identical external conditions, for example in orphanages, or by studying the life path of people whose hereditary predisposition is homogeneous, but whose surrounding external life conditions are different. The first path was chosen by Adelheid Fuchs-Kamp in relation to the pupils of the "Fleingen" orphanage in Baden. The second - by Johannes Lange in relation to monozygotic and dizygotic twins. Both works date to 1929. Fuchs-Kamp, studying the life path of the development of the Fleingen pupils in family, professional, and judicial-legal relations, divides them into three groups: the first - successful in all these relations, the second - unstable in all relations, but often correcting themselves in one direction or another, and the third - suffering catastrophe on all paths of life and hopeless in all relations. This last group consists of the antisocial psychopaths indicated by Homburger. The question of the significance of predisposition and environment is posed even more sharply by J. Lange, and he decides it in favor of predisposition. Of the 30 pairs of twins he studied, 13 were monozygotic and 17 dizygotic. The decisive significance of hereditary predisposition for all behavior and in particular for criminal behavior, the preponderance of its significance over the environment, is given, according to Lange, by monozygotic twins. 10 pairs out of 13 were exceptionally similar to each other not only physically but also psychically, and revealed an almost identical picture of criminal behavior, distributed over the same periods of their lives, despite completely different conditions of their development and subsequent life. The significance of hereditary predisposition, which determines the life paths of monozygotic twins, is emphasized by comparing them with the fate of 17 pairs of dizygotic twins, of which only two pairs had a common criminal fate. However, upon detailed acquaintance with the life histories of concordant monozygotic twins (Lange calls those concordant in whom criminal development coincides), it turns out that most of them were raised in the same family until adolescence, attended the same school, and even the same class, i.e., received the foundations of personality development under the same conditions. Furthermore, sometimes having already committed identical crimes in this environment (which does not exclude mutual induction) and being expelled from their parental home, they were subjected to approximately the same influence of homeless street life or the criminal environment of a prison, into which they fell for thefts or hooligan actions while intoxicated, which are mostly banal for the position of a homeless adolescent or youth. Thus, in all these cases of Lange, just as in the cases of Fuchs-Kamp, one can speak of the significance of hereditary predisposition or constitutional psychopathy as a factor that only to a certain extent predisposes to crime, determining the mechanisms of behavior, both criminal and non-criminal, but not as a factor that is the cause of criminal behavior, the cause of the crime, and the cause of the development of the personality as a criminal type. In all cases, the cause of both an individual crime and the transformation of a non-criminal personality into one or another type of criminal remains the surrounding social environment. However, this is only the immediate cause, which, although it is not brought to the foreground here, is nevertheless revealed with sufficient clarity in the authors' description. But the latter have forgotten the general and ultimate causes of both every individual crime and all criminality as a whole as a social phenomenon: that social system, those production relations of capitalist society, which are the cause of every social phenomenon in it and in particular of criminality. And here, in this new Lombrosianism, as in the old, a hopeless and, from a dialectical point of view, clearly false attempt is made to explain a social phenomenon by the actions of individual persons participating in it. Social phenomena, to the category of which criminality also belongs, do not represent a simple sum of acts of behavior of individual actors, but these individual actions form in the social phenomenon a peculiar indivisible unity of multiplicity, form a new social phenomenon distinct from them; the latter is governed not by biological laws participating in the life of an individual (such as, for example, the laws of heredity), but by social laws. The individual is also subject to these laws in their social behavior. Finally, the neo-Lombrosians make the same mistake as the old anthropologists: they also recognize the criminal as a biological essence of the personality.

Representatives of the right-wing bourgeois wing of the sociological school in Criminology are also to blame for this, as they hush up the true class essence of the law violated by the criminal, provide a formal criterion of the criminal according to the old formula: "there is no crime without a violation of the law" (sine lege nullum crimen), and assert that the law of capitalist countries protects the interests not of the privileged ruling classes, but of all citizens. In reality, however, the words of Kautsky are true, asserting that "it is impossible to find a criterion of crime and the criminal suitable for all times and peoples and for all strata of the population. He who looks at crime as a phenomenon of the social order does not need such a criterion at all." Thus, the conditional and therefore changeable concept of the criminal cannot be an unconditional and immutable biological quality of an individual, transmitted by inheritance. However, despite all the errors and delusions of the old and new anthropological schools, their undeniable merit is the attraction of the attention of criminologists to the personality of the person committing the crime and undergoing punishment. With this, the school laid the foundation for a new branch of Criminology, recently named criminal biology by the Austrian jurist from Graz, Lenz. The latter also includes criminal psychology, which until recently developed to a certain extent independently of criminal anthropology. The rudiments of criminal psychology date back to the beginning of the 18th century; however, Hans Gross, the greatest legal scholar of the second half of the 19th century, is considered its true founder. True, its subject goes beyond the mere study of the psyche of the criminal, but also concerns the psychology of the judge, the investigator, witness testimony, etc. However, its main object is the criminal. This part of criminal psychology is now entirely absorbed by criminal biology, which studies the integral personality in its psychophysical and social manifestations. This new branch of Criminology is still only in its infancy, striving in the West, in capitalist countries, to encompass the personality of the criminal entirely in his bio-psychological essence and development, while in the USSR—in his bio-social structure and dynamics. Criminal biology encompasses not only criminal psychology but also criminal psychopathology. Hence the role of the psychiatrist in criminal biology is understandable. However, the role of the psychiatrist in criminal biology is determined not only by this, but also by the emergence of a new psychology, medical psychology, which has grown out of the daily practice of psychiatrists learning about the human personality and its behavior outside hospital walls—a personality, it is true, not healthy, but also not mentally ill, but approaching the healthy, standing on the border of health and disease, the personality of psychopaths and neurotics. This medical psychology serves as the basis for medical criminal psychology as well. In connection with this, in the USSR, starting from 1923, on the initiative of Moscow, offices for the study of crime and the personality of the criminal have been emerging in many cities. In the study of the criminal, the main role in these offices belongs to psychiatrists.