Chapter IV: Criminal Anthropology (psychical) (1)

§ 1. _Moral Insensibility._

The moral insensibility of the instinctive and habitual criminal, his lack of forethought, his absence of remorse, his cheerfulness, had been noted long before they were exhaustively studied by Despine. In the _argot_ of French criminals, conscience is _la muette_, and to induce any one to lead a dishonest life is _l’affranchir_. This moral insensibility is, indeed, a commonplace of observation with all who have come in close contact with criminals. Gall remarked: “If criminals have remorse, it is that they have not committed more crimes, or that they have let themselves be caught.” Dostoieffsky, speaking from his intimate and sympathetic acquaintance with convicts in Siberia, said: “During so many years I ought to have been able to seize some indication, however fugitive, of regret, of moral suffering. I have perceived positively nothing. Seclusion and excessive work only develop among those people a profound hatred, the thirst of forbidden pleasures, and a terrible indifference.” He goes on to tell of a parricide who remarked carelessly, in the course of conversation: “Take my father, for example; he was never ill up to the day of his death.” “Scenes of heartrending despair are hardly ever witnessed among prisoners,” observes Dr. Wey of Elmira; “their sleep is disturbed by no uneasy dreams, but is easy and sound; their appetites, also, are excellent.”[54] “It is a most singular thing,” remarks Mr. Davitt, “that I have met very few individuals in prison who gave evidence in appearance or talk of being _truly_ miserable, no matter what the length of their sentence, amount of extra punishment, or contrast between their previous and their convict life may have been.”[55] Mr. Davitt seems inclined to attribute this sinister contentment to a sort of heroic fortitude providentially implanted in the criminal breast. He refers, however, to one man who never smiled during the time he was in Dartmoor. “His existence seemed to be one perpetual sorrow, and he formed altogether the most striking exception to the rule of non-despairing prisoners which came under my notice during my long intercourse with Dartmoor’s criminal population.” Now this man was a Swansea stone-mason who had come home one Saturday evening “a little fresh,” but not drunk, to find his wife in tears, and on learning that she had been insulted by a man who lived on the other side of the street, he rushed out, chisel in hand, to the man’s house and left him desperately wounded. It is clear that this man, who was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude, was not an instinctive criminal, or an habitual criminal at all; it was the strength of his social, and not of his anti-social, instincts which had caused his crime. He was merely a criminal by passion, and his case forms, therefore, no exception to the general rule.

On the whole we may conclude that the practice of the instinctive and habitual criminal corresponds very closely with the faith of that religious sect who in Commonwealth days held “that heaven and all happiness consists in the acting of those things which are sin and wickedness,” and “that such men and women are most perfect and like to God or eternity which do commit the greatest sins with least remorse.”

Despine, in his _Psychologie Naturelle_ (1868), studied this question on the largest scale in order to obtain exact results. “I addressed myself for this purpose,” he tells us, “to the collection of the _Gazette des Tribunaux_, going back to 1825, and I soon acquired certainty that this psychical peculiarity is an invariable rule among these criminals.... I acquired the certainty that those who premeditate and commit crime in cold blood never experience moral remorse. I found also that those who manifest acute sorrow and real remorse after a criminal act, have committed that act either under the influence of a violent passion which has momentarily stifled the moral sense, or by accident, without intention.” He concludes that the two great psychical conditions for crime are moral insensibility and perversity, with two accessory moral anomalies, imprudence and lack of foresight.

“You premeditated your crime?” said the judge. “Yes, for eighteen months.” “But that is monstrous.” “I know; I ought to have done it in April, but having no money, I arranged it for January.” A murderer, after receiving sentence, was led out in the midst of a crowd who hurled imprecations at him. He saw a comrade and shouted to him, almost laughing--“Hallo! I’ve just been condemned to death.” An Albanian, after having killed a traveller to rob him, lamented that the expense of the shot amounted to five paras; he had only found four paras on the victim; that was his one regret. An assassin after his crime passed two days eating and drinking with a comrade; “he was as gay as a lark,” said the latter. “But,” said the judge to the accused, “one fact indicates remorse on your part: you were about to cut your throat when arrested.” “That was that I might not be taken to prison.”

Wainewright unblushingly avowed his atrocities. How could he kill such an innocent and trustful creature as Helen Abercrombie, he was asked once. After a moment’s reflection he replied, “Upon my soul I don’t know, unless it was because she had such thick legs.”

It would be easy to give many similar stories exhibiting the moral insensibility of the instinctive criminal, frequently manifested in brutal bravado. They are, however, easily accessible and of sufficient notoriety. It is enough to give one more. A corporal at Paris killed an old woman, the landlady of an inn, in order to rob her. He was condemned to death without any hope that his penalty would be commuted. He knew this, but was not disturbed, and was proud of his calmness and _sangfroid_; he talked to his warders on the most various subjects, without reference, however, to his crime; read books from the prison library, and finally devoted himself to what he called the literary labours of his last hours. He had a taste for verse, and wrote a drama concerning his crime. “Death!” he often said to those around him; “I cannot fear it either as a soldier or as a philosopher. Yet it is overtaking me in my youth and strength. It is a terrible thing, but I am prepared, and I shall go to my execution courageously and with head erect.” The acts of this Socratic criminal agreed with his words. He slept peacefully, rose and dressed himself with a smile on his lips, glad, as he said, to find himself still in this world, where it is, after all, so pleasant to live. His appetite was always good, and he joked with the warder who attended him about the small amount of food supplied to him. “Patience!” he exclaimed, “_à la guerre comme à la guerre_.”

An executioner told Lombroso that all the highwaymen and murderers went to their deaths joking. It would, however, be a mistake to trace moral insensibility in the tranquil avocations and _bon-mots_ of men who, whatever their crimes, are about to pay the extreme forfeit for them. One criminal occupied his last hours with arranging his unpublished literary works; another gave lessons in hygiene to the warders; a third remarked to those who sought to hurry him to the place of execution, “Do not be disturbed; they will not begin without me.” Such stories have, however, been recorded of the most eminent political offenders in all countries.

Dr. Corre, in his interesting work, _Les Criminels_, has investigated the historic and judicial documents relative to the last moments of 88 criminals condemned to death, of whom 64 were men and 24 women. Of the men 25 died in a cowardly manner, already half-dead with fear, or else after a despairing struggle with the executioner. These were more than two-fifths of the whole number, and included many of the chief criminal celebrities, some of them educated men, doctors and priests. Four accepted their fate in a state of extreme nervous excitement, accompanied by loquacity. Twelve maintained to the end a cynical and theatrical attitude; these were vain individuals, often with some pretensions to literary ability; Lacenaire is the type of them. Five died with indifference, an impassivity which recalls the insensibility of the brute or the unconsciousness of the madman. Eighteen went out of the world with a calm and resigned courage, often repentant, and prepared by the exhortations of the priest. They belonged to various social classes. Those of the lower classes were generally more sincere, and publicly avowed their guilt, holding themselves up as warnings to others; those belonging to the middle classes, anxious to leave behind a doubt as to their guilt, declared themselves innocent; others were silent. Of the 24 women, only 5 (about one-fifth) showed cowardice. Only one, a poisoner, showed “revolting cynicism.” The rest, 18 in number, were self-possessed and resigned, frequently repentant, and generally consoled by religious administrations. In this category is included the Marquise de Brinvilliers, who for a long quarter of an hour was exposed to an immense crowd nearly naked--“mirodée, rasée, dressée et redressée par le bourreau,” wrote Mme. de Sevigné--with unshaken firmness. Three-fourths of the women, little more than one-fourth of the men, are among those who died with resigned self-possession. The cynicism, cowardice, and brutal passivity of the others alike testify to moral insensibility.

Out of more than 400 murderers Bruce Thomson had known, only three expressed remorse. Of the 4000 criminals who have passed through Elmira, 36.2 per cent. showed on admission positively no susceptibility to moral impressions; only 23.4 per cent. were “ordinarily susceptible.” Dr. Salsotto, in his recent study of 130 women condemned for premeditated assassination or complicity in such assassination,[56] was only able to recognise genuine penitence in six. He is careful to point out that precise statistics on this point are of no great value, unless they are associated with a very intimate knowledge of individual criminals; the assumed penitence is seldom real, and the real penitence is not obtrusive. Dostoieffsky, the most profound student of the human heart who has ever studied criminals intimately, has noted this fact--“In one prison there were men whom I had known for several years, whom I believed to be savage beasts, and for whom, as such, I felt contempt; yet at the most unexpected moment their souls would involuntarily expand at the surface with such a wealth of sentiment and cordiality, with such a vivid sense of their own and others’ suffering, that scales seemed to fall from one’s eyes; for an instant the stupefaction was so great that one hesitated to believe what one had seen and heard.”

The moral insensibility of the instinctive criminal is the cause of his cruelty, a cruelty which he frequently displays from his childhood. Rossi found in ten of his 100 criminals an exaggerated and precocious cruelty; one of them, as a child, used to take young birds, pull out their feathers, and roast them alive; another revenged himself on birds for the punishments imposed on him by his parents. A certain amount of cruelty is, however, almost normal in healthy children. The instinctive criminal is more distinctively marked by his continuance of the same practices throughout life. At Buenos Ayres a man killed his father in order to rob him, and not finding the money, he placed his mother’s feet on the fire to make her confess that of which she was ignorant. Another, after killing an entire family, played with the corpses of the children by throwing them in the air and catching them alternately. Another, mentioned by Lombroso, when shown a photograph of his wife whom he had murdered, testified to the identity without the tremor of an eyelid, tranquilly adding that after inflicting the fatal wound he had asked for forgiveness, which had not been granted. A little nursemaid poisoned the twin children under her care with the phosphorus from a box of matches, in order to procure the excitement of going out to the doctor’s and the chemist’s.[57]

In India no motive for murder seems too unnatural or too far-fetched to be occasionally true. “A village schoolmaster in Aligarh (1881) killed one of his pupils; and a stepfather in the same district threw his two stepsons into the Ganges because he was tired of them. A man in Jhansi (1885) killed his daughter because his neighbour had slandered her, in order that the girl’s blood might be upon the neighbour’s head. A master murdered his servant (1881) and threw the body before his enemy’s door, solely in order to bring a false charge against the latter. A similar case occurred in Azamgarh five years later: a boy was murdered by his grandfather and uncle; they threw the body into a sugar-cane field, and then charged the owner with the crime. A still stranger story comes from the Mutha District: Randbir, a Jat, who had once been a thriving man in Randbirpur, fell into the hands of the moneylenders, lost his property and his house, and became for some crooked reason embittered against his old fellow-villagers. He made up his mind to bring them into trouble. Taking his chopper with him, he met a little Chamar girl, whom he took into a temple in Bahadurpur. There he cut her throat and slightly wounded himself, and then brought a charge of dacoity and murder against the people of his old village.”[58]

Such moral insensibility is, no doubt, intimately related to the physical insensibility already noted, and is of an equally morbid or atypical character. It passes far beyond that of the savage with which the moral insensibility involved in deliberately killing or injuring a fellow-creature may fairly be compared. “How you snore!” said one person to another. “Do it again, and I kill you.” An hour afterwards he killed him. Lord Gifford mentions an Australian woman of the Muliana tribe who admitted having killed and eaten two of her own children, who annoyed her by crying. (The Australian aborigines are, however, usually very tender to their children.) A Maori chief said to Mr. Tregear--“If I go out for a morning walk with my spear, and I see a man, and I push my spear through him, _that_ isn’t murder--that is ‘_killing_.’ But if I invite him to my home, give him food, tell him to sleep, and then kill him, _that_ is ‘_murder_.’”[59] Such a clear-cut distinction as this testifies to a considerable degree of moral insensibility. It must be noted, however, that while in this respect the criminal approximates to the savage, he is at the same time related to those more or less civilised persons who tolerate killing with equanimity when it is called war.

§ 2. _Intelligence._

The two most characteristic features in the intelligence of the average criminal are at first sight inconsistent. On the one hand he is stupid, inexact, lacking in forethought, astoundingly imprudent. On the other hand he is cunning, hypocritical, delighting in falsehood, even for its own sake, abounding in ruses. These characteristics are fully illustrated in the numerous anecdotal books which have been written concerning crime and criminals.

Several attempts have been made to attain accurate figures as to the relative intelligence of criminals, but there must be a considerable element of guess-work in such calculations. Dr. Marro, a reliable observer, detected a notable defect of intelligence in 21 cases out of 500. He found that incendiaries and then murderers yielded the largest proportion of individuals with defective intelligence; then came vagabonds, sexual offenders, those convicted of assault, highwaymen, and those convicted of simple theft. The fraudulent class, as well as pickpockets and burglars, showed no instances of defective intelligence. That is to say that criminals against the person show a much lower level of intelligence than criminals against property.

The stupidity and the cunning of the criminal are in reality closely related, and they approximate him to savages and to the lower animals. Like the savage, the criminal is lacking in curiosity, the foundation of science, and one of the very highest acquisitions of the highly-developed man. He is constantly compared in this respect to animals. Macé, a former chief of the Parisian _police de sûreté_, remarks: “In spite of the cunning and tricks, which are too gratuitously credited to thieves, their stupidity generally is scarcely credible; they nearly all resemble the ostrich who, when his head is hidden behind a leaf, thinks that he is not seen because he cannot see.” Dr. Corre remarks: “There is something feline in the criminal: like the cat, indolent and capricious, yet ardent in the pursuit of an aim, the anti-social being knows only how to satisfy his impulsive instincts.” Dr. Wey of Elmira says: “It is a mistake to suppose that the criminal is naturally bright. If bright, it is usually in a narrow line and self-repeating. Like the cunning of the fox, his smartness displays itself in furthering his schemes, and personal gratification and comfort.” “Many criminal illiterates,” he remarks elsewhere, “are so densely stupid as to be unable to tell the right hand from the left.” M. Joly, discussing the criminal’s delight in ruse, adds: “Animals are of all living things fondest of ruse when their special instincts are in action. Idle and untrained children, resolved to deceive their teachers and to amuse themselves at all risks, are more _rusé_ than their comrades at the head of the class. Women make use of ruse much more than men.” I will quote, finally, on this point some words of Dr. A. Krauss[60]:--“The specialists say that criminals are more astute than intelligent. But what is this astuteness? It is an instinctive, innate faculty, which does not depend on real intelligence, and which is already found precociously perfected in children, in the lowest savages, in women, and also in imbeciles; although experience comes to its aid, it is never capable of artificial culture. It is essentially a faculty limited to the consideration of concrete cases, and which is chiefly concerned with the deception of others. The mental inertia so often combined with this faculty is recognised in this, that a criminal, in planning a crime, does not calculate all the possible eventualities, and immediately after the success of his action he loses all caution, as if the energy of his mind directed to the project and its execution was exhausted at one stroke. Beside this instinctive faculty, intelligence is a faculty of infinite variety, which matures slowly, and gradually affects language and questions of abstract culture. It needs to be cultivated with diligence, and with the help of a happy organisation of the nervous centres. It often develops late even in highly-gifted men.”

At the same time men of undoubted intellectual power are sometimes found among criminals. Villon, one of the truest, if not one of the greatest of poets, was a criminal, a man perpetually in danger of the gallows; it does not seem to me, however, by any means clear that he was what we should call an instinctive criminal. Vidocq, a clever criminal who became an equally successful police official, and wrote his interesting and instructive _Memoirs_, may not have been, as Lombroso claims, a man of genius, but he was certainly a man of great ability. Eugene Aram is now generally recognised as a comparative philologist who foresaw and to some extent inaugurated some of the later advances of that science.

Jonathan Wild is an interesting example of a criminal of great practical ability, a man whose genius for organisation would have made him equal to any position in which he might have been placed. “In the republic of the thieves’ guild”--I quote Mr. Pike’s excellent summary of his career[61]--“Jonathan Wild became as it were a dictator; but like many of the great men of the middle ages, he owed his greatness to double dealing. From small beginnings he became, in London at least, the receiver-in-chief of all stolen goods. He acquired and maintained this position by the persistent application of two simple principles: he did his best to aid the law in convicting all those misdoers who would not recognise his authority, and he did his best to repair the losses of all those who had been plundered and who took him into their confidence. By degrees he set up an office for the recovery of missing property, at which the government must, for a time, have connived. Here the robbed sought an audience of the only man who could promise them restitution; here the robbers congregated like workmen at a workshop, to receive the pay for the work they had done. Wild was, in some respects, more autocratic than many kings, for he had the power of life and death. If he could reward the thief who submitted to him, he could hang the robber who omitted to seek his protection. If he could, for a sufficient fee, discover what had been lost, he could, when his claims were forgotten, make the losers repent their want of worldly wisdom. He was not above his position, and never allowed such a sentiment as generosity to interfere with the plain rules of business. He carried a wand of office, made of silver, which he asserted to be an indication of authority given to him by the government. Valuable goods he carefully stowed away in some of his numerous warehouses; and when there was no market for them in England, through the apathy of the persons robbed, or the dangers to dishonest purchasers, he despatched them on board a ship of his own to Holland, where he employed a trustworthy agent. Like barbarian monarchs, he gave presents when he wished to express a desire for friendship and assistance; and in order that the recipients of these favours might not be compromised, he retained a staff of skilled artizans, who could so change the appearance of a snuff-box, a ring, or a watch, that not even the real owner could recognise it. When satisfied with the good service of any of his subordinates who might be in danger, he gave them posts in his own household, with money and clothing, and found employment for them in clipping and counterfeiting coin. He did not even restrict his operations to London, but, in imitation of other great conquerors and pillagers, or perhaps through the independent working of his own intellect, he divided England into districts, and assigned a gang to each; each had to account to him, as the counties of old to the king, for the revenue collected. And as a well-appointed army has its artillery, its cavalry, and its infantry, so among Jonathan Wild’s retainers there was a special corps for robbing in church, another for various festivities in London, and a third with a peculiar aptitude for making the most of a country fair. The body-guards of a sovereign are usually chosen for their appearance, or for tried valour in the field. Wild’s principle of selection was somewhat different. He considered that fidelity to himself was the first virtue in a follower, and that fidelity was certain only when there was absolute inability to be unfaithful. For this reason the greatest recommendation which any recruit could possess was that he had been a convict, had been transported, and had returned before the time of his sentence had expired. Such a man as this not only had experience in his profession, but was legally incapable of giving evidence against his employer. Through his actions he was always in the power of Wild, who, as the law stood, could never be in his power. Thus Wild’s authority was in two ways supreme. Nor was he the first man who ever abused such authority. He did what political parties had done in earlier times. He used without stint or scruple all the means at his disposal, either to ensure his own safety, or to crush any one whom he suspected. It was necessary, according to the public opinion of his time, that a considerable number of thieves and robbers should be hanged; he satisfied at once the popular notions of justice and his own principles by bringing to the gallows all who concealed their booty, or refused to share it with himself. When required, he provided also a few additional victims in the form of persons who had committed no offence whatever. Sometimes he destroyed them because they were unfortunately in possession of evidence against himself, sometimes only because a heavy reward had been offered for the conviction of any one who might have perpetrated a great crime, and because, with the gang at his back, it was quite as easy to prove the case against the innocent as against the guilty, and not less convenient.” Wild’s greatness had a sudden fall. He was arrested for coming to the rescue of a highwayman near Bow, and his enemies at once took courage. He was speedily overwhelmed with evidence, and was hanged in 1725.

§ 3. _Vanity._

The vanity of criminals is at once an intellectual and an emotional fact. It witnesses at once to their false estimate of life and of themselves, and to their egotistic delight in admiration. They share this character with a large proportion of artist and literary men, though, as Lombroso remarks, they decidedly excel them in this respect. The vanity of the artist and literary man marks the abnormal element, the tendency in them to degeneration. It reveals in them the weak points of a mental organisation, which at other points is highly developed. Vanity may exist in the well-developed ordinary man, but it is unobtrusive; in its extreme forms it marks the abnormal man, the man of unbalanced mental organisation, artist or criminal.

George Borrow, who was so keen a student of men, has some remarks on the vanity of criminals in regard to dress:--“There is not a set of people in the world more vain than robbers in general, more fond of cutting a figure whenever they have an opportunity, and of attracting the eyes of their fellow-creatures by the gallantry of their appearance. The famous Sheppard of olden times delighted in sporting a suit of Genoese velvet, and when he appeared in public generally wore a silver-hilted sword at his side; whilst Vaux and Hayward, heroes of a later day, were the best-dressed men on the _pavē_ of London. Many of the Italian bandits go splendidly decorated, and the very gipsy robber has a feeling for the charms of dress; the cap alone of the Haram Pasha, a leader of the cannibal gipsy band which infested Hungary towards the conclusion of the last century, was adorned with gold and jewels to the value of four thousand guilders. Observe, ye vain and frivolous, how vanity and crime harmonise. The Spanish robbers are as fond of this species of display as their brethren of other lands, and, whether in prison or out of it, are never so happy as when, decked out in a profusion of white linen, they can loll in the sun, or walk jauntily up and down.” He then describes the principal features of Spanish robber foppery.[62]

More significant and even more widely spread is the moral vanity of criminals. “In ordinary society,” said Vidocq, “infamy is dreaded; among a body of prisoners the only shame is not to be infamous; to be an _escarpe_ (assassin) is the highest praise.” This is universally true among every group of murderers or of thieves; the author of a large criminal transaction is regarded by all his fellows as a hero, and he looks down upon the others with contempt; the man who has had the misfortune to be imprisoned for a small or, in the opinion of criminal society, disreputable offence, represents himself as the author of some crime of magnitude.

A Russian youth of nineteen killed an entire family. When he heard that all St. Petersburg was talking of him, he said: “Now, my schoolfellows will see how unfair it was of them to say that I should never be heard of.” It is this same weak-minded desire to excite interest and sympathy which leads young men and women of ill-balanced mental organisation to commit suicide in some public and startling fashion. The same feeling, and also, doubtless, the need for expression, leads to the frequency with which criminals keep diaries. The Marquise de Brinvilliers wrote a minute account of her vices and crimes which was brought up in evidence against her; Wainewright appears to have kept a diary of this kind which also fell into other hands; John Wilkes Booth, the shallow-brained young actor who killed President Lincoln, had, with his stagy patriotism, some of the characteristics of the instinctive criminals, showing themselves especially in his morbid vanity. The chief suffering he felt after the deed was to his vanity. He wrote in his diary: “I struck boldly, and not as the papers say; I walked with a firm step through thousands of his friends; was stopped, but pushed on. A colonel was at his side. I shouted _Sic Semper_ before I fired. In jumping broke my leg. I passed all the pickets. Rode sixty miles that night, with the bone of my leg tearing the flesh at every jump.” And again he writes: “After being hunted like a dog through swamps, woods, and last night chased by gun-boats till I was forced to return, wet, cold, and starving, with every man’s hand against me, I am here in despair. And why? For doing what Brutus was honoured for--what made Tell a hero.” And again: “I am abandoned, with the curse of Cain upon me, when, if the world knew my heart, that one blow would have made me great.”

The excessive vanity of the criminal sometimes leads him to commit the imprudence of talking about his plans beforehand, and so courting detection. Before killing three rich men, a murderer was heard to say, “I want to do something great: oh, I shall be talked about!” We hear of Wainewright’s “insatiable and morbid self-esteem.” He enjoyed the respect paid to him in prison, and insisted upon being treated as a gentleman. A prisoner concluded a letter to her accomplice, “Your Lucrezia Borgia.” Sometimes the vanity of the criminal shows itself in the artistic or dramatic representations which he makes of his crime. Perhaps the most curious and audacious attempt is that recorded by Lombroso, who gives a representation of it: three assassins had themselves photographed as they appeared with knives in their hands and looks of resolute villainy, when about to commit the deed.

The Abbé Moreau has described the reception of a great criminal by his fellows at the prison of La Grande Roquette. He is immediately surrounded, though the curiosity remains respectful; “he is a king in the midst of his subjects; envious looks are cast at those privileged individuals who have succeeded in placing themselves near him; they listen eagerly for his slightest word; they do not speak their admiration for fear of interrupting him, and he knows that he dominates and fascinates them.”

§ 4. _Emotional Instability._

The criminal everywhere is incapable of prolonged and sustained exertion; an amount of regular work which would utterly exhaust the most vigorous and rebellious would be easily accomplished by an ordinary workman. He is essentially idle; the whole art of crime lies in the endeavour to avoid the necessity of labour. This constitutional laziness is therefore one of the chief organic bases of crime. Make idleness impossible and you have done much to make the criminal impossible. It is not without reason that French criminals call themselves _pègres_ (from _pigritia_), the idle. Lemaire, a notorious French criminal of the beginning of the century, was speaking for all his class when he said to his judges: “I have always been lazy; it is a shame, I admit, but I am not adapted for work; to work one needs an effort, and I am incapable of it; I only have energy for evil; if one must work I do not care about life; I would rather be condemned to death.”

While he is essentially lazy, and exhibits this even in his general neglect of personal cleanliness (though sometimes dressed outwardly as an ordinary man of the world), the criminal is capable of moments of violent activity. He cannot, indeed, live without them; they are the chief events of his spiritual life.

Louis Desprez, an unfortunate _littérateur_, imprisoned at Saint-Pélagie for a literary offence, “summed up the psychology of criminals,” remarks M. Émile Gautier, “in one picturesque formula: They see the world under the aspect of an immense gaol alternating with an immense brothel. And this is true. For them imprisonment is the normal condition. Liberty is their holiday, an occasional transitory holiday, during which they wallow in the _far niente_ and debauch, like sailors who consume in three days the earnings of eighteen months, but a holiday which will have an end, a foreseen and expected end.”

The criminal craves for some powerful stimulus, excitement, uproar, to lift him out of his habitual inertia. That is why the love of alcohol is in all countries so strong among criminals. The man who is organised as we have seen the criminal to be must have some powerful stimulant to take him out of himself, to give him a joy which is otherwise beyond his grasp, and alcohol is the stimulant which comes easiest to hand. When, as frequently happens, he is the child of alcoholic parents, the craving for drink soon obtains morbid intensity. Crime and drink are intimately bound together, although we must beware of too unreservedly setting down drink as the cause of crime. Both crime and drink are the morbid manifestations of organic defects which for the most part precede birth. The abuse of alcohol is not, however, universal among criminals, at all events when any intellectual ability is required. “It would not do to drink in our business,” said a sharper to Lombroso.

The criminal finds another strong form of excitement in gambling. The love of cards is even more widely spread among criminals than the love of drink. It frequently becomes a passion. Lauvergne tells of a band of criminals who played for two days without intermission. We hear of a French prisoner who gambled away his meagre rations of bread and wine and at last died of starvation; of another who in the excitement of the game forgot his approaching execution.

To all forms of sexual excitement, natural and unnatural, criminals of both sexes resort, often from a very early age. The prison, in which the criminal is confined alone, or with persons of the same sex, serves to develop perverted sexual habits to a high degree. Prince Krapotkine, speaking of the moral influence of prisons on prisoners in France, writes:--“The facts which we came across during our prison life surpass all that the most frenzied imagination could invent. One must have been for long years in a prison, secluded from all higher influences and abandoned to one’s own and that of a thousand convicts’ imaginations, to come to the incredible state of mind which is witnessed among some prisoners. And I suppose that I shall say only what will be supported by all intelligent and frank governors of prisons, if I say that the prisons are _the_ nurseries for the most revolting category of breaches of moral law.”[63] There is unquestionable evidence that the same practices exist, notwithstanding all discipline, in English prisons.

Such practices grow up chiefly as a means of excitement and diversion in vacuous lives. Love, in its highest and strongest forms, seems to be extremely rare. This is true even when love is the cause of the crime. The love, even when strong, remains rather brutal. When a man was asked if he really loved the woman for whose sake he had murdered her husband, he replied: “Oh, if you had seen her naked!”

The craving for excitement, for intoxication, for uproar, finds its chief satisfaction in the love of orgy, which is now almost confined, at all events in its extreme forms, to the criminal and his intimate ally, the prostitute. The orgy is the criminal’s most sacred festival; here he attains his highest experiences of forgetful exhilaration. Vidocq, still a criminal at heart, even after he had become a police official, has described the orgy in his _Memoirs_:--“Imagine a rather large square hall, with walls, once white, now blackened by exhalations of every kind: such is, in all its simplicity, the aspect of a temple of Bacchus and Terpsichore. At first by a very natural optical illusion, one is only struck by the smallness of the place, but when the eye succeeds in piercing the atmosphere, thick with a thousand vapours which are not inodorous, the size becomes manifest by the details which escape from the chaos. This is the moment of creation; everything clears up; the mist dissipates, becomes peopled and animated; there is movement, agitation, not of empty shadows but of substantial forms which cross and interlace in every direction. What beatitude! What a joyous life! Never for epicureans were so many felicities gathered together as here for those who love to wallow in mire. Around, rows of tables, on which, without their ever being cleaned, disgusting libations are renewed a hundred times a day, serve to frame in a space which is reserved for what are called the dancers. At the end of this infectious den rises, supported by four worm-eaten pillars, a kind of platform, its construction hidden by two or three fragments of old tapestry. On this hencoop the musicians are perched, two clarinettes, a fiddle, a loud trombone, and a deafening drum.... In this receptacle one finds none but prostitutes and their bullies, sharpers of all kinds, swindlers of the lowest sort, and a good many of those disturbers of the night whose lives are divided into two parts, one consecrated to rowdyism, the other to robbery.”

More interesting than this resort to external sources of stimulus, and more significant of emotional instability, are the spontaneous outbursts of excitement common among criminals, curious self-evolved intoxications springing from mysterious and incalculable depths of the organism. Dostoieffsky has studied these outbursts and admirably described them. “A prisoner has lived tranquilly,” he tells us,[64] “for several consecutive years, and his conduct has been exemplary. All at once, to the great astonishment of his guardians, he mutinies and recoils before no crime, even murder or rape. Every one is astonished. This unexpected explosion is the anguished, convulsive manifestation of personality, an instinctive melancholy, a desire to affirm the degraded _ego_, an emotion which obscures the judgment. It is like a spasm, an access of epilepsy; the man who is buried alive and who suddenly awakes strikes in despair against his coffin-lid; he strives to push it back, to raise it; his reason convinces him of the uselessness of all his efforts, but reason has nothing to do with his convulsions. It must not be forgotten that nearly every manifestation of the personality of the prisoner is considered a crime; also that the question whether the manifestation is important or insignificant is perfectly indifferent to the prisoner. Risk for risk, it is better to go to the extreme, even to murder. It is only the first step that costs; little by little the man is carried away and can no longer be held in.” The prison has much to answer for in the development of these emotional outbreaks, and it is only in prison that there is opportunity of studying them. It would, however, be rash to conclude that they are entirely due to prison conditions. They are in harmony with all that we know of criminal psychology, and it is not alone under prison conditions that they are the causes of crime.

In Germany these periodic explosions (known as _Zuchthaus-Knall_) have been described by Delbrück and Krafft-Ebing. In Italy they have been noted by Lombroso, especially in very hot weather and at such times as epileptic attacks are most frequent, and he regards them as fresh proof of a close relationship between the instinctive criminal and the epileptic. In England they appear to be rare in men, but, on the other hand, common in women who have, in prison language, “broken out.” This wild fit of maniacal violence which from time to time seizes on the women confined in prisons, and might almost be regarded as an exaggerated or vicarious form of orgy, has been studied with some care in England. Here as well as abroad it is frequently supposed to be a voluntary insubordination deserving punishment.

A lady superintendent thus described the “breaking out” to Mayhew:--“Sometimes they know when the fit is coming on, and will themselves ask to be locked up in the refractory wards. When they’re in these fits they’re terribly violent indeed; they tear up and break everything they can lay their hands on. The younger they are the worse they behave. The most violent age, I think, is from seventeen to two or three and twenty;--indeed they are like fiends at that age very often.” The medical officer told him that “4 per cent. of the whole of the prisoners, or 20 in 600, were subject to such fits of violent passion, and these were almost invariably from fifteen to twenty-five years of age.” “Women,” he added, “seldom injure themselves or those around them, though they will break their windows, and even occasionally tear their own clothing to ribbons.”[65]

Miss Mary Carpenter, in her _Female Life in Prison_, reproduces what she tells us is a characteristic dialogue:--

“‘Miss G., I’m going to break out to-night.’

“‘Oh, nonsense; you won’t think of any such folly, I’m sure.’

“‘I’m sure I shall.’

“‘What for?’

“‘Well, I’ve made up my mind, that’s what for. I shall break out to-night--see if I don’t.’

“‘Has any one offended you or said anything?’

“‘N-no. But I _must_ break out. It’s so dull here. I’m sure to break out.’

“‘And then you’ll go to the “dark” [cell].’

“‘I want to go to the “dark.”’

“And the breaking out often occurs as promised; the glass shatters out of the window frames; strips of sheets and blankets are passed through or left in a heap in the cell; the guards are sent for, and there is a scuffling and fighting and scratching and screaming that Pandemonium might equal, nothing else.”

Dr. Nicolson has made an interesting observation as to the periods when these “breakings-out” are most liable to occur. “At dates corresponding with the menstrual period there is a greater likelihood of their occurrence. Besides having verified this in several cases myself, I have the testimony of experienced prison matrons to the same effect.” These maniacal outbursts of hysteria may be compared to the somewhat similar effects observed especially at the menstrual periods among the epileptic, the insane, and the imbecile. Thus Dr. H. Sutherland (_West Riding Asylum Reports_, vol. ii.), from observations on 500 inmates of the West Riding Asylum, remarks that in epileptic insanity the fits are generally increased in number, and the patients generally become excited at the catamenial period; while the mania exacerbations usually occur at this time. He notes the frequency of excitement, violence, indecent language, tearing up clothes, etc., among insane women generally at this period. In a girl with congenital imbecility, who became violent, cruel, and capricious at puberty, Dr. Langdon Down noted that the monthly period was always marked by insubordination, violent language, rude gestures, and untruthfulness. In ordinary healthy young girls the onset of the monthly period is often marked by a fit of unusual boisterousness.

The period of the year seems also to have some influence on the emotional instability. Miss Carpenter remarks that “the prisoners are always the most ill-behaved at Christmas time,” perhaps because this period has, even before the days of Christianity, been associated with excesses. Among the men at Elmira, judging from the charts given by Dr. Wey, there is a tendency to insubordination in the autumn, and also in the spring. In Spanish prisons, it appears from Salillas’s _Vida Penal en España_, quarrels and arrests are much more common in spring and summer than at any other season. Thus, to take one record: March-May, 8; June-Aug., 9; Sept.-Nov., 4; Dec.-Feb., 3. Two suicides both occurred in September.

Very interesting is the instinctive and irresistible character of criminal impulses, as shown by evidence which there is no good reason to impeach. Casanova, speaking of his clever schemes of fraud, says: “When I put into execution a spontaneous idea which I had not premeditated, it seemed to me that I was following the laws of destiny, and yielding to a supreme will.” Several pickpockets have said to Lombroso: “You see, in those moments of inspiration (_sic_) we cannot restrain ourselves, we have to steal.” “I did try very hard, Miss,” the women will sometimes say to the matron, remarks Miss Carpenter, “but it wasn’t to be. I was obliged to steal, or to watch some one there was a chance of stealing from. I did try my best, but it couldn’t be helped, and here I am. It wasn’t my fault exactly, because I _did_ try.” A pickpocket said to Marro: “When I see any one pass with a watch in his pocket, even though I have no need of money, I feel a real need to take it.” Dostoieffsky, giving a minute account of one of the convicts who was most feared, but who was sincerely devoted to him, says: “He sometimes stole from me, but it was always _involuntary_; he scarcely ever borrowed from me, so that what attracted him was not money or other interested motive.” Once it was a Bible which he sold to obtain drink. “Probably he felt a strong desire for drink that day, and when he felt a strong desire for anything it had to be satisfied. I endeavoured to reproach him as he deserved, for I regretted my Bible. He listened to me without irritation, very peacefully; he agreed with me that the Bible is a very useful book, and he sincerely regretted that I no longer possessed it, but he felt no repentance, not even for an instant, for having stolen it; he looked at me with such assurance that I immediately ceased to scold him. He bore my reproaches because he judged that it could not be otherwise, that he deserved to be blamed for such an action, and that I ought to abuse him, in order to relieve myself, as a consolation for the loss; but privately he esteemed it a folly, a folly which a serious man would have been ashamed to speak of. I even think he regarded me as a child, an urchin who does not understand the simplest things in the world.”

Precisely the same instinctive and involuntary impulses, unaccompanied by shame, are found among various lower races. Of the natives of British New Guinea, for instance, it has been said, “They are inveterate thieves, but they experience no sense of shame when they are discovered. They frequently say that they can feel an irresistible power which compels them to put out their hand and close it upon some article which they covet, but which does not belong to them.”[66]

§ 5. _Sentiment._

It may seem a curious contradiction of what has already been set down concerning the criminal’s moral insensibility, his cruelty, and his incapacity to experience remorse, when it is added that he is frequently open to sentiment. It is, however, true. Whatever refinement or tenderness of feeling criminals attain to reveals itself as what we should call sentiment or sentimentality. Their cynicism allies itself with sentiment in their literary productions. Their unnatural loves are often sentimental, as revealed in the character of the tattoo marks. Two interesting examples of criminal sentiment have recently been recorded by Dr. Lindau. A German criminal (it is perhaps as well to note that he was a German), having murdered his sweetheart most cruelly, went back to her house to let out a canary which might suffer from want of food. Another, after having killed a woman, stayed behind to feed her child which was crying. Lacenaire, on the same day that he committed a murder, risked his own life to save that of a cat. Eugene Aram was very indulgent to animals. Wainewright was always very fond of cats; in his last days “his sole companion was a cat for which he evinced an extraordinary affection.” One of the chief characters of Wainewright’s essays is their sentimentality. Himself, when in prison, he described as the possessor of “a soul whose nutriment is love, and its offspring art, music, divine song, and still holier philosophy.”

All prisoners make pets of birds, or animals, or flowers, if they get the chance. This is simply the result of solitude, and has no connection whatever with criminal psychology. It is found, if anything, more frequently among non-criminal prisoners. No one has described better than Dostoieffsky, in his _Recollections of the Dead-House_, the part that animals play in the lives of prisoners. He describes at length the goat, the horse, the dogs, the ducks, the eagle. No one who has once read it may forget the history of the eagle. The eagle would not be tamed; solitary and inconsolable he refused all food; at last his mournful despair aroused the sympathy of the convicts; they resolved to liberate him, bore him to the ramparts on the cold and grey autumn afternoon, and stood long and wistfully watching him as he winged his way across the steppes, free.

Family affection is by no means rare among criminals. Often indeed, as is well known, it constitutes the motive for the crime. It is very rare to find a prisoner who is not touched by an allusion to his mother. Inspector Byrnes, of New York, says: “Remember that nearly all the great criminals of the country are men who lead double lives. Strange as it may appear, it is the fact that some of the most unscrupulous rascals who ever cracked a safe, or turned out a counterfeit, were at home model husbands and fathers. In a great many cases wives have aided their guilty partners in their villainy, and the children too have taken a hand in it. But in as many all suggestions of the criminal’s calling was left outside the front door. There was George Engles, the forger. His family lived quietly and respectably, mingled with the best of people, and were liked by all they met. George Leonidas Leslie, _alias_ Howard, who was found dead near Yonkers, probably made away with by his pals, was a fine-looking man, with cultured tastes and refined manners. Billy Porter and Johnny Irving were not so spruce, but they would pass for artisans; and Irving is said, in all his villainy, to have well provided for his old mother and his sisters. Johnny the Greek paid for his little girls’ tuition at a convent in Canada, and had them brought up as ladies, without even a suspicion of their father’s business reaching them. I know this same thing to be done by some of the hardest cases we have to contend with.”

Inspector Byrnes also mentions a celebrated burglar and forger of America, called by the fraternity “the Prince of Thieves,” on account of his great liberality; “it is a well-known fact that he has always contributed to the support of the wives and families of his associates when they were in trouble.”

The criminal appreciates sympathy. Dostoieffsky tells how immediately the convicts responded to a governor who was affable and good-natured, and treated the prisoners as equals: “They did not love him, they adored him.... I do not remember that they ever permitted themselves to be disrespectful or familiar. On the contrary. When he met the governor the convict’s face suddenly lighted up; he smiled largely, cap in hand, even to see him approach.” Prince Krapotkine quotes and confirms the observations of Dr. Campbell, an experienced prison surgeon. By mild treatment, says Dr. Campbell, “with as much consideration as if they had been delicate ladies, the greatest order was generally maintained in the hospital.” He was struck with that “estimable trait in the character of prisoners--observable even among the roughest criminals; I mean the great attention they bestow on the sick. The most hardened criminals,” he adds, “are not exempt from this feeling.”

Such sentiment as this--limited, imperfect, fantastic, as it may sometimes seem--is the pleasantest spot in criminal psychology. It is also the most hopeful. In the development of this tenderness lies a point of departure for the moralisation of the criminal. What a ruined fund of fine feeling, for instance, was concealed in the young thief, recorded by Lombroso, who committed suicide by hanging, having first set his shoes on the bed between two straw crosses, as though to say, “I am going; pray for me.” “If one thinks of it,” adds Lombroso, “it is a pathetic poem.”

§ 6. _Religion._