exception of cases of minors, deaf mutes, inebriates, and maniacs.

In fact, the classic school of criminology regards all thieves as THE
thief, all murderers as THE murderer, and the human shape disappears in
the mind of the legislator, while it re-appears before the judge. Before
the essayist and legislator, the criminal is a sort of moving dummy, on
whose hack the judge may paste an article of the penal code. If you
leave out of consideration the established cases of exceptional and rare
human psychology mentioned in the penal code, all other cases serve the
judge merely as an excuse to select from the criminal code the number of
that article which will fit the criminal dummy, and if he should paste
404 instead of 407 on its back, the court of appeals would resist, any
change of numbers. And if this dummy came to life and said: "The
question of my number may be very important for you, but if you would
study all the conditions that compelled me to take other people's
things, you would realize that this importance is very diagrammatic,"
the judge would answer: "That's all right for the justice of the future,
but it isn't now. You are number 404 of the criminal code, and after
leaving this court room with this number pasted legally on your back,
you will receive another number, for you will enter prison as number 404
and will exchange it for entry number 1525, or some other, because your
personality as a man disappears entirely before the enactment of social
justice!" And then it is pretended that this man, whose personality is
thus absurdly ignored, should leave prison cured of all degeneration,
and if he falls back into the path of thorns of his misery and commits
another crime, the judge simply pastes another article over the other,
by adding number 80 or 81, which refer to cases of relapse, to number
404!

In this way the classic school of criminology came to its unit of