prevention. There is on the other hand a social prevention which has an
indirect and more remote function, which does not wait until crime is
about to be committed, but locates the causes of crime in poverty,
abandoned children, trampdom, etc, and seeks to prevent these
conditions by remote and indirect means. In Italy, prevention is
anonymous with arrest. That is to say, by repression is understood only
police repression. Under these circumstances, it is well to take it for
granted that some of the expected crimes will be carried out, for crimes
are not committed at fixed periods after first informing the police. The
damage done by criminality, and especially by political and social
criminality, against which police repression is particularly directed,
will be smaller than that done by the abuse inseparably connected with
police power. In the case of atavistic criminality, prevention does not
mean handcuffing of the man who is about to commit a crime, but devising
such economic and educational measures in the family and administration
as will eliminate the causes of crime or attenuate them, precisely
because punishment is less effective than prevention.

In other words, in order to prevent crime, we must have recourse to
measures which I have called "substitutes for punishment," and which
prevent, the development of crime, because they go to the source in
order to do away with effects.

Bentham narrates that the postal service in England, in the 18th
century, was in the hands of stage drivers, but this service was not
connected with the carrying of passengers, as became the custom later.
And then it was impossible to get the drivers to arrive on time,
because they stopped too often at the inns. Fines were imposed,
imprisonment was resorted to, yet the drivers arrived late. The
penalties did not accomplish any results so long as the causes remained.