I have, however, published an essay on international statistics of
relapsed criminals, from which I drew the following general
conclusion: that even in prison statistics, which often give
higher totals of relapsed cases than are given by judicial
statistics, because they are more personal, and therefore less
uncertain, we never obtain the full number of relapses, though the
totals given vary from country to country, from district to
district, and from prison to prison. It would be impossible
to state accurately what proportion the numbers given bear to the
actual number; but I am justified in saying, from all the
materials which I have collected and compared in the aforesaid
essay, that the number of relapses in Europe is generally between
50 and 60 per cent., and certainly rather above than below this
limit. Whilst the Italian statistics, for instance, give 14 per
cent. of relapses amongst prisoners sentenced to penal servitude,
I found by experience 37 per cent; out of 346 who admitted to me
that they had relapsed; and, amongst those who had been sentenced
to simple imprisonment, I found 60 per cent. out of 363, in place
of the 33 per cent. recorded in the prison statistics. The
difference may be due to the particular conditions of the prisons
which I visited; but in any case it establishes the inadequacy of
the official figures dealing with relapse.

After this statement of a general fact, which proves, as Lombroso
and Espinas said, that ``the relapsed criminal is the rule rather
than the exception,'' we can proceed to set down the special
proportions of relapse for each particular crime, so as to obtain
an indication of the forms of crime which are most frequently
resorted to by habitual criminals.