Criminal Sociology by Enrico Ferri
page 62 of 307 (20%)
page 62 of 307 (20%)
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But the true difference between the born and the occasional
criminal is that, with the former, the external cause is less operative than the internal tendency, because this tendency possesses, as it were, a centrifugal force, driving the individual to commit crime, whilst, for the occasional criminal, it is rather a case of feeble power of resistance against external causes, to which most of the inducement to crime is due. The casual provocation of crime in the born criminal is generally the outcome of an instinct or tendency already existing, and far more of a pretext than an occasion of crime. With the occasional criminal, on the other hand, it is the casual provocation which matures, no doubt in a favouring soil, the growth of criminal tendencies not previously developed. For this reason Lombroso calls the occasional criminals ``criminaloids,'' in order to show precisely that they have a distinctly abnormal constitution, though in a less degree than the born criminals, just as we have the metal and the metalloid, the epileptic and the epileptoid. And this, again, is the reason why Lombroso's criticisms on my description of occasional criminals are lacking in force. He says, as Benedikt said at the Congress at Rome, that all criminals are criminals by birth, so that there is no such thing as an occasional criminal, in the sense of a NORMAL individual casually launched into crime. But I have not, any more than Garofalo, drawn such a picture of the occasional criminal, for as a matter of fact I have said precisely the opposite, as indeed Lombroso himself acknowledges a little further on (ii. 422), |
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