The psychology Of The Criminal ([1922])

THE proper subject of mankind's study is enshrined in an old and trite saying. And yet students of every science which bears in any way upon man have an apparently irresistible tendency to wander from this, their proper goal. It would be impossible to enumerate all the examples of this tendency. But nowhere is it more strongly marked than in the study of offenders. What should be done to offenders has been the subject of much consideration by the makers and administrators of laws from time immemorial. But the fact that they were dealing with individuals seems to have been practically overlooked, until comparatively recent times. Mediaeval theories on this subject are not much in point at the present day, for they were permeated by the predominance of the idea of " free-will" in its most extreme form. It has been well said that the old idea assumed the offender to be in the position of a fig tree which had wilfully and of malice aforethought decided to produce, not figs, but thistles, and that for this most outrageous conduct he naturally deserved condign " punishment". There is, however, even at the present time, so much diversity of opinion on the subject of the treatment of offenders that it is necessary to devote a short space to a consideration of what an offender is and of what we mean by " crime ".

Halsbury defines a crime as "an unlawful act or default which is an offence against the public, and which renders the perpetrator of the act or default liable to legal punishment." 1 (Default is, of course, only defect of action or conduct.) The definition of crime in the legal systems of other countries is practically the same as that just given. Some countries have distinctions between different classes of offences. In this country we distinguish between felonies and misdemeanours, and the French code distinguishes between crime and delit. But with these legal distinctions we are not here concerned.

So crimes are, from the legal point of view, acts which, in the opinion of a particular society, at a particular time, are considered to deserve punishment by that society. Many authorities, Hamon 2 for example, have, of course, used the term in a sense which goes far beyond this. But we are using the term crime (or offence or delinquency) purely in this legal sense. And it follows that, in this sense, a crime is an act which is legally wrong, and which is, essentially, an infringement of the criminal law. The question as to whether the act is " morally " wrong does not come in. Much confusion has been caused by the use of the word " wrong " without explanation of the sense in which it is used. And the single point common to all criminals is that they have committed acts which are considered to deserve punishment by the society in which they live. This fact alone is enough to make us reject, once and for all, the idea that there is anything which can be called a " criminal type