Criminality and economic conditions

The Committee appointed under this Resolution has made careful investigation of the literature of the subject, and has consulted by frequent correspondence. It has selected several works from among the mass of material. It has arranged with publisher, with authors, and with translators, for the immediate undertaking and rapid progress of the task. It realizes the necessity of educating the professions and the public by the wide diffusion of information on this subject. It desires here to explain the considerations which have moved it in seeking to select the treatises best adapted to the purpose.

For the community at large, it is important to recognize that criminal science is a larger thing than criminal law. The legal profession in particular has a duty to familiarize itself with the principles of that science, as the sole means for intelligent and systematic improvement of the criminal law.

Two centuries ago, while modern medical science was still young, medical practitioners proceeded upon two general assumptions: one as to the cause of disease, the other as to its treatment. As to the cause of disease,—disease was sent by the inscrutable will of God. No man could fathom that will, nor its arbitrary operation. As to the treatment of disease, there were believed to be a few remedial agents of universal efficacy. Calomel and blood-letting, for example, were two of the principal ones. A larger or smaller dose of calomel, a greater or less quantity of bloodletting,—this blindly indiscriminate mode of treatment was regarded as orthodox for all common varieties of ailment. And so his calomel pill and his bloodletting lancet were carried everywhere with him by the doctor.

Nowadays, all this is past, in medical science. As to the causes of disease, we know that they are facts of nature,—various, but distinguishable by diagnosis and research, and more or less capable of prevention or control or counter-action. As to the treatment, we now know that there are various specific modes of treatment for specific causes or symptoms, and that the treatment must be adapted to the cause. In short, the individualization of disease, in cause and in treatment, is the dominant truth of modern medical science.

The same truth is now known about crime; but the understanding and the application of it are just opening upon us. The old and still dominant thought is, as to cause, that a crime is caused by the inscrutable moral free will of the human being, doing or not doing the crime, just as it pleases; absolutely free in advance, at any moment of time, to choose or not to choose the criminal act, and therefore in itself the sole and ultimate cause of crime. As to treatment, there still are just two traditional measures, used in varying doses for all kinds of crime and all kinds of persons,—jail, or a fine (for death is now employed in rare cases only). But modern science, here as in medicine, recognizes that crime also (like disease) has natural causes. It need not be asserted for one moment that crime is a disease. But it does have natural causes,—that is, circumstances which work to produce it in a given case. And as to treatment, modern science recognizes that penal or remedial treatment cannot possibly be indiscriminate and machine-like, but must be adapted to the causes, and to the man as affected by those causes. Common sense and logic alike require, inevitably, that the moment we predicate a specific cause for an undesirable effect, the remedial treatment must be specifically adapted to that cause.

Thus the great truth of the present and the future, for criminal science, is the individualization of penal treatment,—for that man, and for the cause of that man’s crime.

Now this truth opens up a vast field for re-examination. It means that we must study all the possible data that can be causes of crime,—the man’s heredity, the man’s physical and moral make-up, his emotional temperament, the surroundings of his youth, his present home, and other conditions,—all the influencing circumstances. And it means that the effect of different methods of treatment, old or new, for different kinds of men and of causes, must be studied, experimented, and compared. Only in this way can accurate knowledge be reached, and new efficient measures be adopted.

All this has been going on in Europe for forty years past, and in limited fields in this country. All the branches of science that can help have been working,—anthropology, medicine, psychology, economics, sociology, philanthropy, penology. The law alone has abstained. The science of law is the one to be served by all this. But the public in general and the legal profession in particular have remained either ignorant of the entire subject or indifferent to the entire scientific movement. And this ignorance or indifference has blocked the way to progress in administration.

The Institute therefore takes upon itself, as one of its aims, to inculcate the study of modern criminal science, as a pressing duty for the legal profession and for the thoughtful community at large. One of its principal modes of stimulating and aiding this study is to make available in the English language the most useful treatises now extant in the Continental languages. Our country has started late. There is much to catch up with, in the results reached elsewhere. We shall, to be sure, profit by the long period of argument and theorizing and experimentation which European thinkers and workers have passed through. But to reap that profit, the results of their experience must be made accessible in the English language.

The effort, in selecting this series of translations, has been to choose those works which best represent the various schools of thought in criminal science, the general results reached, the points of contact or of controversy, and the contrasts of method—having always in view that class of works which have a more than local value and could best be serviceable to criminal science in our country. As the science has various aspects and emphases—the anthropological, psychological, sociological, legal, statistical, economic, pathological—due regard was paid, in the selection, to a representation of all these aspects. And as the several Continental countries have contributed in different ways to these various aspects,—France, Germany, Italy, most abundantly, but the others each its share,—the effort was made also to recognize the different contributions as far as feasible.

The selection made by the Committee, then, represents its judgment of the works that are most useful and most instructive for the purpose of translation. It is its conviction that this Series, when completed, will furnish the American student of criminal science a systematic and sufficient acquaintance with the controlling doctrines and methods that now hold the stage of thought in Continental Europe. Which of the various principles and methods will prove best adapted to help our problems can only be told after our students and workers have tested them in our own experience. But it is certain that we must first acquaint ourselves with these results of a generation of European thought.

In closing, the Committee thinks it desirable to refer the members of the Institute, for purposes of further investigation of the literature, to the “Preliminary Bibliography of Modern Criminal Law and Criminology” (Bulletin No. 1 of the Gary Library of Law of Northwestern University), already issued to members of the Conference. The Committee believes that some of the Anglo-American works listed therein will be found useful.

Committee on Translations.

Chairman, John H. Wigmore, Professor of Law in Northwestern University, Chicago. Ernst Freund, Professor of Law in the University of Chicago. Maurice Parmelee, Professor of Sociology in the State University of Missouri. Roscoe Pound, Professor of Law in Harvard University. Edward Lindsay, Of the Warren, Pa., Bar. Wm. W. Smithers, Secretary of the Comparative Law Bureau of the American Bar Association, Philadelphia, Pa.

EDITORIAL PREFACE TO THE PRESENT VOLUME.

By Edward Lindsey.

Any adequate study of the phenomena of crime and of the criminal must take into account the economic phase—must consider the subject matter of the study from the economic standpoint; for while few will follow the socialist theorists in the controlling importance they assign to the economic factors of social life it is nevertheless manifest that these factors are powerful elements in the totality of social conditions and must be given due consideration in the survey of all societal phenomena, including that of crime. The work selected to represent this viewpoint in the Modern Criminal Science Series is that of one of the younger criminalists—an able and thorough study of the effect of economic conditions on crime and distinguished by the extensive and critical use made of a wide range of statistical data.

William Adrian Bonger, the author of the work here translated, of Amsterdam, Holland, is a Dutch Publicist, a pupil of Professor Van Hamel, well known as one of the founders of the International Union of Penal Law and the most eminent of Dutch students of criminology. He was born at Amsterdam, September 6, 1876, and received the degree of Doctor in Law from the University of Amsterdam in June, 1905. The first part of the present work, which consists of a survey, with copious extracts and critical comments, of the previous literature upon the subject of the relation of crime to economic conditions is a revision of a thesis originally presented at the University.

Dr. Bonger is also the author of “Religion and Crime: A Criminological Study”; Leiden, 1913, and numerous articles in Dutch and German periodicals. Among these are the following in “Nieuwe Tijd” (The New Age), a well-known Dutch socialist review: “An Apology for War”, a critical review of “Die Philosophie des Krieges” by Professor Steinmetz (1908); “Capital and Income in the Netherlands” (1910); “Marxism and Revisionism” (1910); “Crime and Socialism: A Contribution to the Study of Criminality in the Netherlands” (1911); and “Religion and Irreligion in the Netherlands” (1911). Two noteworthy contributions to “Neue Zeit” are “Cesare Lombroso” in Vol. XXVIII, number one (1910), and “Verbrechen und Sozialismus: Zugleich ein Beitrag zum Studium der Kriminalität im Deutschland” in Vol. XXX, number two (1912). In 1912 also appeared “The Social Factors of Crime and their Significance in Comparison with the Individual Causes” in Vol. XXIII of the “Tijdschrift voor Strafrecht”, the only Dutch journal of criminal law.

In the first part of this work, instead of stating in his own language the views expressed in the previous literature on the subject Dr. Bonger has by extracts from the various authors given us their opinions in their own language, adding brief critical comments of his own. The second part contains Dr. Bonger’s own discussion of the phenomena of crime based upon an unusually thorough collection of statistical data and the elaboration of his views. In the selection of authors from whom he quotes Dr. Bonger shows his sympathy with the social philosophy of socialism which appears as well in the exposition of his own explanation of criminality; but the facts which he collects together with the evidence on which they rest are so explicitly set forth and his own conclusions so carefully distinguished that the value of the study is not diminished even for those who are not disposed to accept his social philosophy.