Read Ebook: Criminal Man According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso by Lombroso Gina Lombroso Cesare Commentator

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Very characteristic is the almost automatic tendency to destroy animate and inanimate objects, which results in frequent wounding, suicides, and homicides. This desire to destroy is also common to children. Fernando P. , an epileptic treated by my father, when enraged was in the habit of smashing all the furniture within his reach and throwing the pieces over a wall some twenty-five feet high.

Misdea, a regimental barber, to whom we shall refer later, roused to fury by dismissal from his post, broke four razors into small pieces with his teeth. Another epileptic, Piz... used to break all the crockery in his cell regularly every other day, "just to give vent to his feelings."

This tendency to destroy everything in the cell is common also to ordinary criminals.

Subject: Giuliano Celestino, age 16. Yellow skin abundantly tattooed, absence of hair on face or body. Cranium: plagiocephaly on the left frontal and right parietal regions, obliquely-placed eyes, narrow forehead, prominent orbital arches, line of the mouth horizontal as in apes, lateral incisors of upper jaw resembling the canines with rugged margins, excessive zygomatic and maxillary development, tactile sensibility very obtuse, dolorific sensibility non-existent on the right, very obtuse on the left, rotular reflex action exaggerated on the right, very feeble on the left. Devoid of natural feeling. When asked if he was fond of his mother, he replied: "When she brings me cigars and money." When questioned concerning his crimes he showed neither shame nor confusion. On the contrary, he confessed with a smile that when only ten he had tried to kill his youngest brother, who was then an infant in the cradle, and when hindered by his mother, had struck and bitten her. His father was a drunkard afflicted with syphilis, and Giuliano had suffered from epilepsy from the age of seven. At this age he began to indulge in alcohol and self-abuse, and stole from his parents in order to buy sweets. He appears to have been subject to an ambulatory mania, which caused him to wander aimlessly about the country, and if kept within doors he would let himself down from the windows, climb up the chimney, or, failing in these attempts to escape, would break the furniture and attract the attention of the neighbours by his terrific yells. From the age of eight, despite his parents' efforts to apprentice him, he was always immediately dismissed by his employers. He ran away with a strolling company of acrobats, and later apprenticed himself to a butcher in order to revel in the horrors of the slaughter-house. At fifteen he was confined in a reformatory, where he twice attempted to escape and to set fire to the building, and was sentenced to two years' imprisonment. For the space of a few days, he appears to have suffered from epileptic attacks, although in a masked form, accompanied by various attempts at suicide. These were renewed every other month for a whole year. When asked what he would do for a living when released, he would reply laughingly that there was plenty of money in other people's pockets.

L... a morally insane subject, age 16, native of Turin, the son of an aged, but extremely respectable man. Height 1.50 m., weight, 46.2 kg., with abundant hair, and down on the forehead, incisors crowded together, excessive development of the canines, and exaggerated orbital angle of the frontal bone. He was entirely devoid of affection for his family, remarking cynically that he was fond of his father when he gave him money and did not worry him. Sometimes he kicked the poor old man and otherwise abused him. When unable to obtain money, he would smash all the furniture in the house, until, for the sake of economy, his family gave him what he wanted. In order to get a five-pound note from money-lenders he would sign promissory notes for ten times that amount. He changed his ideas from one hour to another. Sometimes he wanted to enter the army, at others to emigrate to France, etc. When only fourteen he frequented houses of ill-fame, where he played the bully.

Although this case may be regarded as a typical instance of moral insanity, there were apparently no symptoms of vertigo or convulsions. At the age of sixteen, however, while suffering from rheumatism, this subject tried to throw himself from the balcony of his bedroom at the same hour three nights running. After this he seems to have suffered from amnesia.

These frenzied attempts at self-destruction, which seem to have taken the place of the epileptic seizure, were related to my father casually by the boy's mother; but in other cases, similar incidents, although of the utmost importance to the criminologist, often pass unnoticed.

The connection between epilepsy and crime is one of derivation rather than identity. Epilepsy represents the genus of which criminality and moral insanity are the species.

The born criminal is an epileptic, inasmuch as he possesses the anatomical, skeletal, physiognomical, psychological, and moral characteristics peculiar to the recognised form of epilepsy, and sometimes also its motorial phenomena, although at rare intervals. More frequently he exhibits its substitutes . But the criminal epileptic possesses other characteristics peculiar to himself; in particular, that desire of evil for its own sake, which is unknown to ordinary epileptics. In view of this fact this form of epilepsy must be considered apart from the purely nervous anomaly, both in the clinical diagnosis and the methods of cure and social prophylaxis.

Moreover, the nervous anomaly, which in the case of criminals appears on the scene from time to time, accentuating the criminal tendency till it reaches the atavistic form and producing morbid complications which sometimes prove fatal, serves to point out the true nature of the disease and to emphasise the fact that while it is attenuated so far as motor attacks are concerned, it is aggravated on the other hand by criminal impulses, which render the patient semi-immune and permit him a longer and less troubled existence, but provoke a constant brain irritation, which clouds and disturbs his intellectual and moral nature.

In order better to understand these two forms of epilepsy, we must recall two analogous forms of another and equally multiform disease, tuberculosis in its forms of quick consumption and scrofula. The etiology is identical and the symptoms frequently alike, but while the latter proceeds very slowly and allows the patient a long life, the former is rapid and severs life in its prime.

In motory epilepsy, the irritation is manifested on a sudden, but leaves the mind healthy in the interval, although the attacks may lead to rapid dementia. In criminal epilepsy this irritation does not break out in violent seizures and is compatible with a long life, but it changes the whole physical and psychic complexion of the individual.

The epileptic origin of criminality explains many characteristics of the criminal, the genesis of which was previously obscure. Many of the moral and physical peculiarities of born criminals and the morally insane may be classed as professional characteristics acquired through the habit of evil-doing, especially the naso-labial and zygomatic wrinkles, cynical expression, tapering fingers, etc. Many anomalies also in the bones, hair, ears, eyes, and the monstrous development of the jaws and teeth, must be explained by arrested development in the fifth or sixth month of ultra-uterine existence, corresponding to the characteristics of inferior races by the usual law of ontogeny which recapitulates phylogeny. But there is a final series of anomalies, the origin of which was formerly wrapped in mystery: plagiocephaly, sclerosis, the thickening of the meninges, cranial asymmetry, and other changes in the cerebral layers, which can be explained only by a disease altering precociously the whole cerebral conformation, as is exactly the case in epilepsy.

Thus the primitive idea of crime has become organic and complete. The criminal is only a diseased person, an epileptic, in whom the cerebral malady, begun in some cases during prenatal existence, or later, in consequence of some infection or cerebral poisoning, produces, together with certain signs of physical degeneration in the skull, face, teeth, and brain, a return to the early brutal egotism natural to primitive races, which manifests itself in homicide, theft, and other crimes.

GENERAL FORMS OF CRIMINAL LUNACY

Epileptic born criminals and the morally insane may be classed as lunatics under certain aspects, but only by the scientific observer and professional psychologist. Outside these two forms, there is an important series of offenders, who are not criminals from birth, but become such at a given moment of their lives, in consequence of an alteration of the brain, which completely upsets their moral nature and makes them unable to discriminate between right and wrong. They are really insane; that is, entirely without responsibility for their actions.

Nearly every class of mental derangement contributes a special form of crime.

In some cases, mental alienation is manifested in a mania for litigation, which urges the sufferer to offend statesmen, state lawyers, and judges.

Young persons at the approach of puberty and women subject to amenorrhea often exhibit a tendency to arson and crimes of an erotic nature. Similar tendencies are sometimes displayed during pregnancy, and an inclination to theft is not uncommon.

Maniacs are prone to satyriasis and bacchanalian excesses. They commit rape and indecent acts in public and often appropriate strange objects, hair or wearing apparel, with the idea of obtaining means to satisfy their vices, either because they are unconscious of doing wrong or because, like true megalomaniacs, they believe the stolen goods to be their own property. Sometimes a feverish activity prompts them to steal; "I felt a kind of uneasiness, a demon in my fingers," said one, "which forced me to move them and carry off something."

Monomaniacs, especially if subject to hallucinations, frequently manifest a tendency to homicide, either to escape imaginary persecutions or in obedience to equally imaginary injunctions. The same motives prompt them to commit special kinds of theft and arson. Na... murdered his friend without any reason, after suffering from delusions for one year.

The characteristics of insane criminals are so marked that it is not difficult to distinguish them from habitual delinquents. They seldom show any fear of the penalty incurred nor do they try to escape. They take little trouble to hide their misdeeds, or to get rid of any clue. If poisoners, they leave poison about in their victim's room; if forgers, they take no trouble to make their signatures appear genuine; if thieves, they exhibit stolen goods in public, or appropriate them in the presence of witnesses. They frequently manifest unbounded rage and assault those present, entirely forgetting the stolen objects. Once their crime is accomplished, not only do they give themselves no trouble to hide it, but are prone to confess it immediately, and are eager to talk about it, saying with satisfaction that they feel relieved at what they have done, that they have obeyed the order of superior beings and consider their actions praiseworthy. They deny that they are insane, or if they admit it in some cases, it is only because they are persuaded to do so by their lawyers or fellow-prisoners. And even then, they are ready at the first opportunity to contradict the idea, eulogising and exaggerating their criminal acts.

A full confession in court is not uncommon, and in the case of impulsive monomaniacs, epileptics, and insane inebriates, the descriptions are full of characteristic expressions, showing what was the offender's state of mind when dominated by criminal frenzy.

Rom..., an impulsive monomaniac, who stabbed an acquaintance, felt "the blood rushing to his head, which seemed to be in flames."

Tixier narrates that, on seeing the old man he afterward murdered pass him on a country road, "something went to his head." Frequently such criminals are quick to give themselves up to justice.

Here are a few typical cases: A father fancies he hears a voice bidding him kill his favourite child. He goes home, has the little victim dressed in its best clothes and cuts off its head with perfect calmness. A lady, ignorant of horticulture, plants some flowers on her husband's grave. A day or two later, noticing that they are drooping, she imagines that the gardener has watered them with boiling water, and after reproaching him bitterly, wounds him with a pair of scissors.

These unfortunate beings frequently show perfect mental clearness before the crime and even in the act of striking the fatal blow; yet their action is purely instinctive and not prompted by passion or any other cause. Although such individuals appear to reason, can it be said that they are in full possession of their mental faculties? If they are, how shall we explain the wholesale destruction of those they hold most dear? A husband kills the wife to whom he is sincerely attached; a father, the son he loves most; or a mother, the infant at her breast.

Such an extraordinary phenomenon can only be explained by a sudden suspension of the intellectual and moral faculties and of the powers of the will.

SPECIAL FORMS OF CRIMINAL INSANITY

ALCOHOLISM

In addition to these casual forms of lunacy, in which the individual is led to commit crime by a momentary alteration of his moral nature, we find other forms which might be called specific, because the criminal act forms the culminating point of the malady. The sufferers from these forms are less easily distinguished from ordinary criminals and normal persons than are the lunatics of whom we have just spoken. These mental diseases, which should be studied separately, are alcoholism, hysteria, and epilepsy.

It is well known that temporary drunkenness may transform an honest, peacable individual into a rowdy, a murderer, or a thief.

Gall narrates the case of a certain Petri, who manifested homicidal tendencies when excited by alcohol. Locatelli mentions a workman of thirty, who, when under the influence of drink, would smash everything around him and stab the companions who sought to restrain his drunken fury. Ladelci and Carmignani cite the case of a miner, who was repeatedly arrested for drunken brawls, and when reproved replied: "I cannot help it. As soon as I drink, I must start fighting."

Very characteristic is the case of a certain Papor... who was imprisoned for some time at Turin. His father was a drunkard and ill treated his wife. The son became a soldier, then an excise officer, fireman, and finally nurse in an infirmary, and was known as a respectable, temperate man. In 1876, he was transferred to the Island of Lipari, where malvoisie only costs 25 centimes a litre, and there he acquired a taste for wine, without, however, drinking to excess. But a year later, a change in the hospital regulations gave him longer hours of leisure, and he began to drink deeply. In 1881, while intoxicated, he accosted a sportsman and pretending to be a police officer, ordered him to give up his gun. At that moment he was arrested by a genuine constable and taken to the barracks, where he was sentenced, without any one's observing his drunken condition. After his release, he committed other offences of the same type, which were followed by confession and repentance.

The gravest phenomena, however, are atrophy or degeneration in the liver, heart, stomach, seminal canaliculi, and central nervous system, which give rise to serious functional disturbances; most of all, in the digestion--as manifested by the characteristic gastric catarrh, matutinal vomit and cramp--and in the reproductive system, with resulting impotence.

The strange pathological conditions resulting from chronic alcoholism give rise to other fearful hallucinations. Cutaneous anaesthesia and alcoholic anaphrodisia make the sufferers fancy they have lost the generative organs, nose, legs, etc.; dyspepsia, exhaustion, and paresis, that they have been poisoned or are being persecuted. The reaction following excessively prolonged stimuli causes furious lypemania and gloomy fancies. Sometimes chronic inebriates believe that they are accused of imaginary crimes and loaded with chains amid heaps of corpses. They implore mercy and try to kill themselves in order to escape from their shame; or they remain motionless, bewildered, and terrified. Not infrequently, because of the profound faith, which, unlike many other lunatics, they have in their hallucinations, they pass from melancholy broodings to a fit of mad energy, often of a homicidal or suicidal nature. They imagine they are struggling with thieves or wild beasts and hurl themselves from the window or rush naked through the streets, killing the first person that crosses their path. In some, this delirium of energy breaks out suddenly like an epileptic attack, which it resembles in its brevity and intensity. With hair standing on end, they rush about like savage beasts, grinding their teeth, biting, rending their clothes, or tearing up the sod, or hurling themselves from some height. These symptoms are preceded by vertigo, periodical cephalalgia, and flushing of the face, and are manifested more frequently by those who are already predisposed through trauma to the head, or through typhus or heredity, or after great agitation and prolonged fasting, and often bear no relation to the quantity of alcohol imbibed, which may be small, or to the general physical state; but depend on cerebral irritation caused by chronic alcoholism. The attacks may disappear in a few hours without leaving the slightest recollection in the mind of the patient . They are, in short, a species of disguised epilepsy, and thus they may well be styled, since true alcoholic epilepsy is noted in many inebriates, specially in absinthe-drinkers.

A well-educated man, after a varied career as doctor, chemist, and clerk, during which time he had been constantly dismissed from his posts for drunkenness, met a policeman in the street and killed him, in the belief that the officer wanted to arrest him. When taken to prison, the first thing he did was to write to his mother begging her to send him some pomade. When interrogated, he informed the examining magistrate that the interrogatory was useless, since he had already chosen a fresh trade, that of photographer. It was only after several months of total abstinence in prison, that he began to come to his senses and to realise the gravity of his situation.

In the prison at Turin, my father had under observation two of these unfortunate beings, one a man of sixty and the other quite young. Both had murdered their wives with the most revolting cruelty, because they believed them to be unfaithful, although in reality both the women led blameless lives.

EPILEPSY

We have spoken of this disease in another chapter and have shown that the born criminal is in reality an epileptic, in whom the malady, instead of manifesting itself suddenly in strange muscular contortions or terrible spasms, develops slowly in continual brain irritation, which causes the individual thus affected to reproduce the ferocious egotism natural to primitive savages, irresistibly bent on harming others.

But besides these epileptics, who are morally insane from their birth and pass their lives in prisons and lunatic asylums, without any one being able to mark the exact boundary between their perversity and their irresponsibility; besides these individuals, whom society has a right, nay a moral obligation, to remove from its midst because they are ever a source of danger there are those who are afflicted with other forms of epilepsy;--forms in which irritation is manifested in seizures exactly similar to the typical convulsive fit, which they resemble also with regard to variation in intensity and duration. Generally speaking, they are likewise accompanied by complete loss of memory and consciousness, but in some cases there may be partial or complete consciousness, and yet the sufferer is not responsible for his actions. This variety of epilepsy, termed by Samt psychic epilepsy , manifests itself at long intervals, sometimes only once, but more frequently twice or thrice in the course of a lifetime, and during the attack the personality of the individual undergoes a complete change.

The attack is described by Samt as follows: During the seizure, the individual behaves like a somnambulist. Sometimes he is dazed, mute, and immovable; at others, he talks incessantly; at still others, he goes on with his ordinary occupations, travelling, reading, and writing: but in every case his personality suffers a complete metamorphosis, his habits, actions, and even handwriting assume a different character. Sometimes he is seized by a mania for walking and tramps for miles; at others, he undertakes interminable railway journeys. Tissi? cites cases of epileptics who travelled from Paris to Bombay, who covered 71 kilometres on foot, and who wandered unconscious for 31 months.

Sometimes epilepsy is manifested only by the tendency to undertake purposeless journeys, as in the case of Ferretti and a certain M... who visited the Mahdi in Africa and from thence travelled aimlessly to Australia.

This ambulatory form of epilepsy is very common amongst lads of fourteen or fifteen. Scarcely a week passes without the police receiving information from parents that their son has disappeared from home with only a few pence in his pocket. The wanderer is discovered later, frequently in some small provincial town, which he has reached after tramping aimlessly for days, sleeping in barns, and living on charity. When questioned, the boy usually displays total ignorance regarding all that has happened to him during the interval.

These attacks may last any length of time, from a few minutes to several months. In one of the cases observed by my father, the attack lasted a fortnight. The patient, a young officer with whom we were personally acquainted, was one of the quietest persons possible, but suddenly he was seized with a mania for writing innumerable letters, especially on stamped paper, in exaggeratedly large writing very different from his usual style. These letters, which were full of absurdities, were posted by the writer from the different towns he passed through on his aimless journeyings, which lasted a whole fortnight. During one of these seizures, he was arrested as a deserter and was unable to give any explanation of his conduct.

In this particular patient, the disease assumed the mild form of absurd letters and still more absurd journeys, but other individuals in the same state may commit criminal acts like homicide, equally without reason or gain to themselves. Once the fit is passed, these unfortunate individuals have generally no recollection of their past actions, and since in their normal state they are quiet, law-abiding persons, it is extremely difficult to trace back the deed to the right source, or to discover the disease, because they show no other symptoms of epilepsy, apart from the particular criminal act.

Samt describes a still more complicated form of this psychic seizure, in which the personality is altered without there being any loss of consciousness. In a case of this kind, a servant, after forty years of faithful service, murdered his old mistress during the night, having previously cut all the bell-wires to prevent communication with the other servants. He escaped with some valuables, but returned in a few days and gave himself up to the police, to whom he gave a detailed account of his crime without showing either horror or remorse. He was tried and condemned, and a few months later was again seized with epileptic fits during one of which he died. Samt, who saw him in this state, came to the conclusion that the murder had been committed during a similar seizure and he was able to prove that attacks of this kind are not necessarily accompanied by loss of consciousness.

As in the above case, these psychic attacks are sometimes accompanied by an insatiable thirst for blood, destruction and violence of all kinds, as well as by an extraordinary development of muscular strength with apparent lucidity of mind. They may last from a few minutes to half an hour, after which the patient falls into a sound sleep and forgets everything that has happened, or else retains only a vague recollection.

Such was the case of the epileptic Misdea, which first suggested to my father the idea of a link between crime and epilepsy. As this case has become famous in the annals of crime in Italy, it will perhaps be of interest to the reader. Misdea, the son of degenerate parents, manifested a series of typical epileptic anomalies--asymmetry, vaso-motor disturbances, impulsiveness, ferocity, etc. At the age of twenty, while serving in the army, for some trivial motive he suddenly attacked and killed his superior officer and eight or ten soldiers who tried to overpower him. Finally he was bound and placed in a cell, where he fell into a sound slumber and on awaking had entirely forgotten what he had done. He was condemned to death, but my father, who examined him medically, was able to prove conclusively that the crime had been committed during an attack of epilepsy.

The physical and psychic characters of this class of epileptic are those common to all non-criminal epileptics, and indeed we are justified in considering them insane rather than criminal, because, with the exception of the attack, which assumes this terrible form, they do not manifest criminal tendencies.

HYSTERIA

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