racter, but would not cross the threshold of an
insane asylum. The same happens in the case of criminality. One may have
a congenital predisposition toward crime, but if he lives in favorable
surroundings, he will live to the end of his natural life without
violating any criminal or moral law. At any rate we must drop the
prejudice that only those are criminals on whose backs the judge has
pasted a number. For there are many scoundrels at large who commit crime
with impunity, or who brush the edge of the criminal law in the most
repulsive immorality without violating it.

This misunderstanding was explained at the congress of Geneva by the
statement that the interaction of the social and telluric environment is
required also in the case of the born criminal. And now we may take it
for granted that my classification of five types is everywhere accepted.
These are the following: The _born criminal_ who has a congenital
predisposition for crime; the _insane criminal_ suffering from some
clinical form of mental alienation, and whom even our existing penal
code had to recognize; the _habitual criminal_, that is to say one who
has acquired the habit of crime mainly through the ineffective measures
employed by society for the prevention and repression of crime. A common
figure in our large industrial centers is that of the abandoned child
which has to go begging from its earliest youth in order to collect an
income for the enterprising boss or for its poor family, without an
opportunity to educate its moral sense in the filth of the streets. It
is punished for the first time by the law and sent to prison or to a
reformatory, where it is inevitably corrupted. Then, when such an
individual comes out of prison, he is stigmatized as a thief or forger,
watched by the police, and if he secures work in some shop, the owner is
indirectly induced to discharge him, so that he must inevitably fall
back upon crime.

Thus one acquires crime as a habit, a product of social rottenness, due
to the ineffective measures for the prevention and repression of crime.
There is furthermore the _occasional criminal_, who commits very
insignificant criminal acts, more because he is led astray by his
conditions of life than because the aggressive energy of a degenerate
personality impels him. If he is not made worse by a prison life, he may
find an opportunity to return to a normal life in society. Finally there
is the _passionate criminal,_ who, like