.

Criminal justice has taken the same historical course of development as
medicine. The classic school of criminology is still in the same stage,
in which medicine was before the middle of the 19th century. It deals
with theft, murder, fraud, as such. But that which claims so much of the
attention of society has been forgotten by the classic school. For that
school has forgotten to study the murderer, the thief, the forger, and
without that study their crimes cannot be understood.

Crime is one of the conditions required for the study of the criminal.
But, the same crime may require the application of different remedies
to the personalities of different criminals, according to the different
anthropological and social conditions of the various criminals. There is
a fundamental distinction between the anthropological and social types
of criminals, whom I have divided into five categories, which are today
unanimously accepted by criminalist anthropologists, since the Geneva
congress offered an opportunity to explain the misapprehension which led
some foreign scientists to believe that the Italian school regarded one
of these types (the born criminal) merely as an organic anomaly.

Just a word concerning each one of these five types.

The _born criminal_ is a victim of that which I will call (seeing that
science has not yet solved this problem) criminal neurosis, which is
very analogous to epileptic neurosis, but which is not in itself
sufficient to make one a criminal. Our adversaries had the idea that the
mere possession of a crooked nose or a slanting skull stamped a man as
predisposed by birth to murder or theft. But a man may he a born
criminal, that is to say, he may have some congenital degeneration which
predisposes him toward crime, and yet he may die at the age of 80
without having committed any crime, because he was fortunate enough to
live in an environment which did not offer him any temptation to commit
crime. Again, are not many predisposed toward insanity without ever
becoming insane? If the same individual were to live under unfavorable
conditions, without any education, if he were to find himself in
unhealthy telluric surroundings, in a mine, a rice field, or a miasmatic
swamp, he would become insane. But if instead of living in conditions
that condemn him to lunacy he were to be under no necessity to struggle
for his daily bread, if he could live in affluence, he might exhibit
some eccentricity of cha