2. The object of every code should be the attainment of social safety,
not the careful weighing of guilt and individual responsibility. The
worst and most dangerous criminals should be treated with the greatest
severity; but indulgence should be shown towards minor offenders. The
former should be segregated for life in prisons or asylums; the latter
should never be allowed to become acquainted with prison life, but
should be corrected by means of other penalties, which would not bring
them into contact with true criminals, nor necessitate their temporary
retirement from civil life.

3. Certain reprehensible actions (abortion, infanticide, suicide or
complicity therein, passionate crimes, duelling, swearing, adultery,
etc.), which are not considered criminal by the general public, should
be non-criminal in the eyes of the law.

4. Born criminals, the morally insane, and hopeless recidivists, whose
first convictions are not followed by any signs of improvement, should
be regarded as incurable and confined for life in criminal lunatic
asylums, relegated to penal colonies, or condemned to death.

A second edition of this book was published shortly afterwards with the
title _Notes on the New Penal Code_. In this edition, each of the most
notable adherents of the new doctrines: Ferri, Garofalo, Ballestrini,
Rossi, Mase Dari, Carelli, Caragnani, and others, discussed one special
point of the code and suggested the necessary modifications.

VI

_Prison Palimpsests_ (_I Palimsesti del Carcere_)

(A Collection of Prison Inscriptions for the Use of Criminologists)

"Ordinary individuals, and even scientific observers, are apt to regard
prisons, especially those in which the cellular system prevails, as mute
and paralytical organisms, deprived of speech and action, because
silence and immobility have been imposed on them by law. Since, however,
no decree, even when backed up by physical force, avails against the
nature of things, these organisms speak and act, and sometimes manifest
themselves in brutal assaults and murders; but as always happens when
human needs come into conflict with laws, all these manifestations are
made in hidden and subterranean ways. Walls, drinking-vessels, planks of
the prisoners' beds, margins of books, medicine wrappers, and even the
unstable sands of the exercise-grounds, and the uniform in which the
prisoner is garbed, supply him with a surface on which to imprint his
thoughts and feelings."