So that it has also
taken quite a long time to establish it so well that it became accepted
by general consent, as it is today. The positive school of criminology
was born in 1878, and although it does not stand for a mere reform of
the methods of criminal justice, but for a complete and fundamental
transformation of criminal justice itself, it has already gone quite a
distance and made considerable conquests which begin to show in our
country. It is a fact that the penal code now in force in this country
represents a compromise, so far as the theory of personal responsibility
is concerned, between the old theory of free will and the conclusions of
the positive school which denies this free will.
You can find an illustration of this in the eloquent contortions of
phantastic logic in the essays on the criminal code written by a great
advocate of the classic school of criminology, Mario Pagano, this
admirable type of a scientist and patriot, who does not lock himself up
in the quiet egoism of his study, but feels the ideal of his time
stirring within him and gives up his life to it. He has written three
lines of a simple nudity that reveals much, in which he says: "A man is
responsible for the crimes which he commits; if, in committing a crime,
his will is half free, he is responsible to the extent of one-half; if
one-third, he is responsible one-third." There you have the
uncompromising and absolute classic theorem.
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