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 character, 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.
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