So long as Pasteur and his
disciples had not given to the world their discovery of the pathogenic
microbes of all infectious diseases, such as typhoid fever, cholera,
diphtheria, tuberculosis, etc, more or less absurd remedies were
demanded of the science of medicine. I remember, for instance, that I
was compelled in my youth, during an epidemic of cholera, to stay in a
closed room, in which fumigation was carried on with substances
irritating the bronchial tubes and lungs without killing the cholera
microbes, as was proved later on. It was not until the real causes of
those infectious diseases were discovered, that efficient remedies could
be employed against them. An aqueduct given to a center of population
like Naples is a better protection against cholera than drugs, even
after the disease has taken root in the midst of the people of Naples.
This is the modern lesson which we wish to teach in the field of
criminology, a field which will always retain its repressive functions
as an exceptional and ultimate refuge, because we do not believe that we
shall succeed in eliminating all forms of criminality. Hence, if a crime
manifests itself, repression may be employed as one of the remedies of
criminology, but it should be the very last, not the exclusively
dominating one, as it is today.
It is this blind worship of punishment which is to blame for the
spectacle which we witness in every modern country, the spectacle that
the legislators neglect the rules of social hygiene and wake up with a
start when some form of crime becomes acute, and that they know of no
better remedy than an intensification of punishment meeted out by the
penal code.
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