And thus we come to the theory
of the prevention of crime. Some say: "it is better to repress than to
prevent." Others say: "It is better to prevent than to repress." In
order to solve this conflict we must remember that there are two widely
different kinds of repression. There is the immediate, direct empirical
repression, which does not investigate the cause of criminality, but
waits until the crime is about to be committed. That is police
prevention. There is on the other hand a social prevention which has an
indirect and more remote function, which does not wait until crime is
about to be committed, but locates the causes of crime in poverty,
abandoned children, trampdom, etc, and seeks to prevent these
conditions by remote and indirect means. In Italy, prevention is
anonymous with arrest. That is to say, by repression is understood only
police repression. Under these circumstances, it is well to take it for
granted that some of the expected crimes will be carried out, for crimes
are not committed at fixed periods after first informing the police. The
damage done by criminality, and especially by political and social
criminality, against which police repression is particularly directed,
will be smaller than that done by the abuse inseparably connected with
police power. In the case of atavistic criminality, prevention does not
mean handcuffing of the man who is about to commit a crime, but devising
such economic and educational measures in the family and administration
as will eliminate the causes of crime or attenuate them, precisely
because punishment is less effective than prevention.
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