Criminality and Economic Conditions
9781465680037
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
In systematizing the literature of my subject I have pursued the following method: I begin with some significant extracts from authors who wrote before the birth of modern criminal science. After these I take up the statisticians, that is to say, those who, without belonging to any special school of criminologists, have treated the subject principally by the aid of statistics. Next I give an exposition of the school which insists especially upon the individual factors in crime, and ascribes only a secondary place to economic factors (the Italian school); following this I treat of the school which considers the rôle played by environment as very important (the French school); and afterwards that of the bio-sociological doctrine which forms the synthesis of the two schools. Then follow the “spiritualists”, that is to say the religious authors who have been more or less influenced by modern criminal science; and finally, the authors who belong to the “terza scuola”, and the socialists who consider the influence of economic conditions as being very important or even decisive. The authors coming under the same heading have been treated in chronological order. Like every classification this is more or less arbitrary. Several authors might have been placed under two different headings. We may add that as time goes on the differences between the Italian and French schools are becoming less and less marked, so that their opinions and those of the bio-sociologists no longer show any great divergences as far as our subject is concerned.
