United States or Tajikistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I have known men who constantly visit the Central Criminal Court, visit also the scenes where famous crimes were committed, form their own theories of those crimes, collect souvenirs of those crimes, and call themselves Criminologists. As for me, my interest in crime is, alas, merely morbid.
In the first place the school of scientific criminologists deal with life as it now is and undeniably it has the merit of having applied the methods of experimental science to the study of criminal phenomena, of having shown the hypocritical absurdity of modern penal systems based on the notion of free-will and moral delinquency and resulting in the system of cellular confinement, one of the mental aberrations of the nineteenth century, as I have elsewhere qualified it.
Let us take, for example, some notorious case, where an unfortunate victim has died from the effects of a poisoned pill or draught of medicine, or has been found dead in his room with a revolver bullet in his heart. The yellow journals have evolved some theory of who is the culprit and have loosed their respective reporters and "special criminologists" upon him.
That, if you come to think of it, was what you writing chaps would call the quintessential Q.E.F. I have not only shown these dear Criminologists that I couldn't possibly have done this trick, but that there's some other fellow who could and did, and whom they've been perfect asses to confuse with me." You may figure me as gazing on Raffles all this time in mute and rapt amazement.
Possessed of ample means, and member of that secret club called "Our Society," which meets at intervals and is the club of criminologists, and pursuing the detection of crime as a pastime, he had on many occasions placed Scotland Yard and the Sûreté in Paris in possession of information which had amazed them and which had earned for him the high esteem of those in office as Ministers of the Interior in Paris, Rome and in London.
Criminologists assert, from many years' observation of many men in many lands, that no man positively desires to become a criminal. So little does the average man wish it, that it is usually difficult, even in the case of the most confirmed lawbreaker, to persuade him that he actually is or has been criminal in intent, no matter what his acts may have been.
The removal of physical defect has repeatedly made an antisocial person normal in his conduct, and it seems plain, especially from the investigations of European criminologists, that certain individuals are born with a predisposition to crime, like the alcoholic inheriting a weak will, or with insane or epileptic tendencies that may lead early to criminal conduct; but it is not yet proven that a majority of offenders are hereditary perverts.
Killed her lover in defense of her honor, you know. Which means that she shot him when he got tired of her. A sobbing jury promptly acquitted her, and now she's writing 'Warnings to Young Girls. They're most improving and affecting, I assure you. We look after that." "Ban! I hate to have you so cynical." "Not at all," he protested. "Ask the Prevention of Vice people and the criminologists.
If you say "The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognised by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment," you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the grey matter inside your skull.
Some criminologists go so far as to say that the majority of criminals have displayed distinct evidences of criminality at so early an age as sixteen years. Whatever may have been the cause for committing crime, the crime itself shows that the youth refuses to acknowledge the obligations which an organized society lays upon him.
Word Of The Day