CRIMINALITY OF CHILDREN.

Press, Volume LIII, Issue 9304, 3 January 1896, Page 2

CRIMINALITY OF CHILDREN.

Cttart Lombroto, of Turin, in the Monist. Montaigne has said that lying and obstinacy grow in children just as their body does. The moral sense is certainly wanting in children in the first months or even the first years of life. For them, right and wrong are what is permitted or forbidden by the father or mother, but not once do they perceive independently that a thing ie wrong. "This age is without pity," said La Fontaine, faithful portrayer of nature. Cruelty, in fact, is one of the common characteristics of children. SayH Broussais (" Irritation et Folie," p. 20), "There is scarcely a child who does not abuse his power over those who are weaker than he." Such is the first impulse, but the cries of the victim check him unless he is born to ferocity, until a new instinctive impulse leads him to commit a new abuse. In general he prefers wrong to right; he is cruel rather than good because he thus feels a greater emotion and can feel his own unlimited power, and therefore he is seen to break inanimate objects witli delight. He delights in torturing animals, in drowning flies, he beats the dog, and he smothers his bird.

Even that fundamental principle of megalomania and of criminality which is excessive vanity, self absorption, i 3 very great in children. In two families in which the principles of equality are maintained by the parents, the children even at three years of age observe the pretended artificial distinctions of social classes and treat with haughtiness the poor, and with deference the children of their own age whose parents are rich or titled. The same thing, for that matter, is also seen in animals; for instance, in the watchdog that barks at peraons in ehabby clothes. All children from the age of seven or eight months, like to show off their new shoes or hats, and get angry when they are taken off. Many children, even those who afterwards show little intellect and slight precocity, at nine or ten months of age are wont to cry if they are not dressed in some particular pretty gown; especially does this passion extend to red shoes. One who lives among the upper classes has no idea of the passion babies have for alcoholic liquor, but among the lower classes it is only too common a thing to see even sucking babes drink wine and liquors with wonderful delight, and to see parents enjoy seeing them get drunk. Nor do we find lacking in early years, even at the age of three or four, obscene tendencies, though limited by incomplete development.

Now when the child becomes a youth, largely through the training of his parents and of the echool, still more so by nature itself, when inclined to the good, all this criminality disappears, just as in the fully developed foetus the traces of the lower animals gradually disappear which are so conspicuous in the first months of the fcetal life; we have a genuine ethical evolution corresponding to the physical evolution. But in some unfortunates this evolution does not take place, just as in physical monsters there is arrest of physical development or of foetal evolution, and then the criminal tendencies become more marked than in the majority of youths, often breaking out in terrible atrocities and obscenities, and per eisting ever after. A child, five years old intelligent and wide-awake, seeing blood flow from hie little brother's nose, knocked him off the chair and, plunging his hands in the blood, cried: "I want to kill this baby, I want to see his blood, I want nothing else." Asked whether he would be willing to kill hie mother he anewered: " I can't just now, I shall wait till I am bigger." Another bright child, eleven years old, had struck and threatened a comrade, then he killed him with blows from a sickle, not. stopping till tired out, then threw the body into a ditch, where he washed himself, and pretended that they had been attacked by a peasant and confessed only when he was promised immunity. Cruelty was observed in the earliest youth of Caracalla, of Caligula,* and of Commodus, who at thirteen had a clave thrown into a furnace for a trivial reason; of Louis XI. and of Charles IX., who had animals tortured, and of Louis XIII., who crushed slowly between two stones the head of a little bird, and became so irritated against a gentleman whom he did not like that to calm him down they had to pretend to kill the gentleman. When he became king he delighted to watch the agony of Protestants condemned to death.

' Now these criminals are recognised even from their earliest days, because they have extraordinary anomalies of the face and of the skull, asymmetry, macrocephaly, exaggeration of the length or breadth, strabismus/ears badly placed or too large, enormous jaws, bad conformation of the teeth, especially of the incisors, now too large, and again too far apart, nose flat and crooked, hair abundant on the forehead, an exaggerated development of the body (a child of seven having the stature and weight of one of nine), strength precocious, lefthandedness more common, and above all great dulness of the senses. The sense of touch instead of marking one or two millimetres is so dull as to give four millimetres or more. The sensibility to pain is very slight. The sense of odours and colours is imperfectly developed. There is then a criminal type, so that your intuition leads you unconsciously to shrink from a person who has the face of a thief, and I have heard the case of a woman who, a few days after the birth of a niece who afterwards became a great criminal, said on seeing her eyes, "She looks as if she were going to murder us all." Recently ths notorious Craven was loath to rent a room to a man who had made a sinister impression on her, and who afterwards killed her. I explain this fact scientifically, by maintain* ing that in the strata of our brain there tnost exist elements of the sensations experienced by our progenitors, sensations which are reawakened as soon as the cause, are represented which first awakened them

It is worth while to study the inclinations which predominate in these individuals, in order to be able to direct them and guide them in a special direction, above all, withdraw them from those fields in which their criminal activity would most develope, especially as they would infect the innocent. When at last no measures will longer avail, and when vice has become crime, and habitual crime, procure their isolation as if they were lunatics, so as to spare society a series of misfortunes, the family greater disgrace, and the judges an activity often useless. Human justice examines only 50% of those who become guilty, and of these does not punish 25%, and punishes them inefficaciously, often sending them back, especially if young, to their wicked deeds, frequently several times a year. That is why 3rime triumphs every day, and all that we do serves only to aggravate it. And thus we suffer from the harm the criminal does us, and suffer for the expense of investigations to find him out and to convict him, without all this preventing us from being injured again by him in the near future. If the teacher, by pointing out the future criminal, prevents his maturing in the bosom of society, he will do a holy work and one truly useful to humanity. : .